Lessons From A Former Self

Posted on October 8, 2015 by jessiepbraun

About two weeks ago I was talking to my neighbor, Tosh, about the weather.

“I am drowning in a multi-season heap of clothes,” I said. “Can I just put the damn shorts in a box and declare winter?”

“I wouldn’t, not yet,” she advised. “Remember that blog post when you went swimming with your clothes on? That was maybe late September or early October.”

And just like that, ~~once I got over the ego boost that someone actually remembers one of my blog posts~~ it occurred to me that this blog had a birthday. Two years ago I wrote the very first post.

It took me a few days to actually go back and read it. I am not a fan of reading my own writing. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, like hearing your own voice on an answering machine, (Do I really sound like that? No, seriously, when I talk, is that the voice you hear?) or reading a paper you wrote in college on something you knew nothing about, with a ridiculous title like: Feminist or Femme Fatale? Sexism and Satire in Wycherley’s The Country Wife. You read it, shake your head, and say: “What the hell was I talking about? I’m an idiot.”

But nothing is more ~~humiliating~~ humbling than reading an old diary. I know this because on a recent attic purge my mom found this gem from 1990, which puts me at the ripe old age of 13.

Here are some highlights:

Wednesday, August 22, 1990
“Well, I am going out with R. (I can’t reveal his name in case this falls into the wrong hands!!) I am glad I am going out with him and everything, but I’m not sure whether he likes me or not – you know? Well, we’ve been going out for about 4 or 5 weeks. I was away for 2 weeks and R was away for 2 weeks. So we haven’t had much time together. Mostly I called him, but he seemed happy to talk to me, but he never calls me. I can’t tell if he is going to dump me or not. Helen is having a party on Wednesday. I can’t wait! He better go!

Friday, August 24,1990
Today I babysat. It wuz boring! I watched 20/20 with Barbara Walters and it was really weird. It was about kids who were in comas and had near death experiences. They say they saw Jesus and dead relatives. Isn’t that cool? I would like to have that happen to me sometime. R is coming home tomorrow! I hope he can go to the party!

August 29,1990
Well the famous party is over. Maybe it wasn’t as great as I thought it would be. It was just ok.

September 3,1990
R dumped me. I am so depressed. He didn’t even do it himself! Geez. Maybe I’ll tell him off tomorrow. Yeah right no I won’t. I don’t really want to talk about it it’s making me feel worse.

I am not sure what I find most amusing/disturbing – the R saga, that I would like to have a near death experience “sometime,” or the fact that I am in 7th grade and watching Barbara Walters on a Friday night by myself.

In any case, going back and reading a blog from two years ago is kind of like reading that diary. It’s sort of funny, but also mortifying, like having a flashlight shone in the face of your most well-intentioned screw-ups.

I know, I know. Don’t think of it as failure, consider it an opportunity! A growth experience! I get that going back and dissecting the past will prevent me from re-creating it. Still, it makes me a little nauseous.

In her book Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change, Pema Chodron writes about our urge to bury the less graceful parts of ourselves:

It’s a tricky business – not rejecting any part of yourself at the same time that you’re becoming acutely aware of how embarrassing or painful some of those parts are.

Oh, Pema. Exactly.

When I read the blog from three years ago, I feel exhausted by the “me” I find there – by how hard I try at things even when clearly it is the wrong thing, how desperate I am to control things in my own stubborn but well-meaning way. I am frustrated by my default tendencies: to please, to assume that everyone’s happiness is somehow my responsibility, to falsely believe that if I can just do ______(get a job, have more sex, meditate, quit drinking wine ~~during the week~~, create a budget, practice yoga, stop cursing, be Donna Reed, be Hillary Clinton, be someone other than me) suddenly it will all fall into place and the birds will sing and the sun will shine and I will have arrived.

Yet there was one nugget from that blog that d~~idn’t make me want to stick my head in the oven~~ spoke to me still:

In times of shared stress, you should order a pizza. Use paper plates. Kick the underwear under the bed. Create the space to be vulnerable -fragile, even- at the same time. Then hold on to each other in this middle place.

