Monday, December 31, 2018

Brave New World...




2018, the year that I named my year of being brave, ended up being pretty much exactly that. From actual bravery in flipping around on a trapeze bar to opening myself up to possible rejection and hurt, I think I managed it as well as one could expect from a rather anxiety ridden, awkward girl who is deathly afraid of, you know, rejection and hurt.

Mostly 2018 will be remembered as the year that I finally felt like I was doing more than just treading water and trying to keep it all together. My time, mostly, is spent on things that I truly enjoy-and learning to enjoy the mundane has been a wonderful experience. I am most grateful for my family, who graciously provide a vacation for the girls and me (and a million other things that would take reams of paper to name), and for all of the fun that the girls and I have had in the past year, from ziplining to our movie nights to all the musicals. My life is blessed. I say that word a lot, probably to the point of being annoying, but I know of no other word to encompass how completely lucky I feel to have been not only born into the family that I have, but to have been given the opportunity to raise these two precious girls who are just the most fun people I’ve ever gotten to spend all of my time with.

In 2015 my life shattered-and that is the only word for it, in 2015 my world shattered and nothing could undo it, nothing could be done about the fact that I was forever and always going to be a different person going forward.

I don’t mean to belabor it but I never for one moment believed that I would love my new life more than my old life. After all, this new Joy had faced the ultimate rejection-and, as I’ve said in past posts, I sort of hated her for it. Anyway, just to say-I never expected to love this life, this single mom life, this working mom life-I never expected that I would love it more than that stay-at-home mom life, that life where I had a partner who loved me. I never, never, never thought that I would think that I prefer this sometimes lonely existence over that life where for a very long time I felt loved and cherished.

But what I realized in 2018 is that I totally like this life, this mom, this woman that I am now, so much more than the person that for fifteen years thought that she had it all.

I promised myself, entering into 2016, that by 2019 I would have most of this figured out.

That isn’t going to happen.

Because I have learned how to be alone. How to take care of things by myself. How to budget and parent a teenager and straighten my hair and all the million things that I’m always writing about.

What I’m still struggling with is imagining my life beyond these things-beyond being Betsy and Felicity’s mom, and Dave and Dina’s daughter, and thinking that maybe, possibly, there is some bigger plan in action here.

And so my word for 2019 is going to be trust.

I’m going to trust in myself, trust in my heart and my gut and all of those bits of me that let me down so terribly three years ago. I’m going to trust in the idea that there is a great wide world out there, waiting so patiently for my tiny little snail like steps to get us there.

We’ll see, 2019. I’m going to try my best, and probably fail a lot, and hopefully make sense of all the pieces that still seem to not fit together just as they should.

In the end, there are parts of the past few years that will never truly make sense, and I know that. But mostly, mostly, the person that I am staring at a whole new decade-she is who I want to be.

All the best is yet to come.


********************************************************



All the best things of 2018:

(According, of course, to Joy)

Movies: Mary Poppins Returns; A Star is Born; Won’t You Be My Neighbor?; A Quiet Place; Incredibles 2; Ralph Breaks the Internet

Books: Paperback Crush; The Immortialists; The Ensemble; Bachelor Nation; Hey Ladies; Us Against You; You Think It, I’ll Say It; Sea Witch



Musicals and Plays: Hamilton, Rent, The Humans, Les Misérables


Podcasts:

Daily and/or Weekly
The Daily; Up First; The Lazy Genius; Pantsuit Politics; What Should I Read Next?; The Popcast; From the Front Porch; On Being; The One You Feed; Diane Rehm On My Mind; The Bible Binge

Series
The Dream, Heaven’s Gate

Episodes
SSR-The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High episodes
Typology-Lisa Whelchel
The Cut-Beat Around the Bush
Simple-The Liturgical Calendar
Literary Disco-Cat Person

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

My Winter Song...




I have entered into the abyss that is the official “12 Days of Christmas.” It is, for me, a time of reflection and a bit of darkness and a bit of light-everything in the past year sort of rolled into one.

I can’t quite remember when I started observing this time in my life-it used to be that I would write down my dreams only in this 12 day period (supposedly the dreams correlate to the next 12 months of your life). I write down my dreams every day now (yes, I am obsessive, I am aware) so this time period has turned instead into a time dwelling on the past year and looking ahead to the new year.

It has also turned into a time of alone for me-the way that we have worked out our schedule for the girls has turned into this time being a week that they spend with their dad and his family, and so for me, that means a lot of time alone, watching movies and reading books and cleaning.

I have learned in the past three years to pace myself-to remember, in the hustle and bustle of the time leading up to Christmas, that this time of quiet and alone is coming. I save up my most favorite Christmas movies (the ones that the girls have no interest in watching). I have three Christmas books that I purposefully haven’t started before this week (plus a nice, healthy stack of new books that were a birthday present from my much too generous sister). I love the idea of deep cleaning my house-a task much easier done when my girls are gone.

I still miss them, of course. I tell anyone who asks me about being divorced, and what it’s like to navigate various parts of it-sharing your kids is the hardest part. It feels like a piece of you is missing, no matter how much you may be craving some time to yourself. My girls and I are a unit, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything-having two girls (which was always my dream) is just as much fun as I always imagined it would be.

The old me got very caught up in doing everything just so. The twelve days of Christmas were observed in a rigorous manor that involved a thorough reading of each day from a book that I bought about just that topic, a recording of our dreams every day, and, of course, our Epiphany celebration with just the perfect Epiphany cake.

The new me has let go of a lot of that. The time that the girls and I have together has become about doing things that we truly enjoy and letting go of the rest of it-for advent, we love watching our Christmas movies and we always read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Of course, we still read a lot of books-but we don’t read nearly all of them anymore. We still decorate all of the trees-and we still love them all so very much-but we don’t bother about all the decorations-just the ones we like, the ones that have meaning or, as is more often the case, that remind us of something that we love (Betsy got an ornament this year that is a replica of The Waltons house and she has already declared it her most favorite ornament ever). We bake and sing and look at lights when we have a chance-but they are things we fit into what we are already doing.

My point with all of this is simply this-life changes. I’ve had some people recently in my life reach out to me, to ask me about my routine and especially my schedule with the girls-and the most important thing that I can think to share with anyone is that being flexible does not come easily for me, and so I have to work out exactly inside of my head how life will look on the days that the girls are gone.

It takes time to work all of this out. It takes time in a way that just nothing else does-life is different than it used to be, and so you have to invent new traditions, some that involve your kids and some that don’t. It you are anything like me, you have to prioritize and plan and make peace with the idea that you aren’t going to check every single box of that perfect family holiday.

Of course, as always, I am writing for myself and my perspective-I try never to presume that anyone else feels exactly like me. But I’ve had quite a few people reach out to me lately, people who are just at the beginning of this notion of their family looking so different from the way that they started out, and I never want to seem like I had this all figured out and under control from the beginning. I definitely didn’t and what I’ve learned has all been trial and error.

What I definitely know after 3 years of Christmas being completely different-your kids will not remember that they didn’t make a perfect gingerbread house, or watch every Christmas movie, or what have you. They will remember that you were together. Period.

Monday, December 17, 2018

It's Coming On Christmas...




"It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees…”

Christmas is my favorite time of year. Of course. When your birthday is on Christmas day, you don’t really have much choice-but I’m pretty sure I would love Christmas regardless.

Christmas in my world is about a lot of movies and television specials that I share with my girls, some of my most favorite books, hot chocolate every night, twinkle lights, and a tree in every room. Fun times.

