A Lot To Handle Me...

Let me be clear: I am very, very bad at dating.

Like, painfully bad.

This has always been true. I'm not great at small talk. I talk much too loudly just in general, and I have a terrible tendency to babble on and on when I'm nervous. And if I'm talking, I'm nervous.

I didn't properly practice dating when I was a teenager. Never have I regretted anything more. Maybe if I had spent my days learning on someone-anyone-how to flirt, instead of just watching Meg Ryan movies and convincing myself that magic would just happen and that the right guy wouldn't want me to be anything but my geeky, loud self...

I still sort of think that. That the right guy will just want me, flaws and all.

It's so hard to quantify and put into words what it is like to just meet the person that you would gladly take a bullet for and have them feel the same way about you and you just sort of skip all the dating part and just start living your life together because it seems like it's always been that way. But that is what Nick and I did. We went on a tiny little handful of dates before we said "I love you," and basically moved in together. In retrospect, that seems like not the best idea I've ever had. But at the time it seemed like, how else would you do this? It was sudden and fierce and wonderful. Even if I had the sense to question it, I doubt that I would have done anything differently. I have read about studies that prove that when you fall in love, the part of your brain that is activated is the same part of your brain that is stimulated by heroin. I have certainly never done heroin, but I completely believe this to be true-I was addicted to Nick from the moment I met him. The final two years of my marriage were hard and hurtful, but I clung to him like the junkie that I was.

I know in my head that these two years alone have been like my rehab. I needed to be alone, to figure out who I am and why I allowed myself to fall so far apart over something that had clearly become so unhealthy. And it may take years and years more. It may take forever. Which is a horribly depressing thought, but a very true one.

I honestly believe that I am so uncomfortable on dates because I haven't learned everything that I'm supposed to be learning yet. The truth is, I want to fall in love like I did before, and not have it end this time. All of the good with none of the bad. And that is just not realistic at all. So I'm clearly not in a head space to really be dating yet.

In the meantime, I just write and pray and write. I'm trying to be brave about what I write on the blog. To allow myself to express my feelings, even when they really just serve to embarrass me with how little I know about what I am doing.

And hope that someday I am able to write down how I figured all of this out.

Tiny Dancer...

"And now she's in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand."

I always wanted a Betsy.

Her name wasn't Betsy at the time. Her name when I was growing up was always Brad, which eleven year old me thought was the coolest girl name ever of all time, because of a show called Hey Dude.

But, anyway, I always wanted a little girl.

When Betsy was a baby, we had so much fun together. We had tea parties and played princesses. Until Betsy could talk more, and told me in no uncertain terms that she really preferred horses (though she did love My Little Pony, so that was sort of girly) and sports and climbing trees and being with her dad. Nick was her hero, and I was that lady that was always there.

She loved me, don't get me wrong. But I was always at home, or with her wherever she was. Nick went off to an exotic place called "work." Betsy was a Daddy's girl, through and through.

My little tomboy has reached a crossroads this past year. Twelve and a half is awkward and moody and just mostly a lot of worry. All the time. About everything.

She still loves Star Wars and soccer and climbing trees. She secretly plays Barbies with her sister. She had her first boyfriend last year, and her first date, but she wasn't super jazzed about either. She understands that most of her friends are starting to be interested in boys, but she is ambivalent toward the whole thing.

I remember twelve. It seems like just yesterday that I was in the seventh grade, writing notes to my friends during class, making up secret sandwich names for boys so that we could talk about them without them knowing who we were talking about. (I loved Lettuce. Who was Tommy Werner. Just in case you wondered.)

Twelve is lots of wonderful things. Twelve is being brave enough to ride the really big rides at amusement parks. Twelve is old enough to ride in the front seat of the car and "navigate" for your directionally challenged mother. Twelve is watching all of the movies, staying up late and sleeping in, and having a room that is such a mess your mother just gives up on asking you to clean and simply requests a path to the rabbit cage.

Twelve is also hard. Twelve is not wanting to go swimming at the local pool anymore. Twelve is feeling prickly and sad and funky, all for no reason.

Add to that a personality of wanting to please everyone, and perfectionistic tendencies, and twelve can be pretty rough.

One of the side effects of my divorce is that Betsy and I are close in a way that we didn't used to be. I'm not just that lady who is always around anymore. I became her connection to the world for a while, when life was too confusing and overwhelming and sad. We were sad together. We grieved together. And we learned together, fought together, and spent the past two years growing up together.

