So, here we are.

If this time of isolation has taught me anything, it’s that there is very little I actually control. It’s a forced social science experiment with no clear hypothesis. The only thing I can I count on is the peanut butter jar sitting topless on the counter, multiple lunches involving melted cheese, one or both children calling me “The Worst,” and my long awaited glass of wine at 6:00.

In the first two weeks of social distancing, we cycled through all the stages of grief in 10 hours or less, ate dinner, and adjourned to the couch to watch Love Is Blind.

Love is Blind is a reality dating show on Netflix hosted by former 98 Degrees singer Nick Lachey. It starts off with a group of singles engaging in multiple rounds of blind speed dating. The “dates” take place in pods where the couple can talk but not see each other, with the end goal of getting engaged, blindly. After the proposal(s), the engaged couples are whisked away to Mexico for an awkward group vacation before moving into the same Atlanta condo complex, like an urban commune with a former boyband pop star as your charismatic cult leader. The show ends with a series of Vegas-style weddings where the betrothed either seal the deal or pull a Julia Roberts in The Runaway Bride.

This is not quality television. It is utter trash and as addicting as Cool Ranch Doritos. But my family agrees that Love is Blind saved us from ourselves.

We would start talking about it before lunch: “Do you think Jessica will ditch Mark when she realizes he’s short? When Amber says she is an Ex-Tank Mechanic, what does that mean exactly? Do you think GG is on drugs or just naturally spacey?” Even on the days that deteriorated into screaming fights and rivers of tears, someone would ask: “But we’re still watching Love is Blind, right?” Especially on those days.

But as much as I cherished those blissfully harmonious 45 minutes of all of us on the couch, the mom guilt would haunt me the next day like a rum punch hangover. I knew that a show that included F-bombs, sexual situations, discussions regarding penis size, excessive drinking, and one drunk person feeding wine to her dog was not going to get the thumbs up from Common Sense Media. Yet still, I didn’t want it to end. I only allowed one episode a night so we could stretch out the bonding experience.

Pre-pandemic, we never watched TV together. We are not big TV people in general.  I think this is because as a kid, my sister Maureen and I were only allowed to watch one show, and that was Little House on the Prairie. My mom has relaxed with age, but in my childhood years she gave off some serious Church Lady vibes. Her favorite word was inappropriate, and in her mind, LHOTP was the only appropriate material on television.

Yet even prairie life could get too racy. Maureen and I would wait with bated breath for the episode title to flash across the screen, praying it wouldn’t say “Sylvia.” “Sylvia” was the one episode we were forbidden to watch, because it was about the most developed girl at school getting raped by the blacksmith disguised as a mime. Maybe the ratings were low and they needed a storyline more titillating than Pa’s wheat crop getting trashed in a hail storm.

Ironically, the whole rape-pregnancy portion of the storyline went straight over our heads. I think the only thing we took away from the Sylvia episode was if your boobs get too big you should secure them with the prairie version of surgical tape, and if you see a mime, run like hell.

My mother’s Inappropriate List was not TV-exclusive: Dirty Dancing. Salt ’n Pepa. Three’s Company. Al Bundy. Madonna (her “Like a Prayer” video specifically, but also just Madonna in general). Bikinis. Thongs. Cleavage. Tampons. Talking about tampons or anything suggestive of genitalia. My Two Dads. Eyeliner. Co-ed parties. Sweet Valley High books. General Hospital. Nudity of any kind, with the exception of the communal dressing room at Loehmann’s. MTV. Strapless dresses. Cursing. Back talk, aka “being fresh.” Double ear piercings. Sex before marriage. Talking about sex, thinking about sex, any show or movie with with sexual undertones, or God forbid, people actually having sex. Oh, and mime rapists.

To this day, the word inappropriate gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach – it feels laced with judgement and shame. Even if someone is referring to a behavior as inappropriate, it still feels like an attack on your personhood. It insinuates a lack of some kind: morals, sophistication, the ability to make good choices. If someone says the length of your skirt is inappropriate, your skirt is not the one who suddenly feels like a slut.

So I was surprised to learn that while the modern definition of the noun appropriate is “not proper,” the word’s Latin etymology is appropriatus: “to make one’s own.” Another dictionary defined inappropriate as “not suitable for a particular occasion.”

To this I say: Who the hell is an expert in knowing what is suitable for the occasion of a global pandemic? No one. So we have no choice but to clumsily yet compassionately make this quarantine our own.

Allow me to digress with a random story: After graduating from college, my friends and I spent three weeks backpacking through Europe. One of our stops was the Swiss town Interlaken, which was stunning but linguistically challenging. We wrongly assumed the primary language was German, when it is actually something called Alemannic Swiss German. Anyway, we were clueless. If a menu didn’t have pictures, we were screwed. While out to dinner one night, we were psyched to discover that our waitress spoke a tiny bit of English. But every time we pointed to something on the menu and asked, “What/how is this?” she would answer in a singsongy voice: “I don’t know whazz good for you, I just know whazz good for me!”

I think we ended up with some raw ground beef and an entire fish that still had eyeballs. But for some reason, 20 years later, her voice is still burned on my brain. Anytime I find myself in a social media shame spiral of comparing myself to more qualified moms, I say to myself: “I don’t know whazz good for you, I just know whazz good for me!” It’s an odd mantra, but it reminds me that my family is its own weird little organism, and comparing it to someone else’s weird little organism is pointless. It’s like comparing a donkey to a goat. They look the same (to me) but they are actually two totally different animals. Or do I mean a mule? Whatever.

