On Dating...

So…dating. Or not dating, which is more accurate.

This past week and a half the girls’ have been with their dad, enjoying the lake. And I have been all on my own, as completely usual. Which is fine. I promise.

And my therapist suggested that I take some time to consider this-when exactly am I going to want to date?

It is not completely accurate to say that I haven’t dated at all in the past 4 years. In fact, I had a really lovely relationship with someone, but the timing was not right. At all. And so it goes.

For all intents and purposes, though, I really haven’t dated in a serious, this-is-a-relationship way-in the way that I would choose to date someone, should they appear. I’m not now and I have never been a casual kind of person-I’m loquacious and intense and just a lot.

I try as hard as I can to just accept this as my reality-I don’t want to casually date someone, and that is how relationships begin, and if I can’t begin a relationship then here we are. There’s really not much more to it than that.

There is, of course. There is so much here to dig through I can’t begin to start sorting it all out, and so I am left with my strict, Type A routine and pretending that it doesn’t exist. But the point of the blog is to be honest about this process-to write down all the bits and pieces to who I am becoming and how I got to this point and where I’m going from here.

So, here’s the thing: being left behind hurts. It sucks. It messes with your head and your heart and your self-esteem. You think, am I a terrible judge of character? Can my heart be trusted to even remotely try this again? Why does this seem so easy for most people?

I have no real experience in these areas. I have nothing to go on other than how it went with Nick, and what I read. And just to give you an example, last week I read an article in the New York Times specifically stating how millennials are dating less and waiting longer to get married, thinking that this would be full of helpful insight (even if, with my 1978 birthday, I don’t exactly qualify as a millennial-it seemed close enough.) This is what I got- “Dr. Fisher found that among a representative sample, 34 percent of singles had sex with someone before the first date. She calls it ‘the sex interview.’” I’m sorry, what?


Importantly, I am not pining away, I am really, truly very contented and happy with my life as it is. And I am an eternal optimist-I truly believe that someday this person will come along. Somewhere there is a person out there who I am not too much for, who would find all of my quirks and idiosyncrasies endearing- I just haven’t the foggiest idea how to meet him, or when I’ll be ready, or any of the things. But I will get there. Someday.


"The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers do not finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."
-Rumi

How to Not Be Perfect (but Still Be Unendingly Happy)...

When I was younger, I wanted to have 4 girls. I talked about them all the time-I even had all of their names put on my birthday cake when I turned 14. (I was completely normal like that.) Their names were Bradleigh Elizabeth, Anastasia Rebecca, Jessica Kate, and Tyme Aryn.

My girls and my nieces consider themselves those four girls.

As they should, of course.

These four girls are every single thing that I hoped for as a 14-year-old. They love to sing and put on plays and play games-they never tell me that something is too dorky, they are absolutely the friends that I would have wanted when I was their age.

We spent this entire past weekend at my sister’s house in Kent, doing nothing in particular, but everything. We played miniature golf (I won) and bowled (my sister won). We played at the park. We went to the library for a Star Wars day (Kent has fabulous libraries, I am most jealous). We ate Swenson’s and Chick-fil-a (the girls and I had never had Chick-fil-a and we very much enjoyed it). We went to Chuck E. Cheese, even though it is not my sister’s favorite. We went to the drive-in movie theater.

When I was growing up, I adored all of my cousins. They were all older than me and my sister, and two of them lived in Indiana, and I thought they hung the moon. I’m quite envious of my girls very close relationship with my nieces.

When we got ready to leave, April said for everyone to say what their favorite part of the weekend was. Betsy said Star Wars. Felicity and Mallory said miniature golf. And Natalie just pointed, and we had no idea what she meant, and finally she whispered, “The girls.” Meaning that her favorite part was just my girls being there. It was terribly sweet.