When they handed Betsy to me in the hospital, when I finally got to look into those beautiful blue eyes, I cried and said, "I love you," over and over. I was so overwhelmed to meet this person that I had been waiting for my whole life. It was the best moment of my entire life.

I want to hold her still and tell her that I know in my heart that everything will work out, that despite her whole world turning upside down two years ago, and then all of the loveliness of puberty on top of that, life will turn out just like it's supposed to.

I don't know that I believe that anymore.

But I believed that with all of my twelve year old heart. Awkward and shy and nerdy as I was, I believed that someday I would fall in love and get married and have a beautiful little girl. And I did. Times two.

Maybe that should be enough.

Full of Grace...

I'm weird.

This is a given.

I've always been awkward and a good bit shy and at the same time overly loud.

Before you get to know me, you think that I am the quietest person in the world, and once you know me, you think that I seem to never shut up.

I'm a walking mass of contradictions-I don't want attention, but I do want to be heard, for my opinion to count for something. What I really want if I'm being completely honest is for you to think that I am a lot more interesting than I seem at first glance.

Life right now is very jarring. When I have the girls, my life is so full to the brim with their lives, their energy, their passions, I can barely stop to breathe. And then they leave for the week and my life comes to almost a complete and total stop, life becomes about quiet and books and rearranging the furniture again.

I've never lived alone before.

I recently told one of my closest friends that I think that Nick and I always felt like we were pretending to be grownups. It felt like someone gave us our life-Nick's job, and these two girls, and our house-and we were expected to know what to do, and how to save money, and, in short, "be adults."

I hate saying that, because in truth I know that we did a lot of things correctly-I figured out how to be the mom that I wanted to be, and I think that Nick figured out how to be the dad that he wanted to be. We bought furniture and appliances and cooked dinner and lived what surely resembled a normal life. We did things that felt so important-I taught Sunday School and was the Girl Scout leader and Nick helped to coach softball-they were practically jobs outside of normal life.

But we messed up endlessly. We were neither good at budgeting, or the careful planning that big expenses needed. We were both dreamers-not so much doers. We knew what we wanted life to look like, we just lacked any kind of map to get us there.

Nick leaving was like being thrown into the deep end of the ocean-I had to figure out how to tread water and eventually to swim. I'm still treading water but I'm so in amazement of how well I have learned to swim. I budget. Wisely. I make big decisions for sound reasons and not just based on how I feel at the moment. I don't just dream about what life is going to be someday, I take concrete steps to get to where I need to be.

When I look back on this time in my life, I'm going to realize that this was the greatest gift Nick ever gave to me. As lonely and stressful and maddening as living through all of this grief has been, this new person, this adult Joy, carved out of broken promises and such a great deal of hurt, she is strong and capable and fierce(ish). And weird. As ever.

My Shot...

I listen to the soundtrack for Hamilton every single day.

I'm pretty sure I drive my co-workers crazy, because not only do I listen to it every day, but I also tend to play it on a loop.

Of all my celebrity crushes, my biggest is on Lin-Manuel Miranda.

I loved him long before Hamilton.

I, as you know, am a musical theatre geek, and I first fell in love with Lin when I watched a PBS special about his first Broadway musical, In the Heights. The documentary was basically a behind the scenes look at someone making their first musical, the vast amount of work that goes into a show that could close in a week, but in the case of In the Heights go on to win the Tony award for best musical in 2008.

What I took from this documentary and carried with me for all of these years was that this man, this Lin-Manuel, who is one year younger than me, was never going to be able to live up to this billing. I adored him-I found him to be so well spoken and charming and fascinating-but I knew, in my wizened age, that lightning doesn't strike twice. Producing one amazing musical, one book of such importance-nothing that this man ever did could live up to this "coming out," as the documentary put it.

Enter Hamilton.

So, what goes through my mind every day when I listen to the amazing feats of a founding father that I knew was important to banking but, like everyone, I didn't realize his true importance until Lin wrote 46 songs that explained it all to me-what goes through my mind is, why was I so certain that this was impossible? What happened to me that made me believe that dreams need to end upon your first success, and if they don't, if you dare fly toward that sun again, you will surely get burned?

I'm not sure. I know that the birth of Betsy was the culmination of all of my dreams, and the birth of Felicity was the icing on top of the cake. That I could have one daughter was a miracle. Me, the girl who dreamed so hard of having a family, who talked about her imaginary children like they were real for as long as anyone remembers, and the girl who never had a boyfriend, ever-that girl somehow managed to have all of her dreams come true.