I read a fantastic article in The Atlantic by Mary Katherine Ham called “It’s Okay To Be a Different Kind of Parent in a Pandemic.” She points out that family bonding is one of the five tenets of resilient parenting. Some of my closest friends bond with their families over board games, baking, or Titanic documentaries. But board games turn Phil and Emma into hostile competitors. Baking stresses me out and documentaries give Phoebe nightmares. So if trash TV is where we bond, then trash TV it is.

In the spirit of embracing what works for your family, Ham asks: “What kind of mom are you? Once you’ve decided what kind of mom or dad you are, do something small everyday to put that identity into practice.”

What kind of mom am I? Damned if I know. So, I asked my family members, because I am brave like that:

Emma: “I’d say you used to be more strict but now you are like average like half strict half not.”

Phil: “A hot mom.”

Phoebe: “You’re fun when you’re drunk.”

Hot, drunk and inconsistent.

I refused to accept this as my bottom line, and sought out additional non-reliable sources by googling “What Kind Of Mom Am I.” I stumbled upon a Myers Briggs website that categorizes your parenting style by your personality type. As an INFJ, my assessment actually rang true: The INFJ mother dislikes mundane chores and feels confused by discipline. She has a unique sense of humor which provides a deeper connection and doesn’t like to treat her children as if they are outside some adult circle.

When I read this to Emma, she replied: “That’s freakishly accurate.”

It’s true that even when I taught third grade, I never spoke to children using a “kid voice,” because I sucked at it. It’s also true that I am confused by discipline (and a bunch of other things, like compasses, the donkey/goat/mule conundrum, and how to change a duvet cover) because I tend to punish as a Pavlovian response to something my mother deemed “inappropriate.”

This time of intense togetherness is teaching me to let go of old voices and learn to trust my instincts. I can marinate in perceived failure or I can embrace the quirky uniqueness of my own little tribe. I am finding that when I commit to this, the veil of comparison is lifted and I am free to celebrate the quirky uniqueness of others as well. I don’t know whazz good for you!! I just know whazz good for me!

I am not using this time to teach my kids Russian or whittle a pan flute out of fallen branches from our yard. But we have a lot of dance parties, and have almost perfected the lift from Dirty Dancing. I no longer try to sensor Emma’s music, because when my 14 year-old daughter asks if she can DJ some Childish Gambino on a sunset drive to nowhere, I will always say yes. Even when one of his songs is “F*ck Your Blog.”

Will my “way of doing things” lead to raising crass, amoral people? Crass…maybe. But amoral? I don’t think so. During one the final episodes of Love Is Blind, when trainwreck contestant Jessica (the one who gets drunk with her dog),walked down the aisle alone and flowerless without one family member in attendance, Phoebe shouted: “I know she’s the worst but someone get that girl some flowers! And how are her friends just sitting there? Walk a lonely sister down the aisle!”

So, I feel like that’s something.

This is the first time in fifteen years we won’t be traveling for Christmas. We will be staying at home, just the four of us.

It has been our tradition to spend Christmas Eve with my husband Phil’s (very large) family in Philadelphia, and then Christmas Day with my (very small) family in New Jersey. When we lived locally in a suburb of Philly, this arrangement worked. We covered all our bases and everyone was happy.

But since moving to Boston seven years ago, upholding the traditions of Christmas past has taken a lot more effort. Like, a lot more.

First, there is the gift organization: What can be transported via car, and what needs to be shipped? A responsible person would use an Excel spreadsheet for such a task; the name of the gift, the receiver, type of wrapping paper used and shipment status recorded in its own neat little box. I am not that person. I am the person who binge shops on Cyber Monday, stuffs the incoming packages into her closet and says: “I’ll figure it out later.” Later = three days before Christmas. Ok, two days.

Then, there is the travel itself: The packing, the last-minute boarding of the dog because we can’t seem to remember that we have one, the installation of the Thule purchased on Cyber Monday to transport anything that can’t be lodged into the trunk, the administering of Dramamine, the traffic on the Merritt and the GW Bridge, the voice of the Waze lady re-directing us to her short-cut through Harlem. Then there is the constant complaining: My IPad is dead, the Wi-fi’s not working, it’s my turn to use the charger, She’s at 11% and I’m only at 6% so I get the charger, I need to pee, I’m hungry, actually no I’m nauseous, why did I eat those Fritos, PULL OVER I AM GOING TO PUKE RIGHT NOW!

I realize these are first world problems. We are fortunate to have family to visit in the first place. But for me Christmas had become a marathon I had to muscle through, rather than a season to slow down and savor. Maybe no one actually does that, I reasoned. Tis the season for overextending yourself.

And Christmas is about being with family, right? I truly do love Phil’s family, and I would prefer for them to love me back. I didn’t want to be “that in-law” to break a family tradition that long preceded my membership.

Until last year, a few days after Christmas, my mother-in-law let me off the hook. .

Over martinis at a restaurant in Philadelphia, she told me the story of the one Christmas they spent away from home over 40 years ago, at Uncle Joe and Aunt Aurelia’s house in Connecticut.

Her holiday tale was straight out of a National Lampoon movie: Nine people crammed in an old station wagon, including Phil’s grandmother who asked every ten minutes if they could jump off the NY thruway for a cocktail. The gifts were transported in my father-in-law’s homemade luggage carrier made out of painted green wood he had found in the backyard.

