The Walk-In Fridge

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I visualize January 1st as a doorway with heavy vinyl strips in the entrance like the kind you see in a professional walk-in refrigerator. During my teens and early twenties I worked at a lot of restaurants. The walk-in fridge was like a sanctuary behind the chaos in the kitchen. I would push through the tentacle-like tangle of plastic and stand still, surrounded by crates of food and a perfect coolness.

It was a dramatic difference from the hustle and sweatiness of waiting tables – a rare moment to pause while getting those little creams in plastic containers for the set-up station.

My younger self envisioned a more poetic threshold to the new year, one imbued with magical powers. I fantasized that January 1st would erase all my idiosyncrasies that kept me from my long list of yet-to-be-accomplished goals. I would become a different person, my best self.

My practical, walk-in fridge version of New Year’s Day came to me in my late forties and I’ve stuck to it ever since.  Today I see January 1st as a sanctuary behind the choas in my mind.  It’s a space to pause, figure out what I need for my set-up station, and then back to hustle and sweatiness of real life.

There are three guidelines to the Walk-in Fridge New Year’s Day:

One: You’re the same person before and after the walk-in.

I use the moment to embrace my totality and not annihilate my very being. I’m never going to completely rid myself of procrastination, Peanut M&Ms, or quick boredom. Whether it’s physical or mental, I try to spend less time thinking about what I can’t fix. From this perspective it’s easier to muster my good intentions and energy to make a couple of changes that I can truly achieve. I’ve learned to work with my positive attributes and not come from a place of deficit.

Two: Pick just a few things to bring back to your set-up station.

Think of the changes that you want to make as assets that will eventually make your set-up station better. Use your time in the walk-in wisely – lovingly pick the items that you REALLY need to bring back with you. If you need more salad dressing don’t bring back lemon wedges. Choose only a couple of items. If you overload yourself, you will drop everything.

Three: Once you leave the walk-in, the work is hard.

It’s been a long reckoning for me but I have come to the conclusion that discipline and stick-to-it-ness are the keys to life. It sounds boring and punitive but I have found it liberating. Showing up for your life will get you three-fourths of the way to your goal.

The only way I can sustain focus is through simple mindfulness. Again, sounds easy but it’s hard work. When I’m being mindful about how I treat other people and how I take care of my body and emotions, my life just goes better.

Ultimately change is an inside job. If you can make one modification in 2015, have it be that you treat yourself like an ally and not an enemy. Be kind to yourself while you are working hard. And remember, it doesn’t have to be January 1st to go back into the perfect coolness of the walk-in to pause and regroup.

Progress not perfection.

You Can’t Go Home Again, But You Can Visit

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Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.  ― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

Most of the time I feel like an expatriate without a homeland.  My life has been divided right down the middle, with the first twenty-five years in New England and New York City and the second half in Austin with a three-year spawning hiccup in Minneapolis.

I don’t feel like a New Englander or a Texan.  I’m an Inbetweener.

It’s not a bad thing. I find the lack of attachment to place liberating. Up until the time I married Matthew, almost twenty-three years ago, I was a chronic geographic Houdini. When we meet, I was months away from a move to Alaska.  Back in those days, a spontaneous change of scenery could fix just about anything.

Slip away, no goodbyes, and off to a new life.

It’s been over two decades since I’ve disappeared to somewhere new, but that doesn’t mean the urge has left. It’s just under the surface. To this day, I think about escape plans like other people play word jumbles or crossword puzzles.  I have a brain full of blueprints of lives imagined.

It’s just a habit, a mental exercise.

My husband does not share my restlessness and his hardwiring has him happy to stay put with our kids, animals and the internet.  Although he respects my wanderlust, he prefers that when I travel I take at least one of our kids as an insurance policy that I’ll return home – sort of like an alcoholic might take their sponsor to a cocktail party.

Day trips to state parks and what on the surface looks like boring out-of-town gymnastics events are the mainstays to my anti-bolting program, but a summer vacation road trip is the best preventative and has a far longer therapeutic half-life. That being said, most of my days belong to Texas and although I do not feel like a Texan I have acclimated well.

That’s why I was so surprised to feel like such a down-to-my-soul New Englander when I arrived in Maine last week to visit my parents. They retired to the small beach community where six generations of my maternal line have summered or lived.

For years, the beach has not felt like home to me.  The characters who had populated my childhood have died, moved on, or their families sold the summer cottages to new families who tore them down and built big winterized homes. Every time I returned, the community that I knew was fading and evolving, as everything does, but it didn’t feel like my place.

My children are Texans and do not have the primordial smell of the sea imprinted on their biology like I do.  I used to feel guilty that I didn’t try harder to cultivate in them an understanding of where I came from, or as my grandmother would say, where my people came from.

I used to think I should have coaxed them into becoming New Englanders.  Now I believe that we are all here to find a place of our own.  We do not belong to each other.  Instead, our sense of identity is an inside job.   Like Ram Dass says, “we’re all just walking each other home.”

When I arrived in Maine last week something was different.  I felt the pull of my past as well as the generational forward momentum everywhere in the landscape. It was off-season and the summer people and vacationers were gone.  The autumn solitude that replaced the hustle of the busy season was so exquisite that I had to swallow hard and close my eyes as not to cry.

The beach and marshes looked like the backdrop of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights; and as in the novel, the sense of place became the central character in my experience, like it was when we were kids stomping through the squishy sand bars exposed during low tide.

At that moment, I knew that I belonged to the smooth granite stones on Timber Island; the bright blue October sky, the umber fertile-decay of the kelp washed on the soft white sands; the slender, reed-like grasses of the dunes; and the salty cobalt ocean that turns lips blue even in August.