This past weekend we went to see The Best Christmas Pageant Ever at the CPAC, which is our local community theater. Every year I read this book to my girls and every year I cry at the end (they hate that I cry, but I just can’t help it). Mrs. Bennett read this book to my class in the 5th grade and I am always reminded of the way that she emphasized certain words as I am reading it aloud. Mrs. Bennett and I didn’t get on all that well-which is a bit odd, because mostly I was always a teacher’s pet-but she read books that I love still and have shared with my girls- Soup, The Secret of NIMH, and most of all, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

Anyway, other things I’m loving this week:

Bookselling is the Most Over- Romanticized Job in the World

Like all girls who dream of growing up to be Kathleen Kelly, I tend to imagine that nothing could possibly be more fun than to run a bookstore where all I did in a day was recommend books to people and host a super fun story hour. In reality, of course, bookselling is a somewhat tedious job full of math and algorithms and no end of things that this English major would find mind numbingly boring.

(On this note, I follow Annie B. Jones on Instagram, who is a real life Kathleen Kelly and owner of the Book Shelf in Thomasville, Georgia, and her stories are a delight, despite the obvious truth that she does spend time at work doing much more than reading.)

The Cut on Tuesdays

Okay, I listened to the episode from November 11, 2018, titled Beat Around the Bush on the recommendation of Laura Tremaine (who is another great Instagram follow). I’m not really going to say much more here because it’s way too TMI, but if you listen to this and want to have a follow up conversation about this, I’m down with that. (This makes me so desperately want to have a pod cast club in the same vein as a book club, because sometimes you just need to discuss.) And if this isn’t your speed, it’s cool and we never need to talk about it.




Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss

If I make a list of books that I loved this year, this one is going at the top. It's a coffee table type book all about the genre of "Young Adult" books of the 1980s and 1990s. So, right up my alley. It's an homage to all my very favorites (The Baby-sitters Club, Sweet Valley, Fear Street, Lois Duncan) and also some books that I completely forgot about (Camp Sunnyside Friends, Sleepover Friends) and some that I had never heard of but now desperately want to read.



Life just now, in my last few weeks before 40, is full of 1990s music (particularly 1997) when I'm not jamming to Christmas music (and as always, the Hamilton soundtrack). It hardly seems real to me that it's been 20 years since I was that girl who so desperately wanted to know where her life was headed-would she fall in love ever, would she have two girls, would they love The Brady Bunch and Annette Funicello and all the Disney songs?


How I wish I could tell her, calm down, you get all of that and so much more.


I'm hoping the 60 year old version of myself is thinking the same thing.


Wednesday, December 5, 2018

By the Way, I Forgive You...



“Over the past years of getting to a healthier place, it’s been important for me to get rid of my really finite standard of normalcy and understand that maybe the bad and ugly things are part of me, but I don’t have to submit to them. And that the existence of anxiety or depression does not negate my own capacity for joy, or my intelligence.”
-Julien Baker



I so desperately want to write, truly write, what it is to grieve something that you miss less and less with each passing day.
-Me, in my journal, yesterday


Gracious. I have worked this particular post out more times than I can count. The words never quite catch the way I want them to.

I’m coming to this understanding, as I wind my way through this process, that the person that I haven’t forgiven is that girl that I was about 4 years ago. The girl that was trying so hard to hold everything in life together, the girl that missed a million red flags waving right in her face-I have a lot of anger at her.

She messed my life up, you know. There are so, so many days that I wish I could grab hold of her and say please, for the love of all that is holy, stop.

The thing is, I love my life. I have found a place of contentment that I never knew before, and I can’t say why that is-it may be that earning my own paycheck gives me a sense of control over my finances that I didn’t have before, it might be that my relationship with my girls is so much stronger since we spend so much time together just as the three of us, it might be that I have a belief in my own abilities that I just didn’t have before. Maybe it’s all of that. I don’t know. What I do know, what I want every last one of these blog posts to make clear is this: my divorce was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Now, I get it if it seems like, then why write all these posts at all, Joy?

Mostly, the answer to that is that it’s taken a good long minute to get here. It’s taken a lot of healing and a lot of growth and a lot of looking around me at my girls and my family and my friends and coming to grips with the idea that I like this version of me.

And coming to grips with the idea that I have to forgive that girl that I was for getting me into this mess. Because, jeesh, as hard and long and drawn out as all of this has seemed, the reward has been great.

It’s all going to be all right in the end.

"Emptiness is just a lesson in canvases.”
-Julien Baker, Appointments


Monday, November 26, 2018

In The End...




November 25, 2000 was the day that my whole life changed.

I spend a lot of time (likely much more time than is necessary) thinking about what would have happened if I had turned that date down? Or if Nick would never have asked in the first place?

In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter. Despite the fact that Einstein did indeed believe that time travel was possible, we have yet to see any evidence of it, and so it’s just a redundant thought-it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.

But.

I’ve had three November 25ths now that technically mean nothing anymore. It’s just a date on the calendar, a memory of a time long, long ago with people who, good Lord, were 21 and 20 years old and were just pretending at being adults.

But November 25th does mean something to me. If I hadn’t gone on that date 18 years ago, then my life would be this whole other life-Sliding Doors and all that.

Divorce is such a strange beast. But I do know that it is very, very possible to grieve something that you know with all of your heart you are better off without. I look back on who I was inside of my marriage and I am so changed-I don’t recognize that girl anymore. And I am trying to make peace with the idea that the idea of that makes me both extremely happy and a tiny bit sad. I am thrilled that I have grown up, that I am not that girl anymore, that I know my worth and I’m not going to settle for less.

But, very importantly, sometimes I miss how she trusted without hesitation, she loved with her whole heart and just flat out owned her emotions without questioning every motivation.

18 years later, I know to my bones that I would do it all over again, even though we break up in the end.








"What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?"
-Valarie Kaur







Thursday, November 8, 2018

Practically Unperfect in Every Way...




Sometimes…I am this girl who fixes her hair and wakes up at 4:30 to workout and keeps spreadsheets on every last little thing and seems like she is totally put together.

Sometimes…I am a girl wearing a white sweatshirt that I’ve only worn three times since I bought it and I manage to get black ink right in the middle of it in front of a customer paying his water bill.

Lest anyone ever think I’m perfect, today I am the second one.

(No one thinks I’m perfect. It’s just a sort of metaphor.)

Anyway, things making me happy of late:

SSR Podcast

Oh my goodness, I am loving this so much! SSR stands for Sh*t She Read and Ali Hoff Kosik basically deep dives into a young adult book-or, in episode 19, an entire series- yes, Sweet Valley High gets the attention it so greatly deserves. I can’t even properly find words for how excited I was to find people conversing about Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield in a loving manner.

So far SSR has 21 episodes, so I intend to listen to most this upcoming 3 day weekend and get my 80s/90s girl book geek on. (Episode 7 on The Baby-sitters Club and episode 18 on Beezus and Ramona are at the top of my list.)


The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

YA is not usually my chosen genre, but this novel did not read like YA to me. Going in, all I knew was that the main character was the granddaughter of a famous novelist who lived in and created the Hinterland, a land of basically creepy fairytales. It reminded me of Night Film by Marshia Pessi only much better (Night Film was not my favorite by a long shot-I think that it’s difficult to write with a premise that something is so amazing that people will buy into an art form as a living creation and that was my big issue with it-in The Hazel Wood, maybe because it’s written for a purportedly younger audience, this was less of a stretch).

It was a nice addition to my fall reading list.

The Hallmark Chanel Countdown to Christmas App

Who knew this was a thing? It’s an app for your phone that syncs to your calendar to let you know when the new Hallmark Christmas movies are airing, and then you can check them off once you watch them. It’s just what this Type A, list loving, Christmas geek needed in her life.

April and I will be seeing Les Misérables on Sunday and I am most excited (I have seen the movie but never the musical itself). I’ve learned to leave time open to just do what I feel like doing-more difficult than it sounds for me because when I don’t have my schedule sometimes I feel overwhelmed and I basically crash hard. I know that sounds sort of crazy-I am sort of crazy, you know-but when the hours stretch around me with nothing exactly that needs doing, I just get a little too lost inside of this notion that this is what life will be like for years on end once the girls leave.

