The story of this blog

Out of the mud, grows a lotus. 

This is literally true, of course. But more figuratively, this is mentioned and quoted in different ways in Buddhism. Thich Nhat Hanh was quoted as saying, "There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus. "

At the moment that we're in the mud, of course, we don't think about the lotus. We think about the cold, the mess, and the feeling of being stuck. From down in the mud, beneath even the water, and the algae, the mud doesn't feel good, and it's difficult to see the flower that isn't yet.

But, creativity and pain correlate. Beethoven lead a miserable life, and (not BUT but AND) produced some of the worlds most recognizably moving classical music. It is the foundation of so much music that came after it. Writers, artists (just look at Frida Kahlo), most anyone with a creative bent will acknowledge that even if they were not able to produce at the moment they were in the mud, they were inspired by the time they spent down there.

It's not really any different for me. I mightn't ever produce things that move or reach people as much as the artists I know best for being inspired by and then out-stripping their pain in order to create, but all of my biggest creative projects came from distress.

My 365 photo-a-day self portrait project came from the realization that grieving the loss of my father and my relationship in one fell-swoop had shut me off to living and knowing the new and beautiful place I was residing in, and because I tried to mourn both at once, I had done neither properly.

My best poems were about that processing.

And this blog . . . well, it came from recognizing the need to, as the wonderfully wise Pema Chodron says in her best book, "lean into the sharp points of life."

Recently, a friend asked me about this blog. Why I started it, what inspired me, how I held myself to such a high standard of honesty and where my topic ideas "come from." She said she felt she was creative and prolific when it came to fiction writing but was having, "a difficult time when it comes to writing about 'real life.' I know the question might be a bit simplistic, but am really curious, and value your opinion as a fellow writer."

Well, first of all, anyone referring to me as a "writer" flatters me more than I can say. I think of myself mostly as a hack who can't keep herself from begging for attention. So, being included in the "fellow writer" circle with someone who had the guts and talent to go the hard road of getting a degree in writing is a sure bet to make me blush.

I gave her advice that may or may not have been satisfying, but also told her the story of this blog, at least partially.

This blog was in my head for months before it was ever on this site. And . . . even when it was one this site, I wrote three or four posts before I announced it on Facebook . .  . thus allowing everyone to see it, and then show it to everyone else. If I think very carefully, this blog started with a piece I wrote for a friend's book about a year before I ever wrote the first post.

This friend is an incredibly talented chef, and when her family began getting various diagnosis where diet changes could make a big difference, she made the command decision to do a full cleanse. As a family that was already Orthodox Jewish, and thus, keeping Kosher, dietary limitations weren't news in her house, but she then added on top of that: wheat free, gluten free, and dairy free. And yet, she magically makes some of the most amazing meals and baked goods I've ever had the pleasure to eat. In a series of long and long-distance conversations, she shared with me that she wanted to write a book. Not just a cookbook with recipes, but essays, research, and discussion on the benefits of eating and cooking your own food, how to do a cleanse and determine food sensitivities, and how to plan meals and events with this lifestyle of mindful eating. I had been experiencing a complete mental road block on the poems I was writing (see above) and found myself one night sitting at my neighborhood pub, drinking a beer, and just gushing out hand-written paragraphs about how eating and health aren't or shouldn't be disconnected from our other life choices. It was edited as an intro to her book.

But it got me thinking about how food worked for me, or didn't. It stayed on my mind and I found myself watching myself from the outside.

Then, another friend inspired me. One of my mommy friends started a blog writing about her family, the intentional and mindful child-rearing decisions she was making, health, and finding balance in her life as a mom and still being a person outside of that. I can't link to it because she ultimately decided to end the blog and give that time back to her family, but the simple, clear, straightforward way she spoke to these topics was compelling enough that I read it eagerly despite being a non-mom. It also taught me that real life doesn't have to be spectacular or exceptional to be interesting.

I carried these ideas and inspirations with me for several more months though, before doing anything with them.  I tentatively started a list of possible topics, but couldn't quite make the leap to writing anything online that others saw. What I found though, was that I started to notice myself from the outside with regard to those topics. One of the first ones on the list was "Perfect is damaging." What's ironic about this is not just where this topic arose from, but that it has yet to be written! The act of putting that topic idea on a list caused me to notice things about it, and it spawned other topics. As I started to observe myself, and how I made day-to-day decisions around those topics, how I thought about them, how I would reason them out if I was discussing them with a close friend, other things started to drift up against those ideas. Quotes. Things my friends said or did. Something I saw or heard in a movie. Some of these things, in turn, got re-purposed into other topics when the ideas got too big to be under one umbrella. Before I knew it, I had a list of 15 or so ideas and some skeleton structure for where I would go with them.

And still I didn't do anything.

It really wasn't until August of last year that I had the will to write and post. And at first I let just a few, select, people in on those posts. (One of my friends who had seen my 365 creative efforts on Flickr, another friend who had a secret blog, and a third friend I discovered had a blog on this site.) The right questions to ask was EXACTLY what my young writer friend asked - what motivated me to do it? What pushes me to be this publicly honest? She remarked that she knew her question was "simplistic." The answer is simple, but in the discipline of doing this, nothing could be less simple.

I was finally moved to do this because I was hurting inside, and the jagged pieces were no longer ignorable. I was faced with a choice of numbing myself and furthering the feeling of being broken and having jagged, broken edges poking me from the inside, wounding me further, or leaning into the pain and letting it teach me and guide me to new places. I chose the latter, but it meant acknowledging the mud I was in.

