Life in the Time of Coronavirus...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spin Me Out Of Control...

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

(Mixing metaphors…still my thing.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Podcast Spreadsheet

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


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

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

He's Always Leaning. Against Stuff...

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

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

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

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

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

Things I’m Loving:

Inside Out by Demi Moore

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

Marriage Story

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

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

The Space In Between...

Oh my goodness. All the things, right?

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

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

Things I’m Loving Lately:

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

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

I still think all of that is true.

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

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

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

Before Sunrise: The Making of an Indie Classic

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


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

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

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

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

The Memories Were Lost Long Ago...

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Little Women

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

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

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

Cats


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

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


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

Fall Into This Circumstance...

How excited am I for 2020 to finally get here? I feel like I haven’t been this excited for a new year since 1999, just because I liked saying that we were going to party like it’s 1999.

Twenty years on, life seems to have taken all of these turns and shifts and bends in the road to deposit me precisely back at who I was at 21. Insatiably curious, desperate to do all the things, and feeling like all of life had finally turned out like I wanted it to. College was a long, hard road of lonely for me-in all of my years at Muskingum, I had exactly one good friend, and mostly got along much better with my professors than my classmates-but by 1999, I didn’t care. I was “becoming who I was to be” (a quote that I stole from my favorite teacher of all time, Mr. Frank) and all I did was read and write and watch a lot of movies.

The past four years have circled me back to that same girl.

4 years ago, staring down the very last few weeks of my marriage before my divorce was final, I had a definite idea of what I wanted to happen- I wanted to let go of the past, to move forward in some healthy way, and to eventually meet the actual , true love of my life that surely God intended me to meet. To my mind, the only way that any of the pain of my marriage ending would be worth it in the end would be for me to realize that Nick had somehow been all wrong for me all along. The truth, I told myself, would feel so much more amazing for having lived so long with what turned out to be a lie.

Of course, that hasn’t been how any of this has worked out.

The only person that I’ve gotten to know better in the past 4 years is that girl that I left behind at 21. When Nick came along, I (quite naturally, I think) sort of shoved that girl aside. My life became about creating this family that I had always, always wanted. My life from 21 to 36 was consumed by Nick and the girls and being the mother and wife that I felt that they needed. When people talk about music or movies or anything from 2000 until 2015, I have little recollection of it. My life was made up of tummy time and Sesame Street, breastfeeding and precious little sleep.

I’m grateful every single day that I met Nick Johnson and I mean that with every beat of my heart.

But I’m also grateful every single day that I have found that girl that I let go of at 21. I’m grateful to have all of this time to read and write and watch all of the movies. To be my own best company. To just be alone, and have it be enough.

My word for 2020 is release.

We’ll see how it goes.


"It's gotta be a strange twist of fate
Telling me that heaven can wait
Oh, I'm gonna get it right this time
Life doesn't mean a thing
Without the love you bring
Love is what we've found
The second time around."
-Olivia Newton-John

Top of the World...

"Feeling my way through the darkness
Guided by a beating heart
I can't tell where the journey will end
But I know where to start."
-Aloe Blacc


I’m working on a better answer for people when they ask if I’m dating.

When a completely well-meaning person asks me that, my instinct is to worry that they are about to suggest a date. Or a dating app. Or what have you.

Then, of course, I usually stumble all over the actual answer, which is a simple no, and say things like, it’s not like I haven’t dated at all in the past four years (lest they think there is something wrong with me), and then stumble into how I’m really not looking to date right now.

All of that is true. But I say it all slanted and weird, and usually the person ends up assuring me that someday I will meet someone.

I then smile politely and often say something equally awkward and eventually, praise hands to God, the conversation ends.

The truth about me and dating and love and all the things is just a bit more complicated that I can go into in a simple conversation.

I’m not sure that the true answer is incredibly complicated, but my answer to this question never seems to be what people are searching for.

The hand-on-my-heart, true answer to this question is that I enjoy spending my free time with my girls. My life when the girls are home is filled with old television shows and books and Barbie dolls. It’s my preferred way to spend an evening.

The second truth to why I’m not all that interested in dating is a bit more complicated. I truly believe with all of my heart that I am going to meet this person who I will magically know is the perfect person for me. (I really do have a physical checklist for this purpose.)

Then, of course, you have to take a step back from that and say, in all seriousness, “but, Joy, you already thought that.” And you are correct. In my lifetime, I have loved one boy ever, and he checked all of those boxes, and all of life was exactly what I wanted for fifteen years, and then it was all a lie.

It’s a hard, hard reality to live with- the notion that I believe to the depth of my soul in true love and soulmates and Nora Ephron movies, and then to juxtapose my divorce and my complete and total belief that it was necessary and correct and the best thing for both of us.

The most truthful answer to this question is simply, I am waiting for the guy that checks all of the boxes for me and the girls, the guy who meets all of my romantic comedy wish list needs, and who understands that I have scars that are still healing.

I quite likely set the bar too high for anyone to reach for a reason. I’m well aware of that. But, for now and likely the near future, that is my truth. Even if it takes too many awkward words for me to say.

"So wake me up when it's all over
When I'm wiser and I'm older
All this time I was finding myself
And I didn't know I was lost"
-Aloe Blacc