In reality, that isn’t true. (I think.) But there is a line between blessed solitude and sheer loneliness that I can bump up against if I’m not careful. And I’m lucky, I’m an introvert who enjoys being alone, but as always, I put voice to my crazy because it allows me to own it and accept it as my cross to bear.

From the bottom of my heart, I truly do thank you if you take the time to read my blogs. Sometimes writing a blog post is just my most favorite part of my day, and I am always most amazed whenever anyone reads them. Facebook has changed its algorithm of late, and so my posts about my blog don’t get the same traction that they used to, but I love posting my words too much to let it go. Thank you for letting me feel that they mean something beyond my own headspace.

Monday, November 5, 2018

Grace in the Happy Ever After...





I dearly wish life were a Hallmark movie, with snow that magically falls without making slush and endings that you can see coming a mile away.

This past weekend I had a most glorious couple of days celebrating this impending 40th birthday with some of my dearest and closest friends. We laughed and ate and (some of us) drank and just completely enjoyed getting to spend time with each other sans children.

(I am beyond grateful to them and their families/babysitters for making that happen, because in my world, I have older girls who were at their father’s house for the whole weekend, and they have younger kids, so this required a lot of time and effort on their part.)

The centerpiece of this weekend was that we had readings done with my friend, Matt Muschott. I have had a reading done by Matt prior to this, back when my divorce was fresh and new and all I really wanted to know was if I was going to live to see the end of that tailspin of grief. His words to me at that time brought such comfort to that panicked girl-they were not a promise that all would be well, but they were a promise of a much greater picture than I could see at the time.

Matt has been blessed with a gift that he graciously shares and I am all the more fortunate for his appearance in my life.

So, this past weekend, we had readings done, and we all agree that they were profound and life affirming.

My personal reading was again in the vein of, what the heck comes next? Because, as I said to him before he began, I am scared. I am scared every single day that I don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m not doing this right.

And again, his words were a comfort, if also a bit of a challenge, a bit of an idea that I can allow myself to dream bigger and bolder than I ever seem to think possible.

But mostly, he told me that my saving grace is my girls. That we are our unit, that I couldn’t ask for better help along this journey. How lucky am I, he said, that they chose me to be their mom?

And so today, I was looking back over some old writing that I had done for the blog but never seemed to find its way to the actual print, and I found this:

“Things are so much better now.”

These are actual words from my Betsy. The question to her was, “Do you miss the way that our family used to be?”

I can’t quite explain how this child always knows just the right way to say something to her somewhat wayward mother.


I wrote that in March. I remember the conversation. Betsy said, “Things are so much better now,” and then she proceeded to talk about how much I have changed. And it’s true.

I worry to an absurd degree that the girls will end up like kids on an after school special. I definitely know people who have struggled when a parent left. But, at least for us, so far, we are changed in ways that has strengthened us as a family, that has turned on its head the idea that somehow living in separate homes was not the ideal for our kids.

I certainly understand that the absolute ideal in this world would be for my kids to have parents who live together and love each other. But our reality, which has been hard fought for, is something that, honestly, I am proud of.

Things are so much better now.

Indeed, Miss Betsy Anne, they are.

I still don't know the ending, I still don't live in the magical snow globe of a Hallmark movie, but I'm trying (so hard) to make peace with the idea that our happy ever after still exists, in a completely different form than we imagined 18 years ago.

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Reflections (Visions of Johanna)...



October is a month of reflection for me.

I’d like to think that’s because of the change in seasons, because my birthday is two months away and I’m pausing to truly embrace what my thirties have taught me (which, by the way, is so, so much), that just like the earth, I am entering into a new season of life.

(It’s truthfully about a lot more than that. But we’ll put a pin in that.)

I’m sure, always and forever, the defining moment of my thirties will be right there in the middle of it, the day that my divorce was final. There is a sharp before and after. But my thirties were a time of such growth, such becoming who it is that I want to be.

I became a mom at 25. Which seems like a baby to me now, but it seemed like I had waited forever at the time. My twenties were filled with Goodnight Moon and Sesame Street and tummy time and honestly believing that I had to do everything just right or someone would figure out that I was wholly undeserving of these girls who had been entrusted to my care.

My thirties allowed me to grow into the mom that I am now. I mess up, and I own it, and we go on. Sometimes dinner is tuna fish sandwiches. Sometimes dinner is tater tots. Sometimes I realize too late that I’ve let them watch something as inappropriate as The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

When I think back on who I was in my twenties, I really can’t remember. Because my entire being was caught up in being a mom and a wife. I honestly didn’t know who I was outside of those roles.

My life now is simple and small. It’s full of a joy that exists inside of writing things that no one else ever reads. It’s full of a joy that exists inside of a warm blanket, a cup of tea, and a good book. It’s full of a joy that exists inside of two girls who put together dances to music that we listen to loudly. It’s full of a joy that exists inside of waking up at 4:30 in the morning and inhaling a cup of coffee and pushing myself to do all the push ups and all the squats for nothing other than that it makes me feel good to start the day that way.

That old Joy, she loved her life so much. But she couldn’t have told you any of those things.

Two months from today, I will be 40. I know all of the things that I’m hoping that a new decade will bring into my life. But for today, on a somewhat dreary October day, looking into the future too far just doesn’t interest me. I’m blessed to be here. We’ll figure it out as we go.







Wednesday, October 17, 2018

This Is Us...





“Does Garfield talk?”

“What?”

“Does Garfield talk? Like, his mouth doesn’t move, but does Jon know what he’s thinking?”

This conversation, which led us down a rabbit hole of Google information, particularly this thread about whether or not Garfield is actually speaking, or if Jon is simply following his body language, or my very favorite theory, that the entire comic strip is just Jon projecting his own thoughts onto his pets-anyway, this conversation is why I love the ages that my girls are just now.



My Betsy is on the edge of 14, and my Felicity is 10 (and a half, she would add). I don’t mean to suggest that these are easy ages, by any means. Nearly 14 can be tricky-there are just days where she is prickly for no good reason, and there is a lot more time that she needs to spend listening to music very, very loudly. As for Felicity, she is just so polar opposite of Betsy and me-she is extroverted, and she loves to be surrounded by people, and living with two introverts who need downtime is difficult for her. (When we all have time alone to read, Felicity often comes to check with me about “how many more minutes?”)

But these ages lead to such interesting conversations. I have had intense conversations with Betsy on the way home from volleyball games about theology and climate change and what it’s like to feel rather like a square peg in this world. I love that she is developing her own ideas, independent of mine or anyone else.

Felicity and I bond over movies, as we have since she was little. But her selection choice is getting wider, and I marvel at how she can remember the tiniest details of books and movies.

My favorite part of being a single mom is that I get to spend time with the girls and have them all to myself. It’s a gift of this divorce that I didn’t fully appreciate at first. We all three need each other in a way that I can’t quite put a name to-we rely on each other, we laugh at the same things, I have somehow convinced them that old 80s television shows are the bomb. We talk about silly things, and serious things, and things in between.

It does catch my breath when I wrap my arms around my baby and she is towering over me. But, I assure you, no matter how much taller than me she gets, my baby she will always be. And just now, they still need their mom, and like to pile on my bed, one on each side of me, and watch movies and read books and pick at each other. I know that won’t last forever. But I’m treasuring it for now.


Friday, October 12, 2018

4 AM...






"We're all looking for redemption/Just afraid to say the name
So caught up now in pretending/What we're seeking is the truth
I'm just looking for a happy ending/All I'm looking for is you"



Sometimes other people say the words that I'm searching for.


Sometimes I am talking to myself and I say, "“I am trying to learn to love someone without losing myself in the process.” And there are so many hard truths in that statement, about how exactly I have loved in the past, and how I'm thinking about love going forward, and what on earth these past three years have been about.



"I wandered out into the water/I thought that I might drown
I don't know what I was after/Just know that I was going down"



Everyone in my family talks about the "old Joy" and the "new Joy." Some of the change in me has been ridiculously superficial, and some of it has been profound, and probably most of it has just been growing up and being an adult.