That mud included far too many dysfunctional relationships. I was not merely dissatisfied at work, I felt . . . misled and neglected to the point where neglect becomes passive abuse. I was noticing addiction everywhere in my loved ones. And I was in a romantic relationship defined by lies and denial. It hurt, but more than that, it made me sick because my engine runs on integrity and honesty and the chance to learn and contribute to making things better. I had sugar in the gas tank, which is a sadly hilarious metaphor since sugar was part of what I turned to in my brief stint of trying to deaden the ache.

It didn't work of course. And so, I did a bunch of things. I started going to a 12-step meeting for the loved ones of addicts, I got myself a therapist, I looked long and hard at a proverbial mirror and tried to come to terms with my beliefs and my needs, and I created some systems of accountability and honestly with myself, including this blog. I told my "fellow writer" friend that, "I started this blog at a time when I was facing a lot of dishonesty. Dishonesty at work, dishonesty in what is now my previous relationship. I was seeking more open doors." I truly felt like it was the element in my life that was lacking, like not getting enough sun or water. So, I decided I needed to BE the change I wanted to see. I had no idea how far I was going to have to reach down to do that, and so the other piece of this story is that when I find myself hedging around something now, I imagine my (incredibly loving, generous, extremely tiny and fierce) grandmother saying, "Now, Christie. Is that the whole truth?"

The short story is, we can be moved by the art, the ideas, the things happening around us, the people who teach us and show us new things, and I am. But I had to be in the mud to make a go of this kind of writing. As much as it feels like a bruise on my soul to be writing this post five months after losing my job with no new career in hand, I was far more wounded and far less functional and healthy on August 27th, 2011 (9 months ago, with a job!) when I first sat down to write something here. I know I am a better version of me now, I know the things that aren't ideal will change and change again. I know more about who I am, and who I can be, and what lengths I will go to to make that positive and meaningful, and I see myself in a much kinder light. I know everything is impermanent and I'm learning how to breathe through that. I know that I bruise easily, but that as thin as my skin sometimes is, the rest of me is tough and keeps going.

The long story is the tale of a blog that started with an idea about accountability, eating mindfully, exercise and health, and became a blog about the work of looking at myself, health in much broader terms, and the occasional post about zombies.

You know how people who lose 200 pounds always say, "I'll never go back to that. This feels too good." There is more behind that story. There is also the fact that there are days where it has to also be true that it doesn't feel good. Where putting the time in at the gym is the last thing they want to do. Where all they want is ice cream. But they know how working past those hard moments makes them better able to enjoy everything else, gives them more opportunities to feel good. Because when we dampen down pain, we aren't able to selectively anesthetize just pain. We shut out out good things also. That's me. It doesn't always feel good to feel all of my feelings. It's harder than going to the gym (which, let's be honest, I still don't always like doing). But it is better than being dishonest with myself, knowing that that leads directly to accepting dishonesty and dysfunction from others. And it makes me better equipped to feel and see and accept good things in my life. Sometimes leaning into the sharp points of life is like using sandpaper to uncover the natural beauty in the wood grain and shape us into something even better.

So, in that vein, I've decided to bring back another venue of creativity, structure, accountability, learning, outlet, and feedback into my life.

Welcome all to the first day of my second 365 (well, ummm, second in terms of it being version 2.1 since I did start a second 365 in 2010 and then . . . failed to finish it.) with a photo collage acknowledging that this is not just my birthday but the fourth anniversary of my residence in Boulder. I hope you enjoy it because I got up at 5am to make this happen!

Birthday List

Nearly a month ago, I noted that I needed a job before my birthday. Well (shuffle, shuffle) . . . ummmm . . . ahhhh . . . errr. Yeaaaaahhhhh.

In a week, it's. My. BIRTHDAY.

I've been joking around about this being the one week countdown to my midlife crisis (yes, yes, I know most people wait until their 40's to do this, but I figure a running start is warranted. I also think, as long as I'm freaking out, I should multi-task my anxiety and just package this in. And, a good friend pointed out to me today that Dante had his mid-life crisis at 35, so, there's precedent!) but I'll admit this is dfficult for me.

My birthday is also the anniversary of my becoming a Colorado resident, and, for anyone who has read this blog, you know that the story of how I came to live here isn't really a good one. I remember that first birthday here as a blur of unloading boxes and furniture after having been driving for close to a week (it feels like most of that week was spent in Nebraska. Ugh). Somewhere in there, there was a bad movie, and a broken promise. So, birthdays here in Colorado are always seem to come part and parcel with feeling a little tender and tentative.

And this year, my birthday also feels like it is bound up with other drama. My need to figure out my living situation. This arbitrary deadline I set for myself to get a job. The end of the month . . . yayyyyy, more bills due. And, well, 35 doesn't feel like a small number. I want to not have hang ups about that, and to be enlightened and to feel that age has made me better, but without a clear picture of where I'm headed, looking back and saying, "all of that got me here" doesn't work as well. Meh.

For many weeks, as this date approached, I had the ostrich reaction and my instinct was to stick my head in the sand and IGNORE. NEGLECT. And, if things got really bad, maybe uproot from the proverbial sand, RUN AWAY.

But the truth is, I will turn 35, and be unemployed, and wake up with these same unsettled questions whether or not I acknowledge this birthday. So, I'd better get on with it and acknowledge the impending arrival of my mid-life crisis. And as long as I'm acknowledging it, I should go ahead and celebrate. Sitting here, right at this moment, I'm not sure what there is to celebrate to be painfully honest. But I have always adored birthdays (yours, mine, birthdays are just great) so I'm trying to fall back on that.

