My Winter Song...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Coming On Christmas...

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

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

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

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

Anyway, other things I’m loving this week:

Bookselling is the Most Over- Romanticized Job in the World

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

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

The Cut on Tuesdays

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

Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss

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



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


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


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

By the Way, I Forgive You...

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In The End...

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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








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

Practically Unperfect in Every Way...

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

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

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

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

Anyway, things making me happy of late:

SSR Podcast

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

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


The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

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

It was a nice addition to my fall reading list.

The Hallmark Chanel Countdown to Christmas App

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

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

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

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

Grace in the Happy Ever After...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Things are so much better now.”

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

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

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

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

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

Things are so much better now.

Indeed, Miss Betsy Anne, they are.

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

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.