I never quite seem to say the right thing about this- and so I fall into songs and poems and books that say it better than I ever could.


"The clouds broke and the angels cried/You ain't gotta walk alone
That's why he put me in your way/You came upon me wave on wave"



Sometimes I want this space to just hold this truth- I loved my old life hard, with all that was in me. And at the same time, I want to figure out how the heck I'm going to fall into a space of trust and openness and faith in happy endings. And somehow those two truths coexist in me.


It's not profound or deep or life changing. It's just hope. The redemption that I'm searching for is hope.


"It came upon me wave on wave/You're the reason I'm still here, yeah
Am I the one you were sent to save/It came upon me wave on wave"



(That's all Wave on Wave by Pat Green, and it might be my favorite song ever)

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Hello October...






”I am so glad to live in a world where there are Octobers.”
-Anne Shirley


Oh, my Anne, I am too.

October is my most favorite month of the year. October is beautiful and full of all of my favorite things-baseball and football and cider and pumpkins. (Not to belabor it, but I chose October for my wedding because I love it so much, and I think that if I ever married again, I just might choose it all over again.)

October is my time for very seasonal reading and for movies that the girls and I (mostly) love. Our schedule is just about to wind down, volleyball is ending, the nights are getting longer-it’s the perfect time of year for our movie nights and long book chapters because we are (blessedly) home.

Here are a few of our favorite fall things:

Hocus Pocus

My favorite Halloween movie of all time. Everyone loves this movie, so I won’t go on and on, other than to say that I saw this movie with April in the theater, and I loved it so much that I named my most beloved pink Aspire Dani Jo, with the Dani being in honor of Dani in this movie (the Jo was so that I could shorten it to DJ, in honor of DJ Tanner on Full House-these two facts alone tell you a lot about me at 16 years old).

Betsy finds Hocus Pocus terrifying. Betsy is an HSP (which just stands for Highly Sensitive Person). Figuring that out has helped us a great deal-Betsy gets overwhelmed by certain things, especially by books or movies that have a theme of people being in trouble or being punished, particularly for something they didn’t do. When she was about 7, I read Matilda to her, and it was almost painful for her to hear, and I just couldn’t figure out why. Being able to recognize this in her has helped us so much and it has allowed me to understand her reluctance to not only certain movies and books, but to things that I find super fun, like amusement parks. Knowing this has also made Betsy aware of those limitations and she has gotten so that she will try things more easily, sort of pushing it aside, if that makes sense. As her mom, I must say that the most amazing thing to me is that Betsy knows her limits and if something really bothers her, she simply does not participate, no matter what other people might say to her. I admire her understanding of what she is able to handle-there are many times that I wish I had her resolve.

Anyway, all of that is just to say, Betsy genuinely thinks that Hocus Pocus is scary. But she has been watching it since she was about 5, so she grins and bears it because she knows how very much I love it, and how it is our way to usher in fall.

Ghostbusters

So, I watched Ghostbusters with my parents and April in a theater when I was 5 and she was 4. (This is one of 2 times that she and I can remember of seeing a movie in a theater with my parents.) We were *scared to death.* We did not understand that it was a comedy at all. So, that HSP thing, Betsy comes by it honestly.

The girls and I watched the new female-driven Ghostbusters as a part of this lineup this year. It was okay-not great by any means, but not as horrible as I had anticipated based on reviews. As for the original and its sequel, they are a normal part of our Halloween lineup, and parts of it make me laugh out loud and parts of it I just think are plain weird.

Casper

I love this one. And “Remember Me This Way” was the John Glenn High School Class of 1997 class song. So, it checks all the boxes-romance, bathroom humor that the girls love, and convincing myself that I graduated, oh, surely just about 5 years ago.

We watch several others in the rotation-Hotel Transylvania (not my favorite, but the girls love it), The Addams Family (the movies with Angelica Houston and Raul Julia, and also a tv movie that I bought in 7th grade from a book order that we religiously watch on Halloween Eve), The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Beetlejuice, Clue, and a couple of Munsters movies that star the original cast.

As for books, we are currently reading Harry Potter, which feels deliciously correct at this time of year.

I myself am having a seasonal theme to my reading stack at the moment and I have read a couple of books that have been excellent.

Sea Witch by Sarah Henning

I just finished this last night and, oh, was it a delight. It’s the backstory of Ursula from the Little Mermaid-I am a complete sucker for a good fairy tale retelling and this one was so, so good. (On that note, I watched a PBS special several years ago now that was a ballet of the Little Mermaid told from the actual Hans Christian Anderson story, which is of course much sadder and maddening than the Disney version and it had a profound impact on me.) This story is in the vein of that original story and it, too, is heartbreaking.

Toil and Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft edited by Jessica Spotswood and Tess Sharpe

Jessica Spotswood has edited 3 of these short story anthologies for young adults about empowered women, and this one seemed fitting to my fall reading list. I love short stories (my sister does not at all) and most of these were right up my alley. “If you don't feel safe enough to yell back, you're not safe enough.” That resonated.

My stack of autumn books is pretty big, and I still have a few weeks left until all I want to do is watch all the Hallmark Christmas movies, so hopefully there are a few more gems to be mined.

“I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”

Oh, Anne girl. Me too.

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Life on a Fairy's Wing...




This past weekend was Homecoming in the place that I call home.

(Can you call it homecoming if you have never left?)

When I was a senior in high school, I walked around with a video recorder every day (much to the embarrassment of my friends). I wanted to capture what life was like for me at that age, the edge of eighteen. I wanted to videotape all of the people, not just the popular kids, I wanted to remember the fun bits- my friends and our weird sense of humor.

I was always watching, making up stories, imagining the life that all of these people around me were leading. I was too quiet at times, and much too loud at other times. I was often just too much, and the only way I knew to avoid that was to shrink back and hide behind the camera.

The video shows all the things you might expect. Football games and pep rallies and me and my friends putting on makeup for homecoming. It shows every assembly and concert. I made scrapbooks (4 of them) filled with every newspaper article about our class.


What I don't have anywhere but inside my skin is that feeling, that anxiety that I carried, that notion that if only I would do all the things perfectly, I would somehow become a confident, more popular girl who might just catch the eye of a boy. (Not to spoil the ending, but that never happened, in high school anyway.)

I see the parallel- I'm still that girl so filled with an anxiety that threatens to overtake me, still trying so hard to do things in the proper manner, thinking that somehow this will fix all of this panic over the idea that I have no idea where life is headed.

Most of my life is deliriously happy. Most of my life is filled with blessings wholly undeserved, family and friends and a job that I love, movies and books and interesting conversations with a particularly special person. All amazing.

I can never quite pin it down, though. Never quite convince myself it's not all just about to crumble. And then I feel guilty because, after all, I am blessed with so much and this still persists.


Anxiety sucks. That is simply the point of this post.

"They were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald



Friday, September 21, 2018

10 Things To Tell You...




10 things to tell you:

I grew up in the house just beside the house that I live in now. I experience the same seasons, the same smells, the same neighbors, the same humid summers, the same snowy winters…my road home has never changed in 39 years.

Someone who has influenced me is my mom. I thought long and hard about this prompt, and I can think of many people, people that I know in real life, and people that I have never met, and people that I love more than life itself…but the very top of all of those lists is always my mom. My mom is who I have always wanted to be when I grow up-she excels at everything she does (and if she doesn’t excel at it, she just doesn’t do it), she always buys the perfect gift for every situation, she knows who she is and she stands firm in her beliefs. Making her proud has been my job since the day that my birth interrupted her Christmas in 1978.

A thing that changed my worldview was my divorce (we knew we would get there). My divorce changed the way that I viewed my own personal little world, and what my future looked like, and just literally everything that I hold dear to my heart got turned upside down and flipped inside it-it’s still there, it’s just different. But it also allowed this shift inside of me, a way of looking at other people, and seeing the world through a kinder lens, through a more tolerant lens. Basically, happiness became something that I truly wish for every person, however that appears to them, in whatever form. And of course, I learned that sometimes the ending that seems the most painful can lead to the most beautiful beginning.