Dreaming beyond that seems impossible. What dreams I harbor now are for my girls to be contented and free and blessed. Growing up with them, which make no doubt is exactly what I'm doing, is fun and my favorite part of my life. I exasperate my family and most of my friends because, as I have grown fond of saying, "I want to be invited to the party but I don't want to go." I want to be seen. I even want to be heard. But beyond that, I can't function. And I can't even find proper words to express that. Words have never failed me before, but when it comes to what my future is supposed to look like outside of my girls, I am at a total loss.

Enter Hamilton. Again.

Pick up the pieces. Keep moving forward. Write and write and write.

And someday, this will all make sense.

Back to the Future...

All 80s, all the time summer.

It's such fun.

How did all 80s, all the time summer come into being? Well, I claimed it for myself a few years ago and what I mainly meant was that Nick and I watched 80s movies all summer. It was fun.

Then, of course, summer 2015 happened.

Last year was better, but the girls and I were still adjusting to how summer works in this new family that we have created from broken pieces of the old family. At this particular juncture in life, summer means that the girls are with Nick during the week and with me on the weekends. So, you know, backwards and inside out from normal.

But this year all 80s, all the time summer is making a comeback. And it's even better than before because sharing movies with my girls is so much fun. I dread the day that they outgrow watching movies with their mom, eating popcorn and junk food and just basically living the slumber party part of being a house full of girls that makes my life as it exists now a delight.

So, anyway, all 80s, all the time does take a slight bit of planning. Because, after all, I am me and I'm pretty type A. But I try not to overthink it or it becomes a chore, one more thing I have to do. And that is most definitely not what the 80s was about- the 80s was about fun and glamour and Molly Ringwald.

All 80s, all the time summer involves things other than just the movies. It involves all 80s music in the car, and 80s board games for game nights. For me personally, it involves rereading my favorite books (Sweet Valley, Baby-sitter's Club, and some classic Lois Duncan) and also trying to catch up with some that I missed (I am currently trying to read all the Madeleine L'Engle that I somehow sadly neglected as a young adult).

Shelf Discovery by Lizzie Skurnick is one of my most favorite books of all time. I love reading about what other people love reading and this particular collection is so wonderful because it is completely full of books from the late 1970s and 1980s that just sound delicious. I'm not quite sure why I love reading what other people think of things so much, but I definitely do, and hearing about your favorite 80s novel that you treasured in junior high just thrills me-all the more if you are just slightly older than me, and so can speak with a sort of wisdom that I'm always stretching toward but never quite manage. I'm never going to be as cool as I find people to be who were born in the early 1970s, it's just a fact of life.

Shelf Discovery is a great collection of somewhat more serious young adult lit. There isn't much discussion of the luscious Wakefield twins and other books of their ilk, so if you are into that sort of thing, let me point you toward the Cliquey Pizza website. There are actually 3 of these websites for some reason, and all feature stacks of books that I would love to get my hands on from the 1980s. The reviews that she has are great, but the vision was clearly grander than the reality. I have an idea in the back of my head to someday have a blog devoted solely to these guilty pleasure reads, just to create what it is that I'm searching for, but for the time being, that is just going to have to live in my head.

Retro Hell is also a cool book devoted to both 1970s and 1980s pop culture. It's meant to be read more like a dictionary but I always start on page one and read all the way through. I'm a nerd.

But, of course, all 80s all the time summer is mostly about the movies. According to the girls, that's the fun part. My go to reference guide to all 80s movies is Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies by Jonathan Bernstein. I bought this book by chance at WaldenBooks way back when I was 16 and I loved it so much that I bought two more copies to give my best friends, Michelle and Tanya. We all three adored 80s movies and mostly spent our Saturday nights at the Cinema Shop watching as many as we could find. Bernstein takes to task these movies, and he loves some that I'm iffy on, and vice versa, but it's just mostly just a delight.

So, what is my 80s watch list? I will tell you. But I do have some caveats. I can't chose anything that is very scary because I have a highly sensitive child who feels permanently scarred by my insistence on watching Hocus Pocus every October. Additionally, I try to not choose anything that I think is too blue. I do let them watch some stuff that is more raunchy than I probably should (Vacation has a lot of bad language and sex, but who am I to deny them the pleasure of watching John Candy be forced to ride roller coasters at BB gun point?) And this list is in no particular order other than when a movie popped into my head making this list.

