Right Where You Left Me

 

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”  -Antonio Gramsci

 

Never have I stumbled upon a quote that speaks more to my heart in this darkest time of the darkest year of life.

 

This time of year is always one of introspection for me, this last bit of the year that holds my turning a new age just as the world turns a page onto a new time, a new perspective- I have realized in the past few years how very lucky I am to be born on Christmas day, which just naturally is a time of year lent to figuring out how much you’ve grown in the past year and to look forward to the new year with all of its empty planner pages ready for new hopes and dreams.

 

But of course, this year everything has a completely different shine to it. Life at the end of 2020 is not about looking back over my favorite things that I’ve stored up to recommend, not about looking back to where I have traveled and how I have grown as a person- life at the end of 2020 is about survival, and joy found in pockets of the tiniest glimmers of hope, and grief unlike I’ve ever known on such a wide scale.

 

My own personal grief story, cataloged so thoroughly in this blog, feels to me like it has been lived out in front of my eyes by nearly everyone I know as they grapple with this year. The world turning upside down through no fault of your own isn’t much comfort when you still have to deal with the consequences of decisions taken from your hands. Life keeps plodding along even as all of the tentpole moments have been stripped so bare it is hard to recognize them.

 

I keep being reminded of the first year that the girls and I decorated for Christmas as just the three of us- I kept saying, “Just think, next year this won’t seem so strange because we will have lived through it before.” And now, every single year as we get the decorations out, I say it and we laugh over how silly with grief those three girls were, so sad to be dragging heavy boxes out and trying to figure out what decorations could be safely put out without dredging up too many memories of their father. If it helps at all to know, this year we put all of the old decorations out, even those “Johnson Family” decorations that we so carefully stowed away that first year, because it doesn’t make us sad to remember anymore.

 

Which leads me to what this year that I chose the word “release” means to me now. 2020 has been a year of release unlike anything that I have ever known. Some of it (most of it) has been the same for me as for everyone- an understanding of how many seemingly small joys I take for granted in life, of coming to grips with how frightening it is to understand truly what tender hooks my life is balanced on.

 

But it has also been a year of me releasing, finally, the idea that I am going to just control life from here on out. I could have told you, 5 years ago, that I knew that my obsession with my hair and my weight and my routine was a symptom of my feeling at loose ends, staring at the end of my marriage. I understood it in my head. But I honestly didn’t care. If straightening my hair gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning and not see that girl whose husband had abandoned her, then straighten my hair I would.

 

I’ve released bits and pieces of all of that leading up to this year. But this year was the year that I finally got it through my head that it doesn’t matter exactly how my marriage ended. The story that I began living at 21 years of age had this painful ending, yes, but that was all a part of the making of me.

 

I envy people that I know whose love stories have continued on, true, but I also have a deep desire to own this story that I am living. I lived out a story that had an ending. I’m never sure what exactly I’m brushing up against when I bristle against that- if it’s that good Christian girls don’t get divorced, or if it’s that Type A girls don’t give up on anything- but this year of release has been about me accepting that as a fact and letting it live. I’m not trying to tie it up in a bow and make it all neat and tidy. That grief hurt. But it’s gone now.

 

The word that is pressing on my heart for 2021 is “quiet.” That’s a scary word for me to embrace. I’ve spent such years working my way out of my shell, getting to a point where I talk (much too much) instead of being overcome with fright. But quiet is what I’m feeling entering 2021. I want to wrap my arms around my girls and enjoy these last few years of Betsy being at home, I want to wrap myself inside of my books and music and movies and just marinate in the enjoyment that life brings. I want my words to be uplifting and hopeful, words untangling themselves from fear and worry.

 

I want to be the girl who lived.

Freaks and Geeks

 

It’s the spooky season in the Watson Johnson house, and we are eating up all of our favorites, which include (but are not limited to) Hocus Pocus, Ghostbusters, Halloweentown, E.T., Hotel Transylvania, The Munsters, The Addams Family, and (finally, for the first time) Scream.

 

As such, my apologies for the Christmas spreadsheet being late- my brain isn’t in Christmas mode yet. (Although, allow me to assure you that the moment we hit November 1, the Christmas playlist will be on and I will gladly consume any movie that includes “mistletoe” in the title.)

Christmas Movies 2020

 

Anyway, anyway….

I don't talk about politics on the blog even though, as my therapist says, it's my jam. As the wonky nerd that I am though I will talk until my final breath about how important it is for you to vote. Vote 411 is a great resource to learn more about your ballot choices before you vote. 

 

 

The Bible Binge: Faith Adjacent

Purity Culture

 

I adore this spinoff from my beloved Bible Binge podcast, in which Erin Moon searches for biblical “reception in unlikely places.” I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago, I have been really pondering my own experience with purity culture. This podcast spoke to so many experiences of my youth, holding them up to the light without making fun of them, just searching for truth and meaning- all of it engrossing, in my opinion.

 

 

The SSR Podcast

Episode 117: Meet Kirsten

 

SSR is one of my most favorite ever podcasts, in which Alli Hoff Kosik and a guest read young adult literature (normally from their own youth) and reexamine it in light of adult minds and perspectives. I was excited for this episode with Kate Kennedy from the Be There In Five podcast (I truly love Be There in Five but-important caveat- Kate’s episodes are so long, often two hours, I have to really prepare myself to pay attention for that long to just Kate alone talking- I’m sure that says something about my attention span).