I am strangely good at organizing a bookshelf. Creating a spreadsheet. Cleaning a closet.

I have mixed feelings about most things. Nothing in my world is black and white, and sometimes that makes for wonderful dialogue, and sometimes that makes for frustration. And while there are days where I wish there wasn't quite so much gray in my thinking, I also know that it's simply the way that God made me.

A defining moment of my life was becoming a mom. All I wanted to do, ever, in my whole life, was to become Betsy’s mom. It’s all I ever talked about. The day that they handed her to me, and I looked into her big blue eyes-it was like winning the lottery times 1000.

A recent discovery I can’t stop talking about is my ability to make playlists on YouTube. Because you type the song in and there it is. We live in the future. (And yes, I'm well aware that I'm late to the party. And that the party is on Spotify.)

Right now I’m struggling with not creating a 5 year plan. I have a general outline for life in the next few years, dictated mostly by my children’s ages and interests. But for my own goals, my own direction, my own dreams…I have no idea. I’ve never not had a plan. Even the past 3 years of riding those waves of grief, they had an end goal. But just now, I don’t really have any idea of what exactly I want life to look like. It’s scary.

My magical reset button is reading about Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. Or Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill. Or (sigh) Joe Garbarini.

In 3 months, will you ask me about...okay, I understand the point of this prompt is to hold me accountable. But see that whole "what am I struggling with" question? I'm none too sure what to ask me about. Ask me about life and routines and not being able to control the future? Maybe in 3 months I'll have a really pithy answer to all of that.


*Taken from Laura Tremaine's 10 Things To Tell You challenge

Friday, September 14, 2018

Only the Horses (Can Find Us Tonight)...




My life is pretty purposefully quiet.

I’m an introvert, big time, which I used to mistake for being shy. I was shy, so very shy, when I was in college-I barely spoke to anyone for four years, which was as lonely and painful as it sounds.

I’m not shy anymore. But I am still an introvert and that lends itself to books and music and podcasts. (My idea of a perfect Friday night when the girls are gone involves a glass of wine, a good book, and sweatpants.)

Some of what I’ve been loving recently:

Books

Us Against You by Fredrik Backman

I read Beartown last year and while I thought it was well written, the story really didn’t do much for me. I felt like nothing really happened that I wasn’t expecting. This sequel exceeded my expectations-it is beautifully written with some profound observations-it explores and mines the tragedy from the first novel and offers up some searing truths.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

I loved the first half of this book. I love stories told as characters age through time and the beginning half of this book delivers on that.

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

I loved most of this book-there were some cliched bits here and there that could have stood some finessing, but mostly this was an enjoyable read. I listened to the playlists at the beginning of each section as I read the book, and I think that helped to understand the complexity of the music.

Bachelor Nation by Amy Kaufman

Disclaimer: I don’t watch any television anymore that isn’t either sports or the occasional Hallmark movie. That sounds pretentious, I know-it’s not that I don’t want to watch tv, but that I just don’t have the time. Eventually I will get around to it. But I say that to explain that I really only know the basic premise of this show and not much more, and I still thoroughly enjoyed this book.

You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

I love Sittenfeld, mostly. And I love short stories, nearly always. So this worked for me.


Hey Ladies! The Story of 8 Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails by Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss

A perfect beach book, told through emails and text messages-I think most women can easily identify with being inside of a passive aggressive email chain. It’s not deep, it’s broad and funny and not especially life changing, but not all books need to be.


Podcasts:

Pantsuit Politics

This podcast prides itself on bringing nuance to its political view, and if I had to describe my own politics in one word it would certainly be nuance. I listen to Sarah and Beth every week and enjoy that they each have a distinct way of viewing the world but can speak to each other in a way that is respectful of the other. They have been doing a series on 9/11, digging into the history going back all the way to World War I and bringing it forward, and it has been excellent.

Overdue

I love the Overdue podcast and use it as a tool for learning the spine of books that I just know I might never get to (I mean, I honestly believe I’ll eventually read everything but people who are good at math are constantly telling me that it’s impossible). Right now they are doing a series for their patreon supporters called Stop! Homer Time where they are going book by book through The Odyssey and they release it on the main feed as well. It has inspired me to order my own copy and (fingers crossed) maybe I’ll actually understand all of it.

Typeology

I am a personality junkie (this drives my psychologist sister a bit nuts as she mostly thinks it baloney but let me tell you, she is wrong). I’m a 9 on the Enneagram, and knowing this helps me to come at life from a different place of understanding and acceptance of other people. If you are at all interested in the enneagram, I would recommend both the book The Road Back to You and this podcast, both of which are by Ian Morgan Cron.

The Bible Binge

I have gone on and on in several posts about The Popcast with Jamie Golden and Knox McCoy (they are, as Jamie would say, a delight). They are in their third season of The Bible Binge, which is sort of their take on the bible, so it’s funny and topical and also theological and inspired.

Also, if theology is your thing, I again am going to tell you that the First Five app is wicked cool and all sorts of awesome.

It’s not my weekend to have the girls, and so that means lots of cleaning and rearranging the furniture and getting lost in a book and being grateful for solitude. Of course, I miss the girls, and I do have some really fun things planned this weekend that involve other people. But, when life first flipped upside down, weekends without the girls dragged on and on. Embracing the fact that I genuinely enjoy time spent alone with a good book-for as long as I like-it’s a gift that I am given every other weekend.

Friday, September 7, 2018

Choose Joy...




This year of being brave has been a bit life changing-yes, doing the brave things has (mostly) been super fun and eye opening. I’ve managed to try some new things and be kinder to myself if I mess up because, after all, being brave is about taking a risk.

The girls and I have learned to be brave together. Which I highly recommend, because nothing makes you braver, truly, than being the only adult in a situation and so you just have to act like, oh, I got this.

We have also let go of several things in this past year, and the result has been (to me at least) a bit surprising. I have always prided myself on being the mom that does all the things. So, somewhat naturally, this lent itself to kids who did all the things.

I want to preface this entire post with this: I truly admire everyone out there who is volunteering their time and energy to all the things. The years that I spent as the room mom, the Sunday School teacher, the Girl Scout leader, the Cloverbud advisor, all of it-they are some of the best memories of my life. In no way at all do I want to suggest that people out there who graciously give of their time should feel that I’m dogging on them.

But this past year, the girls and I have shed a lot of activities. We have purposely curated a schedule filled with only the activities that are bringing us joy. And this has led to more fun than I quite imagined.

When life first flipped upside down for me, my instinct was to insist that nothing change in the girls’ life. That they would keep all of their activities and that I would just somehow manage (with, of course, help from my parents). They had done nothing to cause this eruption in our lives, and I was bound that they not feel that they were missing out.

So, we tried to keep up. We continued to do all the things. I did have to cry uncle at physically being in charge of so many things, but as far as the girls’ schedules, they were as full as ever.

But what I have come to realize is that, for us, doing all the things is just not what we need anymore.

This past year, we have said goodbye to several activities that we enjoyed at one time, but that were just draining us anymore. And, just like when you clean out a closet and only keep the clothes that you actually want to wear, when you clear your schedule of all the things that you are doing just because you think you should be doing it, and instead only concentrate on the one or two activities that you truly want to be doing, you find that you are enjoying life more.

Or at least we are.

This new schedule allows us to have down time, for each of us to be alone for a bit each day, which we all need. It allows us to have game nights and to watch movies and spend time together at the end of a long day. For us, it’s lovely.

The thing is, our lives are different than they would have been if life had not been interrupted three years ago. And part of making peace with that reality is accepting that we are all three just a little bit changed-we all three need each other in a little bit different way. Spending time together, just the three of us-it’s important.