I am still trying to find this middle place – how to be ambitious but not avaricious, loose but not lazy, free-spirited but not fool-hardy. And the one benefit to going back and rehashing the past is the realization that there is a learning curve to this whole process. I didn’t know that a boy not calling me was a super bad sign until he dumped me. I didn’t know that making monogramed pot pies would not alleviate marital tension until I made them.
We do the best we can with what we know at the time. And in the words of Maya Angelou, “when you know better, you do better.”

Tosh is right. After a few fleece and flannel mornings, Mother Nature gifts us with an almost-70 degree day. Phil’s breakfast meeting is cancelled so we take a morning walk after the kids go to school. We call these our “mobile executive meetings;” we discuss kids and schedule and the orthodontist’s payment plan. But there are periods of comfortable silence, because there is an ease with which we are together now. We decide to run down to the base of the cliff and then walk back on the rocks.

He climbs up the rocks and then extends his hand to me. I hold my phone between my teeth as he pulls me up, shaking his head but smiling. You carry around too much stuff, he says. I laugh. Don’t I know it.

We haven’t walked these rocks in over a year; they have shifted and changed with the storms. The path is no longer contiguous – we need to climb down, trudge through the muck and climb back up. But the element of surprise keeps it interesting, the need to suddenly re-adjust our path keeps us on our toes.

We end on the beach and look for sea glass as we move toward home. There is no swimming on this walk, Phil doesn’t even suggest it. I worry that we have lost some of our passion, some of our go-big-or-go-home-ness. But then I decide that after a year of being pulled in by the tide and bashed up against the rocks, it feels good to have our feet firmly planted on the ground.

I Choose The Ducks

Posted on November 6, 2014 by jessiepbraun

In the marriage book Getting The Love You Want, there is an exercise called “Closing Your Exits.” An exit, according to author Harville Hendrix, is any way you avoid being fully present with your partner.

Oh, I don’t do that, I thought. I don’t avoid Phil ~~because then I would be drinking alone.~~

So, I amended the exercise from “How do you avoid being fully present with your partner,” to “How do you avoid being fully present?” Because if you are avoiding the present moment, you are indirectly avoiding anyone who exists in the present moment, in addition to anything that is actually happening in the present moment. More importantly, you are avoiding how you feel about what is happening in the present moment, which is most likely the reason you are escaping it in the first place.

This gave me much more material to work with.

The problem I encountered while compiling my list was that all my exits are pretty lame. In the first year of our marriage, I was hospitalized with an eating disorder. According to Hendrix, that’s a SERIOUS exit. INSANITY. That’s exactly how it appears in his book, in all caps: INSANITY IS A SERIOUS EXIT. But now, my exits are just soft, garden-variety, small font exits.

And this is a problem…..why?

It is not a problem – it just makes the exits easier to rationalize and harder to eliminate. When your exits are not destroying your life or that of someone else, that little devil on your shoulder pops up and says, “Oh c’mon. Is _________ really that bad? So what that you like to drink wine and cry to the Jackson Browne Pandora station? Isn’t a girl allowed to relax around here?” But the fact that you have to ask yourself that question is a little…suspect.

I’ll give you an example.

I am addicted to real estate websites: Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com. I know everything from the cost of a two-bedroom ranch in Austin, TX to an entire vineyard in the Napa Valley. I know the Zestimate of your house, my house, and Ellen DeGeneres’s house.

Little Devil: “So what’s the big deal? You like houses – it’s just a hobby ~~kind of like porn.”~~

Maybe that is true for some people. And maybe that would be true for me if I was purely stalking celebrity real estate transactions. But in quiet moments, usually at night when the kids are in bed, I look up my old house in Scituate.

The photos are still live – photos of the house I decorated for Christmas, of the wrap around porch with the hammock where we napped and cuddled and read books, of the electric fire place that warmed our dog’s tired bones in her final days. And just like that, I am transported back to that house. I can smell our neighbor’s wood burning fireplace. I can see the salty sea air crystalized on my windshield in January. I can hear the ocean buoy. I am there.