I walked along the water’s edge alone, remembering what it felt like to be home.

For Ilaria

“All things belonging to the earth will never change-the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth-all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth-these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.”  ― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

 

The Fall Garden

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“Then there are those who plant. They endure storms and all the vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener’s constant attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.”  Paul Coelho

When I was kid, autumn was my favorite season.  For most of the summer, I stayed with my grandparents in Maine.  Back then, school started after Labor Day and I returned home to Massachusetts well into September.  I loved the subtle melancholy cool of late August nights that announced fall’s return with its promise of color and bright skies that would eventually descend into cold grey and darkness.  I felt the descent.  Even as a child, autumn made me aware of life’s brilliant decay.

Spring’s showy resurrection green was never as compelling.

I’ve lived in Austin for twenty-five years, half my life thus far.  In an alchemy of getting older and the seasonal cycle of Central Texas, my feelings about autumn have reversed course.  It’s still my favorite season, but now I feel the restorative ascent that comes with the end of a Texas summer.

For me, a fall vegetable garden is the epitome of renewal.

October marks my first year at the community garden.  My 10×10 plot is surrounded by two-hundred other gardeners.  Last year I got a late start on my fall garden and spent most of my time settling in and trying to rediscover my green thumb. The prior gardeners’ presence lingered and made me respectfully conservative with my plans.

I made it through winter’s oddly frequent freezing snaps and managed to save most of my cabbages, kale, artichokes and beets. By the time spring arrived, the hundred-square feet of dirt was mine.  I had the best spring and summer yields of my haphazard gardening history.

Finally, autumn has arrived to pull back summer’s blanket of relentless heat and scorching sunlight that squeezes the color out of the world.  Even the old timers, the hearty, smiling, veteran gardeners who generously mentor me in the ways of growing, let their plots burn up in the August sun.

It’s the ever-so-slight crispness of late September mornings that summons us back to the garden.  It’s not the garden we abandoned with its verdant organized rows of domesticated nature.  Entropy rules the universe and nowhere is it more obvious than an untended garden.

Tomato plants are shackled in cages, slumped life-less and brown.  Every inch of soil is host to the wild plants that have stealthy roots, burs and stinging stickers to remind you of their tenacity.  They choke out the few remaining peppers and hide the cucumber and squash carcasses.

Autumn in Central Texas is not as conspicious as its New England counterpart. Instead of bedazzling the landscape before a winter’s sleep,  it tempers the extremes of summer and offers up the quiet possibility of balance before the darkness.

I approach the fall garden as a re-awakening.  It challenges me to try again.  To pick up a shovel and turn the earth, to sift through the chaos patiently and restore order. It doesn’t matter that the cycle will go around again, it’s the effort that has meaning. The time spent doing serves the ascent.

How I Happened to Paint My House Orange

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I painted our house orange for a day – traffic cone orange – Candy Corn to be accurate.  It was a premeditated decision.  I developed the plan with Jimmy at the local hardware store and Eric the contractor.  I brushed aside their concerns that my paint choice was too bright or that maybe the Canary yellow trim I picked was too much.

Did I mention the neon lime green I chose for the sheds in the backyard?

I’m a month and a half into a summer spent primarily amongst teens and tweens – specifically an almost-fifteen-year-old-boy, soon-to-be-thirteen-year-old twin girls, and an adolescent English Bulldog.  Unlike last summer, there are no marvelous plans for adventure. I knew the facts going into the season.  As I predicted in my January blog post, Belly of the Whale, this year is about standing still, fixing what’s broken and finding North.

Juxtaposed to this backdrop are my kids and dog who shape change from child/puppy to teen/dog in unpredictable and unsynchronized cycles.  There is always a creature in crisis and several days out of each week this summer Otis has forgotten that he’s house trained.  I caught him in the middle of the night relieving himself at the top of the mountain-esque pile of clean laundry next to my bed. Apparently it was easier for him to make the climb than ask to go out.

This summer our tribe is particularly messy and we have to watch where we step.

I have found that as the kids become teenagers is when I truly see my genetic cards on the table –  face up. The good, the challenging and the parts that make me grimace.  If you’re a parent of teens you know what I’m talking about.

When they’re young you still believe in the blank slate.  When they become teenagers, you’re hit on the head by the apple falling from the tree and there are moments when the knowing identification and transference will make you nauseous. You’d like to give them warning but it’s their hand to play this time around.  It can be a difficult game to watch in the teen years.

It takes an incredible amount of my energy to hold space for three changelings and an English Bulldog with an alpha attitude.  I bike and run in the early morning as a daily inoculation against the teen invasion that I face everyday – it’s like I’m in one of those zombie movies where they just keep coming.  Our zombies have reached the age where they’ve realized that there aren’t any parenting tools that can take them down.

The All-Powerful-Parent magic trick has been revealed for what it is – two flawed middle-aged human beings with good intentions but who are running out of steam. The Zombies sense their power and I’m the starring victim in the movie.  The embarrassing mom they love and loathe in equal parts. The epic push/pull of emerging independence has begun.

In order to keep my sanity, my summer has been built around a to-do-list approach to survival.  A to-do-list is a leash for my wandering brain.  It helps me to see a path through the zombie attacks and the summer doldrums.  There are micro to-do-lists for each day and macro lists for big summer projects.

This brings me back to my orange house.  Painting the exterior of our house was number one on the Macro List.