Of course, what everyone has asked me is, What do you want for your birthday? I have some pretty phenomenal people in my life, both near and far. Some of them have settled this questions by telling me what they are doing to celebrate my day, and others have asked me. One of my smartest, funniest friends put it this way, "what do you want for your birthday aside from word peace and an awesome job?"

Actually, if those things could be gift wrapped, that would be just awesomesauce. Way to hit that nail on the head, RR!

I don't think Amazon has a category for those, so I've put some thought into what else I'd enjoy. My mom askes me to make two lists, each year. A Christmas list, and a Birthday list. I try really hard to make the first no longer than 10 items, and to ask for things that aren't things (Can you make lasagna? Can we go get pedicures?) and the later no longer than 5 things. This year, something about free-falling and not having my feet on any kind of solid ground means I feel free to ask for just EVERYTHING I want. Here goes:

• I would like to excise the parts of my head and heart that tell me, with searing repetition, that I have become "less than" in my weeks of unemployment.

• I want to be able to do the bound yoga poses without fear of losing my balance.
• I want someone to create head bands that don't slide off the back of my giant head

• I'd like for dresses that accommodate girls with GIRLS to be made more flattering.

• I want to put honey in my yogurt without the honey bottle getting all sticky.

• I want my friend to be released from prison and exonerated. I'm grateful that he still has a loving heart, and kindness, but I want him out sooner rather than later to keep it that way. 

• I want children to be wanted and planned. And loved beyond all belief. All of them. 

• I want all of my friends who love each other and are willing to risk everything to be allowed to get married and have those marriages be recognized by my government.
• I want for our country to stop thinking that separate but equal works. Because it never does.
• I want for the U.S. voters and leaders to remember that in a free society you need a reason to make something ILlegal, not a reason to make something legal. And, bee-tee-dub, "the bible" isn't a good thing to point to when it comes to our laws since we eat shrimp and don't sell our daughters.

• I want women to not feel so limited and judged that they treat life as a zero sum game, and learn, all too well, to tear each other down. 

• I want men to not feel so pigeon-holed and pressured that they feel competition and destructiveness are expected. Required even.
• I want a cure for cancer.
• I want to hear my dad read Brer Rabbit stories, with the killer accents and voices, one more time.
• I want more people to go to therapy prophylactically.
• I want more people to hold themselves accountable for their own issues, wounds, and baggage. I need people to be accountable for how their actions affect others.
• I need for us to realize how broken our education system is. How wrong it is that we will spend money to incarcerate, but not to educate. How forced into lock-step my teacher friends feel. How unhappy parents and students are. How wrong our curriculum is and how sticking with it is throwing good money after bad. And, why, oh why, do we think it is ok for us to require college in order to aim higher than Walmart in the job market, but then expect to pay them with no regard to the cost of that education . . .which keeps going up.
• I want people to be kind to each other. And if that's too much to ask, can we at least not be engaged in (and horrendously thrilled by)  being cruel to one another?
• I want things to stop being at this constant fever-pitch of black/white, right/wrong, good/evil where somehow we picket funerals, call women "sluts" on national broadcasts, and say that we wish certain groups of people would die out. (Can you believe it was a pastor who said this?! It actually made me physically ill.)
• I want a way to have all of my closest people at one dinner party - my Colorado people, my Florida, Maine, OK, Illinois, NY, Boston, and Jersey people. And my brother in New Haven for good measure. Then I want, as I once did with Heather, to come up with a curriculum so that people understand each other better, as David and Rob and I have, talked about how to actually do good for people in the world. Then, I'd put Wil in charge of implementation. The rest of us would be his minions. I'm sure I'd be hired on as a personal masseuse. (And if that comes with health insurance, that solves my job problem. La!)
• For just ONE day (it would have to be limited for reasons of will power) I want Dunkin Donuts to be down the street from me so I can spend $3 or less on really good coffee and a donut.
• I want more choices available for streaming on Netflix. Don't you?
• I want popcorn to be magically carb free. Especially when I eat it at 11pm

Barring all of that, because, really, I think it will be hard to get Dunkin Donuts to set up shop here on time, and because none of us know what to do about the crazy people who take it so lightly to propose concentration camps for gay people, I'll take some beer, a burger, and a nice quiet birthday with a few of the people who I think of as teachers and friends and loved ones. But, you know, if you happen on some carb-free popcorn that tastes as good as the stuff I make at home . . . send it on over.

ADD and focus

Everyone in my family has "special needs." (I know that term has a specific meaning, but hate it. Because . . . don't we all? I have friends who are allergic to dairy and I attend to this when I cook for them. And friends who are introverts and won't enjoy a large group. Friends who are afraid of heights or elevators. Cello, we all have things, yeah?) Although my father had the kind of singular focus that all engineers do (in my experience), he also had some pretty apparent hyperactivity. And for those who think hyperactivity is the same as kids being boisterous and that people "outgrow" this, well, umm, no. You'd need only to meet my brother who is still the most ADHD person I know, now in his 30's, to see the incredible effort it is for him to sit in one seat for more then 10-15 minutes. While strong leanings towards math, science and mechanically complex knowledge as well as allergies and diabetes are traced on my mother's side of the family, strong leanings towards creativity, art and writing, nurturing and teaching, OCD, and ADD/ADHD cascade through my father's side of the family. (Both sides have poor vision and asthma, so, there was just no way out there.)