Things I’m loving this week:

Toy Story 4

First off, I do love to go to the drive-in movie theater. We saw Toy Story 4 and we watched Aladdin again, and I love being in my own vehicle, able to turn the volume up, leave my phone on, and talk to Mallory and Betsy basically the entire time. Drive-ins are the bomb.

I love Disney and Pixar and all the bits and pieces that go into Toy Story movies, so it is not shocking at all that I enjoyed this. I did think that it was a different story than the others-the two main storylines dealt with the existential question of what it means to be alive, and when your care for others crosses the line into narcissism. Heavy stuff for a kid’s movie. Some of it I completely agreed with, and some of it I have a lot of feelings about.

Dear Evan Hansen

I have been anxiously awaiting this musical, but also a bit fearful of it hitting a bit too close to home, and it did, but not for the reasons I anticipated. The buzz on this is huge, and rightly so, because it’s an amazing piece of theater. I have decided that we are having a moment right now, a moment in which we are beginning to think it’s okay to own our idiosyncrasies, no matter how overwhelming they may seem, or how insignificant they might feel in the grand scheme of things. The story here is profound, and it hit triggers for me that I did not expect.

There is a storyline here involving Evan Hansen’s mom, about her guilt over being a divorced parent and over how that has perhaps contributed to Evan’s anxieties. As the mother of a precious, beautiful, amazing daughter who struggles a good deal with anxiety, this hit me harder than I’m sure it was meant to.

I still feel so much guilt over being divorced. I don’t for one moment want to believe that I have caused or created any kind of anxiety in my daughter. It’s all complicated and sometimes I can’t believe that it’s four years later and I’m still dealing with my own insecurities over what it means to be someone’s ex-wife. What I have learned lately is to take these moments that hit on all of my triggers and give it some space to just sit and be with that feeling, to just let myself feel sad or scared or whatever it is. And then to give myself some grace-to remember that I am not perfect, and that just as I did not have a perfect marriage, I do not have a perfect life after marriage. And that’s okay and no one is expecting me to have all of the answers.

I remind myself that these 4 girls that I dreamed of having came to me in a way other than me being mother to all four of them. And yet they are all four my dear girls, all with such different personalities and attitudes and I cherish each of them. Life comes differently than you imagined sometimes, and it turns out even better than you had hoped. That might sound like a Hallmark card, but it’s true.

This crazy life I lead is not the perfect life I imagined that I once had. But it’s ten times better.

Echo Chamber...

Back in the day, so long ago it feels like a different lifetime, I wrote short stories- some that were truly just all my own creation, but the vast majority of which were Roswell fan fiction. Which is sort of embarrassing to admit-I mean, fan fiction alone has a bad reputation, but add Roswell in there and it’s sort of like admitting that you’re a complete geek. (I am a complete geek.)

Roswell was a show on the WB, back in the day when the WB had Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its rotation; heck, back when the WB was the WB and not the CW. I was in college when those shows came on the scene, so too old to just swallow the characters whole as potential role models (that role had been filled by 90210 and Saved by the Bell). But young enough to watch them all in a non-ironic way. I fell in love with most of those late 90s dramas-Felicity, Dawson, Buffy being my favorites, Popular and 7th Heaven being the filler.

But Roswell came along at just the right time-I was a sophomore in college, right in the middle of this time in my life when I was reading so many books, learning so many new things, and, most importantly, writing like my life depended on it. Stories came pouring out of me and I had no where to put them. Somehow I stumbled upon a Roswell fan site, looking for spoilers if I remember correctly, and came upon this notion of fan fiction. I had no idea what that was, and it just so happens that I read a couple of really wonderful stories on whatever site that was-fan fiction is a tricky thing, and some of it is retched awful, truly. But in that first blush with it, I found Persephone’s Footfalls, which, in the world of Roswell fan fiction, is like stumbling upon Great Expectations-it is widely acknowledged as the best fan fiction that this tiny show ever offered up to the world.