“It looked like a green coffin on top of the car,” she said. “People kept slowing down on the highway to check out the corpse we were carrying.”

I was laughing so hard I was crying. My mother-in-law – an Irish firecracker from South Philly – knows how to tell a story.

“By the time we arrived,” she said, “I was already exhausted and knew I would never travel for Christmas again. We were barely there when the kids spotted Aunt Aurelia’s collection of gingerbread houses. I’m not talking about the sloppy ones you slap together with some icing and gumdrops. These were masterpieces – Martha Stewart worthy. God knows how long they took to make. But within five minutes, my children ate them. Devoured them. Not a crumb was left. I wanted to die.”

I snorted and vodka come out my nose.

“My point is,” she continued, “is that you don’t have to do this next year. I appreciate that you make the effort, and we love seeing you, but you should be in your own house for Christmas.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in – for what she was saying to register.

I always thought being part of a big family meant going with the flow: showing up and blending in. To not take part in this tradition, I feared, would be seen as a rejection of those who did. Everyone else made it work, so I should make it work, too. No excuses. But, according to my mother-in-law, 300 miles is actually a legit excuse. And she’s The Boss.

The word tradition is derived from the Latin root tradere, which means to “hand over.” And that is what my mother-in-law did in that moment. She passed the torch. She released me: selflessly, magnanimously, no strings attached. She gifted my Christmas back to me by saying, “This is your family, your holiday. You need to do what works best for you.”

The thing is, I have no idea what works best for me.

Marrying the baby of a large, tight-knit family is like an all-inclusive vacation package at Sandals. There is very little guesswork as to how things run. Holiday traditions were long ago set in motion and now run like a well-oiled machine. By the time I came onto the scene, the Christmas Eve menu consisting of eight pounds of bacon, six pounds of sausage, and six pounds of ham had long ago been set. All I had to do was show up with a fruit salad to offset the 20 lbs of pork and pour myself a cocktail. Phil’s family knows how to party, and Christmas Eve is their Super Bowl: great-grandchildren banging on the piano, thirty-three people sitting shoulder to shoulder around the dining room table or huddled in the kitchen, kids required to sing a carol for their presents, stories being told and re-told. And so much laughter. Lots of good, deep belly laughs.

Clearly this is a tough act to follow. How do I compete with a feast that showcases a pig in all its versatile glory? What do I know about creating traditions? How do I create a Christmas from scratch?

All I know is, everything needs to start somewhere, and traditions need to change with the times in order to last. Hanging stockings for Santa to fill with candy started as shoes being left out for St. Nicholas to fill with coins. Before it was a cake, the yule log was actually  burning wood meant to keep away evil spirits. My mother-in-law’s Christmas Eve celebration started as a dinner, but was bumped up to a brunch once grandchildren entered the mix.

So, I will approach this with the spirit of a pioneer. We already have a few traditions in place, like giving books as gifts on Christmas Eve in matching plaid pajamas. Just yesterday, my friend Katie invited us to join her family for Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant. This felt like a gift from God. If we are depressed and hating each other by the end of the day, we will be saved by shrimp tempura, Katie’s hilarious kids and the waiter at Gourmet Garden who pours a 10 ounce glass of Kim Crawford.

If I have learned one thing in my thirteen years of parenting, it’s that kids smell your desperation. They sense your need for perfection, and will go to great lengths to remind you that it does not exist. They know that you have appointed yourself as The Keeper Of Everyone’s Happiness, and feel it is their responsibility to return you to a more humble state.

So my holiday refrain is: “Here goes nothing.” The higher the expectation, the steeper the fall. I am prepared for frustration and failure. Right now my plan consists of a walk on the beach, staying in my pjs as long as possible, and letting people briefly feel all their feelings before distracting them with Elf and overly buttered popcorn. There will be very few instances when everyone is happy at the same time – which may be the one consistent tradition regardless of location. But another thing I have learned about parenting is that there will be a few grace-filled moments of perfect harmony, if I am present enough to notice.

While I am sure there will be sadness at what we are missing 300 miles away, there is an element of excitement and freedom in creating something new. And when this sense of freedom triggers feelings of guilt, I need to remind myself that putting my immediate family first doesn’t mean I love my extended family any less. To grow, there has to be room for both the past and the future. Maybe the actual tradition is not as important as the core belief that fuels it. And when a parent gives you permission to step fully into your own life, as my mother-in-law did for me… well, I can’t think of a better tradition than that.

I haven’t written here in over a year. I started thinking I had nothing left to say, or more accurately, nothing that anyone would care to read. But then I randomly met a former blog reader named Liz, who said if I wrote something, she would read it.

So I thought about that for a few weeks.

And just like that, I found something to say.

So this blog is for Liz.

On November 4th, my friend Katie and I ran the NYC Marathon. We committed to 26.2 immediately following the Winter Warrior Run Challenge, a local contest that involved running outside everyday in January, sub-zero temperatures be damned. After dodging black ice in snow pants and ski goggles, a marathon was just what we needed to keep the self-torture streak alive.

As training partners we were simpatico: our see-how-we-feel-today pace, our non-stop chatter, the commitment to getting it done early in the day as to leave time for Starbucks. Both proud owners of bladder slings, we respect the need to pee behind a tree, and/or shove a prolapsing uterus back in.