I worry about writing this post because I know that there are people in the world who truly love all of the busy of life, especially life at the ages of my girls. And that’s totally cool and I understand that. But I also felt like I needed to put my truth into this space because I also know that there are plenty of people who don’t yearn for busy, especially at the ages of my girls-and I do feel like there is a bit of a pressure that, if we don’t do everything now, we won’t ever get to do it again. Which indeed may be true-but movie nights and game nights will be a thing of the past in a few short years as well.

Choose joy. Whatever that means to you. Choose it again and again.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018





"Precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke


This blog, quite accidentally, turned into a blog about grief.


Sometimes I try to write exactly why that is, or what the point of writing about it is, or just get my arms around a loss quite as confounding as a divorce. I find myself-still-when I tell people that I’m divorced feeling like I want to somehow convey that I took my marriage vows very seriously, but also that I’m a much healthier, much happier person divorced than I was particularly at the end of my marriage. Why I stress over this, I don’t know-it’s beyond silly.

"We must trust in what is difficult.”

I have found myself recently trying to explain why this time of solitude, this time of falling into a sadness that had, to my mind, no conceivable end, why that is the ultimate grace of grief?

Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t, if I could somehow reverse time, do anything differently. Being still was important. Not knowing the ending is important (as hard as that remains for me). Being alone is important.

Learning to be alone has been the biggest grace of all. Going to football games and sitting by myself, going out to dinner by myself, to the movies and shopping and all the things that I dreaded to do alone for some reason-I can’t quite remember why that seemed scary to me 3ish years ago but it did.

"I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.”

I’m not quite eloquent enough to state this in the way I want to, but my point is this: grief is a gift of grace. And it doesn’t seem like it at all, and it only seems sad and lonely. But, for me anyway, figuring out who I am when you strip away all that I defined myself as, it’s such ultimate joy.

I honestly intend to pivot the blog into a new space-and I always worry when it’s this sort of piece that insists itself to be written that I am again only seeming like that sad, lonely girl when I promise, I am anything but-but I want to give this a voice. I want my little corner of the universe to be stamped with this truth, always-holding the pieces of something that you loved is sad. It just is. But it’s also the beginning of who you get to become.

Ultimately, I grieved not only Nick and the loss of our family, but the loss of who Joy was as a wife. Taking the time to sit inside of that empty space and just let it live-it’s hard. But the reward of figuring out, well, okay, if I’m not that Joy, then who the heck am I? It’s worth it.

“Love consists of this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”


*Quotes from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke




Tuesday, August 21, 2018

But Do You Have A Plan?






Planning is my love language.

Sincerely. It’s my act of service to the world. It’s taken me 39 years and some therapy to learn that not everyone wants to be organized-this was a revelation to me. I knew that not all people were organized, of course, but I assumed that all people in the world deep down wanted to be organized, and have everything in its place. Coming to terms with the idea that not everyone is at least striving for order-it was (is) a mind-blowing thought.

For me, order is my coping mechanism. I would have been adjusting the drapes as the Titanic sank. The more out of control something feels inside of my life, the more I place my routine around it. See: my hair.

So anyway, this is one of my favorite times of year, middle of August, weather just starting to turn a bit, planning out all of my fall decorating and activities-and, of course, the girls and I getting back into the routine of school and sports and dance and piano. Even though summer is gloriously fun, and it is so nice to have a break from homework and just lay around and swim and read a lot, the three of us do best with a routine, and fall provides that for us.

(We have learned to lighten our schedule in the past year, and concentrate on only the activities that are bringing us joy. But that’s a different blog post.)

Because I basically live my life on a school calendar schedule still, fall is when I buy my planner for the year. In the past four years I have bought an Erin Condren paper planner. I loved the look of Erin Condren. The paper planner lives on our kitchen island, to serve as a reference point for the girls (and sometimes my parents) as to what is going on when. Everyone has their own color so you know immediately if the activity includes you. This suited us.

However, this year when I began my planner shopping, I wanted something a little different (not a lot different). I still wanted the look of the Erin Condren planner-spiral bound and sturdy paper and the vertical layout-but I wanted to customize the layout. I wanted each of the girls to have their own space-I didn’t want to be wedded to using the different colors because, while it’s pretty to look at, it’s time consuming to write everything out in different pens, and really, we are the only people who ever look at it.

I ended up getting a Plum Paper planner and I am delighted with it. It has a similar look to Erin Condren (the only thing I really miss is the rose-colored spiral binding). I was able to break each day out into a space for me, Betsy, and Felicity, as well as a space for work, meal plans, and the blog, which was exciting and somewhat grownup. There’s also space for anything extra that might not fit those categories.


When I added in all of our fall activities, I did use the colors, but I’m fairly sure that going forward I’m not going to-it isn’t necessary anymore, and I actually like the look of the black pen on white paper.


Plum Paper was significantly cheaper than Erin Condren as well (I spent $40 as opposed to $80). Overall, I’m very pleased with it.

The other calendar that I use on a regular basis is the Cozi app. This lives on my phone, and also on Nick and Jenifer’s phones, and Betsy’s phone. It’s a shared calendar so that we know when the girls’ activities are-it would work well for anyone that you want to share your calendar with, but I would especially recommend it for co-parenting. It saves us a lot of back and forth about when the girls are available.

I could go on and on. For me, laying something out is the best and easiest way to know what is coming. It’s cool if planning isn’t your thing. But if you are struggling with balancing your schedule, those are two of the easiest ways that I know of to get your arms around it.

And for now, I’m super excited for football Friday night and the idea that it’s nearly time to get out all the pumpkins and I am most blessed to be going into another school year with my favorite girls, which will surely be full of all the things, and we will hope for more good than bad, and savor all of this time together.

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Fear of Falling...



Remember in January when I said 2018 was going to be my year of being brave?

One week ago today, being brave was climbing a rather rickety ladder up 25 feet in the air and flipping around on a trapeze as if I had the slightest notion what I was doing.

The old Joy would probably not have tried. She definitely would not have actually succeeded in doing a backflip off on the bar. Why is that?

Certainly part of it is that I am in better shape than the old me-that cannot be denied. But also I have become a tad bit fearless. As I climbed that ladder I told myself that even if I fell down and made an idiot of myself, what did it matter? I would have tried. I would have proved to myself that I am willing to take a risk. That’s a tricky thing for me, trusting that risks won’t always end in hurt. Or that even if they do, I won’t break from said hurt.





Two weeks I got to hear Lysa TerKurst speak (because of this sometimes amazing thing called the internet). Lysa is the most profound speaker and teacher that I have simply stumbled upon on my own journey through this maddening grief and rebirth cycle I’ve been on. I’ve mentioned the First 5 app that I use for my devotions a couple of different times-Lysa is the head of Proverbs 31 ministries, of which First 5 is a part. Lysa’s teachings reach some part of my soul that is aching to understand my faith in the context of loss.

Her teaching, the one that I was listening to as I was washing my hair two weeks ago, her teaching was about continuing in the face of disappointment. I listened as she weaved a tale of theological teachings and grand ideas about faith and sin and ultimate redemption, and then she got to the bit where she tied this into her own story of loss and disappointment. Her story of her husband’s betrayal, and of what that sort of disappointment does to your soul, and how on earth you take that and move on and change somehow for the better.

Sometimes I feel so ridiculous for how hard my divorce was on my heart. In reality, my divorce was a healthy and necessary part of my life. I don’t go into all of the bits and pieces of the bad in my marriage. But rest assured, I do know, somewhere, in the back of my mind, I’m this new and different person, physically and emotionally and even somewhat spiritually, because…because. How many different ways can I teach myself that I’m a better person for letting go of this notion that holding onto something that was causing me nothing but hurt and pain and misery in the end was a brilliant idea?





I’m none too sure. But flipping around on a trapeze bar, being told by the instructor that I’m flying so well-somehow that’s a piece of it. My sister and my brother-in-law at one point said to me, “This is the new Joy.” And I know that seems silly-I know that my family in no way at all blames me for ending my marriage-but it’s like, it means the world to me that they have my back. That they have embraced all of these changes, even the ones that probably seem a little crazy and somewhat vain.