We have lived in our current house for two years.  The previous owners painted it a bank lobby forest green with burgundy trim.  The inside was painted rain cloud grey which I remedied before we moved-in with a warm white and healthy doses of raspberry, yellow, orange, and melon green

As previously stated, it has been a couple of months of genetic payback and checking off lists.  I’ve been feeling a growing pressure to liven things up a bit.  The kids’ life stage and a little summer stagnation awakened the repressed adolescent in me who needed to make an over-the-top identity statement.  A declaration that I may be middle aged but I’m still alive.  Little did I know I was going to let it all out on the exterior of my house.  Bright orange, yellow and lime green.

Hear me roar!

I met with the painter and the contractor the night before with my color chips.  The painter smiled a happy grin and said that the house will look like a piñata. Sounded better than a bank lobby to me.  The next morning the contractor called from the hardware store and asked me one last time if was certain that I wanted orange, that particular orange.

Yes!

I stayed around in the morning, just long enough for one half of one side of the house to be painted orange.  It looked good. Ha! It was going to be just fine after all.

Hear me roar!

A busy schedule had me on the go and I didn’t make it back to the house until mid-afternoon.  What I saw when I turned the corner onto our street was an orange mistake of radioactive proportions.  Our house was pulsating under a glowing orb that ricocheted off the homes on either side.  I had created an orange force field that encompassed half the street.

If it wasn’t my house, I would have considered it to be quite awe-inspiring.

The young couple next door later told me that they thought they were experiencing the apocalypse when they walked into their kitchen that afternoon.  Meanwhile on the other side of our house, the sorority girls didn’t even notice.  We tolerate their late night  karaoke parties and yappy dogs so a little orange wasn’t going to mess with our arrangement.

The rest of the neighbors tried not to make eye contact.

I was greeted by the painter who still had a big smile on his face. This time he told me that my house was Hot, Hot, Hot as he opened and closed his fists like sunbursts with each word. Between my kindergarten level Spanish and his earnest attempt with English, I frantically told him to stop painting my house orange.

Please, for the love of god, no second coat.

My heart was beating irregularly.  The kids, back from driver’s ed and gymnastics practice, were horrified.  Eli thought our house looked like a package of Skittles and then said that he wouldn’t live in an orange house. I kept circling the property trying to find the right angle that would give me hope that I didn’t make a nuclear orange blunder.

To close my eyes was the only immediate remedy.

Always one to be solution focused, I called the contractor and told him of my mistake and then loaded up Georgia, my most color-coordinated child, in the minivan and headed off to find a way out of this orange morass.

Our neighborhood hardware store has an interactive program that scans paint chips and gives a mock up of the colors on a digital model house.  We poured over color pairings that could bring our little piece of the world back into homeostasis.  We settle for the first combination that I chose before my middle-age crisis inspired orange fiasco.

Holly Glen with Purity White trim.  Feeling like colorist superheroes, we had two test quarts made up and headed back to the house.

When the news spread in our neighborhood that we were not keeping the orange, my quiet neighbor across the street came over with his iPad to show me a couple of his wife’s alternative color suggestions, all creams and beiges.   I told him that I had picked Holly Glen and was hoping that it was not too close to their color.

He didn’t care.  He just wanted the orange force field to be turned off.

Mercifully, the universe conspired to protect me from my folly by having the paint spraying hose break and a delay at the hardware store gave us a window that prevented the last three gallons of orange paint from being made.

Within 24 hours the exterior of our house flipped to the opposite side of the color wheel and all evidence of the orange was gone except for the gravel in my garden path where the paint spraying hose burst.   I did keep the neon green sheds and painted the front porch swing the same color.

Hear me roar.

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Link to Belly of the Whale:  https://ebreston.wordpress.com/?s=belly+of+the+whale&submit=Search

Control

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I’m so sick of my nagging self. I woke up at four in the morning yesterday, sat up and promised Ruby, our orange cat staring at me from the foot of the bed, that I would not let one negative word come out of my mouth for twenty-four hours.

Given my mood, that was the best I could do.

Usually a glass-half-full kind of person, I’ve been taking note of how obnoxious and short tempered I’ve been with my family.  Some of it’s due to the end of the school year event-a-thon, but there are tectonic changes too. The kind that involve big issues and life transitions.

It all begins with a thought. Control is a possession that starts from behind my eyes, scanning for weaknesses and problems that may arise in the upcoming chapters of my What If Manifesto.  It reads like one of those Worst Case Scenario guides but is much darker and survival is not guaranteed.

I can keep the demon contained for only so long. I get restless and quiet. It’s never a good sign when the kids start asking me what’s wrong.

It’s downhill from there. The glass-half-full version of me stands to the side and shakes her head as the glass-broken-in-shards version is sighing, complaining and enlightening each family member about how they could improve their lives.

“I’m just trying to help,” I say with that crazed look in my eyes.

This is familiar ground for me.  Although I’m now more adept at negotiating a truce with the demon, a couple of weeks ago I just waved the snarling creature in for a visit.  When I get this cozy with Control, I feel like I did as a kid swinging on the monkey bars in the summer.  I’m holding on by one hand, not yet within reach of the next rung, and worried that I’m losing my sweaty grip.

I delude myself into thinking that I can keep myself and everyone I love from slipping.

Control tells me that it is my job to protect my family members from themselves while I conjure up their next rung so they won’t precariously fling themselves into the future. That’s where my minds goes when it’s presented with a larger than usual serving of uncertainty.

Life according to my What If Manifesto.

It’s an exhausting mental exercise.  Fortunately, I have been given children and a husband who are skilled exorcists and balk when my head spins.  My oldest son, making a brief pitstop home between the end of his sophomore year and an internship abroad, doesn’t much give much of a hoot about my manifesto. He’s twenty.  What could go wrong?  The other three are even less impressed with my hectoring.

It turns out that they all actually listened to my advice over the years.