We woke up at 4am on race day with our typical text exchange about coffee, pooping, and weather-appropriate layering. The gun finally went off for our wave at 10:45. The weather was perfect and the crowd was incredible – but the whole experience from the beginning was a bit overwhelming in a sensory overload kind of way.

The race itself did not mirror our training runs – between the cacophony of the crowd and the navigation of the water stops, it was impossible to find a shared groove. We kept pace with each other, but often with other runners in between.

By mile 18 Katie started to lag behind me. This never happens. Between the two of us, she is the stronger runner. Katie is a formidable athlete all around – she actually won a triathlon. I am just a chick who runs away from her own crazy.  So, I was slow to process what was happening.

“I don’t feel great,” she said. “I may need a bathroom break.”

So, we stopped at a Port-o-Potty. Then a few miles later, we stopped again. Shit was unraveling. Literally.

By mile 23, she stopped. “I need to walk,” she said.

I tried to fight the panic as I slowed to a shuffle. I feared walking at this point would cause every lower-body muscle to seize up, ass to ankle. I tried to breathe clarity into my muddled, tired brain.

But making good choices at Mile 23 of a marathon is like trying to parent with a stomach bug. It’s tough to be your Best Mom Self while lying on the bathroom floor. So, your Mediocre Mom Self plants your kids in front of the TV with a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch so you can puke in peace.

This was me at Mile 23. My mitigated self wanted a quick fix. But I didn’t have a TV or Cinnamon Toast Crunch or the nice, cool bathroom floor to lie on. All I had was a warm packet of peanut butter in the pocket of my running pants.

“Here,” I said to Katie. “Eat the peanut butter.”

She looked at the smooshed packet in my hand, turned a little green and said: “Um no.”

“Maybe it will help, just try it.”

She tried. She gagged.

Now what? Thinking was hard.

I am not sure how long we hobbled along, going back and forth Abbot and Costello style about whether I was staying or going. I said stay, she said go. Stay. Go. Stay. Go.

She said: “I really just want to suffer alone.” There was enough finality in her voice for me to believe her.

“Promise me you’ll call me if you puke or pass out, ok? Because I’ll come back.” Because calling someone while unconscious and running backward in a marathon both seem like solid options.

I knew with that first stagger-step away from Katie that I would regret this decision. Everything about it felt wrong in all the ways your body tries to tell you it is: pit in the stomach, heart in a vice, lump in the throat, hot tears behind my eyes. The world around me shrunk to a narrow, silent tunnel of shame. I kept my eyes fixated on the trees of Central Park up ahead, listening to the only sound I could hear, which was the voice in my head: You are just straight up a bad person.

I crossed the finish line in a fog, then stood there, dazed. The finish line officials tried to usher me along: “Keep it moving, keep it moving, collect your medal, blanket and water, just keep walking straight ahead.”

The word “medal” triggered the tears. This was not how I pictured this ending. It felt like a birth plan gone awry; a water birth-turned-c-section.

“M’am, keep moving please.” The race official man was getting testy with me.

“I can’t,” I whimpered, teetering on the edge of full-on ugly crying. “I have to wait for my friend.”

He sighed. “Ok whatever just go stand over there,” and shoved a medal into my hand.

I stood on a curb and fished my phone out of my running belt. I saw a text from my friend Shelly and immediately responded:

Shelly and Terri are friends from home who traveled to NYC to drink Bloody Marys and cheer us on, in that order. Shelly, conveniently, is an ER nurse, so I knew Katie was in the best possible hands. I tried to breathe deep. It’s going to be ok, it’s going to be ok. 

And it was. Shelly and Terri got her to the finish, and we were reunited.

Katie immediately let me off the hook: “I would have left you, too,” she said. “You gotta let it go.”

But I couldn’t let it go.

In the week following I re-played the events of Mile 23 over and over in my head. I could not stop crying. I wanted to stuff the memory of the marathon way down to the bottom of my mom purse, under the ticker tape of CVS receipts. I put my suitcase back in the closet with my medal still in it.

Phil tried to put things in perspective: “It’s a marathon! You have to run your own race! She would have felt worse had you stayed!”

And while I wanted to believe him, I couldn’t absorb his words. So I continued to obsess and cry, then obsess and cry some more. I was in the Shame Cave. In retrospect I think maybe I was also a little dehydrated.

Fortunately, I am 41, which is too old for many things, like crop tops and wallowing. Nothing good or productive happens in the Shame Cave, because no one lives there but me and the cast of Law & Order SVU. And the Real Housewives. There’s a big TV in the Shame Cave.

For me, the beauty of middle age has been the realization that no one can save me from myself. The only exit I have found out of the Shame Cave is to be my own best friend – to say to myself: I LOVE YOU GIRL, BUT ENOUGH WITH THE I SUCK SOB STORY. Then, I put on clean(er) yoga pants and focus on doing the next right thing.

Next Right Thing #1: Ask For Help. Because I appeared to be stuck in a do-loop of self-loathing, I called in the big guns: Gerry. Gerry was our marriage counselor in Philly, but over the years has morphed into more of a Shaman/Jesus/Mr. Rogers figure. Since moving to MA, I think of him as my Phone-A-Friend lifeline. That I pay for.

I spilled the whole story to Gerry who listened without interruption. After a thoughtful silence he said: “So basically you left her in a foxhole to die.”