(Written by Elizabeth, who remains one of my favorite authors of all time despite the fact that I know nothing about her except her name, she wrote the very best of Roswell fan fiction. This particular story was a retelling of the myth of Persephone and Hades using the human character of Maria and the alien character of Michael, and while that could have turned out awful, in her hands it became an exploration of falling in love with the enemy, of what it means to be “other,” and of what it means to be a family. It is one of the best stories I have ever read.)

It didn’t take too terribly long for my writing to find a home in the Roswell world. I loved writing these stories, because the characters were already established, and so I could play with the constructs as much as I wanted to, I could write POV pieces that explored ideas that I needed to play out in my own head-it was an early form of therapy for me. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and was rewarded for these efforts by something of a following in this Roswell world. I loved that-I write so much better than I speak, and this was a way to meet new people and not trip all over my tongue.

And then the bottom fell out. Roswell, you see, had been a tiny show. It was developed by Jason Katims, who had been a writer on My So-Called Life. Initially the show had been promoted as a My So-Called Life with aliens-all of the alien stuff was just sort of a large metaphor for being an outsider. That story telling is what drew me to the show. But because it was a science fiction show, there was a hunger for more special effects and “alien” storylines among a lot of its fans. When it just barely survived cancellation that first season, the writers began to amp up all of the more “out of this world” aspects to the storylines, to the point that the show became almost unrecognizable. With that shift in tone, the fan base for Roswell stories, and particularly the large, angsty teen drama that I liked to write-the fan base just collapsed for that.

It was just at the same time that my stories completely stopped generating any traction that I got engaged. My life shifted away into planning my new, adult life, and writing along with it. Until the blog came along, I didn’t write at all for about nine years.

Sometimes the blog feels the same to me-like sometimes I’m just sending these words out into the void and they don’t really have any life beyond that. But writing is my happy place, my passion, my joy inside of every single day. Words don’t come in the form of stories anymore, and for a long while I beat my head against that and tried to force them, but I have finally made my peace with the fact that they aren’t going to come out in that way any longer.

Words come to me in snippets, in long essays that exist, I know, as still just a form of therapy that sometimes I hope that other people can relate to. That’s all any of this is. But I do cherish having a place to keep my words, a home of my making to hold them and remind me years later of all the changes inside of me in the past eight years that I have been blogging.

So, I’m going to keep right on blogging like it’s 2011, and sending these words out into the void, if only to hear the echo of my own voice.

Halfway There...

In the summer, my girls are gone often through the week, which is backwards and inside out from normal. When the girls are home, we are so busy with all the things-spending time with friends and at the pool and of course watching all the movies-and when they are gone, it’s like a slo-motion camera, as I spend my nights reading and trying to not panic that when the girls are grown this is how my life will always be.

I’ve been watching old episodes of Designing Women, which is one of my favorite shows ever of all time. I have said many times there are 4 women that I grew up aspiring to be-Anne Shirley, Sally Albright, Corky Sherwood, and Charlene Fraiser Stillfield. Charlene always spoke to me-she would be such a different character if the show had been made even a few years later. Charlene starts out the never married one, the one who trusts so easily with all of her heart-naïve, really. That’s a word that many people have used to describe me. I’m good with that, mostly-maybe if I weren’t quite so trusting, life wouldn’t have shattered quite so hard, but at the end of the day I’d rather be too trusting than to be suspicious of the people around me. It takes a lot for me to cut ties with someone completely.

My word for this year is indeed trust. God keeps reminding me of it too. I can’t count how many times recently I have listened to a podcast that I don’t normally listen to and the theme has turned out to be trust the universe, trust your voice, trust your body. How many of my devotionals lately have spun around this idea of trust- it’s quite possible to walk right past your burning bush for years without noticing. And that’s okay, because when you are ready, you will see it. Or, at least, that’s been the message to me of late. Turning 40 is this amazing thing-I’m old enough to feel settled, I’m happy with my life and where it is, I’m thrilled, truly, to wake up every morning in this house that I wanted from the time I was a little girl, surrounded by my family and friends-my life is a small life, small but happy.