 

I was just honestly jazzed because this was an American Girl book. My Samantha doll remains to this day my favorite gift ever, and I own all of the Kirsten books, so I was familiar with her story. Alli and Kate dig deep into American Girl and its origins and subsequent buyout by Mattel. It’s all fascinating in the best way.

 

Open Book by Jessica Simpson

 

I’m only halfway through listening to this on Audible and I’m loving it so much I have to gush about it on here. I watched Nick and Jessica’s television show and always felt such affinity for Nick-he was closer to my age, and it always seemed that he was the mature one. Listening to Jessica’s story is captivating. She doesn’t deny at all her mistakes, but it is so fascinating to understand where she was coming from, what her life was like leading up to her stardom, how much making a reality show truly changed the course of her life. I’m forever and always interested in other people’s lives (which is why memoirs are my thing), and of course throw in divorce and I will devour it.

We are heading into the darkest days, and in this crazy year everything feels anxious around the edges. I'm holding onto this time with my girls full of movies and books and nights in and trying to learn the dance to BTS' "Dynamite." Which is harder than it looks.

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

 

18 years ago today it was raining (not quite as dreary a day as today, but it was raining). My grandma told me that was good luck. (It wasn’t, obviously, but when I am a grandma, I will say the same thing.)

 

Every year, on this particular day, I write a blog post that mostly I don’t post.

 

5 years on seems like a good time to let them live.

 

From 2017:

“The thing is, as I have mentioned, I waited a really long time to meet someone and fall in love with them. I didn't wait patiently. I prayed and wished and hoped for love to hit me over the head like a sledgehammer and I exasperated everyone around me because I was forever talking about wanting to fall in love and get married and that's exhausting and boring after a while. I didn't have a plan for my life.

 

Enter Nick.

 

Enter exactly everything you ever wanted all in one fell swoop.

 

It was so very fairytaleish.

 

It makes everything much more complicated than it surely needs to be.”

 

From 2018:

 

“I had a revelation today.

 

(To begin, I talk to myself in the car in the mornings, unless I am on the phone. Most days, I actually am on the phone. But when I’m not, I yammer to myself.)

 

Anyway, a revelation.

 

I said, “I am trying to learn to love someone without losing myself in the process.”

 

And then I just sat there for a minute.

 

Because, you know, what the heck?

 

I know all of the correct things to say about this-things that I say to my girls, about being strong women, about finding their passions. I have spent this past year doing all the brave things, trying new things, falling down and getting back up and all the things.

 

But here is a brave thing: I’m going to be very honest in this space. When I met Nick, and he fell in love with me, I tangled myself all up in that feeling, that idea that someone wanted to build a life with me, wanted to have children with me-and that’s as it should be, of course. I married someone who was my very best friend at the time, who I just adored-I had never been in love before and I found it intoxicating.

 

My marriage came apart in pieces. You know that metaphor about boiling a frog? How, if you want to boil a frog, place it in the pan and let the water slowly rise and it doesn’t know to jump out? That is the best way that I know of to describe how my marriage came to be in pieces without me even completely realizing it. Because, of course, looking back everything seems obvious.

 

But somewhere recently I read something that said, if you don't feel safe enough to yell back, you're not safe enough.

 

 

It all dovetails-my personality is that I want to be the best, so naturally I wanted to be the best wife. Mix that with genuine adoration and trust and faith in happy endings, and just what I always wanted, always, for as long as I could remember, and my beautiful girls and our family, and it just”

 

(That’s where I ended it.)

 

From 2019:

“I don’t know how to teach Betsy how to navigate dating-how to flirt, or how to figure out if a boy is interested in you, or any of those things. I feel completely useless to her.

 

The lack of instincts that I have around any of that is somewhat astounding.

 

In the before, I would have simply told her that when you actually fall in love, everything just falls into place. That was my experience. Nick Johnson came along and swept me off my feet and life was never the same again. It didn’t matter about flirting or dating really or any of those things-because I met Nick and I just knew that he was who I had been missing.

 

In the after, I am left with this notion that mostly that wasn’t the best way to go about falling in love. I should have questioned more, I should have concentrated on figuring out who I was instead of just who I was as Nick’s wife.

 

Divorce is just such a tangle of emotions-it’s like living beyond the end of a fairy tale into the cold light of day, and realizing that a lot of what I believed to be the truth that I built my life on was a lie. It takes all that I have not to go into this explanation every time I tell anyone that I’m divorced-we did all the right things. We had date nights, we were best friends, we were all the things. And it still didn’t work out.

 

My marriage taught me that there is no guarantee to love. We wake up every morning and chose to love that person that we are with. Which is an amazing notion when this other person is choosing to be with you, and”

 

(That’s the end of that one. No idea at all what the rest of that sentence was.)

 

In the end, it’s just that I want to remember. I didn’t post these at the time because my feelings are always so raw around this particular memory. Even as it has changed and evolved and twisted into what exists today. I can't put to words what it is today. Maybe next year. 

Doves Cry

 

“I am well in body, although considerably rumpled in spirit”- oh, Anne girl, me too.

 

Life just now, today, feels heavy. Pressing. Dark.