But there is not here.

Here, where Phil is, where my girls are, where my life is now. And that is why it is, in fact, a big deal.

When I confessed all of this to Phil, he said: “This makes makes me feel terrible. I want to fix it. I think we need to sit down and strategize. Hold on, let me just go get my white board…”

Strategizing-white-boarding-and-overall-fixing is in Phil’s Top Three Exits, ~~right after beer and Peanut Butter Captain Crunch.~~ By brainstorming for the future -or as he calls it, Braunstroming – he gets to escape the painful moments happening in our life right now.

So…if I am escaping to the past and Phil is escaping into the future….who the hell is running this whole operation? It’s a miracle the kids get bathed and fed.

We made a pact to close these exits and see what came of it: No rehashing the past, no Braunstorming for the future. I deleted the Trulia App from my phone, and Phil shoved the whiteboard in the closet.

Then, we went for a run, together.

And we had absolutely nothing to talk about.

We ran the first mile in total silence. I know this because when my running watch beeped at the 1 mile mark, I thought, Holy shit we have not talked for an entire mile. I started to feel panicky – I wracked my brain for something to say that did not involve the past or future. Nothing. I had nothing.

As we passed the duck pond at mile 2, Phil broke the silence:

“Interesting that the ducks and geese don’t intermingle,” he observed.

“Huh,” I replied. “Weird.”

Then, back to running.

Around mile 3, an Olympic-type runner blew past us on the trail.

“Wow,” I said. “He’s fast.”

“Yeah,” Phil replied. “Real fast.”

Back to running.

It wasn’t until the final mile that I stopped resisting the silence and just settled into it. And just like that, the run went from awkward to pleasant. Relaxing. My mind drifted. I remembered a car ride with my cousin Megan and her husband David, when she turned to him, and said with such a sweet innocence that it squeezed my heart:

“Honey, do you think squirrels laugh?

To which he replied (lovingly), “Babe, you are so weird.”

Maybe this what well-adjusted couples talk about….the complex inner lives of squirrels, ducks and geese. Maybe this is what you talk about when you aren’t busy lambasting yourselves for your last mistake or maniacally planning your next one.

If those are my choices, I choose the ducks.

I came home from the silent run feeling oddly recharged. While it felt strange at first, in the end it was a relief to spend time with Phil minus any “big talks.” It was refreshing to spend time together without our usual psychobabble: Am I projecting or are you projecting? Are you being passive-aggressive because you are internalizing conflict? Why don’t we draw a life map identifying all our mistakes and the upper limit problem that caused them?

Maybe labeling something as a mistake is the real mistake.

Maybe this whole thing is not as hard as we make it.

Maybe the seemingly innocent things we think help us relax, or connect, or feel in control do just the opposite. Maybe the escape – however harmless it may seem – causes more pain than that which we are escaping from. Maybe that which we label as “pain in the present moment” is actually vulnerability and tenderness. Maybe the present moment feels uncomfortable because we don’t stay there long enough to get comfortable. Maybe, if we are patient, we might discover a whole world that exists beyond those first few miles of silence.

But we’ll never know unless we stay and find out.

This Was 36

Posted on July 1, 2014 by jessiepbraun

In the past year on The Huffington Post, there have been a number of posts by writers I admire encapsulating what their current age “is” to them: Lindsey Mead with This Is 38, Emily Mendell, This Is 45, and Allison Tate, This is 39. These lovely pieces made me laugh, cry, but most of all….reflect.

Thursday is my 37th birthday.

I feel a lot of resistance to writing about 36. I am not one to look back or dwell on what was. I am the client who says to the therapist, “Oh do we really need to get into all of that?”

I’d rather look to the future – to all the possibilities that lie ahead. I think this is because I don’t like to be sad. Because when I get sad, I get REALLY SAD. And I am scared that if I go down that hole, I will never claw my way out.

But as I sit here right now, straddling two ages….I can’t help but think you need to reflect upon where you have been in order to know where you want to go. See? I’m more mature already! And it’s not even Thursday yet.