I still want to explore this world, I want to go out and see things and do things and have all sorts of experiences. I still feel young enough to want so many things. But old enough, I guess, to truly appreciate what I have. Broken heart and all.

Summertime...(in Will Smith's voice)...

It’s been a busy few weeks in our world-Betsy graduated from 8th grade, and Felicity from 5th, and there were meetings for work and dinner with friends and all the things.

(Betsy’s class was to say what they want their occupation to be as they got their certificate-Betsy wants to be a pediatrician, which has been her dream since she could talk. My mom asked me what I would have said at age 14 and the answer to that is that I wanted to be a wedding coordinator. Such dreams.)

The start of summer is mostly just the best time-the weather is fairly lovely, not yet scorching hot, and the girls are so happy to have days of staying in their pajamas, eating a million popsicles, going to the pool, staying up to watch *all the movies*-it’s such bliss.

I miss my old life most of all in summer, as I leave in the morning and miss all the fun all day long. But I do love my job and we have grown accustomed to food and shelter, so off I go.

This year is the year of Betsy and the Bug’s Brady Bunch Binge-a-thon. (I seem to have taught them that thinking up a cool name for your most geeky endeavor makes it even more cool-I firmly believe this. I’m still All 80s All the Time Summer, myself.)

Anyway, there are a lot of things that I’m loving just now:

Rocketman

All the hearts. The music is fabulous (of course), the story is so compelling-and I say this as someone who mostly knew the whole thing going in. Taron Egerton is pitch perfect and Jamie Bell is also wonderful.

I had a song that I played for each of the girls when I was pregnant, a song that is “their” song to me, and Betsy’s is “Tiny Dancer.” So of course I cried all over her when they sang it in the film. “Tiny Dancer,” to me, is about carrying this person in your heart, this person that no one else can see but that you know to your bones is there. When I was young, I talked so much about my children, and of course people acted like that was weird because it was, but to me, I knew that they were there, just waiting to meet me someday. When they laid Betsy in my arms and I looked at her big blue eyes, I cried so hard because it felt like, “Oh, it’s you. Finally.”

(Felicity’s song, if you are wondering, is “Sweet Child of Mine.” And Isaiah, who of course came into my life at the age of one, does indeed have a song, “Swept Away,” by Christopher Cross.)

I Think You’re Wrong but I’m Listening by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers

I know, I talk about Pantsuit Politics all the time, and I do so wish that everyone would listen to every episode because I love how Beth and Sarah disagree without any anger, how they parse out what their position is, how shaded all of their positions are-as a person who does not see black and white in any issue, I so appreciate the nuance that they bring to their conversations. This book lays out exactly what the parameters are for those conversations, lays out how to extend grace when you just feel like the other person is flat out wrong.

Aladdin

I really enjoyed the new Aladdin-I don’t compare the live action versions to the animated movies, I go in with no real expectations, so perhaps that changes things. What I loved the most to be honest was that Will Smith seemed to be having an excellent time-I am old enough to remember those summers when Will Smith was in the blockbuster movie of the summer, and the thing that I loved about those movies was that he always seemed to be having such a good time. (I think that, at least at the beginning of his career, Will Smith just thought he was so lucky to be invited to the party, and it showed in his enthusiasm for his projects.)

Booksmart

My gut reaction to this was, it’s a bit much. I went into it expecting something a bit different than it was-parts of it I thought were hilarious, and parts just uncomfortable. Sort of similar to how I feel about Bridesmaids. But in the time since watching it, I listened to a podcast full of people who loved this movie and they did illuminate me to bits that I just glazed over without much thought. So perhaps I need to think about it some more.