“Yup,” I said.

“And this feels like a huge betrayal.” Gerry gets me.

“Exactly! I keep asking myself: What kind of person does something like that?”

“Well,” he said, “that kind of question suggests that you are only one kind of person. When in fact there was an internal conflict between the ‘You’ that wanted to run and the ‘You’ that wanted to stay.”

See what I mean? Gerry should have his own hotline.

“You know of course,” he continued, “that this is not just about the marathon.”

I laughed. “Is it ever?” That’s some therapy humor.

I won’t bore you with a catalog of my deepest wounds and darkest secrets (unless you buy me a drink – then I probably will) but the bottom line was that while shame thrives in the cave, it dies in the light. Like a Gremlin. And the only way to shine some light on that bitch was to ask for forgiveness.

Now, one might argue that I didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. Phil said: “You two should have discussed this scenario before hand. Next time, you need a pact about how you will handle something like this.”

To my brain, this sounds like a tidy solution: A pact! That is what we need! Then no one feels guilty, confused or conflicted because we have a PACT!

But my heart knows that the real pact was not made with words.

The pact was made in those pitch-black 5 AM track workouts. It was made on a 16 mile run in 98 degrees, when we kept each other going even though our arms were crusted in salt. It was made in the hundreds of phone calls and texts reminding each other to hydrate or drink the recovery shake. The pact was made in Target when I bought not one but TWO adult sized llama onesies to wear over our running clothes pre-marathon. The pact was made in those post-run swims in the ocean, fully clothed.

It was never my race. It was always our race.

Next Right Thing #2: Ask For Forgiveness.
I was shopping for a kid’s birthday gift at a local gift shop when I saw the hat: fleece lined, navy blue, perky pom-pom. The inside was warm but soft like a rabbit.

I bought the hat, wrapped it, and left it on Katie’s doorstep. Inside was a card – the rambling handwritten message serpentining front to back – in which I clumsily but wholeheartedly apologized for leaving her in the foxhole.

Back at my house, I still had my coat on when my phone rang, the name “Emergency Contact” flashing across the screen.

***Yes, Katie is my Emergency Contact. Phil was fired from this post the day I received an IV iron infusion and my arm blew up like a balloon animal. When I called him in a mild panic, his voicemail lady said what she says to me at least once a week: “This mailbox is full and is not accepting messages at this time. Goodbye.” Katie picked up on the first ring, so she was hired. And yes, I abandoned my Emergency Contact in an emergency. The irony is not lost on me.***

“I’m coming over,” she said. Some things are too much for text. (Is this a thing? TMFT? If not we should throw this into the acronym rotation.)

Next Right Thing #3: Receive The Forgiveness
She walked in the door, made a beeline for where I was standing at the kitchen island, and gave me a good, strong hug – the kind of hug that speaks without words. I cried AGAIN, but from relief this time.

“Here,” she said, handing me a small gift bag. “I saw this at a shop in Duxbury and thought of you.” It was a tea towel that said “Na’mastay in Bed.” I snorted but the tears kept coming, because the real gift is knowing that you have someone who thinks of you while shopping in Duxbury.

Phil poured us each a beer in a frosty mug (he will never be fired as the bartender). We shot the shit for a bit, and with another good hug, she went home to make dinner for her kids, aka. order a pizza.

And just like that, I stopped obsessively re-hashing the race like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, inserting different scenarios and their potential outcomes. There was no more self-flagellation; no more treading water in a pool of my own moral depravity. I felt only lightness and gratitude.

In the past, if I heard someone refer to forgiveness as “a miracle,” I would roll my eyes at such hyperbole, just like I do when James Lipton calls another actor a genius on Inside the Actor’s Studio.

But when I compare who I was before Katie came over with the person she left standing in that kitchen, the transformation is nothing short of miraculous. I felt healed in a Christian Tent Revival kind of way.

Last summer, one of my best friends from college, Krystin, came for a visit. We met in the freshman dorm 20 years ago, and it was love at first bong hit. During her brief stay in Scituate, we took my dog for a walk on the beach. In the midst of shooting the shit about nothing and everything, her upbeat and confident voice became uncharacteristically shaky.

“I want to tell you something,” she said, still walking beside me but a half step behind.

Ruh-roh. My catastrophizing mind was off to the races.

“I want to apologize for bailing on you sophomore year,” she said. “For choosing not to live with you.”

As freshman, Krystin and I planned to room together the following year. By the end of the year, however, Krystin changed her mind, for reasons that had everything to do with me being a total basket case who subsisted on vodka, cantaloupe, and mustard packets. She ended up living with someone else, and I lived alone.

I stopped in my tracks and turned to her. “Have you been carrying this around all these years?”

Her eyes filled up, then looked down. “I just feel like I abandoned you.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “That was the right thing to do. You were a kid. I was a liability with a capital L. Sure, I was bummed to not live with you but I never faulted you for that for a second. If anything, I abandoned you by falling off the deep end! I was a walking disaster and you set an appropriate boundary.”

“But you had to live alone,” she said softly.

“Uh, yeah that’s what happens when you do five shots of Jaegermeister and throw up in your roommate’s hamper. It’s called consequences. And that year was good for me. I had to learn to be ok with my own company. So, you did me a favor. Are you hearing me? It’s ok. Are we good?”

“Yeah,” she said, as we resumed our walk. “It just felt…shitty.”