Since they could understand, I’ve told the kids that they’re always just one thought away from changing their perspective.  I’ve reminded them over and over that their worldview and actions arise from what they think and that the fastest way out of the mental weeds is a change of attitude.

I made it through the first twenty-four hours and decided to try for another day. This time I voiced my intention to my family and not just the cat.  I created a new context and offered an apology. I’m still feeling on shaky ground with serenity but have managed to make use of that game changing, millisecond pause before my thoughts become words.

Are my words true?  Are my words necessary?  Are my words kind?

Control evaporates in the face of such simplicity.  So far everyone is making it across the monkey bars just fine.

 

Ten Thing Every Kindergarten Parent Should Know

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Suggestions from my 15 years in elementary school

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Elementary school is a lot like going down the Raging River Ride at Schlitterbahn Water Park.  While holding an inner tube, you and your child climb the stairs of the entry tower to launch into the headwaters with a confused mass of strangers.  You push each other along to get started.  Tip-overs, tears and unexpected separations occur but it all works out and everyone is back in their tubes smiling. There are lifeguards along the way.

Small talk begins with those around you and in an instant a floating community is created.  You feel more relaxed.  By the middle of the ride you hit a slow patch and stop paying attention.  Then, without notice, things pick-up again and you have to hold on tight.  It’s one of the longest rides at the park but you’re still surprised when you reach the end with a sudden splash down. Your turn is over … that is unless you have another child, and then you pick up your tube and get back in line again.

Below is my list of ten things that I wish someone had told me on the way up the tower the first time.

1)  Lurking somewhere among the teary-eyed group of parents standing in the hall on the first day of kindergarten are your best friends that you haven’t met yet.  You will raise your children with these people and love them with a gratitude that you don’t understand now.  It’s commonplace to say that it takes a village to raise a child, but elementary school is about as close to a village as most of us get.

2) You will serendipitously encounter teachers whose particular superpower matches your child’s moment of crisis.  The teacher will not wear a cape so be on the lookout for remarkable progress in your child, emotionally or academically, that you know in your heart didn’t have anything to do with you.

3) Get out of your helicopter – parenting is best done on the ground with a little distance.  Let your kids wander and make mistakes.  Be an advocate for your child, when necessary, and bring solutions to the table not anger.

4) Unless you have a mutant parenting gene, science fair projects will bring you to your knees.  Both you and your child will cry. This is normal.

5)  We are all visitors passing through. I’ve watched people move on from our small elementary school whose absence I thought would bring doom. Instead, new faces replace the old, the culture evolves and the school continues to hum along.  With that in mind, have good guest behavior – help out, be curious, listen, and work to make things better for everyone.  Enjoy your stay.  It will end.

6) The teachers, principals and support staff won’t tell you that they are running at 150%, neither will the parent volunteers who fill in the gaps. Kindness and appreciation go a long way.   Remember to say “thank you” to the people who teach, nurture, feed, and clean up after your kids.  Volunteer or donate when you can, every little bit helps.

7) Watching your child and their friends grow from kindergarteners to pre-teens is a privilege.  You will come to understand the softening eyes of every old person who says that they remember you when you were young. Pay attention and take a lot of pictures.

8) Be mindful of the sweetness – the handholding and toothless beaming grins – it won’t last forever.  You too will become an embarrassment to your child and be replaced by texts, over-scheduling, clubs, sports, and friends.  Now are the years to chaperone field trips and go to school plays, learning celebrations and festivals.

9) Don’t save every piece of paper that your child touches.  Keep a few choice pictures and projects from each year.  Your college-aged kid only wants a couple of pieces of elementary school memorabilia and the emotional hurdle of getting rid of the rest is a mighty high bar to get over.  Save yourself the anguish.  Trust me on this – I kept my children’s first bandaids.

10)  Raising children makes you vulnerable and you will experience emotions that you didn’t know were in your range.  Don’t be scared, you are actually getting stronger and more resilient. You will earn a tougher skin and a bigger heart.  Be open to all that you can learn from the people around you. Your child isn’t the only one growing up.

After four kids and fifteen consecutive years as an elementary school parent, I’m in the holding tight part of my LAST ride down the Raging River. The splashdown will officially occur on June 5th, at my daughter’s sixth grade graduation.  I’m telling myself that I’m ready to move on; but I know that when my turn is really over, I’ll be a blubbering wreck as I lay my tube down and shuffle off in a new direction toward a different ride.

 

A Note From My Mother

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I was born on Friday, February, 14,1964 in Waterville, Maine. That makes me fifty today.  I harbored a hope that a new decade would make me feel different, like discovering a latent super power.

Instead the morning greeted me like most.  I wrangled our teenagers up and off to school.  Leo texted me Happy Birthday, no call.  Q annoyed me as she finished her math homework in the car, even though I promised myself I would be more patient in my fifties.

I guess patience is not my latent super power.

The plan for today is to lay low because of the marathon this weekend. I need to conserve my physical and mental energy. Tonight Matthew and I are going out to listen to music. Later this spring, I’m taking a short trip with a friend to mark this milestone.

I have absolutely nothing to complain about, I know.

That’s why I feel so terribly guilty for emotionally flailing today.  I didn’t expect this. It began with the ordinariness and gained momentum when my mom called.  I started to cry.  She said exactly what I needed to hear.  She reminded me that the big birthdays with zero’s need time for grieving as well as celebration.  My mom gave me permission to meet fifty on my terms.  I didn’t have to be happy.

I’ve flailed about all day, with breaks to be grateful and laugh with friends.  It’s OK though, I have a note from my mother.

Fifty.  Downtown Austin.

