Contradictions and Complexities...

Late fall is full of contradictions-the weather can’t quite make up its mind, the threat of icy roads is dangled as a possibility more than I would like, the trees are barren branches but it is still quite warm on my walks at night, the dark confuses all of my sense of time and I mostly want to curl up in bed with a book by 6 o’clock every night.

Late fall still brings to the surface mostly lovely memories-memories of falling in love for the first time, and memories of becoming a mother (which for me was the culmination of a million dreams come true), memories always of the lead up to Christmas, which is of course also my birthday, so it is indeed my most favorite day of the entire year.

Four years on, those memories are all mostly just truly lovely. That’s one of those truths that I wish I had understood in the beginning. That eventually you are able to remember mostly the good, mostly the magic, mostly the fun parts. It’s not that I have forgotten the painful parts. But four years ago, remembering the good just brought to the surface so much that I didn’t want to deal with-was it always a lie? Was I remembering everything wrong? When did it shift?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I likely never will. But I have learned, in my slow as a snail way, that it doesn’t truly matter.

Things I Have Loved Lately:

The Lazy Genius Podcast Episode 131: The Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey

I. CANNOT. RECOMMEND. THIS. HIGHLY. ENOUGH.

Nick’s leaving created all sorts of holes in our lives. One of those was that Nick always made the turkey for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was always a joint effort on our part, Nick and I together made most of the food that my family then shared at our Thanksgiving meal. (My mom makes the pumpkin pie, my Grandma makes Betsy’s most favorite Cherry Jello, and my sister, bless her heart, makes the crescent rolls.)

I had absolutely no idea how to make the turkey. And then I found this recipe. Kendra (aka The Lazy Genius) is indeed a genius about the things that matter, and lazy about the things that don’t. This recipe makes a delicious turkey with an absolute minimum of fuss. IT. IS. THE. BOMB.


Dolly Parton’s America

The girls and I adore Dolly so much. This podcast is a bit different, and it took me a minute to grasp the point, but ultimately I’m really enjoying it. I will admit that when the girls and I went to Dollywood a couple of years ago, the irony was not lost on me that I was spending over $200 for the three of us to enjoy a theme park that is built on the idea that Dolly grew up with a coat of rags and nearly starved to death one winter. But at the same time, I see what she has done for the area that she grew up in, how she has lifted them up- it is, of course, the dream that I hope that everyone would have, the ability to provide a life for those around them. To encourage literacy and development and all the things. I will always love Miss Dolly.


Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters

This was an interesting read for a bit of a Little Women superfan, which indeed I am. This book explores not only the well known biographical trope of Louisa’s use of her own family as the model of the four girls, but also explores adaptations of Little Women and its place in the literary cannon. I could quibble with a few of her own personal opinions, but mostly it all holds together nicely. She picks apart different characterizations, spends a good deal of time on the idea that it is Katharine Hepburn’s Jo who we all remember, as opposed to some of Jo’s actual character-after all, she does ultimately marry. And so what does it say that that was the ultimate goal, even for headstrong Jo?

(My own personal favorite of the Little Women is Beth, who is contented and happy at home with her sisters.)

The girls and I are anxiously awaiting the new movie, along with a million other movies that seem to be about to drop. Betsy is in complete love with the new Disney+ streaming service. We have been watching Christmas movies and reading all the books (we have well over 100 Christmas books). Enjoying so much our evenings in.

“If it’s dark, put it in park.” That’s our motto for this late fall. So far, it’s been fairly glorious.

The Road to Xanadu...

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge


On Wednesday, Felicity came home from school sick. Thus, I became that stay-at-home mom that I used to be for a day (which I do miss from time to time, back when my babies were babies and my life was just wholly centered on them- life has moved so far from that now, and it’s as it should be, but it is nice to go back sometimes).


Felicity slept and played with Barbies, while I did laundry and read my book. And then she declared that we needed to watch something. Which was a tricky proposition, because Betsy hates to be left out, and so we had to chose something that she wouldn’t care that we watched without her.

And so we landed on my most beloved Xanadu.