1. Footloose
2. Fame
3. Summer School
4. Mystic Pizza
5. The Princess Bride
6. Pretty In Pink
7. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
8. Weird Science
9. The Breakfast Club
10. Pretty in Pink
11. Can't Buy Me Love
12. The Karate Kid
13. The Outsiders
14. Xanadu
15. Adventures in Babysitting
16. Back to the Future
17. Caddyshack
18. The Lost Boys
19. Dream a Little Dream
20. E.T.
21. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
22. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
23. Ghostbusters
24. The Goonies
25. Just One of the Guys
26. License To Drive
27. Vacation
28. European Vacation
29. Say Anything...
30. War Games
31. St. Elmo's Fire
32. Dirty Dancing
33. Mannequin
34. Maid to Order
35. Happy Together

I could go on and on. I was trying to keep it to 24, because that would be two movies every weekend. But I just had to get a few more in there. I'm learning to be okay if we don't get to everything. It's part of my learning to be an adult.

Anyway, this post is likely not that interesting to most people. But I hope that there are at least a couple of other 80s lovers in my orbit. I know in my head that my poor college professor who told me that no good music was made past 1975 simply lived in a different era- she wasn't a child looking up to super cool high schoolers with big hair and shoulder pads, dreaming of the day she would join their ranks. Of course, by the time I got to high school all of that 80s glitz had dissipated into 90s grunge. Which I love in its own way. But that is another blog post for another day.

For this summer, I'll stick with my most beloved John Hughes and Debbie Gibson and try to pretend that I will ever be as cool as someone born about eight years earlier than me.

A cold and broken Hallelujah...

I'm pretty positive that I have PTSD.

I have never been officially diagnosed with that, but I have had lots of therapy and I lived with someone who had severe PTSD for 15 years, so I'm confident in saying that PTSD is among the side effects of my divorce.

This post is really not about that, though.

This post is about my life these past 2 years, about what pulled me out of a spiral that nearly killed me. I am writing this particular post because all I wanted to know when my world crumbled was what to do. I asked anyone that I knew who was divorced, "How did you handle this?" "What happens now?" "Please tell me how to fix this, how to live this, how to be divorced." Because, like I hope all people who vow to love someone forever, I had no intention of having that end. I felt so at sea, so lost as to where to even begin to piece my life back together.

I'm still piecing it together, of course.

But I have, mostly through sheer trial and error, figured out some things that helped. And I feel compelled to share that on here, just in case someone stumbles across this blog that needs to hear any of this. That scared girl that I was 2 years ago-this is what she wanted to hear, to know, to feel in her bones, just so that she would know that things would be okay. Hard as it is to believe, Joy Elizabeth, we are still alive and breathing and figuring life out.

The absolute most aching time in this whole process was the very beginning. And I knew that even at the time, in that scary fog that I was operating in, I kept saying to myself, "This part sucks. But the next part will be better." I had no idea if that was true, but I needed to believe it. My main coping mechanism has been to just pretend that I'm okay until I actually feel okay. But this was the hardest part-I was down a dark hole, barely able to function at all, unable to eat, unable mostly to even get out of bed.

Somehow, and I so wish that I could remember how this happened because I sadly do not, I managed to get up out of bed. I forced myself to eat once a day until I had anything of an appetite.

And when I emerged from that particular black hole, I was pretty skinny.

It was the first thing that people noticed. I got a lot of positive feedback because of it. And that is the one thing that I genuinely wish for anyone who has to go through a terribly dark period, because it felt good to hear, "Well, you look great."

Now, naturally, starving is not a good thing to do to yourself.

However, the hard part was done. What was left for me to do was maintain a smaller body in a healthy way. And that is what I have managed to do for these 2 years so far. I gave up bread, I eat lots of vegetables and fruits, and I eat some protein with every meal in order to maintain muscle.

I work out every day. I do a combination of yoga and abdominal work and I lift weights. I'm never going to be a cut, lean body builder. But I do find that starting my day with exercise clears my head. I call it eating my frog. One of my co-workers went to a training once where they told you, if there is something that you need to do every day that you don't particularly want to do, do it first. And then you will have "eaten the frog" for the day.

Trust me, this was not a panacea. For almost a year, I couldn't bear to think that anyone saw even the smallest flaw in my appearance. It came from a very deep seeded belief that if someone saw a flaw-any blemish at all -they would see immediately that I was a girl who was so unperfect her husband had to abandon his family to get away from her.

I have slowly begun to make my peace with that.