“Look, I really don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive, you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you’re quiet, you’re not living. You’ve got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy, colorful and lively.”  ― Mel Brooks —

Women!

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I was running out the door last night to pick up Georgia from practice when I saw the package in our mailbox on the porch. It had Richard’s distinctive handwriting and I knew what was inside. He was sending me something for my birthday on behalf of Marcia, my dear friend who died three years ago this spring.  I am blessed that she loved me like a daughter.

The letter ends with, “This remembrance of hers is sent with much love – Richard.” The cotton in the box and the black velvet pouch smell like her. I didn’t know that I remembered how she smelled, but there it is, distinctively Marcia. I had seen the silver chain of dime-sized hammered metal links around her neck many times, usually with a casual sweater.  Marcia was sophisticated and stylish but this necklace was a rare piece of her jewelry that could fit into my simple, athletic, thrown-together approach to fashion. She would have picked it out for me.

Richard got it right.

In my thoughts and heart, Marcia accompanied me in the car as I made my way to the gym. We both agreed that middle-age is the time when your friendships with women move to another level of meaning that is unimaginable when you are younger.

If I could only pick one word to characterize my last decade it would be WOMEN.

The family of women I have built during my forties has been my most treasured achievement outside of my life with the kids and Matthew.  When I was younger I was somewhat of an outsider, most often by choice. I didn’t really understand other women, particularly when they moved in groups. I preferred men or to be by myself.  It was easier that way.

A shift occurred in my late thirties. It began in playgrounds and the hallways of preschools, over cups of coffee and during long runs on hilly wooded trails, on desperate calls and through inside jokes. By my forties I found myself surrounded by women I loved.

They hug me when I’m undeserving, don’t flinch when I’m imperfect, lead the way, and shine the light on my strengths.

Together we belly-laugh, shake our fist at the sky and cry, get sick and recover, raise families, bury parents, volunteer, cook, downward dog, travel, play, console and celebrate.

They are the people I design escape plans with and then go back home.

They get me through all the bruises and triumphs of kids, the realities of marriage, and the painfully joyous process of growing up. I know with a devotional certainty that I’m a better person for letting their love and courage lift me to a place that is always safe and accepting.

To the women in my life, you know who you are, thank you for seeing me through to fifty. Our lives are joined together like the silver links of Marcia’s necklace.

I love you.

And Then There’s Maude

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“You’re turning fifty?”

Now imagine that question asked in slow motion by a wide-eyed incredulous twelve-year-old girl from my daughter’s gymnastics team. The words came out of her mouth laden with disbelief as if I said that I was turning into a lemur.

Her sweet mom took a quick read of my facial expression to gauge my reaction. I laughed and asked her why she was surprised.

“You don’t look fifty,” she answered.

I’ve noticed that people think that telling someone that they don’t look fifty is the best compliment they can come up with for a person on the verge of turning fifty – particularly a woman.

What they are really saying is that I don’t look old … yet.

Fifty is definitely the gateway to old. Little kids think the number is dinosaur ancient. Teens associate it with their parents. Twenty-somethings pity the loss of youth. Thirty-year-olds are way too busy with career and family to have an opinion.

On the other hand, people in their forties are a little leery of fifty, like perhaps it may be contagious.  It is, if you’re lucky!

I’m not sure what fifty is supposed to look like. When I was a kid I thought the coolest “old” person on television was Maude, played by Bea Arthur in the sitcom of the same name. I liked her flowy sweaters and jackets that traipsed after her as she paraded across the set. She was bossy and wise-cracking and did what she wanted. She did not look or act like any of the middle-aged women from my life as a child.  I suppose that I wanted to be Maude when I was old.

Fifty-year-olds don’t share a uniform profile. I will wear the number differently than another. Instead of focusing on what I look like, I want to celebrate arriving at this milestone healthy and content, surrounded by family and friends and curious about what’s next. It’s more about who I’ve become and where I’m going.

I am a partner, mother, daughter, sister, aunt, dog mama, friend, social worker, marathoner, gardener, artist, writer, yogini, traveller, volunteer, photographer.  That’s what my fifty looks like and yes, I feel the most beautiful when wearing flowy sweaters that trail behind me when I walk.

Maude

Lady Godiva was a freedom rider,

she didn’t care if the whole world looked.

Joan of Arc, with the lord to guide her,

she was a sister who really cooked.

Isadora was a first bra burner

Ain’t ya glad she showed up?

And when the country was falling apart

Betsy Ross got it all sewed up

And then there’s Maude

And then there’s Maude

And then there’s Maude

And then there’s Maude

And then there’s Maude

And then there’s Maude

And then there’s that uncompromisin’ enterprisin’ anything but tranquilizin’ Right on Maude!!!

Lyrics from theme song for the sitcom Maude

One final note: I know flowy is not a word but it should be.

Welcome Back Eli

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I don’t write about Eli very much because he asked me not to mention him without his consent. It wasn’t hard to do. There has been distance between us over the last couple of years. The same strain occurred with Leo during middle school and seeped into 9th grade. Whereas Leo was silent in his disgust for me, Eli is very vocal.

I’m not sure that Eli has ever forgiven me for leaving him in the attention vacuum between his older brother and two demanding babies.  In recognition of his place in the birth order, I began taking Eli on trips alone to give him respite from the squeeze of the middle.

It turns out that Eli is an excellent travel companion. We visited France, San Francisco, Yosemite, and Olympic National Park.  Our trips were always perfect and helped to take the sting out of our push-pull at home. During the last couple of years neither of us talked about traveling together.  On our road trip through Montana with Leo last summer, Eli spent a lot of the time mad at me.