Here is the thing about Xanadu: I am super well aware that it is a mucked up mess of a movie. The actual storyline is terrible and mostly boring. When we start watching I always start to question why exactly I love this movie, because it starts slow and Michael Beck is woefully miscast as the lead.

But by the end I’m always so charmed that I want to start watching it all over again (I did make poor Debbie listen to the soundtrack 3 times the next day).

There’s just something magical about what is basically a 1940s musical updated to a late 1970s roller skating, glittery disco. Gene Kelly is in roller skates! Olivia Newton-John is at her most fabulous, singing songs that would go on to become some of her biggest hits. There is a Don Bluth animated short in the middle of the movie!

It all makes up for the complete and total lack of a coherent script, and the lack of any kind of chemistry between Michael Beck and Olivia. If only John Travolta were opposite the love story would at least seem believable. I read that Olivia had tried to get Mel Gibson for the role, which would have been just amazing, but alas, this is what we have.


I'm not one hundred percent sure why Felicity always loves the movies that truly tend to make the least sense that I love (she adores Return to Oz, which is genuinely one of my most bizarre favorite films). But I'm so grateful that she enjoyed spending her afternoon with her mother watching a movie that was dated and old even when I watched it for the first time.

I'll take all of the sick day, magical disco roller skating moments that are still left with my girls.

The One With the Spreadsheet...

This weekend for me is going to be about cleaning and reading and watching the scary movies that the girls refuse to watch. (I can't convince them that Scream is a treasure and that they are missing out.)

BUT...

Someone, somewhere, decided to start the Christmas movies tonight. Even I, most avowed lover of Christmas ever, think it's a bit early.

In any case, however, I did indeed create my spreadsheet of all the Christmas movies from tonight until New Year's. And so, dear blog reader, I share because honestly spreadsheets are my love language and I would love for someone else to enjoy them as well.

(You will also notice that the Christmas Very Brady Renovation is there too. Again, we are geeks.)


Christmas Movie Spreadsheet


My own personal Christmas movies will begin on Halloween, when the girls and I indulge in all the candy and watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's a most beloved tradition.


Happy Halloween and Merry Christmas and all the things from this most nerdy, Type A girl :)

Through a Glass, Darkly...

Sometimes words fail me.

Nothing frightens me more.

Words, after all, are the only thing that I had to cling to for such a while.

But recently I have had a season of silence.

A season of starting to write and having the words come out all slanted and wrong. A season of struggling to find the tone, the shift, the texture of what this space is holding just now.

Life has changed this year, this year that I dubbed the year of trust, this year in which nothing of consequence has happened at all. My life is still divided into all of its corners, I’m still that girl who believes so much in what must be magic-nothing at all is different, and yet I feel so very changed.

Grief, they tell us, is not linear. Grief does not end. Grief simply morphs and changes until we don’t recognize the weight of it anymore. (If we are lucky, of course.)

Every night that I am able, I walk. Outside. Around corners that I could navigate blindfolded. When you live in the same place for 40 years, you carry the bends in the road in your step, in your soul. And so, every night I reach the top of the same hill, the hill that is what I will always consider “my hill,” the hill that I climbed at the age of 10 and declared to God that I would never, ever leave. And every night I think about that little girl, and about all of those dreams that she held tight.

All of the important dreams came true, I tell her.

There has been too much sadness lately. Too many people that I care about have lost loved ones, have realized a bend in the road that they weren’t expecting. It’s tripped them up. I want so much to tell everyone-this is how I did it. This is how you survive grief. But, of course, I cannot.

Grief is not survived. It is lived. I am still-still-four years later living the grief of a broken heart, of what it means for someone’s words to be a lie. It’s crazy and maddening.


I made a lot of room for grief. I wrapped myself up in it like a blanket and held tight to it.

This year of trust has felt truly like I’m not doing much of anything-just living and holding onto my girls as tight as I can and reading and writing and all the things. After four years of trying to become a stronger person, a person more sure of herself and her worth, right now I’m just holding steady. Enjoying this moment in time, where I am the mother of two girls who still enjoy spending their free time with me, where I am the daughter of parents that I get to see every single day, where I’m defined just as Joy.