Spending an entire week in a fifteen passenger van with your entire family can get a little hairy. You’re cramped, you only have certain snack foods, and, if you are me, you only have a little bit of data on your phone that you have to hoard for uploading pictures. Tensions run high. It can be especially easy for me to feel like a kid, the only one on the trip without a spouse, without someone else to act like my crazy is somehow divorced and different from the rest of my family’s crazy. I drive everyone a bit batty because I can’t quite help myself from talking so much and so loudly.

But on a trapeze in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Massachusetts, I flipped and flew and served as some sort of metaphor for figuring out life 3 years after a bomb detonated and tore life all to bits.

Maybe there is no real difference between flying and falling.







Thursday, July 26, 2018

Life In The After...



Summer is my downtime.

In the past three years of life, my girls have spent the majority of their week in the months of June and July with their father in Columbus. Which means that I spend the majority of my week at home, reading, cleaning, and trying not to be bored. (I don’t find reading or cleaning boring. But this past weekend, I cleaned the entire house, part of the garage, and read two books and started a third.)

I’m an introvert and so I readily admit that I enjoy time spent alone. But the past three years I have discovered that I am an introvert who likes to talk. Rather a lot. It’s an adjustment. So, I place strict boundaries around my day, I crave my schedule, I recognize when I need to talk to my sister or my friends or the guy. Of course, just because I need to talk, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t insanely busy. So I do talk to myself quite a lot as well.

When the girls come home, life is busy and loud and full of all the talking. It is also much harder to transition that I ever would have imagined. When I put myself in their place, though, I understand-switching between houses and families and pets and rules and bedrooms and all the things-it’s a lot for a thirteen year old and a ten year old. I am grateful that they have each other-Felicity leans on Betsy and Betsy takes care of her sister.

And even though we all adore each other, and the girls are always so glad to get home to their rooms and their grandparents and life as we know it, it is also just tricky. The emotions of moving between their parents, even as we have done this for such a while now, I think is just bubbling under the surface. We nearly always get into an argument about the state of their bedrooms (I try so hard to remember that I used to have a messy room, but it’s difficult sometimes to even find a path through their rooms, and I fault myself for that, but at the same time I don’t want to spend my time picking up after them only to have them wreck it again). There are days that I miss that old Joy and her strict ways.

When life fell apart, the girls saw me fall to such a state that I could barely function. I think-I think that broke open something inside of me. I’m not making excuses for it. But I am laying out a truth in our life. I’m not that strict Mom that I used to be. I want to spend the time that I have with my girls making memories, watching old 80s television shows, eating macaroni and cheese and all of the kinds of potatoes, obsessing over The Brady Bunch and Spin and Marty and Annette Funicello and all of the things that I treasure and somehow got lucky enough to have girls as geeky as me who love these things too.

It’s a balancing act.

And the truth is, it’s a tougher transition than I expected when all of life changed. But I think that I have at the very least gotten to a place where I anticipate and expect the transition to be tricky, and I make room for us to have nothing planned so that we can just pile on my bed and watch Perfect Strangers and sometimes talk about things that happened while they were gone, and sometimes not, and just readjust.

One of the most amazing things about being forced to change all of life after a lifetime preparing for a quite different life is that you realize that you aren’t going to break, you will survive life falling apart, and there will come a time of after. Life will turn into all kinds of befores and afters. Grace, for me, just now, is the gift of change. Life in the transition may not always be exactly perfect, but it’s exactly where we need to be.

Honor the space between no longer and not yet.
-Nancy Levin

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

More What I Had In Mind...





I have sort of repeatedly said, falling all to bits and piecing yourself back together can be a fascinating process.

(It can also be overwhelming and exhausting, but that’s not the point of this blog post.)

I’m one of those people who likes to know where life is headed, and I always have been. When I was a kid I knew that I would grow up to have girls and live in the exact house that I live in. My life unfolded exactly as I planned it all out, down to the age I was when I got married and when I had each of my girls.

Then, you know, life diverted. Two roads diverged into a wood and all-only not quite the sad longing of Frost, but more of being shoved onto a path that you weren’t expecting.

Of course, in the beginning, I panicked. I mean, I was wrong about the cornerstone of this plan, I was wrong in where I laid my trust and my future, and nothing seemed like it was ever going to make sense ever again. You can’t trust yourself because, after all, it was your trusting nature that got you into this predicament.

Three years on, I still have a lot to come to terms with. I’m not done figuring all of this out yet.

But, about six months ago, a path opened up in front of me that I wasn’t expecting. My initial reaction was to pull back and question everything and not trust myself at all to make any sort of decision. But I did manage a tentative step and braced myself for sure heartbreak and so far, we are still walking and talking and figuring things out.

I don’t exactly have a plan. I have a sort of broad outline, and we exist inside of as much margin as we can. But what I found myself telling someone recently is this-this part of my life, this strange path that I have found myself on in the past half a year or so-I am loving it because it wasn’t a part of the original design. I wasn’t planning on life taking a turn that was quite so unexpected and out of the blue.

“There is pleasure in the pathless wood-“ I don’t know that I quite agree with Byron on that, I’m much too in love with my routine to just throw all caution to the wind. But I can say with all certainty that sometimes spontaneity can be just what your heart was longing for all along, that opening yourself up can be frightening and fun all at the same time, and that finding yourself existing outside of the lines can be just the thing that eases the worry that you have that you haven’t the foggiest idea what you are doing.

Piecing yourself back together is a delicate dance in which you get to question every last little thing. But perhaps the person that emerges is worth this strange journey.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Go Your Own Way...





“And hope that someday I am able to write down how I figured all of this out.”
-Me, last summer


I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the blog and its purpose and how it has morphed so far from what it started out to be. About the things that I write about, and the things that I don’t, and why exactly I do any of it.

I love to write. I love to write like I love to breathe-it’s my favorite thing in the world to do. Often when I write something down, it’s the first time that I’ve ever realized that particular thought and it sort of catches my breath and I go oh. Huh.

So anyway, naturally, most of my writing doesn’t end up on here. And some of what I have written here is just the loose ends of a girl grappling with a great deal of fear of where to go and what to do next. When life fell apart, I didn’t write anything on the blog for 6 months. I spent 6 long months wondering if I would ever find the words to tell the world about anything happening in my life ever again. And then I wrote that first post after we decided to divorce, the post that told the world, yes, my marriage has ended (and there are many things about that post that embarrass me now) and it broke open a dam inside of me-it was my way of saying, this happened. This mattered.

I don’t know how common my feelings are to other divorced people, but I know that I felt like I was taking an eraser to fifteen years of my life. Like we were saying, oh, we didn’t really mean any of that. And writing down anything-from the shame that I felt over getting divorced to the overwhelming fear that I had of what to do next-it gave this chapter of my life some meaning. I know, of course, in my head that no one thinks that my marriage meant nothing, but I just didn’t know what to do with the pieces that existed in my hands.

Many people at the time came to me and told me that I shouldn’t panic, that I needn’t worry about dating, that the only thing that mattered was the girls…they were words of kindness, but they only served to make me more insecure. I was scared to death of never falling in love again, of living all alone forever, of not having any kind of a plan other than getting up every day and breathing in and out.

So, I wrote it down. I wrote down how scared and all alone and bereft I was. I wrote down guilt and fear and shame and joy and bliss and wonder. I wrote it down so that I could process it, so that I could own it, so that I could understand any of it.

Sometimes I worry that the blog seems to only perpetuate the idea that I was sad and scared and alone. I’m not that anymore (I’m not sad and alone-scared I’m working on). I write about the things that overwhelm me so that I can get a grip on why I’m feeling that way. I write about things that I am ashamed of to allow myself permission to let go of the shame.