 

When I lived all those years inside my own head- those years in college when I only spoke to a handful of people and then those early years of motherhood where my social circle mostly just included Nick, my sister, and my parents- sometimes I long for that girl. She was lonely, yes- especially the one in college- but she didn’t feel so much.

 

We have lived through our first breakup. And I am so very proud of Betsy and how she handled herself- she was honest and brave and tried her best to explain that she values the friendship that they created. My heart, though, my heart was not created for such things. I truly adored her boyfriend, and found him to be so polite and kind. I am proud of Betsy for understanding that she needs to be honest about her feelings- she is so much braver than I am.

 

That compounded with an unexpected death in a friend’s family, along with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg- it’s all so much. (Most people who know me well know that I love to read Supreme Court rulings and I adore, honestly, all of the justices in one way or another.)

 

The original plan for today’s post was to be this fun post about various podcasts and books I’ve been loving and then sharing my spreadsheet for the Halloween movie schedule.

 

I contemplated just not posting anything at all, but spreadsheets- they truly are my love language.

 Halloween 2020 Spreadsheet

For now, that will have to do. 

To Dawson, with Love (but Joey and Pacey forever)

 

We have finally arrived at Capeside.

 

The girls and I began watching Dawson’s Creek at the start of the school year, and they are rightly hooked- we are still in the beginning, the Dawson/Jen/Joey phase.

 

Michelle Williams is one of my all time favorite actors in the here and now, and watching her in this first role I ever saw her in- I have a much better appreciation for what she is asked to do with this role that was so clearly defined as the girl that you were initially supposed to root for, to find as a suitable side to this love triangle of two girls in love with the same boy- before, of course, the entire thing shifted to two boys in love with the same girl, due to the undeniable chemistry of one Katie Holmes and one Joshua Jackson.

 

I was in college when Dawson premiered, and as an avowed Buffy fan I began watching that very first night. My favorite character, then and now, was Joey Potter. I, of course, saw Joey as an extension of myself, the girl pining away after the boy who is all caught up in the beautiful blond girl- I knew that role all too well.

 

Imagine my surprise when my girls exclaimed after watching for about 20 minutes that I was so clearly Dawson- and my reluctant admittance that they are entirely right. The movie geek with rose colored glasses and a complete oblivion to everything around him, bound and determined to mine every life lesson into a script for life to follow?

 

So, I’m trying to make some peace with the idea that I am not, in fact, the sarcastic, overlooked but beautiful girl next door but instead the sort of pathetic geek who realizes everything only after it’s patently obvious to everyone else.

 

 

How Did This Get Made? Sleepaway Camp

Sleepaway Camp is this movie that I watched when I was 11 years old and I have been trying to exorcise from my soul ever since. I genuinely believe that it is a masterpiece of a slasher film, an allegory for sexual identity and growing up and, you know, dealing with a completely insane person raising a young girl. 

Somehow, trying to find a podcast about Grease 2, this popped up because I truly believe that God intended me to find it- this is the most dissection I've ever seen on this movie and it's just incredible- they bring up some good points that I have never thought of, and also I think that they are completely wrong about a couple of theories, which made me realize that I sort of feel some ownership over this bonkers movie.  

If you have ever seen Sleepaway Camp you will enjoy this podcast. And if you have ever seen Sleepaway Camp, please tell me so that we can have long discussions about it.

Class Action Park

When the girls are at their dad's, I tend to watch documentaries (the girls hate it if I watch nearly anything without them, but documentaries are not their cup of tea). This documentary is a completely fascinating look at this amusement park in New Jersey that ended up killing several of its guests and injuring many more.

I am a thrill seeker by nature, and as this began I was completely sure that I would ride most of these rides. However by the end I was most glad that I never visited this park, as I am sure I would have attempted most of these rides and surely gotten my much too trusting self hurt- it is mind blowing to me that there was so little inspection of these rides.

 Just now, the pumpkins are out, the Halloween costumes narrowed down, the wind has shifted and our walks are cooler and earlier every evening. Remote learning hasn't been completely clear of bumps, but it has been mostly really challenging in all the best ways and I am beyond proud of how hard the my girls are working and adapting and becoming the resilient souls that I have long prayed they will become.

Sweater Weather

It’s planner season.
 
In this strange year of too much and yet not enough, I went ahead and bought a planner even though I haven’t had much occasion to use my planner since March. My head is all prepared for sweaters and pumpkins and sharpened pencils, even though of course my heart knows better.
 
My mind in late August always starts preparing for school, no matter how old I get, apparently. I found some of my old collages in my cleaning out my basement this summer and it struck me how these- especially the ones that I would put on my notebooks and book covers- they were sort of vision boards for that young Joy.
 
That young girl that I was back then, she had such dreams about what exactly life was supposed to look like- she always thought that she was eventually going to grow out of her awkwardness.
 
Long ago I realized that I was never not going to be this clumsy, much too loud person who never fails to realize two minutes too late that she has said the exact wrong thing. But this summer, this strange summer of forced introspection, has allowed me to make a peace with that in a new way. 

The Wondering Years and All Things Reconsidered by Knox McCoy

 

I consider Knox and Jamie (of my most beloved Popcast) to be friends who are much cooler than I am. (I often wish that podcasts had been around when I was in college and so at loose ends for what to do about my absolute inability to talk to anyone around me.) These two books by Knox speak so to my soul about what it means to remember with such fondness these pieces of my faith that I grew up holding to, while at the same time digging into and learning so much more to theology than I ever grasped as that young girl.