Trust seems to have been about figuring out that all of that is just enough.

Pretend It's Stars Hollow...

Council Mondays are not my favorite.

When I first started working at the Village, all of my co-workers bemoaned Council Mondays and how crazy they seemed. I must admit, after three and a half years of working here, their theory bears out-anything weird that can happen does on Council Mondays.

But, that being said, I had a weekend full of things that are my favorite (with the exception of the girls being with their dad-never a favorite-but I have learned through four years of this being alone every other weekend thing to plan a lot of stuff-keeping busy, especially with things that I enjoy spending time doing, is the key (quite literally) to sanity).

Peanut Butter Falcon

This quiet movie is one of my favorites for the year. The screenplay was specifically written for star Zack Gottsagen, who has Down Syndrome, and it is quite pitch perfect. I’m not a huge Shia LaBeouf fan but this movie might have made me one.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who finds herself needing therapy after an extremely painful breakup. (Most anything that is a true story about an extremely painful breakup is on my radar to read, always hoping to glean some kind of best practice for how to move on from a broken heart.) This is a non-fiction book, so to say that it was eye opening is an understatement. As an advocate for therapy, I feel that for nearly anyone in therapy or considering therapy, this should be required reading. She pulls back the curtain on both her own therapy and some of her clients that she has been given permission to share. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Waiting for Tom Hanks by Kerry Winfrey

I’ll preface by saying I liked the idea behind this book better than the actual writing, although by the end I was charmed by the story. The writing could use some tightening. But I freely admit that I love rom coms, especially ones written by Nora Ephron, and Winfrey is trying her best to spin a romance around that specific love-it’s harder to do than it looks, and some of the writing is clunky as a result. But the story is set in German Village (The Book Loft is one particular setting) and as a total romantic at heart, I enjoyed this story.

1619

This podcast is blowing me away- it is profound and amazing and all the words to mean I am forever grateful to be learning so much. Episode 3, which dropped this past weekend, “The Birth of American Music,” is fantastic- I wrote an essay in college about cultural appropriation of R&B in the 1950s and rap music in the late 1980s and early 1990s that was one of my favorite essays ever to write (mostly because I love music and this was an excuse to listen to a lot of it). This podcast is in the same vein, and filled with music (I do adore yacht rock). It’s the bomb.

I also got out all the pumpkins and watched the Buckeyes win and the Browns lose and the most amazing Rafa Nadal win his 19th grand slam title and watched Serena just lose her grasp on her 24th. All in all, a weekend with slightly more good than bad (though my Browns did manage to crush my heart-I have a feeling that I will always and forever love the most the people who hurt me the most in the end).

Drift Away....

Hello routine.

We have had exactly one week of a school routine, and I’m blissfully back to my usual routine in the best way possible. There are many days that I am unsure if I am doing life correctly-I mean, learning to let go was like the most important thing I learned from my divorce, surely? (Actually, not surely, because I learned so, so many things, but that was a big one.)

Like it or not, though, routine is my friend and I’m delighted to have it back.

Routine has meant the return of my podcast routine. Podcasts are my favorite (after books, of course) because you can listen while you do something else-this actually keeps me so much more focused. I listen to my podcasts in the morning while I do the workout, in the afternoon when I walk, while I clean, and most luxuriously, in the bathtub with a glass of wine.

My podcast routine is one of those things that I’m super proud of in my most nerdy way. So, I thought I would share.

Mornings are for news. New podcasts almost always drop at 6 AM, and I get up at 5 (that hour is for morning devotions, mediation, and coffee). I start my workout at 6 (after waking the girls up) and so my morning podcasts are Up First and The Daily.

(Side note-so far mornings have been fabulous now that we all three are back on the same schedule. The girls get up and fix their breakfasts and get ready for school with minimal fuss. I didn’t realize at all how much of a difference all of us being awake and asleep at the same times would make.)

