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

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

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.

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.