This is me on my 36th birthday. It was taken at a beach party in Scituate that was actually for the 4th of July, but I pretended was just for me. It was a magical evening. I look really happy because I was. I felt 100% alive.

For me, 36 was about my family: Phil, Emma, and Phoebe, and until January, our dog Ellie. This is the family I co-created, and before this year I am not sure I really grasped the hugeness of that – the beauty and joy and bring-you-to-your-knees challenges of having your own independently run familial operation. Which is what we became when we moved from Philly to Scituate, MA, a town where we knew not a soul.

36 was “just us.” A kamikaze trust mission. 36 was not running away from an argument because you are 30 minutes from the nearest Target and you forget where it is, exactly.

36 was realizing that sometimes you need to be the strong one. 36 was being the glue, the one that held things together. It felt good to be the glue for a change.

36 was being a cheerleader; it was being more Tigger and less Eeyore. 36 was saying, “We can do this!” when you want to say, “Do we know what we’re doing?” It felt good to be a Tigger for a change.

36 was being a caretaker. It was spoon feeding your kid ice cream when she breaks her leg.

36 was playing Barbies on the couch for hours. It was using a chopstick to scratch that itch inside her cast, even though the doctor told you not to. 36 was spray painting a wagon Caribbean Blue so she could still perform her duties as flower girl at your best friend’s wedding.

36 was saying you weren’t going to cry at your best friend’s wedding, but then crying tears of happiness the entire weekend.

You remember all the years you didn’t cry at all, because you were just kinda numb. So at 36, you are grateful for the tears, for the best friend singing Bon Jovi with the band, for the ability to feel real joy for someone else, all the way down to your french manicured bridesmaid toes. Because for so many years you stood slightly outside the joy; you didn’t think you deserved to be in it. At 36, you know that was a lie; that the only one who kept you on the bench was yourself. So now you jump into the joy.

36 was loving a dog through her final days, even though you never thought of yourself as a “dog person.” It was letting her make out with you until you broke out in hives, letting her eat people food and lifting her up on the couch so she could watch TV.

36 was lying on the floor with her in the vet’s office, crying and whispering “I Love you, Ellie-Dog” over and over and over until it was…over. Your heart is broken, but you would do it all over again in a New York minute. At 36, you see the tender beauty in having your heart broken. At 36, you know this is a gift.

36 was about dreaming big.

36 was learning that sometimes dreams change. Sometimes dreams become a horse of a different color. And you just have to roll with it. You have to believe that the real dream is bigger and better than the one you manifested in your mind.

36 was wanting everyone to be ok. And trying to make everything ok for everyone. And then realizing that sometimes you can’t. And you just have to roll with that, too.

37 will be different; I can already feel the shift.

Phil is finding his groove at work; he has his helmet on. He is in it to win it. He will be ok.

The girls are finding their feet back in PA. Summer has healing powers. They swim, do yoga in the driveway, sell lemonade on the corner. I am amazed by their resilience. They will be ok, too.

And when school starts, Phoebe will be in all-day kindergarten. Those precious years of just her and I are behind me. My little buddy, my co-pilot, my Pandora DJ.

So that leaves….me.

Me at 37.

I think it’s gonna be good.

I’ve got some ideas.

Stick around. I’ll let you know how it all shakes out.

Into The Woods

Posted on May 15, 2014 by jessiepbraun

Just three months ago, this is where we lived:

It was a dream come true, to live this close to the water. I am a Cancer, a water sign, a crusty crab. The ocean puts me in my place; reminds me of my smallness in the grand scheme of it all. Yet at the same time, it’s vastness can help me to expand. Transcend. Feel closer to God…if I am open to experiencing God. Somedays I am not. And then the ocean can feel like the loneliest place on the planet.

Phil loves the woods. “So much life surrounds you in the the woods,” he says. “When I step into a trailhead, I go into a meditative zone.”

When we moved into our house in Scituate, I bought two prints by Mae Chevrette, one for my office:

and one for Phil’s.

We didn’t live there long enough to hang them up.