When I picked Eli up from rowing last night he was in a great mood. We joked and laughed all the way home. At the stop light, I looked over at him and it hit me that the thaw in our relationship has been happening for months now. We are more natural with each other again, kinder.

As we drove through the dark, he suggested that we take a trip to Washington DC together this summer.

We both want to see the pandas.

My friend Shelly took this picture of Eli and me after hiking near Grenoble, France.

Almost Fifty

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 ‘‘One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.” – Paulo Coelho

Fifty is not the new forty.  Let’s face it, fifty is fifty.

While talking to other tail-end boomers and reading what the media and blogs tell us about being middle aged I find that there are four major approaches to turning fifty out there.

The first and loudest camp is the pro-fifty crowd. By listening to this group you’d think that middle age was just one big find-the-best-part-of-yourself fest. This group plans to never age or die. They eat kale, do triathlons, change careers and have great postmenopausal sex.

Then there’s the survivalist group. They definitely know they are aging and want to stop it at all costs. They also eat kale but on a restrictive life-extending 1,000 calorie diet. Many in this group gets an extra colonoscopy each year AND will tell you their triglyceride levels at a cocktail party.

On the flip side, there are those who have given up. They have lost their jobs, their health insurance and well being. This group of fifty year olds do not have a lot of hope. It’s a young world out there and it’s hard to find your way. This isn’t just an outlook but a social/economic/political issue.

Of course there are those who don’t give a damn and are just living their lives.

If we boomers are honest, we can recognized a little of each of these perspectives in ourselves. Much of the noise out there sounds a lot like whistling in the dark to me. I for one am not whistling. The tune I was trying to carry is being drowned out by the ticking of the clock. It’s not the biological clock of my thirties, this is the sound of mortality.

I know I am going to die.

At almost fifty, this line of thinking can leave me feeling like it’s over.  As a counter balance, I am fortunate to have many thriving friends and mentors who are Old. Capital O Old. Our culture hates the word, particularly middle-aged people. I use this word with the greatest of respect. If we are lucky the ultimate destination is OLD.

Ask any person in their seventies if they are living the new fifty and they will chuckle.

Standing here at the brink of fifty, I am fully aware, but not-so-accepting, of the fact that in a hop, skip and blink of two decades I will be seventy. One of my Old friends once picked up a comb and ran her thumb down the teeth, smiled and said, “This is how fast the time goes.” For me the sense of urgency is palpable.

I realize that I need to get off my lower-than-it-used-to-be butt and move a bit faster toward living. To do more, love more, make more mistakes, keep promises, show more kindness, make amends, take more risks, follow through. Let go of the hesitation and leap; to hear the clock as a heartbeat, a breath. A metronome for staying in the present.

When I tell people that I’m almost fifty, it is more often than not greeted with, “You’re at the halfway mark.”

More whistling in the dark.

If you look at statistics, I passed the top of the mountain about a decade ago. I’m more like at the timber line on the other side, going down.

Time is an illusion and the mountain analogy is too. In actuality we are all dancing from the most fragile, beautifully shimmering thread of the present moment. There is no solid mountain beneath us. There is no thinking, eating or exercising our way out of this predicament. It is universal. It doesn’t change if you are almost fifty, twenty or eighty.

When my friend Marcia knew she was losing her battle to cancer she organized a glamorous birthday party for herself. People came from all over the country. It was her pre-funeral. She didn’t hide it. She wanted to celebrate her life with the people she loved while she was alive and feeling well enough to have fun.

Marcia always said, “Nobody gets off this planet alive, so what are you going to do?”

LIVE.

I took the photograph at the Bastille in Grenoble, France.

Three Medals

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I ran my first marathon on February 18, 2001,  four days after my 37th birthday.  I was newly pregnant, about a month along.  After discovering we were having twin girls, I contacted the organizers of the race and asked if I could have two additional medals, one for each of my daughters. When our girls are feeling challenged or frustrated, I remind them that they ran a marathon as an embryo.  It always makes them smile.

Stones

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Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth. Age is an honor, it’s still not the truth – Vampire Weekend

Fifty looks like a scary number. I’ve been barrelling toward my birthday with all the genuine optimism I can muster.  I know I’m surrounded with so many blessings. I truly feel it.

However, with less than a week to ground zero I’m starting to lose my enthusiasm. Fifty. The word makes me grimace and my eyes well up. It sounds old.

I’m having one of those days where I willingly pile a lifetime of regrets, wasted days, faded loves, squandered opportunities and loss on my chest like heavy stones. I can’t breathe.

So much stupidity. Not enough courage. Days I can’t get back. People I can’t touch.

I will rally. But for this moment I take a certain comfort in laying under the stones. I want to hold on to them, feel their heaviness, and remember every mistake, misstep and careless gesture.

The weight is a summons to live purposefully.  To have more courage.  To find the acceptance to leave the stones on the ground as to not burden what’s left.

Almost fifty.

 

I took the photo at Pedernales State Park, Johnson City, TX.

Metamorphosis

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When I was a girl of eight or so, my grandmother showed me how to carefully cut the stem of the Milkweed plant after we discovered a fat yellow, black and white striped Monarch caterpillar on a leaf. She talked me through how to gently place the plant and the creature in our empty glass jar. We had already poked holes in the metal lid. Carefully holding the jar, we walked home and put our guest in a quiet corner of the kitchen.

Every other day we added a few fresh Milkweed leaves until we found the caterpillar hanging from the lid forming its chrysalis. Like magic, a butterfly appeared in about a week. If we were lucky we witnessed its outing but more often than not the butterfly emerged alone, the torn translucent remnants of its chrysalis still hanging. We let the butterfly go at the end of the beach path where the Milkweed grew.