I don’t know exactly why this journey took this particular shape. I do know that whenever anyone has told me that they enjoy my blog or relate to some aspect of it, it makes me feel like it is serving a purpose bigger that just me navel gazing. Maybe that’s ludicrous. I have no idea. But what I’m meaning to say is that writing led me through this maze of grief, and now it’s leading me into this brave new world of whatever it is that comes next.

”I do not know what lies around that bend, but I’m going to believe the best does.”
-Anne of Green Gables

Friday, June 8, 2018

Wake Up. Be Amazing. (That's What Betsy Says...)




Routines are life giving.

I am resolute in my belief about this.

People are constantly teasing me about my quite ridged ways, and I will agree that not everyone needs to be as structured about life as I am, but the fact remains that routines are life giving. Having a routine, first of all, ensures that you get everything done that you were intending to do. It frees me of the notion that I forgot to do something.

But more importantly, routine gives a structure to my days that I crave. I have written about my anxiety a lot-and some days are better than others-but having a routine just allows my brain that little bit of space to breathe, like, we got this.

I have spent the past three years perfecting my morning routine. Prior to life flipping all upside down, I was much more of a night owl and my mornings generally just consisted of getting my kids ready and out the door rather than worrying over my own self. Such was the life of a stay-at-home mom. (That feels like lifetimes ago.)

But I have managed, somehow, to turn myself into a morning person. I honestly enjoy waking up every morning, which was certainly not the case in my old life. Some of that, I’m sure, is like everything else-I am such a different person in so many ways now. (Hopefully good ways.) But some of it is due to figuring out a routine that gives me the space I crave to physically prepare for my day.

A couple of people recently picked my brain about my morning routine, and so I thought that I might share a few of the highlights here, just in case anyone else remotely cares. I don’t pretend that it’s perfect or anything, but so far, it’s worked for me.


The first, and perhaps single most important piece of this blog, is my Philips Wake-Up Light Alarm Clock with Colored Sunrise Simulation and Sunset Fading Night Light. Oh, my goodness. The life changer. This alarm clock basically simulates the sunrise for half an hour before waking you up-you can chose to either wake up to the radio or to the sound of birds chirping. I have it set to the birds, and I tell the girls all the time that it makes me feel like I’m Cinderella, waking up to her forest friends. It is the loveliest way to wake up.

I journal first thing in the morning, and then I use the Headspace app for a meditation exercise for 10 minutes. I will admit that I was a little weary of purchasing that app because most of the time when I have tried meditating in yoga class, I always find myself realizing when we are almost done that I have been thinking about a hundred other things, rather than concentrating on my breathing. But what I like about the Headspace app is that it is guided meditation, meaning that it helps me to focus on what I’m doing. I have tried a few different packets and I really loved the anxiety packet-imagine that.

While I’m making my coffee and getting my breakfast, I pray. It feels strange to me to write that down, and I’m not quite sure why, but that’s what I do. Starting my day by covering my family and friends in prayer has been my habit since college, and it is one of the few bits of life that didn’t change after my divorce.

While I’m drinking said coffee, I read my devotion. I have been using an app that my sister recommended called First Five, and I absolutely love it. I get an infinite amount out of those five minutes of my day (on the weekends there is a video wrap up with about a 10-minute lesson and I have found them to be incredibly eye opening and interesting).

I have the same thing for breakfast every day-hot water with lemon, a banana, coffee, and Greek yogurt (usually strawberry or raspberry). I know, it’s super boring. It’s okay-that’s who I am.

And then we get to my workout. All told, it’s an hour and a half. I do yoga, cardio, weights, and I run. Here’s the thing-getting blood moving to your brain is the best possible thing that you can do for your mental health. It’s changed my life-clearly, it hasn’t dissipated my anxiety or my depression, but it has changed my ability to get a grip on them, to keep my head above water when I want to fall under waves of sheer panic.

Like a year ago, Betsy showed me how to make a playlist on YouTube. (I’m sure there are cooler apps for this, but I am like an old lady with my phone, so this works for me.) I have a yoga playlist and a workout playlist. My yoga playlist is a mix of Sarah McLachlan and Jewel and the Black Crowes and my favorite song, “Hallelujah.” Just what you would expect out of the angst ridden 90s teenager that I still think I am.

My workout playlist is more upbeat, more probably what you would expect out of a woman trying her best to do things that scare her. “Fight Song.” “Whatever It Takes.” “Part of Me.” “Praying” by Kesha is my cool down song and the lyrics there (“Cause you brought the flames and you put me through hell/
I had to learn how to fight for myself/And we both know all the truth I could tell/I'll just say this is I wish you farewell”), they are a healing balm to my soul *every* *single* *day*.

And from there, I just get ready for work. It’s sort of a lot for a morning (I’m up at 5 and to work by 8, so it’s basically 3 hours all told). But I can’t really overstate how lovely it is to have that workout done and out of the way before my day really even begins. Whenever I have tried to move my workout to evening (for whatever reason), it just doesn’t work for me. I’m tired when I get home, and all I want to do is read my book.

Embracing truths about myself has been one of the best parts of my life in the past 3 years. One of those truths is that I am far from perfect. But one is also that this life I lead may seem super boring and predictable to some people, but for me, this is a part of my weird existence on this planet.

It’s a beautiful life that I get to live.

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

All Endings are Beginnings...




Kind hearted people often tell me that they admire me for being able to be friends with Nick and Jenifer. It’s a lovely thing to hear, but I don’t always know how to respond. Because really, there’s a lot to unpack there.

People often say something along the lines of, “It’s great for your kids that you are friends.” And it is, it is a great thing for my kids to witness. But my head usually reels to people that I know that are divorced who either don’t really get along with their ex-spouse, or who honestly have no choice about it either way because their former partner is completely out of the picture.

And this is the thing that I want you to know if you read my words ever and think that I magically knew just how to handle my husband having a whole other family and how to approach that with any kind of grace at all-I didn’t. I made up everything as I went along, and I did a few things correctly, and I also messed up a lot, and suppressed a lot of my feelings, and therefore ended up stuck in waves of grief for what seemed a long, long time.

I approach everything in my life, always, with the questions, “What would a good mom do? What would a good daughter do?” and so on. So, when all of this came down the pike, I asked myself, “What would a good ex-wife do?”

The answer to that, of course, is simple. A good ex-wife would let her husband go with as much grace as she could muster, and wish him all the best, and hold tight to her kids while understanding that they need to have a good relationship with their dad, if only because everything that you read during your divorce makes a point to tell you that children who have divorced parents are more likely to go down dangerous paths of drug use and promiscuity and all kinds of lovely avenues. It’s super fun.

But the reality of living that answer is not that simple.

Sometimes people will say to me, “I would stay friends with my spouse because that’s the {fill in the blank}.” Father of my children. Mother of my children. Person I first fell in love with. You name it, there’s a reason. And in the abstract, yes, of course. Nick is the father of my children. He was my first love. Heavens, Nick was my first real and true boyfriend. Can’t go much farther back than that.

But here’s the deal: divorce changes people. There are all kinds of things to maneuver around. There are the reasons that you are getting divorced, to start. There are feelings of abandonment, of loss, of fear. There are new people coming into your life who get to have a say in this new reality. There are decisions to be made, and wounds to be healed, and dreams to lay to rest (I want to write dreams to kill right there, but that seems passive aggressive).

My point with this particular post is simply this: this friendship is hard won, and it’s not perfect, and I worry constantly that it’s not enough. I have issues with boundaries, you know. But I’m working on it.

There isn’t an easy way to say any of that if someone says anything, good or bad, about my continued friendship with Nick and Jenifer.

Divorce is a messy thing. Nothing about untangling yourself from someone that you loved is easy or simple. But eventually, perhaps three years later, you will find yourself excited about being brave, and learning all kinds of new things, and getting yourself tangled up in new adventures, and just feeling forever grateful for whatever grace existed to get you to this place where all of life feels shiny and new again.

To make an end is to make a beginning.