Growing up in house full of talented, smart (if not always conventionally so) people the expectations were high. (And no, this doesn't impact me at all now; I have no idea what you could be talking about! ) We were all expected to work hard, do our homework, get good grades (really good grades), as well as participating in other activities with dedication and some success. Swim lessons were not an option, and taking a musical instrument was strongly promoted. We all played soccer, for various lengths of time, and we all had at least one sport each year all through high school (My brothers typically had three or four, while I switched to music, writing, and what can only be described as the busiest high school drama program EVER). This on top of speech therapy and other kinds of assistance for me for years, and some early intervention for my brothers as well.

My mom's attitude was always, "Oh, that's harder for you. Hmmm. Too bad, you still have to do it." She wasn't unwilling to help, to try and strategize ways to make life more functional, or to be an advocate for us at school. But she was unwilling to let us make excuses. Spelling was surprisingly hard for me, considering my large and growing vocabulary in elementary school and my high school reading comprehension by grade 4. This was probably because of the delay in my hearing (my ears were blocked until I was about 5 or 6), which in turn probably caused my speech difficulties in addition to some weakness in phonemic awareness . . . which we now know through reading readiness research is linked to spelling. My mom fought for a speech therapy IEP for me, but she also wasn't going to let me off the hook. Whatever lists of words I was practicing for speech, she adamantly inserted into our conversations at home. And I was drilled on spelling words every night.

Much the same was true for my brothers who were identified early as struggling with focus and concentration. She wasn't unwilling to adjust the daily schedule to include laps around the house to burn off energy before homework or dinner . . . or both. There was never any blame or lack of understanding. My brothers weren't berated for their struggles and I was never made to feel badly about my spelling or mushy speech, but I was expected to work on it and consistently get better. My brothers weren't excused from acting like human beings, but there was often plans on how to best make things work for them so they could function. There is a subtle but important difference there that I've come to appreciate as an educator who heard over and over, "Well he has _____ and that means he can't ______." Ahhhhhhhhhh!!

In my house it never meant "s/he can't" but instead: it might take longer, you might have to work harder at it, or we might have to do that a different way to make it feasible.

So, I have of course carried this view into the world. Differences in what is easy or hard for me about a task aside, I should just do it and find the way that makes it work. (Case in point: who thinks it's a good idea for an asthmatic with two bad knees to run? ME!) I look down on no one who medicates their ADD kids, but know that it's not necessary for all ADD kids. I also think that whatever intervention or therapy is used or not used, environment and expectation management at home bears huge relation to successful management of learning differences and challenges.

All of this has been on my mind for the last month as I have, alarmingly, noticed the marked increase in my own ADD tendencies. I was never diagnosed as a kid - I certainly rarely exhibit any hyperactivity, and I would add that this is why so few girls are diagnosed with ADD. But two therapists in my adult life have remarked on it. I CAN focus, but I don't always PREFER to focus on one thing at a time. Our current societal norms of texting, while I check my FB status and send an email, while drinking coffee and making a grocery list of course, do nothing to disuade this. The interestingly unanswerable question is: am I genetically wired to multi-task to the point of dissipating my focus or ability to concentrate on one thing? Or is it learned behavior from being surrounded by a family who rarely did one thing at a time, and never did it without fidgeting? Or both?

Whatever the case, it has always been true that even when it looks like I am doing one thing, it only looks that way - with a couple of important exceptions. By this I mean, I can do a very good impression of total focus, but when I'm taking a test, I'm also managing a panic attack, and when I'm on an important phone call, I'm probably also folding laundry or making a to-do list. When I'm running, I'm doing interview prep.

But there were always exceptions. It has always true that I could sit quietly and read or write. This was importantly true in my family of loud, chaotic, bouncing-off-the-walls-climbing-the-bookshelves (Literally - when my brother was less than 3 he was found sitting atop high things frequently having scaled his way to get there) people. If I needed to not be part of that, I could throw my legs over the side of an arm chair and read . . . for hours. I could escape to my room and write, and write, and write. Now, well, it's been months since I could read for more than 30 minutes at a time, which rings the alarm bell for me since that's the measure my brother used to pace himself in getting through college - study or read in 30 minute blocks and then go do something and start again. And I was doing fine on writing (maybe because I had so, so many feelings in so, so many directions as I go through all of this?) but the last month it's been harder and harder for me to gather myself together to sit in one place and collect my thoughts on one topic. I find myself, even when I don't mean to, avoiding it. Or sitting down to write, and then as I get up to pour coffee, drifting off through a series of actions I don't even realize are taking me farther and farther from the keyboard - coffee, mug, mugs are in dishwasher, dishwasher needs to be unloaded, unload, did I fold laundry?, check dryer, drink coffee and plan interview outfit, wash coffee cup and then all other dishes in sink . . .  and before I know it I'm multi-tasking four other things and a half an hour has gone by.

I have been struggling with focus since November when things got very hard and emotional on the job. I had a brief reprieve of peace and quiet in my brain when it looked like two or three job options were shaping up in February, but now . . . It's been four months and ADD is rearing it's head so much that I realized last night that I'm basically not watching TV because the thought of sitting in one place to watch something for 30-60 minutes sounds massively unappealingly uncomfortable to me unless I'm already exhausted, in which case I've found myself falling asleep to the three things I've tried to watch in the last couple of weeks. I mean, come on, unemployment is when you're supposed to sit around and watch TV!

Filling my days through only my own initiative was something I had to do every day for close to four years working as a remote, solo office here. But, of course, I was guided by deadlines, things that needed to get done for my instructors or supervisors, and the tasks involved in the work I was doing. Now, I have to generate not just the initiative and motivation, but the tasks themselves and the structure to do them in. It's been really tiring, if I'm being honest, and it has meant that I go to bed almost every night exhausted, ready to turn my brain off from this constant process. Not to mention, of course, staving off panic, anxiety, disappointment, and at times, depression.