 

I grew up loving Brio magazine and DC Talk and I adored the Christy Miller series so much that I not only wrote a letter to my future husband at 16 (just as she did) but also I wrote a letter to him every single year on my birthday and presented them to Nick on our wedding night and genuinely never thought that a weird thing to do until two years ago.  

 

Knox (and Jamie and Erin) grew up in this same culture, too old for VeggieTales but a little younger than Salty, right in that McGee and Me, "Jesus Freak" hotspot. And frankly that’s not something that I talk about too very much- none of my friends in high school read or watched these things, and it was just sort of something that was a part of who I was but was also not something that I discussed with anyone. Finding these books spoke to that part of my soul, the one that remembers so fondly that world that I grew up in while reconciling it with my much deeper and more considered adult faith.

 

Knox writes, “I am a part of a generation of evangelicals who struggle to balance the simplistic spiritual perspective we internalized as children with the more complicated notions and cultural conflicts we experience now as adults.”

 

It was a delightful way to spend bits of my summer.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Everyone kept telling me that I needed to read Untamed. People who know me really well, and people I have only barely met. So finally I plunged in. 

And I get it- my co-dependent soul needs to inject some of her words into my veins. Becoming an adult in the middle of life, becoming who you were meant to be after what seems like the biggest bits of life have come and gone- it's hard and yet amazing, uncomfortable and yet freeing. 

There are pieces of Glennon's story that I just cannot relate to (breaking up her family, even though I completely and totally understand why that happened, and it's not that I fault her for it, but it is also far from my reality), and the old Joy would have internalized that as having done the wrong thing, not grieved or changed in the correct way. The Joy of 2020 takes that as different people living different lives and loving them and understanding that growth comes in all kinds of different forms. 

Glennon is a brave soul and I am all the better for having met her.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett is officially one of my favorite writers. The Mothers was amazing, and yet The Vanishing Half tops it. This novel is intricate in its examination of race and family and it has stayed inside of my soul, in the way that all the best books do.

This summer has been full of many more books and movies and rearranging the furniture. Full of reliving so much of who I was twenty some years ago, and at the same time listening to Folklore on a loop and falling in love with Sam Ryder on Tik Tok (his version of "What's Going On?" is perfect)  and absolutely loving The Baby-sitters Club on Netflix (much to my surprise, because I truly love my Baby-sitters on VHS tapes). 

This summer has been a reset, a time of quiet that has been healing to my soul. A time of learning and grace and trying to be kinder to myself in understanding that we are all figuring this out as we go.

Goodbye to Yesterday...

Last night on my walk I heard the sound of the cicadas and I suddenly realized that it is nearly late summer. This year has at once crept along and also flown by-very much like my years spent at home with my babies. The days would stretch on, especially in the very beginning when it seemed like I just finished breastfeeding and suddenly she would be hungry again and I honestly felt like I would be this lumpy mess of a human being who would manage not one thing in a day for the rest of my life.

I tell this story a lot, but when Betsy was about 2 a friend of mine was talking to me about her teenage daughter putting on her coat and I said, “I just cannot imagine that there will be a day when Betsy can just put on her coat.”

And now in the summer of 2020 we are teaching Betsy how to drive.

It goes so fast.

Anyway, this morning I was reading this insightful (and quite funny) piece on Grub Street called “Life After Sourdough,” and it reminded me exactly of what life first felt like 5 years ago.

I have a terrible tendency to loop everything back to my divorce- it is the prism through which I filter everything, I know, but the thing is, living through this unprecedented time feels like everyone is going through a grief so very similar to mine at the end of my marriage- as the year goes on, and we have to accept change that we did not want, we grieve so hard this thing that we have no control over, that we cannot change no matter how much we wish things were different.

This article, in which Rachel Sugar discusses how four months ago she was excited about her sourdough starter, about how she has tried to find a hobby that is useful and time consuming but also sort of easy- “That would require constant attention but also demand nothing.”

It hit a cord.

Five years ago, I wanted to fill all of my time with something- I tried so many different things. I took my life down to the studs and built it back up again, trying new things, pushing myself past old boundaries that I had invented for myself. It sounds sort of pleasant, stated that way, but it was hard.

I was unmoored from all that I knew myself to be. That is a scary place to be.

What has become of that is who I am now. I am a much more confident person because I have tried so many different things, and failed a lot, and I truly believe that most things can at least be understood if not mastered by reading and asking a ton of questions.

I’m never going to know the answer to the question that I’m searching for- as Rachel says, “It can’t stay like this, I’d said for months, but it turned out it sort of could.”

Sometimes I tell myself, “This is just a thing that happened. There isn’t any great mystery to it- people get divorced all the time.” And sometimes I look back at the past five years, and see all of this change in how I approach the world, and I’m just floored that I ever think that it just happened.

"It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Simple Kind of Life...

You know how I like to take a metaphor and beat it to death.

This is release. This completely full dumpster.

17 years ago, baby Joy bought this house that she had wanted for as long as anyone can remember while her husband was in Iraq. It was exciting and terrifying. I hated making huge, life altering decisions without Nick, but at the same time this was the dream. This house and babies. That was all I wanted or cared about having once I became a grownup.