So far, summer is delightful. Betsy is working a 5000 piece puzzle, so my family room is sort of a disaster, and the girls are inhaling The Brady Buch and we are watching The Wonder Years (they make fun of me because I cry at the end of every single episode) and we are catching lightning bugs and jumping on the trampoline and getting ice cream from the Dairy Duchess and going to the playground (it is hilarious to me when they talk about “when they were little” at the elementary school). It’s a summer that mirrors all the summers in my life, which is what happens when you live in the same place for 40 years.

But I promise, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Both Sides Now...

Somehow it is the middle of May. Betsy is off to Washington D.C. next week. I swear that it seems like just a couple of years ago that I was in Washington D.C. with my friends.

(I was just getting over a cold when we were in D.C. and so the last stages of a cough always take me back to those three days with my friends in which I felt like such a teenager, an actual teenager with a social life.)

Watching Betsy be fourteen is a delight. She is so very much like me anymore. It’s all a bit strange because for all the years that we were the family of four, Betsy was such a tomboy and such a daddy’s girl. For all that I have changed so much during the past almost 4 years, Betsy has changed too-it all took its toll on her as well, but she and I have come to this new place where, as she says just about every day, “we are so much happier.” Which is very true.

In the beginning all of this change was overwhelming-the experience of Nick leaving for me and the girls was very jarring. Everything happened suddenly, and our world flipped upside down, and there were new people and an entirely new routine and there was just so much to mitigate. Betsy’s personality is to be pleasing and so she tried as hard as she could to act like none of this change bothered her, but the reality is that change bothers Betsy more than any of us.

The other day she and I were talking and she said, “I remember that I always wanted to be with Daddy. But then it’s like that doesn’t make sense.” Listening to her try to make sense of all of this change helps me to understand why it’s so difficult for me to find the right words sometimes-the words to describe what living through such a profound change does to you. Because you come out the other side and you feel like your old life was forever ago and also just yesterday.

It feels like a fraud to forget-to not acknowledge the good parts of the old life, the parts of life that we remember still with joy. Because that’s the bit about all of this that is so profoundly difficult, and I think is particular to divorce-there are all of these memories that exist that contain really wonderful, happy memories, but it’s all wrapped up in memories of the way that Nick left. It slants everything, and I’m sure that there are people for whom getting divorced was not a terrible trauma to live through who think that we seem overly dramatic.

It’s all a dance, and watching Betsy helps me to realize that I’m not the only one who remembers the good while struggling with what to do with the damage of the bad, and that coming to these realizations is difficult.

I am so very lucky to have these girls to go through this journey by my side. Because frankly, there are bits of this life that we live that only make sense to us. I don’t know that I am even able to write it down in terms that explain-the best way to put it would be, we remember, quite happily, bits of life that existed prior to Nick leaving, but we always come to this realization that life now is better. And I can’t explain how that can possibly be true, but it is.

The thing of it is, we had all of these wonderful years that we were a family. And I don’t want to deny that part of my life. But I also want people, particularly the people who have reached out to me about being in a similar situation, to know that life on this side of being divorced is actually really wonderful. I would have given anything, about 4 years ago, to have someone say to me, “It will be okay. It will be glorious. Life will twist and shift until you can remember that it was happy before, but that you know that it’s happier now.”

Change is still not my favorite, and never will be. But I’m not scared of change like I was 4 years ago.

These precious girls that I get to raise, they just keep teaching me all the things. I don’t know how I was so lucky to get to be their mom. But I’m grateful for every single second of it.

In the Songs of Yesterday...

Oh, gracious. So many words.

I went to a concert.

It sounds trite and simple.

For me, it’s a big deal.

I have a thing about crowds. I hate them. I tend to panic. I’ve taught my girls, when we walk into a large room-like the movie theater-to immediately find the exits. I don’t know why that’s my own particular quirk, but crowds send my heart racing and my blood pressure rising. I leaned on Nick a lot to help me with this particular issue-he knew to squeeze my hand harder, to help push me through a crowd of people-and of course, now it’s only me. Even worse, it’s often me with the girls, which means I am the adult and then expected to know how to navigate the circumstances I get us into.