Being tired and emotionally worn is definitely not helping with the ability to concentrate, but it also can't be entirely blamed since I've been tired and emotionally worn in the past and, you know, written 100 page thesis papers. More, I think, I feel ungrounded. And I need my feet to be a little more planted to sit quietly and read or write - it's hard to lean into only one thing when you're running in six directions, I think.

Here are some other strategies I'm thinking of:

• My mom made my brothers run around the house. Not as in "go out and play" but as in, "I think you should do eight laps tonight - I'll count and wave when you run by the window!" I probably need to run or walk every day, even when it's my "day off" from working out. Burn off some of the anxiety or whatever it is coursing through my veins these days.
• Conversely, my family never had much of the just sitting quietly and being going on. And this is something that I struggle with. I was so much better at it when I was walking as one of my two primary forms of transportation (see above), and had weekly practice from my attendance at Quaker meetings. But, when I do it I feel better. I feel like I know who and where I am. I feel . . . resolved and strong. So, I've decided to try the same thing I used to advocate to parents who asked me why Kumon work for their child started from such an easy point. I told them that the idea of doing something every day is actually hard - how many things could they say they do EVERY DAY without fail, after all (It's a short list for most adults. Something I became keenly aware of when I did a 365 days photo project in 2009-2010). I asked them to think about, if they wanted to do pushups every day - should they start with 50 pushups tomorrow having done none for the last several weeks? No, then they'd be too sore the day after to do any and the psychological process of building a new daily habit would have been disrupted. Start easy, build up to 50. Seems logical.
  
  So, for my meditation practice I'm following this suggestion of starting small - at first, 2 minutes a day. 
• Caffeine has helped me eat less and let's just be honest, I make some killer good coffee . . . but it is probably not helping me focus. I may not need to go all the way back to my 2 cups a month standard, but probably would do well to do less than coffee every day. And let me just own up - I love me some Diet Dr. Pepper but it has no redeeming value other than it being yummy. So, there's another source of caffeine I should let go of.
• Getting enough sleep is crucial - I will work to keep that out of all of this. It's been great to sleep 7-9 hours a night instead of calling 5-7 hours of broken a sleep a win, as I was in 2011.
• I probably need to make myself sit and read daily if I want to relocate that capacity.
• Similarly, I probably need to write some every day. Cover letters don't count, but this blog, my creative writing, and my journal do.
• I probably need to acknowledge that part of happy for me is having creative pursuits. In 2008 - 2009 a creative writing group, in 2009-2010 it was photography, every day, without fail, for 365. In 2010- 2011 it was all about performing and singing. Right now I'm putting so much towards staying afloat that I can't afford (literally) to sing, and I'm missing it. Writing is cheaper, but also complicated since it uses the same part of my skills that are being tapped to try and sell my wares to potential employers (write cover letter, adjust res, apply, lather, rinse, repeat.) I'm thinking the first thing on the list is to do some tutorials for the new (free!) photo tool someone awesome directed me to recently. It's also spring in Colorado, which, you know, is just the worst time to get out the fancy cam. (sarcasm)
• I also probably need to acknowledge that the times in the last 10 years when I was most grounded and focused, I was also pretty unhappy. Despite the stress of really-really NEEDING to find a job now, I'm pretty happy. I don't think this means that I can only be grounded when I'm grimly determined to beat tasks that are unsatisfying into submission, or that being content equals being all over the place. But it does probably mean that there's some renovation going on and that finding out what happy AND grounded looks like will likely be a process for awhile.
  
  

Now, one other thing. Diet. Both of my brothers (and I will proudly mention that they came to this conclusion after investigation that was instigated by a conversation with me) have determined they are "glutarded." I had seen the enormous health benefits of reducing or eliminating gluten when my Jewish family was able to resolve not just skin, celiac, and allergy concerns by taking it out of their kitchen, but were also seeing major improvement in their two children who had sensory based learning differences and/or hyperactivity. I mentioned it to my brothers, and though the notion was initially rejected, they both have become avid gluten-free eaters and have felt better for it. I have been "gluten-reduced" for 4 years now, and have always done full gluten cleanses at least twice a year to try and re-set my system. I may never trip the scales on the incredibly expensive test that medically diagnoses gluten allergy, but I know this: when I limit myself to one serving of gluten a day my energy level and concentration level go up, my skin issues and allergies are decreased. Not eliminated - it's not magic. But I'm less reactive.

It is harder to eat gluten free on a budget - fact. I do better than many because Boulder is pretty much the gluten-free (GF) capitol of the world, but replacing normal every-day items with GF ones is often expensive. I do my best to just take bread out of the equation most days, and have found a good source of oatmeal and rice cakes, that are not certified GF, but hav no wheat products or "natural flavorings" (the bane of anyone trying to track down hidden sources of gluten) in them. But when it comes to things like pizza, waffles, beer, bagels, and my person mainstay - low calorie snack bars (think nutri-grain or cliff bar type items) a person can easily spent $6 - $8 on the GF equivalent of something that for everyone else costs $2.99. So, I admit it - although I'm basically not a bread eater anymore and there is plenty of rice at my house, I need to meter my other carbs a little better. Or, you know, get a job and start being able to put the 8 GF items I enjoy back on my grocery list.

And, now, for the first time in the illustrious history of this blog (ha!) I will make an inside joke for my bestest friend everst's benefit. Rob, I need some FOCUS.