This old house planted itself in my heart around age eight, and as such I love it despite a great many annoyances that come along with it- bugs love it; I have this incredibly annoying small leak in my bathroom closet that I have been trying to fix for months and every time I think I’ve got it, water gets in again; the person that owned it just prior to me raised the living room floor and lowered the ceiling at the same time, which seems like a weird combination.

Still, my babies came along inside of this house, and it grew right along with us as we finally gave up on the idea of having a dining room (that we never used) at all in favor of a game room; as we rearranged furniture to create the illusion of more space; as the babies’ rooms grew into the rooms of (much too messy) teenagers.

The house had come with a ton of stuff that the previous owner did not want, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to me (or Nick, for that matter) to have done anything about it. As such, our basement and garage held bits and pieces of someone else’s life.

And then, 17 years of living happened, and Nick never met anything that he particularly wanted to throw away, and when he did leave, he left behind mounds of stuff.

It has taken 5 years for me to get to a place of release inside of my heart to want to claim this space as completely and totally my own. And here we are, and I feel ten times lighter just from letting go of everything that was taking up that space in my heart (and also literally inside of my house).

June normally undoes me. Try as hard as I might, June comes along every single year with her insistence on waking up this part of my heart that I’ve bandaged up and healed as best I can and reminds me that I’m a girl who was left behind. It brings fresh to the surface memories of what that sting felt like, of how helpless I felt and then anger at myself for feeling helpless at all and frustration with myself for any of it.

This year, though, that hasn’t yet happened. Oh, June came, and brought her memories with her, but somehow there wasn’t all of the emotions. There was just, oh, there you are. Welcome back.

Maybe physically releasing things is helping in ways I can’t quite articulate. Maybe it’s just been long enough that I’m used to it. Maybe it’s that I’m over it.

Whatever it is, I’m loving that I chose release.

Is It Cool That I Said All That?

The sun is shining, Michael is singing “I Want You Back” through my speakers…it’s that time of year.

And it’s finally (almost) time for me to declare five years.

You know how cancer survivors hold five years sort of out there, as a goal? Well, I have held five years out there since all of this began. There is no real secret to five years, I know. Wait long enough and time will elapse and that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. But here we are.

I’ve had many, many revelations about all of this recently, and I don’t know for certain if it is a matter of how much time has elapsed, or if it’s been this season of forced downtime with my precious girls, or if it’s an emergence of a new outlook on life- or, most likely, it’s all of those things.

Life just now is really right where I want it to be. As always, I wish that I could hold that girl from 5 years ago and tell her that. It all turns out okay. Better than okay. Promise.

(I honestly don’t know if this is interesting to anyone at all besides me. I realize that most people in this world move through things quicker than I do. Heavens, I know people who have been widowed who have remarried in the time that I have been slogging along in this. Which is fabulous for them, and I truly hope for all of the world to find love, and I’m here for all of it. It’s just not my truth.)

Here’s the deal: in the beginning (I have said this before), I simply assumed that life would lay itself out like a romantic comedy that I was unaware I was living inside. If Nick wasn’t the right person, then right person would somehow appear and all of life would fall into place. Not right away, of course. I spent a nice long year inside of searing grief, and then another year emerging slowly from that. Slowly beginning to notice men noticing me, and for a moment enjoying that. I dated a bit. I promised myself that at the least I would have a new friend in the one person that I went out with for a while, and that has completely turned out to be true.

But here’s my revelation in this year that I promised myself release- I’m happy with life the way that it is. I’m here for movie nights with my girls, for meals with my parents, for texts with my sister about books. I love being the one to make all of my own decisions about my house, about my paycheck-these are things that I take for granted now, but that it took time to get used to.

This time of heightened anxiety in the world has brought to the surface some gunk that I never properly dealt with at the time of my divorce. In the beginning, life was about surviving (truly). There was so much to mitigate then, and now there is space and time and healing and so coming to revelations about what someone breaking your trust and what that has created in its wake- it’s all easier to deal with. And, for me, it’s important that I’m dealing with it on my own.

Why does any of this matter? I don’t know that it does. But it’s where I am just now. And I sort of want to shout it from the rooftops- just exactly the same way that I felt when I fell in love with Nick Johnson and I wanted the entire world to know. I want the world to know that five years after life fell all to pieces at my feet, I’m feeling independent and strong and at peace.

Life has worked out just exactly like it was supposed to. Promise.

I used to be lunatic from your precious face
I used to be woebegone and so restless nights
My aching heart would bleed for you to see
Oh! But now...
(I don't catch myself bouncing home
Whistling buttonhole tunes to make me cry)

No More "I love you's"
A language is leaving me
No more "I love you's"
A language is leaving me exiled
No more "I love you's"
Changes are shifting me outside the words
-The Lover Speaks

Walk and Not Run...

It’s Star Wars week and Cinco de Mayo and a terrible lot of goodness here at the Watson Johnson house.

We are up to The Last Jedi (which I have never seen). Betsy wanted to watch them in actual episode order rather than chronological order and while I was initially very resistant to that idea, I must admit that I have enjoyed watching them in that order. (You simply have to put aside the dialogue and the fact that by the third movie Natalie Portman seems like she is being held hostage to a contract she signed at 18.)