Now, we live among the trees, in a suburb of Philadelphia. This past Sunday (Mother’s Day), there was a heavy energy in the house. The girls were cranky and combative; repeatedly banished to their rooms. Phil – already uptight because Hallmark holidays give him performance anxiety – had no patience for their pinching and poking; for Emma’s quiet teasing and Phoebe’s maniacal response: “EMMA’S MAKING A VAMPIRE FACE!!!”

“To your rooms!” Phil ordered. “Now!”

And up the stairs they trudged, whispering to each other: “It’s YOUR fault.” “Nuh-uh! YOUR fault!” “Nuh-uh! No it’s not! YOU are the one…”

And so on and so on.

I was being a Little Girl in a Huff because it’s Mother’s Day and CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? I decided to leave the job of prison warden to Phil and went outside to mow the lawn.

But the lawn mower, of course, would not start. I yanked and cursed, yanked and cursed, until I finally ~~kicked the pice of shit~~ gave up and flopped down in the grass. Lying on my back, I looked up at sky and said, “Ugh, HELP.” Something had to give. Our collective energy was as gunked up as the mower. I thought of other times this has happened to us as a family, when ~~everyone falls apart at once~~ our combined resources were low. What did we do to salvage the day, to declare a Do-Over?

We went to the woods. Even when we lived at the beach, we went to the woods. The day following the school shootings in Newtown, we went to the woods.

When our dog Ellie died, we went to the woods.

I abandoned the lawn mower and went inside.

“Let the animals out of their cages,” I said to Phil. “It’s Mother’s Day and I say we take a hike.”

We piled into the car and set out for Rolling Hill Park in Gladwyne. As we navigated our way down the trail head, I could feel us decompress; a collective “Ahhhhh.”

Emma, who has had the hardest time with the move, said, “I love trees. They are so…inspiring. They all have different faces, like friends, kind of. I feel like I’m in a cocoon of trees…like they are giving me a hug.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I never feel lonely in the woods.”

As a kid I remember wondering if the ocean felt lonely in the winter. It felt good to spend two winters by it’s side, to keep it company. Our time spent by the ocean taught us how much in this life is beyond our control, and in order to live peacefully we must learn to just let it ride. To feel exposed. To not hold on so tightly. To let go. To be free.

But I can’t help but think that wherever we are – right now – is exactly where we need to be. That right now, this lush, wooded place is waiting to feed my soul something it needs. Wading in the Mill Creek beneath the shade of the towering oaks, life is calling us to go within, to lay some roots, to feel our feet firmly planted on the ground.

I think the lesson of the woods is to be still long enough to let our roots take hold. To reap the nutrients of the soil. To dig a little deeper into who we really are, what we really want, what we are here to do. To be sturdy and steadfast. To stay. To grow older and wiser, together.

Post hike, the girls crashed on the couch, and I finally mowed the lawn. When I finished, I resumed my position, lying on the ground looking at the sky.

Phil feels guilty for moving us away from the beach. He thinks he stole my dream. But as I lie sprawled out on the driveway looking at the trees, dirt, grass and gravel stuck to the back of my sweaty legs, I am peaceful.

Because what he doesn’t realize is, he is my dream.

Scituate, A Love Story

Posted on February 13, 2014 by jessiepbraun

Dear Scituate,

It was love at first sight.

For days we had been driving, looking for the perfect town to move our family, up and down the coast from Portsmouth to Plymouth. Newburyport, Marblehead, Hingham, Cohasset – all beautiful in their own way. Lots of harbors.

“What the hell are we going to do in a harbor?” I asked Phil. “We’re from Philly.”

“There’s one place we didn’t hit. It’s off the beaten path a bit – Scitu-ate? I’m probably saying that wrong.” (He was.)

“Ok, sure, we’re here, might as well.”

That ain’t no harbor. I turned to Phil: “This is it.” He smiled. He knows I don’t mess around.

Things moved fast, as they tend to do when you know what you want. Our courtship was complicated. Sacrifices had to be made before we could make it official. Like the temporary lodgings we found online – in a house that happened to be on a marsh.