Last year, in the year of being brave, I tried out many things and conquered many fears. This particular fear is one that I’m not certain can exactly be conquered-mitigated is likely a better word. I’m always going to feel slightly panicked in a large group of people, I’m always going to figure out two ways out of a room, I’m always going to do my best to avoid masses of people if I can help it.

But I proved to myself this past weekend that I can navigate an entire concert experience, including being surrounded by drunk people, one of whom vomited on the girl in front of us right as the concert was beginning; I can lead my girls through the streets of Cleveland in search of my sister, who did the driving so that we didn’t need to park the car; and generally, I can be an adult in yet one more situation that is something I really enjoy-listening to music live-but am rather terrified to deal with.

The concert itself was most fun. My girls love the New Kids. Debbie Gibson has been my most favorite singer since I was 11 years old. (I have every one of her CDs and Debbie was my very first concert ever-Michelle and Tanya and I went and saw her in Wheeling when Tanya turned 12. Tanya and Michelle were neither one even necessarily Debbie Gibson fans, but they endured my complete fangirl love with perhaps an ironic gleam in their eye, which sums up nearly everything they ever did because I asked them to.)

Tiffany, Salt-n-Pepa, and Naughty by Nature were the other acts, and the girls and I had a blast singing so many songs that we love. Betsy said that she loved it and wished it would never end, while Felicity leaned over at 10 and asked me how much longer it would last. Which encapsulates their personalities perfectly-Betsy always wanting me to know how much she loves me, and Felicity feeling comfortable enough to tell me that she’s ready for this whole thing to be over. I’m grateful for both, the yin and the yang of their personalities, and of the fact that we are all three us-we do everything together, the three of us, and it’s been the best side effect of life falling apart and not exactly fixing itself.

Many people, having been alone for coming on four years in a couple of months, would have moved on to at least one serious relationship. But that’s not how it’s working for me, and even though there are definite disadvantages to that, one of the best side effects is that the girls and I are a unit, we do everything together. Sometimes I think that’s my biggest stumbling block-I have this rich, full life 90% of the time, and then on the weekends that the girls are gone I wish to the depths of my soul that I had someone to hang out with-as my dear Felicity has pointed out, I need a friend. Which is not at all to say that I don’t have friends, because I do and I love them so much, but all of my closest friends have young children and are not just available for me on a rather boring Saturday night.

Anyway…I have gotten extremely off topic.

The entire weekend was lovely, if jam packed full. The girls and I watched my niece Mallory in her high school’s production of My Fair Lady on Friday night. The cast was absolutely amazing, and all the more so because they were working with a shoestring budget. The school district that my nieces attend cannot pass a funding levy, and so their arts programs have been cut to the bone. It was quite a visual to me, having watched John Glenn’s production of The Music Man in an auditorium just a few weeks ago and watching this production of My Fair Lady on folding chairs in the gymnasium. I don’t have all the answers to the school funding question, but I definitely think that what we do as a state is not sustainable. As a person who loved the arts programs provided by my school, I definitely think that they are not extra or unnecessary programs-they are, for some kids, a reason to participate in their class.

April and I also saw A Bronx Tale at Playhouse Square-it was so good, April and I neither one knew anything about it going in, and it was a lovely and moving piece of theater- and I took the girls to see Ugly Dolls, which was cute and had a good message about loving someone who isn’t perfect. And I got to have a galley boy from Swenson’s, which is my all-time favorite sandwich. So overall, excellent weekend.

Yesterday I took the day off just to sleep and watch soap operas and it was lovely. So much of the time, I get so caught up in my checklist of life, it was nice to just have a day all to myself to do whatever I wanted. (Always having to give myself permission to do that, you know.)

And today, the sun is shining, “Here I Go Again” is blaring through my speakers, which seems most appropriate, and all is lovely and shiny and new.

"Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.
Cause I know what it means,
To walk along that lonely street of dreams.”