I'm trying to allow myself the space to allow my scars to show, the space to feel crazy and different and who I am, inside of a body that is as unperfect as the rest of me. I'm not going to lie, it's hard. What if I gain weight and no one ever asks me out again? What if all I have from the past two years of struggling to move forward is that I look better? It's complicated and tricky. Yes, I know that I am much more than my body. Yes, I know that looks are superficial. But I can't really overstate how important it is to me that I look different.

It's like a baptism by fire. This process burned away all of these parts of me that were clouded in self-doubt, these parts of me that believed that somehow just being as passive as is humanly possible was a positive character trait. I want to look like a different person because I am a different person. The old Joy is still inside of me, scars and all. But who I am is fundamentally different and I can't go back. And that, in my experience, is the hallmark of a PTSD survivor. It's hard to describe, there aren't words that I can get my arms around to adequately explain that sharp before and after to my life.

I am a person slowly (oh, so slowly) coming into her own as a fully functioning adult. I don't have all the answers. I feel ashamed that I fell so far apart over losing my marriage because there are people in this world who have lost far more than me. I'm a blessed person and I know that with every beat of my heart. But I absolutely have to own that shame, and that sadness, because I want to be able to say, here is a small step that will help. Here is a tiny speck of hope. Even if the only person that I am truly writing this for is that scared girl that I was 2 years ago, unsure of how to begin to emerge from that dark abyss.

My dearest Anne...

I hate change.

I'm sure that this is not surprising to you. Heavens, the focus of this blog has become my snail-like pace of healing over my divorce-in fact, I don't write on the blog all that much precisely because I feel like it's nothing new to read about the most small little steps that I have managed.

Anyway, I hate change and therefore most of the things that I most adore are from my childhood. If I lived in a perfect world, I would go home to late 1980s/early 1990s music, television, movies, clothes, you name it. I know in my head that it has been 20 years since I graduated from high school, and in those 20 years the world has changed in amazing and most wonderful ways. I can remember reading a review for The Net when it came out and the reviewer saying, "You can't actually order a pizza online." And I think about how basically my entire world is online now, and it has made shopping so easy, and I can connect with people that I actually know in real life and people that I have never met but now love beyond recognition, like Jamie Golden, who is just perhaps the funniest person ever in the world.

But in my heart, which is, as we know, an entirely different beast, I long for my Wilson Phillips tapes and my pegged jeans and for TV movies about proms that aren't in any way ironic. Thus, I am none too jazzed about this remix of Anne of Green Gables on Netflix. I love my Anne in giant puff sleeves, I love my Gilbert mooning over Anne in an obsessed manner but not so sissy that I can't see his appeal, and there is only one Marilla Cuthbert, and that is Colleen Dewhurst.

I don't want Anne to be gritty. I don't want Anne to be someone that I, as a middle American white girl with two living parents, cannot relate to. My Anne is, was, and always shall be Megan Follows.

I watched the CBC Anne of Green Gables well before I read the book. This book, I might add, is what I will answer if you ask my favorite book ever of all time. And yet-I love the miniseries more. That is how hard I fell for this magical production that would turn up on PBS every pledge season like clockwork.

I read Anne (all eight books) to Betsy a few years ago and I was struck at the time by how much I truly love the miniseries considering all of the liberties Kevin Sullivan took with things that I genuinely love in the book. I forgive Anne of Avonlea (Anne of Green Gables Part II, if you are in Canada) its many missteps because I love the character of Emmaline, who I do realize I resemble far more than Anne, and I love Morgan Harris, and I love that Anne utters my most favorite line of all human time, which sadly is not in the actual book, "I discovered that it's not what the world holds for you, it's what you bring to it."

Anne came into my life at the most precious time, when I was forming who I am and what I bring to the world. And she encouraged me to create-to think that what I had to say has merit.

And I have been writing ever since. There are many times that my writing, especially on this blog, just seems like the same drum beat again and again. I long for a day to be able to write a blog post about a change in my life, about a new person and a new love and everything that goes with it. But I just can't quite get there. I try-I have been asked out, I have even been on dates, I attempt to flirt with people, which is frankly just a lot of me being awkward, but my practice person at least seems somewhat okay with it.

For now though-for now I am learning what it is to be myself, which is a kind of wicked cool thing to do as a grown adult. And my touchpoint for who the heck it is that I am, that's Anne Shirley. She never loses hope, she never looks at life as a struggle but as an adventure.

She is my true north. And she's in a 1980s puff sleeve concoction that may seem dated and silly in this gritty, real 2017. She is who I long to be.