But we did it willingly, because love is blind, and you were worth it. I braved the late night marsh sounds of a coyote mauling an egret because I knew we could do this, we could make this work. And then, serendipity stepped in. We met the right agent who happened to know of a winter rental in a neighborhood overlooking the ocean called Third Cliff.

Phil looked at me and shook his head. After a decade of living in a landlocked state, he knew I was a goner. I think I was weeping. “We’ll take it,” he said to our realtor.

Of course, no relationship is perfect. We had some bumps in the road, like a hurricane

and a blizzard.

But somehow these challenges seemed more like adventures. They made us feel tough and resilient, like we could roll with anything life threw our way. And for the times when our energy flagged, the right people always seemed to come to our aid.

When I discovered that the big blue house across the street was for sale, I imagined myself living in it. I saw Phil and I with cocktails on the wrap-around porch after rolling back from the beach, sandy and starving. I imagined the girls dozing in a hammock, being lulled to sleep by the clang of the ocean buoy. I actually printed a picture of the house and carried it in my wallet – my own little secret fantasy.

I didn’t think it would actually come true.

But it did – all of it.

The sandy walks home from the beach…

the cocktails

the hammock.

While I hoped it would last forever, I fought back feelings of impermanence. It all felt too magical to last. I blamed my fears on my pessimistic set-point, on my leanings toward fatalism – that everything good is just one heartbeat from being taken away. But in my gut I think I always knew that we wouldn’t last forever.

And that made me pay attention. For the first time in my life, I was present. For every sunrise and sunset, for every run on the cliff or walk on the beach, I was there. I didn’t want to miss a thing. When I look back at my photos from this experience, I notice that I am always walking behind.

As a mom, I often find myself behind things: a swing, a stroller, a wobbly kid on a two-wheeler. Phil likes to lead the charge, but I love to walk behind. It’s where I can see everyone, where all are accounted for. I can read their body language – if they are happy or tired or holding something in. I think mothers prefer the panoramic view. The big picture.

And in the big picture, our move back to Philadelphia is the right decision. My instinct was probably right all along – this was a passionate fling, a summer romance, not a long-haul kind of commitment. But for a blissful 18 months, we found ourselves on your rocky shores. Why? What did we come here to learn?

You taught us awe. To have our breath taken away daily by nature. To truly comprehend the vastness of the ocean and how small we are in comparison. Hopping from rock to rock on the cliffs became a meditation for me.

Especially when I stumbled upon messages I felt destined to discover:

You taught us that people are good, welcoming, and kind. I have yet to meet a Masshole. Ok, there was that one. Our neighbors – loyal like family – kept us from feeling orphaned. They even attempted to make sailors out of a bunch of Philly landlubbers.

You taught us to be brave.

To try new things.

To take care of each other.

To feel alive.

But mostly, you taught us how to be together. Just us. And have that be enough.

Better than enough.

It was here that Phil, Emma, Phoebe and I learned how to depend on each other. And while we may not always get along, we are all we’ve got. Moving someplace new is like a Family Immersion Program. It is exciting and terrifying, and at times, really fucking lonely. But we road that roller coaster together. We learned by trial and error when to make someone laugh…

Or give them a hug

Or just leave them the hell alone.

You taught us how to be a family.

And for that, a piece of my heart will always belong to you.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

xoxoxo

My Dog Is Dead and We’re Moving: How to Choose an Attitude of Abundance

Posted on January 16, 2014 by jessiepbraun

“My dog is dead and we’re moving.”

This was how Emma greeted her bus stop pals on the first day back to school in 2014. Happy New Year!

But that’s my firstborn. In all of her 7.5 years, she has never been one to sugar coat things, and she tells the truth. The whole truth and nothing but, whether you’ve had your coffee yet or not. So put on your helmet.

Our dog is dead, as you already know, and yes – we are moving. AGAIN. When I told my friend Kathy she said, “You move more than an army wife.” Yes, except we are not nobly sacrificing ourselves for the good of this country, nor is Phil out in the trenches fighting for freedom and justice for all. He is fighting to make “validation sexy.”