Mirrors and potholes

I have a friend who recently was incarcerated.

It shocks even me to write this, so I imagine this is news to any of my readers.

He is not just my friend - more like an adoptive big brother. He and his wife took me in when I was lost and lonely. They may not have realized that's what they did, but that's how I remember it.

I arrived in New Jersey for grad school attached to someone. And suddenly that whole situation changed and with it, my living arrangements, my feelings about relocating from one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been, to one of the meanest. And about three weeks after that I was diagnosed with a very serious and complicated illness. So, then not only alone, but scared and alone and pretty miserably unhealthy.

Some months later a series of weird coincidences brought me into a karate school of all places. And within a week I knew I was hooked. I had zero natural ability for the sport but I was fascinated and determined. I was also sick and hoping to do what I could do to feel better. So I kept going. As the months went by I had treatments and medical procedures, I had good days and bad days, I had care packages from my best friend from college, and homework, and tests, both academic and medical, but I also had karate classes, growing confidence, and a better handle on what it felt like to feel powerful and safe as I walked through my new world. (Which, for me, as a young woman who had experienced some  violence, was a pretty significant change in my outlook and sense of security.)

The routine I settled into was to go to class on Monday and Wednesday, and so I would pack my lunch and dinner, show up for classes, cross the river to head to the lab on the north side, do some research, and then head to the karate school . . . because it was time consuming to cross back and forth over the bridge. So I'd go to the dojo about an hour early, change, and ask permission to microwave my dinner. I'd sit and watch the pre-teens and teens work out, and think about what it would take for me to get to that level of technique. It only took about a week of this before a tiny little brown baby girl (she was almost 3, but talked like a 6 year old, and was small enough to look like she was still entering toddler-hood) walked directly up to me and said, clear as a bell, "That smells good. Can I have some?" I asked her mother, and discovered her mother was my Sensei's wife, and we all agreed roasted veggies or rice and beans were good food. That's how S brought me into this family. Sharing dinner with S became them wanting to share lunch with me . . . on Shabat. And that became babysitting. Babysitting became them thinking, "If we trust her with our kids, we can probably trust her with other people's kids. And that became them expanding the Kinder Karate program and adding me as a new instructor.

Over time, I stopped just working for them, and started working with them, and, additionally, being part of the family. I would help with things as disparate as bathing kids, moving the dojo, teaching karate, writing lesson plans, covering birthday parties, setting the table for Shabat, making salad, and saying prayers with the daughters and mothers. After a couple of years, it actually became an expectation that I would bring fruit to Shabat and to other holidays, and for certain holidays it was routine for me to help out with the preparation of certain dishes. I spent almost every Friday night at the Shabat table saying prayers, eating dinner, drinking shots, discussing (read: questioning. Asking questions is not at all considered rude or disrespectful to belief in the Jewish belief system. In fact, it's considered a responsibility of that faith) Torah, and telling tales of the karate school that week, teasing and being teased for four straight years.

Family. Plain and simple.

Ask yourself this - if someone in your family went to jail, would they still be part of your family? Of course, the answer is yes. At least if you're me, it is.

When my friend was first accused of this infraction, I actually never even wasted time asking if he did it, or anything like it. I knew everyone involved, knew the politics, and knew my friend's heart. There is just. no. way.

But, can I say this? Even if he had done it, he's still my family. And his family is still my family. I still love him, and them. And so even if we, the extended family and loved ones of my friend, really thought he did this, I think we would still be struggling with the same question: how could this happen to the generous, funny, sometimes-difficult-but-also-eye-opening person we loved and what can we do to be part of the good person and worthwhile objectives we knew him for?

Having indulged me to say the above, I will also admit to you that it's much, much easier for me to arrive  at that place because of my certainty that he was not involved in this crime.

So, I ask myself a lot of tough questions when I think about him and my family :

• What do people say about him to his kids?
• What do his kids know or understand?
• What must it take for his wife to get up every day and keep going, knowing that everything is, and always be different, knowing that it's all on her to keep her family safe and healthy at the moment.
• Why does accusation equal guilt and responsibility in the court of public opinion?
• As someone who believe victims of violating crimes should speak up and be heard, and not treated EVER as having been at fault for what happened to them, what kind of stance can I take on the fact that sometimes people do lie about this and have other goals beyond telling the truth
• What does it mean to plead guilty to a crime you didn't commit? What did it take for him to stand up in court and agree to that?

Some of this is why I've been working on this post since December 14th (for reference sake . . . t-minus one week before losing my job). That was the last time I spoke to him on the phone, knowing he had already plead guilty, and knowing he would be facing sentencing and leaving his family in two days. His family threw a Chanukah party, and family and friends came from all over to celebrate, and have a moment to love and support my friend and his family.

Another good friend had tipped me off, and I was able to call and talk to my friends for about an hour before the party got too loud, too busy, too much. And we did what we do best - we talked deep.

Of course, there are some obvious lessons to this. For one, however angsty I am feeling about unemployment, and the prospect of re-creating my life from the ground up, things could be worse. That's the gimme. That's not a reach as something to keep in mind.

The other thing this has caused me to dwell on is what justice means. My dear friend being faced with losing his home, business, and life as he knows it, for a possibly longer jail sentence vs. saying he did something he didn't do and accepting 1-3 years inside, isn't what I thought of as just. But in the same way that someone being acquitted doesn't mean their innocent, my friend pleading guilty doesn't mean he is. What I said to him when we talked that night was, "Hashem (God) knows the truth. And your real friends do too."