Being a homebody is a definite asset to this shelter in place lifestyle. The girls and I have settled into a groove of movies and walks and board games. I have gotten Betsy as addicted to Days of our Lives as I was at her age, and there is just something about sharing something with her that I shared with my Grandma West that carves out this niche in my heart that I hope remains forever.

We have watched all of the music specials (Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood and Lady Gaga and Elton John all from my house- I am HERE. FOR. IT.), the NFL draft (my amazing Buckeyes breaking all the precedents), all the Tik Toks.

As the complete and total nerd/political junkie that I am, I look forward to watching the governor every day and truly would be down for these briefings long after all of this is over. That combined with Beth dissecting all of the recent Supreme Court opinions on the Pantsuit Politics Patreon feed are settling to my anxious soul. For me, the more information that I have, the better I can process the world around me.

Life is still anxious and scary and words cannot describe how heavy my heart is for anyone who has lost their life or their job. I can never quite convey how grateful I am for my local grocery store and bank and gas station, for my girls’ teachers for working hard to exist within this strange new boundary, for my co-workers and my friends who check on me and for my family, especially my parents who make dinner for me and the girls every day. How lucky am I?

Tonight, it’s all the tacos and Aggravation and then I get to see if I can understand who exactly Rey is.

Life in the Time of Coronavirus...

Just now, the sun is shining, and ABBA is playing though my speakers and I’m feeling light.

I’m trying to hold to all the good just now. It’s amazing how grateful one can become for seemingly simple pleasures that we mostly take for granted on the good days. Just this past week, I have thought how wonderful it is that we still have trash service.

I told my therapist that this is me firing on all cylinders- I have experienced my anxiety at this level exactly 3 times now- when Nick was in Iraq, when I lived through my divorce, and just now. It’s interesting, looking back at those times- Nick being in Iraq was the scariest time in my life. I can remember fighting back tears nearly every night as I drove home from work that year, promising myself that I would not allow myself to get accustomed to the idea that he was gone. I insisted to myself that I wouldn’t think of the house as mine, that I wouldn’t experience anything without him that came even close to joy. But, of course, I adjusted to him being gone because your body won’t allow you to live in such a heightened state of panic for long stretches of time.

I hold that thought now, and remind myself that eventually this (whatever this is) will become normal.

The girls and I have established a bit of a routine the past two weeks- everyday includes games (most especially endless rounds of Clue), a walk around the loop, and a movie (we take turns picking- Betsy is on a huge Brat Pack binge just now, which seems just about right and thank goodness because Felicity picks things like Angry Birds 2). Weekends are full of books and movies and cleaning-all in my wheelhouse.

Routines are my lifeblood. Adding in taking my temperature in the morning and watching Mike DeWine at 2 in the afternoon gives me some notion that I’m checking off the boxes of what I’m now responsible for.

Living with anxiety makes you question always if you are overreacting- after all, that is what anxiety is, being unable to parse out what is an actual worrisome event, and what is not. But this time I’m trying to lean into my anxiety, realizing that there is truly nothing that I can do but follow the advice of people trained in living through an epidemic, praying over bits I can’t control, and holding tight to the notion that eventually this will end.

Four years ago, no one could have convinced me that I would ever get over Nick leaving. I couldn’t imagine a day of not missing him. I couldn’t even imagine a day of not wishing that my life would just go back to what it used to be.

I don’t wish that ever now. My life as it is now is ten times better than my life ever, ever was in all of those years that I was (quite happily) married.

Holding those two contradictions- the notion that I adored being married to Nick Johnson and yet I am a better person divorced from him- those contradictions define who I am. If I have learned nothing else in the past four and a half years it is that your emotions are messy and complicated and they don’t always line up with reality.

Life just now is scary- I’m scared for my girls, for my parents, for the economy. I have read accounts of people who are sick that frighten me to my core. I worry for the doctors and nurses and what this could look like. I stress over politicians taking measures that I fear could be too little.

I could be wrong, of course. I pray that I am. In the meantime, I will be so grateful for what I have, and hold tight to the idea that we are all in this together.

Spin Me Out Of Control...

When I chose release as my word for 2020, I didn’t realize the ramifications. 2020 has been filled to the brim with so much feeling and it’s been a long time since I allowed myself to drown inside of what sometimes seems like mountains of emotion.

(Mixing metaphors…still my thing.)

When I chose the word release, I meant it in a sort of metaphysical way- like, I'm letting go of the idea that I'm going to understand all the things, or that I'm going to release my grip on my insistence on routine. I wrote things like, "When something slips through your fingers that you held onto much too tightly it takes a long time to forgive yourself for letting it go." That was sort of the gist.

Instead, the world turned upside down, and the idea of control has slipped from my grasp, perhaps forever.

I found myself saying to the girls at the bank the other day- people do crazy things when they think they cannot control anything. This blog is proof of that, again and again.

Everyone having big feelings right now is normal- whether they are trying to prepare, whether they are creating schedules, whether they are rolling their eyes.

My personal coping mechanisms include watching old movies (the girls and I watched Far and Away yesterday, and they loved it every bit as much as I do, and on Saturday I introduced them to both Ghost and Never Been Kissed and we watched Frozen 2); listening to podcasts- mostly happy, easy listens about books and pop culture; reading (Felicity and I are working through The Westing Game, which I read one time as a kid, but I remember nearly nothing, and Felicity loves a good mystery, so it's terribly fun); and, when I'm almost to a coma with my anxiety, watching HGTV and eating potato chips.