We were midwives to at least a half dozen butterflies that summer.  It was pure wonderment.

Over the years, I attempted to recreate the scene for my kids with the store bought kits that send the caterpillars in the mail – they were not Monarchs. The mealworm looking caterpillars arrived in a plastic jar.  I placed the larvae in their snazzy butterfly habitat along with the provided food.  We waited and watched.

Metamorphosis is an intrinsically stirring event. However, the mail order version never matched my memories of Milkweed and Monarchs. Back then metamorphosis was more than a common science project or YouTube video – it felt more mystical and connected to nature.

Across cultures and in many religions, the butterfly’s life cycle is a symbol of transcendence and rebirth.  I have learned that a caterpillar’s astounding ascent to butterfly has less to do with death or decay and more with actual transformation.

Within the chrysalis the caterpillar dissolves into a soup of cells that looks a lot like snot. The light yellow and green goo contains the cells of the caterpillar’s brain, nerves and muscles.  How this goo recombines to form a butterfly is still a mystery. A clue lies in the blueprint of its future form that each caterpillar carries within itself. When scientists dissect a caterpillar they find that some of the butterfly structures have already formed before pupation.  It resembles a hologram that is super thin and gets pushed tight up against the chrysalis exoskeleton. It does not liquify like the rest of the caterpillar.

Here is the freaky part.

Scientists have conducted experiments to determine if the butterfly has any awareness of its life as a caterpillar. They want to find out if there’s any “being” continuity through the stages of the butterfly’s life-cycle.

In one study, caterpillars are exposed to an unappealing odor, something like nail polish remover, while being administered a non-lethal jolt. They are exposed to the combination over and over again until the caterpillars try to escape when they smell the odor and are trained to loathe the smell.  Weeks later, the caterpillars pupate and, in this experiment, become moths.  All of the moths that were exposed to the jolt as caterpillars hate the smell.  Only half of the moths in the control group had the same reaction.  It appears that the memory of the caterpillar survived with the adult moth.

It follows that within each caterpillar is its future and within each butterfly is its past. Metamorphosis seems more like a process not an annihilation, a transformation not a death. Perhaps we are not so dissimilar from the earth bound caterpillar and just maybe our version of our butterfly self is already within. We live in a culture that tells us to look outside ourselves for answers, buy-this-do-that quick fixes.  At almost fifty,  I’ve come to know that it’s about finding the blueprint inside and then letting the magic happen.

Endnotes:

I took the above photo (one of my last film rolls) in 2008 when I was in Xilitla, Mexico at the remote surrealist sculpture park at Las Pozas.  We hiked to the top of the waterfall pictured.  While walking along the stream above the falls, we saw four Blue Morpho butterflies silently fly across the water.  I had my camera but it all happened so fast and I remember not wanting to miss the experience by trying to get a picture.  I will never forget the sunlight and the iridescent blue of their wings.

Visit RadioLab to learn more about the study referenced in this blog.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/goo-and-you/

Fifteen Hard Miles

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“For me, running is a lifestyle and an art. I’m far more interested in the magic of it than the mechanics.”  Lorraine Moller, Olympic Marathoner

I will run my third marathon on February 16th, two days after turning fifty. I train alone, without music, even on my long 15 and 18 mile runs. I don’t care about my finishing time or latest trends and gadgets. For me, running has always been a moving meditation. I meet myself on the trail, one step at a time.

For the past six days I’ve kept to an intense running schedule that has wreaked havoc on the rest of my life. About now is when I want it to be over. The coming week will be even more demanding, followed by five glorious days before the race when I will cut back and rest.

I ran a hard 15 miles this morning. I was planning on running 18 but I didn’t have it in me. My calorie and water intake was off leaving me shaky and nauseated. My doubting self appeared in my head.  She sounded a lot like my daughter reminding me that the Greek messenger sent running 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens collapsed and died after completing his mission. My training has been sporadically interrupted by an unexpectedly cold winter and its soporific effect.  As the race nears I’m beginning to question if I’m sufficiently prepared to complete the marathon.

Can I really pull it off?  My last marathon was a decade ago.

Hell yes! One step at a time.

What I liked about today’s arduous, sometimes miserable, fifteen mile run.

  1. Top on the list is listening to the pieces of conversations that blur by me and come together in my mind as a collage of lives and emotions. I feel like one of the angels in the film, Wings of Desire, wandering through a black and white Berlin listening to people’s thoughts.

  2. The Boy Scout parade on the Congress Avenue Bridge – I love a parade.

  3. The people on the trail preparing for the upcoming marathon – all ages, sizes and abilities.

  4. The babies in strollers and the dogs at Riverside Dog Park.

  5. Cliff Shot Turbo Gels, Double Espresso.

  6. Everything seems right with the world after a run, even a hard run.

  7. I. CAN. RUN.

Published!

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I have a short essay on the back page of the February issue of Austin Woman magaziine. They asked for pictures of me, Matthew and the dogs from which they created a drawing of Matthew as a blonde and me in a wedding dress. I have never worn a wedding dress. It’s funny but I don’t care – it’s a big thrill for me. This is my second published essay!

http://issuu.com/austinwoman/docs/02_aw_february/99?e=1966870/6539479

Toby and Maude

The Yoga Teacher in the Safety Vest

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There he was in perfect Chaturunga form on the sidewalk at the stoplight at Congress and 12th street – a construction worker dressed in his work clothes and an orange vest.  My heart raced with recognition and joy.

I am him, he is me!

Before I continue, I need to come out of the closet. I’m a certified yoga instructor who does not teach because I’m chicken-shit scared to stand in front of the room. I was as surprised as anyone to have my introversion and fear of public speaking bite my big plans in the butt the way they did.