To a lot of us, justice is about acknowledging, or righting a wrong, or the administering of a punishment or reward in order to partially give back something which was taken. But justice is also defined as morality, or adherence to a moral code, just conduct, or rightfulness or lawfulness. It's lawful that he's in jail, in that the law provided for him to plead guilty, and he did. But it's not right. It's not moral, to me, that those were the choices he faced. But, it was a moral choice for him to not spend years putting his family through this.

What I've thought a lot about is that our court system isn't really about justice so much as it is about applying laws(often imperfectly). In general, when things get taken into a court room or trial, things have already failed deeply enough that they can't really be recovered. A really smart lawyer once shared with me, "In my experience, people are rarely satisfied with a legal resolution to their problems." Honestly, it was really easy for me to understand that from the complainants perspective before, but I also now know that it applies to defendants. It's all so easy for us to hear about someone hauled into the police station for hurting someone, or accused in court of something really violating, and assume that if they were accused they did it. But hey, one out of every nine times we sentence someone to die in this country WE'RE WRONG. We're so wrong, DNA proves that we're wrong. (I like what this speaker says. If airline pilots were wrong this often, if pharmaceuticals were distributed in error 10% of the time - we would never accept it as a society. But we accept it in our legal system. Crazypants) If our justice system has this much injustice built into it in crimes where the burden of proof is so much higher not just for trial, but for sentencing, then how often are we wrong for "lesser" crimes?

And what do those errors mean for real people? For my friend it means 1-3 years of not being there for his wife and kids. Of not earning money. Of not voting or being a citizen. And it means a lifetime of people assuming that if he was accused, he must be guilty, and worse, with an irrefutable criminal and prison record following him to help people to that conclusion.

But I've also spent some time thinking about something he and I started to talk about that Chanukah night. He said, "There are people that are mirrors for us. and I just want to stay grateful for the people who have held up that mirror for me and kept me honest, kept me walking towards what's good in me. And there are potholes. They can slow us down, but they only stop us if we let them. I just need to remember that every day in there. I'm still me. And I appreciate so much you saying that my real people know the true truth. I hate the idea that people think of me as a scum bag. And I need to remember that I get to choose whose opinions I care about. I get to choose my mirrors, if not my potholes."

Of course, he and I haven't spoken since then. I hope in 12-36 months to sit at his Shabat table, drink some shots, and talk about this topic with a lot of heart, and attention, live. And in the meantime, we write. Nearly every week. and this is often the theme. I mean, he also tells me about his friends on the inside, how inmates make wall hooks for pictures, and trading for apple peels or playing basketball. But we also talk a lot about his faith, about his attitude, about his understanding of what this means to him. In his first letter he said, "It's not that I'm happy to be in prison, it's that I'm choosing to be happy while I'm in prison."

More recently, he reminded me that not everything is good, but that we can always choose to get good out of it, to work the bad together into a good. It's a little humbling to be sitting on my comfortable couch, with all the wall hooks I need, being reminded this by my friend in jail. Mostly, I'm proud of him and hope that his heart can stay this strong, and positive.

I need to believe that the bad can be worked for our good. If he can do it, there is certainly hope for me too.

Pain

I'm in a little pain today. My knees have been hurting, and that has had some implications for my workouts, but mostly, I've accepted that this is what my knees do. Allowing pain to determine what I can do would mean to give up doing a lot of things I like. So, I go do them and keep a steady supply of ice packs in my freezer. I also have blisters on the soles of my feet, but this is not too awful either.

Today I'm in pain because it's my dad's birthday.

I'm not sure why this bothers me more than other meaningful days. I could get really sad on the anniversary of his death, and often, I do get a little introspective but not usually anything approaching full sadness.  It's possible that because I've attached some other things to that date, that August 9th and 10th mean different things to me now. I intentionally chose to start and end my Flickr 365 days photo project on these dates and so I think about my dad. I think about the hospice nurse coming to the house twice that night - once shortly before midnight, and then again, just a couple hours later. But I also think about managing to finish taking a self portrait every day for 365 unbroken days despite personal issues, a crazy work schedule, not one but two knee injuries, and a knee surgery RIGHT before finishing. I emptied that day out, and refilled it with triumph and closure and accomplishment. I could be bothered over Thanksgiving and Christmas, because I don't have the option to spend those holidays with my father anymore.

You'd think Father's Day would be the problem but, instead, it's this day, every year, that lurks and looms and makes March very problematic for me. I have taken to writing this day on my calendar, as if I'd forget. This is one of the vestiges of my relationship with my dad. I also kept his phone number in my phone (which is just silly, because his phone number was the phone number I grew up with and is imprinted on my DNA at this point. Keeping it in my phone isn't about remembering the number, of course, since I wouldn't need to use the phone number anyways. It's because taking him out of my phone feels wrong). I can't seem to listen to Dire Straits without laughing and then feeling melancholy. And, I write this date in each year, "Dad's Birthday" in the same way that my calendar is marked for "Rob's birthday" as a reminder to send a card or do whatever I do because I think birthdays are the best (mine, yours, everyone's - love birthdays).

There isn't anywhere to send a card. I can't pick up the phone and call my dad (using the number I've known since I knew there were phone numbers in the world) to say happy birthday. I can't make a plan to celebrate his birthday with him. I can't call my brother and see if he wants to join forces for a lunch, a present, anything. Why is it on my calendar? Because not putting it there makes the day feel even worse to me.