For the two introverts in our house, this is not a terrible pain. For Felicity, this is harder- she brings her Barbies into my room just to be in the same general vicinity, even if I'm doing something boring.

As my humble offering to your own sanity, I offer my podcast spreadsheet, complete with my favorite podcasts broken out into how often I listen to each:


Podcast Spreadsheet

If you need something to cheer you up, The Popcast is the best I can point you toward. 80s All Over and SSR are also two so high on the list just now- I crave anything from the 1980s/early 1990s like oxygen when I am stressed, and both offer up a balm to my harried soul.


I found myself twice this past weekend reaching for my wedding rings, a habit I had long since broken. Stress does strange things, sends your mind to odd places. Things seem scary, but also, I'm not, and never was, in control of this.

On the other side of that release, we will realize that it was faith carrying us all along.

He's Always Leaning. Against Stuff...

The very best thing about being a mother of a teenager and an almost teenager is revisiting all of my old favorites-favorite books, favorite movies, favorite television shows. The girls and I live every day basically like it’s about 1995, and it is the complete bomb.

We just wrapped up watching My So-Called Life and it was just what my heart needed entering this 2020. It took a minute for the girls to fall in love, but Rickie was their way in (of course) and by the heart shattering ending they were both as devastated as their mother was upon her first encounter with Angela Chase leaving Brian Krakow on that bike in the road.

Betsy repeatedly asked Felicity and me, “Who would you pick-Brian or Jordan?” If you know my girls at all in real life, then you know that Felicity without hesitation always said Jordan, and Betsy picked Brian every single time, always bemoaning the idea that anyone in the world would have their head turned by Jordan.

My answer every time was, of course, I can’t choose between them. I love Brian Krakow with every beat of my heart, his awkward demeanor only making me adore him more. And then Jordan Catalano reaches for Angela’s hand in the single most romantic gesture I’ve ever encountered in 41 years of watching rom coms and I know, without a doubt, that I would have left Brian behind too. I’ve never encountered a creature as much of a kindred spirit to my own self as Angela Chase. (I watched My So-Called Life on its original run on ABC, I chose it over Friends in its first season, confounding my friends who only discovered it later on MTV.)

Anyway, much as I would love to think that if love ever finds me again, I’ll have the sense to see Brian Krakow for who he truly is, I have a feeling my heart is forever doomed for the Jordan Catalanos of the world.

Things I’m Loving:

Inside Out by Demi Moore

I adore a good memoir and this is one I will carry on about forever. It’s deep and meaningful and honest. Demi is open about each of her marriages and exactly how they came apart at the seams; she is vulnerable about what it feels like to be hurt by someone that you thought loved you more than anything. I’m forever grateful whenever I grab onto anything- a poem, a song, a self help book, whatever- that makes me feel seen, that makes my particular journey seem not so out of the realm.

Marriage Story

Speaking of out of the realm, I purposely avoided this movie for a minute because I knew that it would feel different- the experience of two people wanting out of a marriage and fighting through lawyers, that wasn’t ever my experience- but of course, good movies make you feel for people in situations different than your own. I love Adam Driver and performances like this one are why. As for Scarlett Johansson, she is not and will never be my favorite, but she is a talented actress and it is roles like this one that chip away at my resistance to her.

For now, the girls and I are watching The Torkelsons and falling in love with Riley Roberts and I’m wishing, as always, that this season of our lives would never, ever end.

The Space In Between...

Oh my goodness. All the things, right?

2020 has, thus far, been full of a lot of feelings. Now, I do tend to care about people that I have never actually met to an absurd degree (and, importantly, I never hope to meet them in real life-that episode of Growing Pains where Ben is horribly disappointed by the rock star that he has idolized convinced me long ago that I don’t really want to meet anyone famous, but I do care deeply and to my core about a lot of people that I do not actually know).

2020 feels a little like the world has cracked open to me.

Things I’m Loving Lately:

Why Megxit Matters
This episode of the Daily is a wonderful blend of the royal family’s recent drama, the British public’s reaction to it, and why any of it matters.

When I was in high school, I was lucky enough to go to Europe and the tour guide that we had for the trip was British. I always sat at the front of the tour bus (I’m a geek like that) and she would talk to those of us toward the front, and one day we asked her about the opinions of the British people toward Diana. This would have been 1996, so Diana was alive but divorced from Charles. She told us that the British people were more in favor of Charles and found Diana to be somewhat lacking in decorum. As someone who was a huge fan of Diana, I realized right then that Americans were profoundly different than the British in how we view celebrity and royalty and such.

I still think all of that is true.

For me, though, I used to pray hard for William and Harry every night. I cried when Matt Lauer talked about how lucky they were to have each other as they walked into William’s wedding. I adore Queen Elizabeth and have read far too many books about her. I have far too many feelings about Harry and Megan, but I know that my American prism of looking at this is totally different from the British outlook, and that Brexit is days away, and the world is upside down for lots of reasons.

You Must Remember This: Six Degrees of Song of the South

I have never seen Song of the South, though I do have a cassette tape and a book, one of those read-along books from when I was a kid in the 1980s, that is about a piece of the Brer Rabbit story. This is a behind the scenes look at Song of the South and it is engrossing-it walks through all of the bits from the minstrel elements of the story, the career of Hattie McDaniel, and the creation of Splash Mountain. I binged most of this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and it was a most illuminating way to spend that holiday.