“That’s because you’re a good person,” I said. “And because you missed my alpaca sweater/hippy skirt collection.”

“It’s true,” she said.

On that walk with Krystin, I offered up a quick prayer: Whatever just happened here is important….so, thank you. Standing in the kitchen with Katie, I felt the same intense presence and gratitude – for this perfectly vulnerable exchange of asking and receiving. And when a human connection yields instant relief and lightness – well, that feels pretty miraculous to me. It feels….whole. Complete.

I think there is a depth to forgiveness that defies logic…a place inside us where the right or wrongness of a situation is not always the point. Even though I had jumped into that foxhole headfirst, Krystin still carried the weight of leaving me there. And while other people in her life – her family, other friends – may have reassured her that it was ok, in order to fully heal, she needed to hear it from me. She needed to feel it from me.

It can be scary to ask for forgiveness, because there’s no guarantee you’re going to get it. But there is healing in the asking, and peace in knowing you did the next right thing. Sometimes we are forced to do the hard work of forgiving ourselves, even when the other person cannot. The wound still closes, although maybe not as cleanly as we hoped.

Glennon Doyle writes:

Healing is so painful. Thankfully when we turn away from someone who would have helped us heal (or they turn away from us), God sends another. I don’t think He punishes us. I think he gives us lots and lots of tries. God is forever tries.

I asked Gerry: “Is forgiveness a universal healing agent? Kind of like a Spiritual Aquaphor?”

“Hmmm…” he said. “Go on.”

“Well, if a person forgives you, does it help heal the times someone else didn’t forgive you – like when you take an antibiotic for strep throat and it inadvertently clears up your infected toenail?”

He laughed. “I’m not sure it works exactly like that. But the more we experience forgiveness, and understand the depth of how it works, we stop being the victim of our own story. Then we are rooted in compassion, and our ability to forgive others comes from a deeper place.”

This is where James Lipton, with eyes closed and hands in prayer position, would say: “Genius.” And this time he would be right.

When I give up being the hot mess of my own angsty ABC Afterschool Special, I create the space for compassion. I make room for mistakes. I think the transformation happens when you can own your shit without believing that you are your shit. No one is 100% hero or villain – we play both those roles, sometimes all on the same day. Or, in the parenting world, the same hour. We are only human, baby.

Anne Lamott explains how forgiveness fills “the swiss cheesy holes inside us:”

Over and over, in spite of our awfulness and having squandered our funds, the ticket-taker at the venue waves us through. Forgiven and included, when we experience this, that we are in this with one another, flailing and starting over in the awful beauty of being humans together, we are saved.

Let’s keep saving each other.

 

I have a literal closet of self-help.

The beauty of a new house is the insane amount of storage – closets you don’t even know what to do with. There is a hall closet outside my bedroom that is filled with books devoted to self improvement.

When I say “filled,” I mean it. The books on the top shelf the books used to stand neatly as they would on a regular bookshelf. But then the rows beneath got messier. Now when I find more and more boxes of self-help books in the basement, I just shove them in the closet and shut it really quick.

I cover a range of topics: marriage, meditation, finding your inner Buddha while simultaneously healing your gut with fermented foods. My favorites are highlighted and dog-eared, chock full of sticky notes with scribbled messages: “YES!” or “Huh?” or “I understand the what and the why, but I don’t understand the HOW.”

The thing is, you would think with all this study and guidance, that I would be a zen master. Or at least less of a neurotic, high strung head case. But no. I am still me.

Every time I walk by the closet I say to myself: I need to organize that closet. I bet there is even a book in there on how exactly to organize your closets. But I don’t want to go into the closet. There is a deep resistance, a little girl inside me who stamps her feet and says: “NO! I don’t want to do the closet!”

Because the closet makes me feel bad. The sight of all the books stacked and shoved in there produces an instant tightness in my chest, a heaviness. All the books I started and never finished, or bought and never looked at again. No wonder I am still a mess, I think. I haven’t worked hard enough. Is there a self-help book on people who buy self-help books but then resist reading them? I am tempted to Google it.

About 10 years ago I went on a yoga training in the Catskills with a famous yoga master. At one point the teacher called me up to the front of the group to engage in a discussion. I can’t remember what he asked me, but I said something like: “But this book says this, and that book says that.” He studied me in silence for what felt like an eternity and then said: “I think you need to burn your books.”

To which I replied: “Even your book?” He laughed at that. “Maybe just put mine away for a while,” he said.

I understood why he said this. I have read the books that tell you to stop reading the books. That the answer is within. That you are the one you are seeking. That what you are searching for is already inside you. This applies, I decided, to everyone but me. There’s no way there are any answers in there! I’ve looked!

About a month ago, when I was shoving yet another box into the Closet of Shame Self Help, I noticed a random business sized envelope sitting on top of “Keeping the Love You Find.” The envelope was addressed to me, but in my own handwriting.

Ohhhhhhh. I remember what this is, I thought. A few years ago, on another writing/yoga retreat, the facilitator asked that we write a letter to ourselves, and then she would send it to us at a later date. I cringed at this exercise, just as I cringe when a yoga teacher makes me audio-record myself teaching, as the sound of my own voice makes me want to jump out of my own skin. In fact, I am pretty sure when the letter came in the mail years ago, I opened it, glanced at it, and then shoved it back in the envelope.