If I could teach with an orange vest I think I could find my way.  It would serve as a reminder to myself and others that I’m very human and cannot readily distinguish between my left and right.  It would call out, caution, I’m not perfect like the teachers in the videos or magazines, but I live yoga and it has saved me physically and mentally.

My vest would say let’s be careful with each other.

I was the most unlikely candidate for enrolling in a yoga teacher training program. Although I had never practiced yoga, it annoyed me. I am a runner. I even stopped running with a group because they talked about yoga too much.  I could not listen to them sharing another blow by blow sequencing of their practice. Yoga was not for me, period.

Then, in my mid-forties, my lower back was in so much pain that I could not stand up straight in the morning.  It came on fast and I thought my running days were over.  It was at a Christmas party when my neighbor convinced me to try yoga for my back. She was older than me, had practiced for over thirty years, and had just finished her teacher training.  She was practical and didn’t talk about yoga with that cult-ish look in her eyes.  For whatever reason I was able to hear her message.

A week later I signed up for a beginner’s series at a nearby yoga studio. I was hooked by the end of my first Savasana. Within three weeks my back pain was gone and I was running and attending class or practicing at home almost everyday. A year later I was sitting in a 200 hour teacher certification program surrounded by a small group of wonderfully life-affirming women. We were all different but not a whiner in the bunch. I loved every minute of it and my practice evolved to be a pillar of my life.

At forty-seven, I was the oldest person in our group to complete the certification. Austin has a thriving yoga community and is bursting with certified teachers. From my vantage point, my peers seem so young and polished. Everyone around me appears to have mastered some kind of happening angle to their teaching style.  I’m not a breathe-bliss-into-the-bottoms-of-your-feet type of practitioner.  Of course there is nothing wrong with breathing bliss, I am just too scientific, and yes, a little jaded.

I’m a biomechanics, no frills, need-to-move-and-breathe-for-my-sanity kind of practitioner.  When I graduated I felt like an old work horse, strong and disciplined, but not the most flexible or cutting-edge.

From the beginning, I was already counting myself out.  Coupling that with my fear of public speaking, I put myself out to pasture.  I decided I would be one of those people who went through teacher training to advance my personal practice.

Fast forward through a couple of years of changes and moves.  I have continued with yoga and am thinking about teaching again.  I started blogging as a way to practice being vulnerable but far enough removed to still feel comfortable.  This is a first step in the process of feeling confident enough to be seen at the front of the room.

I accept that I’m aging and I believe that in that acceptance I will find my path as a teacher.  Rather than striving to keep up with the effervescence of youth, spandex and enlightenment, I’m concentrating on just showing up on my mat.

The rest will come. The yoga teacher in the orange vest taught me that this morning.

About the photo: I took this photograph this morning at the corner of 12th and Congress, across from the capitol building, Austin, TX.

Adam and Eve and Their Fifty Chickens

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There is a rooster across the street and two houses down who lives with a pair of Barred Plymouth Rock Hens and a Rhode Island Red in a fine backyard compound. This winter, the rooster and I are on the same odd sleeping cycle. I appreciate his company as he crows with precise regularity at 4:30 am for about five minutes and then again at the more customary crowing time of 6:30 am.

Like me, I imagine that he worries about getting up on time. Since he’s up, he thinks through his day’s activities and reassures himself that he can get it all done without forgetting something.  After his mental inventory he settles down, walks about his yard, takes a bit of food, and contently waits for the sun.

The rooster’s early call reminds me to contain my worries – to greet my troubles, real and imagined, and build a fence around them. The fence is made with gratitude, rationalization and acceptance. I have to go about rebuilding every morning, as worries are a mischievous lot and are prone to escape.

The fruits of this mediation and construction are the most productive peaceful couple of hours of the day, before the kids are up for school or weekend practice.

From time to time, we toy with the notion of raising chickens. We read up on what would be needed and visit the feed store where they sell chicks.  Our hypothetical chickens are named Sunny Side, Scrambled and Over Easy.  It sounds ideal until I think about Big Otis, our English bulldog, versus the chickens.

Besides, I already have a rooster friend, a kindred spirit.

Since last October, I’ve had a chicken conversation replaying in my head that I had with a homeless man I met on the Lamar Bridge. I was taking pictures of Thirst, a temporary art installation in the middle of Lady Bird Lake created to bring about drought awareness.  When I began, the man was at the other end of the bridge feeding pigeons and yelling at a runner.  I’ve seen him before on my runs and knew he was prone to bouts of hollering but was otherwise harmless.

As I continued photographing, the man walked up to me and calmly asked about what I was doing. I put down my camera and talked to him. It was about a half-hour conversation that covered his time in the Florida swamps as a boy, whale sharks, religion, and chickens – in that order.

He told me that Adam and Eve had fifty chickens and that Adam named each of them. He proceeded to list the names: Mr. Chicken, Mrs. Chicken, Henny Penny, Lucky Ducky, Hokey Pokey and so on.  I don’t remember past the first memorable handful of names but about halfway through he slowed down. I politely told him that it was OK if he couldn’t remember the rest. He stopped but promised me that Adam knew each of his chickens by name.

I love to think of Adam and Eve tending to their chickens, all fifty of them.  I can see them in overalls and cleaning chicken coops.  Going about the day, despite their fall from Grace.

Being human.

I return to the scene of Adam naming his chickens every morning when my rooster friend crows and reminds me to enjoy the stillness.

Thirst sponsored by Women and their Work and created by a team of women including lead artist Beili Liu, Emily Little, Norma Yancey and Cassie Bergstrom.


With his permission, I took this picture of the man I spoke with on the bridge.