Before Sunrise: The Making of an Indie Classic

This oral history of the making of Before Sunrise is fascinating. Before Sunrise is one of my most favorite movies ever and I’ve watched it so many times I can recite a lot of the dialogue. Before Sunset and Before Midnight I’ve only seen one time each-I did not care for Before Sunset but loved Before Midnight and that was likely due to circumstances in my own life at the time, so they would need a rewatch to make a definitive statement. But I loved this look at the way that this film came into being, and how they had to film things that, of course, seem natural and brilliant and exactly what my seventeen-year-old self thought that traveling in Europe would be like.


The girls and I have spent a large part of January talking about Australia and watching My So-Called Life and learning about impeachment and the democratic process (they super love that). We have been blessed with a lot of time together and a last minute cousin weekend and all the fun things. It's been blissful (being with the girls, I mean, not the wildfires).

And yes, I'm a bit obsessed with Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt and the grasping of the hand. And yes, I know that it may be publicity and that it says something about this man who rather callously left his wife and who seems to be, while a fine actor, a bit of a mess of a person. But of all the people that I looked to when I lived though my divorce, through the hardest days of not being able to function, the person that I looked to was Jennifer Aniston, as crazy as I know that sounds. Her words at the time, "I love Brad; I really love him. I will love him for the rest of my life. I don't regret any of it, and I'm not going to beat myself up about it." Those words hid themselves inside of my heart, and even though I knew that maybe she didn't even mean it anymore, she said it out loud once, and so it was okay-it was okay to be divorcing someone and still love them and feel confused and crazy.

And I have moved far away from that person that I was then, and I know that she has too. But I'm happy for her if there remains something of that love, even if it's only a moment at an awards show that the world got to glimpse.

"Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?"
-Celine, Before Sunrise

The Memories Were Lost Long Ago...

Epiphany is always one of my favorite days of the year.

We always celebrate our Wise Men finally making their way to the manger scene with an epiphany cake and blessing the house. All of life feels shiny and new. It’s most wonderful.

The past few weeks of turning 41, entering a new decade-all of it has felt quite blissful. The past two decades of my life have been marked by such amazing highs and such lowest of lows-I’m excited that the past year was such an even keel in my life, and I’m hoping for that to continue in this new decade.

This past year has forced me to make some peace with a few things-the fact that no matter how outgoing I manage to make myself become, I am still an introvert at heart, and I still need down time to process the world around me; the fact that being “in my 40s” does indeed feel different than my 30s, in ways both welcome and not especially; and that, while I wholly admit that I have a problem with caffeine, I am also never really going to do anything about it.


On the other hand, I have learned that I can prioritize laying in bed all day when I want to, that any bad mood can be helped by a snack and a nap, and that I truly am just a complicated house plant that needs more water than I ever think I need.

As usual, my weekend was filled with movies and books (all rereads because that comfort is what my heart is yearning for at the moment). I introduced the girls to Forrest Gump just in time for them to see Tom Hanks receive his Cecil B. DeMille award (I told them that to truly appreciate Tom Hanks, we need to watch Bosom Buddies). But for now, I am on the precipice of introducing them to my 90s dramas-first up, My So-Called Life, and then Freaks and Geeks and Dawson's Creek (they love The Mighty Ducks so I kind of can't wait to see their reaction to Mr. Pacey Witter).

In the meantime, though, all the movies. Betsy saw The Rise of Skywalker of course with her father, and Felicity saw Jumanji 2 with her stopmom. Therefore, we saw Little Women and Cats (at Betsy's insistence).

Little Women

I spent my New Year's Eve rereading Little Women, as the clearly super cool party girl that I am. This movie captured the book in ways that I simply did not think was possible. By beginning the story at the end, Greta Gerwig finally solves the never ending problem of Jo marrying anyone at all, and especially the problem of that person not being Laurie. Amy has a storyline of an adult woman making somewhat sensible choices, colored by her childhood of being the put upon youngest sister. Concentrating Meg's storyline on her vanity gives her more to do than just mother hen. And my dear Beth is Beth.

"Women have minds and souls as well as just hearts, and they've got ambition and talent as well as just beauty. And I'm sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for. I'm so sick of it! But-I'm so lonely!"

All of that. I didn't know how much I needed Jo to say all of that.

Cats


Cats. What can I say? It's not as terrible as all that, if you go in knowing that it is a musical about cats. It's weird because that's a weird thing. The music, though, is mostly lovely-I especially like the new Taylor Swift/Andrew Lloyd Webber penned "Beautiful Ghosts." I love James Corden, even if that is a dorky thing to admit, and I think he's funny here. There were several young children at the show the girls and I went to and let me be firm, this is not a movie for little kids. It is a confusing plot for a grownup. They will be bored. (My biggest pet peeve in the movie theater is whiny children.)

So, Christmastide has come and gone and into the routine we go. I'm so jazzed for 2020. It just may be the best year yet.


"And so maybe my home isn't what I had known
What I thought it would be
But I feel so alive with these phantoms of night
And I know that this life isn't safe but it's wild and it's free"
-Beautiful Ghosts