My week breaks out like this:

Sunday- The Bible Binge
Monday- The Lazy Genius
Tuesday- Pantsuit Politics
Ten Things to Tell You
Wednesday- The Popcast
Thursday- NPR Politics
Friday- Pantsuit Politics
Saturday- On Being
The One You Feed

Somewhere in the middle of the week I usually find time for Pop Culture Happy Hour and The Diane Rehm Show. Every night I listen to The Skimm.

Weekends are for the book podcasts. My current favorites are What Should I Read Next?, SSR, and From the Front Porch. And I usually find time for Every Little Thing, Oprah’s Super Soul Conversations, The Next Right Thing, and Throughline- and I’m currently binging when I can the series on Mitch McConnell on Embedded.

I’m still making my way though 80s All Over, which is the two guys talking about all the '80s movies. Unfortunately, they had to cry uncle and give up in mid-1985, but I’m still on November 1980, so I’m good for a while. (I love listening to this because they talk about extremely obscure movies and as a movie geek nothing really thrills me more than movies that most people overlook.)

My music playlists make up my entire day at work (at last count, I have 150 playlists). I try as hard as I can to mix it up so that my co-workers don’t have to listen to the same songs over and over. (I do listen to the same morning playlist every day though, so they do have to listen to "September," which is my most favorite song of all time, every single day.)

It’s amazing to me how much my head has quieted since school started and we have a normal rhythm again. Once when I had a reading with Heather, she said that she had a vision of my brain as a bunch of spiders running in all directions and I was desperately trying to corral them. I wish my brain wasn’t spiders, but I totally understood what she was saying-I’m constantly trying to get everything into its place, like if I just can situate everything perfectly life will make sense. I’m well aware that can’t actually happen, but my routine just gives me such space to breathe and loosen up a bit. The girls and I are enjoying this season of not being so busy, of going to games and watching our friends play, of having evenings free to take walks together and to watch ‘80s and ‘90s television shows and just be.

A season of quiet is the reset that we needed.

525,600 Minutes...

It’s planner season. Which is just my favorite time of year.

Fall is coming, with its glorious pumpkins and cooler weather and football.

I keep reminding myself of that as we round this last corner of summer. The girls have their school schedules, so the past few days have been full of texting friends to find out who we know in each class (and worry when there is no one in a certain class that we seem to know). We walked through the high school to each of Betsy’s classes (I dream about being in the high school a lot and walking all over those hallways was a bit surreal to me). School supplies are ready to go, planners are brand new and full of promise.

This year we are taking a break from participating in any fall sports, which we have never done before. Felicity will still dance, but we are purposely taking a break from any structured sport. This came about after much soul searching on my part, and also on the girls’. We sat down and talked about what we really love about playing sports (being with friends and being a part of a team) and what we don’t like about playing sports (nerves about playing in front of people).

Betsy is an anxious soul, just like her mother. The amount of anxiety that she feels about being in front of people is easily overwhelming to her. I completely and totally understand because I am the same way. I have no idea if we are choosing the correct path here, because after all, she will only be young once, but I also know that, as much as she loves being a part of the team, the relief at the idea of just being a spectator was palpable when presented as an option.

It’s taken me four years now to fully grasp how life has changed-in the beginning I was constantly concerned that life not change for the girls, that they understand that they could still do all the things and I would just somehow make it work. After all, I have help-my parents always step in if for any reason I can’t be somewhere, and I am blessed with a flexible job with great hours.

Slowly, however, I have realized that it’s not just about ferrying the girls to all the things. It’s about being clear about the things that take our time away from each other. The girls are gone every other weekend during the school year, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it has meant that all of the things that they want to do at home need to be done in that time frame.

I have friends who count down summers, who count down Saturdays-and when you share your parenting with someone, those summers and Saturdays are even more precious. So, for us, this fall is going to be about watching our friends and cheering them on and resting in a state of calm.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I’m worried-I am worried that Betsy will feel left out of the fun of being on a team, that I’m teaching her to let her anxiety get the best of her. I honestly don’t know. As I tell the girls just about every single day, I don’t have all the answers. I’m making this up as we go.

I do know that the girls and I love nothing more than nights when I say we don’t have anything to do tonight. It’s our favorite. So I’m just going to hope that having more nights like that is exactly what we need.