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.

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.

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)

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.

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