But hey, if he didn’t, who would?

Alas, it is a position within his current company that sends us back to our beloved Philadelphia – 18 months, 2 rentals, and 1 house purchase later.

This was a bit shocking at first. We have only been in this house for six months.

I’m still unpacking from the last move. It was only a month ago that I got one of those silverware drawer organizers at Bed Bath and Beyond. Opening that drawer gave me such pride in my attempt at organization. But now, as I reach for a fork – destined to be thrown back in a moving box – I think, I can’t believe I actually used a tape measure for this shit.

I am not going to lie, I spent a day ~~or three~~ in my snowman pajamas. I wondered if Phil had unconsciously manifested this re-re-location by never changing our license plates.

I just felt so…..torn. Sure, there are many benefits to moving back to Philadelphia: family, old friends, the Phillies, WaWa….

God I do miss WaWa.

But, even a 24 hour store that has everything from Midol to mac-n-cheese cannot compare to this:

Yet compare is what I continued to do.

In high school, I had a friend who was trying to decide between two colleges: Tulane and JMU. They were both great schools and she was having a hard time choosing, so she made a comparison chart. I only remember the first bullet point:

Tulane: Smelly

JMU: Not Smelly

She went to JMU.

I began to notice that both Phil and I were taking the Smelly-Not Smelly approach in order to feel better about our decision. For example:

Boston: Crazy Cold

Philly: Normal Cold

Boston: Lobster Rolls (no thanks)

Philly: Soft Pretzels (yes please)

One night over a ~~bottle~~ glass of wine, a rapid-fire compare and contrast ensued: Boston doesn’t have a Liberty Bell! The ocean is too cold in the winter! It’s a 30 minute drive to Target! I hate clam chowder!

Our Bash Boston list became increasingly more shallow and sophomoric, yet the negative energy ~~and booze~~ continued to fuel our bad behavior. We finally hit bottom when Phil said, “The women at Lululemon in Philly are hotter than the women at Lululemon in Boston.”

Oh, Phil. That’s just weird. Way to ruin the game.

With the Bashing Phase over, I moved into the Avoidance Stage. I stopped going for runs along the rocky cliffs. I drove circuitously in order to avoid the scenic route through the harbor, where, on a clear day, the sun reflects off the water and the lighthouse stands proud in the distance.

The Avoidance Stage came to a reluctant end when I ran out of episodes of The Real Housewives of Anywhere. I had no where left to hide. Now I had to actually let myself think and feel again (dammit!) and ask myself, Ok, what is going on, here?

I was scared. Scared of feeling sad. Scared of missing this truly magical place and the people in it. Scared of never being as happy as we have been here.

Then I read this line in a daily reflection book by Julia Cameron:

Life is what you make it.

Our life here in Scituate has been awesome and abundant because we decided it was going to be awesome and abundant. When Phil’s work brought us to New England, we literally picked a town off the map of MA and said, “This feels right -let’s try here.” This was huge for us, having always lived near family and in familiar places. Sure, there was some lonely moments, but we dedicated ourselves to believing our own bullshit: “This is going to be GREAT. This is going to be the best thing we’ve done YET. We are going to meet some amazing people.”

And you know what? It was. And we did.

But this move back home to Pennsylvania holds the same possibility of abundance and awesomeness – if we choose to invite it in.

Emma said at bedtime, “What if I don’t make any friends?”

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“How is it impossible?”

“Everywhere you have ever gone, you have made friends. You made friends in the sandbox, at the playground, on the beach, in school. You make friends because you love people. So all evidence supports you making friends again in Pennsylvania.”

She seemed to accept this as plausible. I think because I used the word evidence.

Acknowledging the good you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance. -Eckhart Tolle

Life is so good right now. And there was a time where I might have said, “Well, this is as good as it’s gonna get. I’ve filled my happiness quota. It’s all downhill from here.”

But this line of thinking made me a miserable f***k.

So I’m adopting an attitude of abundance. Instead of assuming every blessing will be my last, I will assume there are an infinite amount still waiting for me…for us.

I am still sad to leave.