But it’s not often that you find a letter from yourself to yourself, so I sat down in the hallway and read it. This is what jumped out at me:

“….the missing ingredient for you, the shit that makes the pizza dough rise that you forget to include in your self-help recipe is COMPASSION. And love. For you. Because whether you choose to believe it or not, there is a lot to love.”

And then this:

“The thing is, do it for you. Phil will benefit, the girls will benefit, but you need to do it for you. Because you are a good person. Let me say that again and maybe it will sink in: You. Are. A. Good. Person. You deserve to feel good. And when you start to consistently allow yourself to feel good, the times you feel sad won’t feel as scary. I’m not sure how I know this, but I do. You won’t feel like you are dying or being consumed.”

At this point I am sitting in the hallway next to the Closet of Self Help and I am BAWLING.

I have never cried like that reading a self-help book.

I am not bashing the books. I read my first self help book at age 11 (it was called “I’m OK, You’re Ok”) and don’t plant on stopping anytime soon. I’ve even come out of the closet enough to read them in public, as evidenced by yesterday’s pre-swimming lesson text to my friend Steph:

But the older I get the more I realize the books can only take you so far. Because thinking can only take you so far. You can read a whole book about potatoes – how to grow them, harvest them, boil them, mash them, bake them, and turn them into french fries….but if you have never actually eaten a potato, none of this information is going to truly land. You need to actually taste the potato to know the potato.

My letter to myself did not tell me everything I needed to know about the potato. It said: “You ARE the potato.”

My point is, while the books are great to have, what if this letter is all I will ever need?

What if I am my own guru?

I recently read an article in “O” Magazine by Glennon Doyle Melton that stayed with me. She tells the story of the day her young daughter -upon hearing of the divorce of a friend’s parents – asks her: “Mom, will that ever happen to us?” Melton replies: “No, baby. It won’t You’re safe.” A year later, she and her husband separated.

I too, have fallen into the “No, never, that won’t happen, not us, no way!” parenting trap.

When we moved from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania three years ago, it was hard on my kids. Really hard. They were ripped out of school mid-year. They went from public school to private school. They went from wearing whatever they wanted to a turtleneck and itchy plaid jumper. They were blindsided.

Those first few months in Pennsylvania were really tough. The girls were sad, then angry, then sad again. The guilt I felt was intense. I called the school guidance counselor once a week to check in until she gently said: “Please stop.” I wanted to fix it, to give them some kind of solace, to bandage the wound and make everything better.

And because I was even more out of my mind than usual, I said: “I promise we will never move again.”

Fast forward 18 months and guess what we are doing? Moving again. That was a fun conversation. Talk about eating your words.

“We will never move again.” What’s in God’s name was I thinking when I said this? Am I Moses? The Great and Powerful Oz? Granted, I didn’t anticipate moving 18 months later, but how did I know we would NEVER, EVER move again? Because, what do we know, really? We may not plan to move, or get fired, or divorced, or get struck by lightning, or elect an orange-faced sociopath to run our country. But us thinking its not going to happen doesn’t always stop it from happening.

So what would compel me to make crazy false promises? The same reason I make many questionable choices: Fear. Fear of seeing my kids struggle, of permanently screwing them up, of failing at this one job God has entrusted me with.

To assuage my guilt, I tried to convince myself that maybe moving wasn’t as traumatic as I thought, and tried to back up this theory with some online research. I Googled “benefits of moving for kids.” Well, apparently there are none. According to Google, moving increases a child’s chance for mental illness, relationship issues, suicide, drug abuse, cystic acne, prostitution, foot fetishes, gluten intolerance, becoming a killer clown, you name it. I could not find one positive article.

But, research be damned, we did move again. And not only did my girls survive – they thrived. Take that, Google!

One day after dropping Phoebe off at gymnastics, I had some alone time in the car with Emma. She was in a chatty mood so I took a chance and asked: “Hey Em – do you think anything positive has come out of you moving so much?”

“Sure,” she said. “I have friends in two different states.”

“Good point,” I said. “How about you, personally – do you think you changed or gained some insights as a result of moving?”

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “It’s like nature and adaptation – like a rose has thorns to keep away predators… or a wolf has a heavy coat to keep warm. But those are bad examples. Because it’s not like I’m angry or scared of people or anything.”

(Proud Mom Moment: When your child uses discernment in her selection of metaphors).

“No, definitely not,” I agreed. “You are neither cold nor thorny.”

“The point is,” she continued, “is that I can adjust. I know now that I can make new friends or catch on quickly with academics.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “And you are brave. I still remember you holding Phoebe’s hand and walking into a new school mid-year with your head held high.”

“Yeah, well it’s not like I was excited about it,” she said, giving me a well-deserved hairy eyeball. “But I had no choice. And it ended up being great. So now I walk into every new situation assuming it’s going to be great.”

Maybe Emma should write the article on the benefits of moving.

The more I hit the “pause” button amidst the daily craziness, the more I learn from my kids, and the more I recognize how I underestimate them. Emma already understands what has taken me dozens hundreds of self help books to learn: She recognized her fear and discomfort, but chose not to focus on it. She didn’t give into it. She chose to feel empowered rather than victimized.

I think as parents it’s our default to anticipate the worse case scenarios, the potential danger and inevitable trauma that lurks behind every corner. And of course, some of that fear is real and necessary. But when I try to protect my kids with my fake promises and my illusions of control, I take away some of their power. I rob them of the chance to navigate their way through new and difficult experiences. Plus, I look like an idiot.

I’ve spent so much time thinking about how the kids were affected by moving that I never stopped to look at how it affected me. Three years of packing, unpacking, cleaning, selling, renting, and buying put me in survival mode. It was all about getting over the next hurdle. But with a little distance comes the realization that my neurotic-meddling-fixing-catastrophizing helicopter parenting style has never served me well in the past. So now, it’s my turn to adapt; let go of the fight or flight behaviors that no longer serve me, and move into this next phase of life.

I assume it’s going to be great.

 

I haven’t written here in a long time. Because really, where would I start? “Hey guys! Remember me? I moved, then moved again, and then again…”

The thought of launching into the details of this saga has been completely paralyzing, so I’ve just avoided the blog all together. But I miss blogging, so I’ll give you a timeline and we will leave it at that:

August 2012: Moved from Pennsylvania to Scituate, MA. Lived in two rentals. Bought a house.

February 2014: Sold house and moved back to Pennsylvania. Bought another house.

August 2015: Sold that house and moved back to Scituate. Lived in three rentals. Bought another house.

I just can’t get into it you guys.

On Valentine’s Day, a Facebook friend re-posted a blog I wrote three years ago, just days before we moved from Scituate back to Pennsylvania. Reading it was intense, like watching your mistakes being played out in slow motion. There is one line in the blog that says “I know in the big picture, moving back to PA is the right decision.” You know, until a month later when you realize that it isn’t. Don’t you just hate when that happens?

Since moving back to Scituate, I often get this response when meeting new people: “Oh! I heard about you guys! You’re the couple that left and came back!”

Yup. That’s us.

So instead of diving into The Moving Trilogy, I am going to tell you a story about the couple that left and came back, inspired by a Whitney Houston song I heard on the radio yesterday.

One evening, about three years ago – during our first Tour de Scituate – I ran into a local liquor store for wine. When I came out and walked through the parking lot, I heard Whitney Houston’s “Didn’t We Almost Have it All” coming from the car parked next to mine. I glanced inside and saw a woman sitting in the driver’s seat, sobbing.

Oh man, I thought. She is definitely having a rough night.

I took my time finding my keys as I debated what to do, even though clearly there wasn’t anything I could do. I did consider giving her my wine.

I felt sad for the woman as I drove home. But if I am being totally honest, there was a little part of me that was relieved. That I wasn’t her. That I wasn’t sitting in the dark, crying in my car to the lyrics of an ’80’s pop princess. I was going home, to my family waiting for me in my big blue house by the ocean.

A year later, after we moved back to Pennsylvania, I was the one crying in my car. I cried in my car A LOT. What is it about a car that makes it so conducive to crying? Is it the aloneness? The close quarters? The song playing on the radio that seems to be speaking directly to you?

In high school, my friend broke up with her boyfriend at the end of senior year. She needed to have a friend in the car with her all summer, because if she got in there alone she would completely lose it. Driving while crying is like skiing in a blizzard with no goggles. It’s a safety issue.

Anyway.

Like my high school friend, being in the car alone consistently triggered the water works: in parking lots, in car line, in my own driveway. I even made a playlist called “Mixed Tape” for the sole purpose of car-crying. Whitney was not on the playlist, but you would be surprised at how many times Whitney is played on the radio, especially in grocery stores and hair salons. The song seemed to be following me, haunting me, reminding me of that relieved feeling I felt that night in the liquor store parking lot. The slightly superior voice that said, “Thank God that’s not me.”

Talk about karma.

This past Halloween we went trick or treating in our old Scituate neighborhood versus our new neighborhood, because that’s what our kids wanted to do. When the kids ran up the porch steps of my former big blue house, I hid in the shadows. Phil knew what I was doing and covered for me. I just couldn’t do it. Not yet. I gave myself props for braving the neighborhood at all and counted it as a win. The kids moved on to the next house and Phil came over to where I was standing in the street, next to the driftwood swing he had hung from a tree three years before. We walked down the street, the moon ahead of us, painting streaks of light on the water. As he reached out to take my hand, I started to sing:

“Didn’t we almost have it all….”

and he joined in: “The night we held on till the morning…”

And we laughed. Because while the moment was sad and poignant, we had to laugh, because we still do have it all. The difference is, now we know it. Back then, in the beautiful big blue house, we had it all but were too afraid of losing it, or messing it up, or not deserving it….so we could never really receive it or be grateful for it. I have come to realize that it is very difficult to be grateful when you are afraid.

Now, we don’t have to be as scared of of losing it or screwing it up, because we already did that. We lost it and then had to figure out how we lost it and how we could get it back. With this came a better understanding of what “having it all” really is. And it’s not the dream house, or the perfect job. It’s watching your kids run back and forth with their friends across the lawns, a sea of costumes and glow sticks. It’s walking down the street hand in hand, with the shared knowledge of what it took to get there.

Car-crying is therapeutic until it becomes masochistic. Eventually you need to be your own best friend and say: “Enough.” You turn off Whitney and put on Madonna. You take a deep breath and say, “Ok…now what?”

There is freedom in taking your lumps as a couple; in being vulnerable enough to own your collective mistakes and move on from them. You can care what other people think or you can be happy, and we chose the latter. Yes, we are the couple that left and came back. And with our return came a deep rootedness, both in my marriage and this place we choose to call home.

Which is why, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.