On March 26th, it doesn't matter if I'm working, or if it's the weekend. It doesn't matter if I'm alone, or with people. It doesn't matter if I drive up into the mountains or lie flat on my back on the couch and stare at the open canvass of my ceiling. It doesn't matter if I eat chicken and brussel sprouts or if I try to numb out with some really bad carbs. All I can think of is how, somehow, I was the only person who knew on his last birthday that it was his last birthday.

It was actually a great day, but with my moving cross-country two months later, and him going so severely down hill two months after that, it was the last time I got to do a family celebration of any kind with him. And the fact that it was for him made him that much more excited and pleased. We had a great day, but in a place that was nowhere near the back of my mind, I knew with deep certainty and some not insignificant sense of peace, that there wouldn't be another birthday with him, and that that almost surely meant we had already had our last Thanksgiving, Christmas, . . . I drank a shot with him and my brother and thought, "I hope this day is good enough to count for everything we won't have."

I think that there are days that I tell myself that death is part of life, and that I can live with that. And there are days that I tell not only myself, but others too, that if he hadn't died, we might not have gotten to the place we got to in our relationship . . . that it took to the end for my dad to be really honest, open, and to tell me what he loved about me in a way I believed it. And there are days where I am very relieved that he's not struggling, in pain, or fighting the demons he dealt with long before the cancer.

But I don't ever have those days on March 26th. On this day I am struck that I'm supposed to somehow be ok with 25 years of what can only be described as troubled and dysfunctional love with my dad followed by 2 weeks of him sharing under what can only be described as enormous pressure. On this day I can't help but think how sad it is that he never met his grandchildren, and that he'll never meet my future-and-hypothetical kids. On this day it's a little heartbreaking that he'll never see any of us get married. On this day I remember drinking that shot with him, but I also remember calling my Jewish family the morning after he died to make sure that when they were drinking wine that night on Shabat that they would change the prayer they had been saying for him and not waste it.

I was lucky today to spend the day with a smart, sensitive, interesting 10 year old and all-around cool kid. My friend thinks I gave her 6 hours of not struggling with what to do with him on spring break, but in reality she gave me 6 hours of talking about karma (with a 10 year old!! See, he is REALLY cool), helping him practice photography, getting some sunshine, and comparing thoughts on the pros and cons of being an oldest sibling. But . . . I have to then be at home and face the fact of this day.

Pain is there to keep us safe. And I know, in that way, pain is healthy. But on this day, pain doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I knew Knew KNEW that he was dying (maybe before he did), and I didn't just tell myself I was ok with it, I really was. But on this day, nothing feels exactly right because 4 years ago shots and salads and lazy conversation did have some unexpected rightness.

So, there it is. I have been writing all week, and unable to finish anything because this date has been clouding up a lot of things for me. A friend who also lost her father asked me a couple of months ago, "How long is it normal to grieve?" I said something ostensibly wise about how grief has no set timeline. I said that we all go through life with a collection of people we think we can count on, and when one goes missing, we can't expect that hole to not be a wound, and one that throbs. I told her however she felt her grief and sadness was "normal." And all of that is more easily said than done.

This is it for me. This 24 hours.

Brothers and Sisters

I talk a lot about my friends. My friends are amazing and make me truly one of the luckiest people I know. In a lot of important ways, my friends run deep in my blood the way family does for some other people. I am often stunned at the amount of love and support my friends give away and direct to me. I hope everyone has the kind of friends who will offer a guest room in a time of need, who will accept their boyfriend even when he isn't that nice, who will bend over backwards to visit. I hope so. I know that I am remarkable though, in that when I found myself grieving two different people and all alone in a place where I knew, literally, no one, one friend quickly offered, "I can come out if you need me," and another friend pushed, "Call me if you decide to move back and need a driving companion." (Not my family, though I a lucky to have a brother who said," If I ever see the guy who did that no amount of karate will save his ass.") This seems like a happy accident to me. A windfall.

I learn so much from my friends, and that is not an accident. I pick and choose people by who fascinates me. Who makes me laugh? Who kills me at Scrabble? Who shows me a way to look at things I don't achieve on my own? Who has a skill set I can't even imagine? Who flies a plane, makes cheese from scratch, can take my computer apart and put it back together, who knows art history or poli sci? Who can play the guitar with such shocking perfection that it makes me feel feelings I can't describe? Who makes me laugh until my sides hurt even when I'm in super serious Depressio mode?

Now that I'm at a certain age, it's rare to find many of my friends who don't have children and families that they are busily building on their own (I actually can count on one hand those people and for many of them it is by choice). I actually recently realized that somewhere in the last two years, I crossed an invisible line. When I was 32 and dating I encountered a few people who had been married or had kids. Now, it's everyone. This, more than all the weddings and baby showers I've bought gifts for are the sure sign that building new families is the business of being 30 something.

Of course, this means considering the families we all came from, or at least it does for all of my friends as they try to enter into this with their eyes open. I've been thinking a lot about this for the last month, for a lot of different reasons. And then I came across this TED talk. Let's all acknowledge that TED talks are pretty cool. Not all of them are my personal cup of tea, but they are all well done and thought provoking. I typically watch about 2 or 3 of them a week because it reminds me of the lunch series my grad department used to have a couple of times a month, or better yet, the "donuts and discussion" group the grad students did. Smart, smart people sharing their well detailed outlook, and yet not hours and hours long. Just enough to give you a taste and make you want to learn more.

I urge you all to listen to this talk as it may persuade you to think beyond the surface of your family. But, I'll say a few things about this talk by Jeffrey Kluger to set up some of my thoughts. He speaks powerfully for the fact that siblings color our lives profoundly, and that this relationship can be significantly defining in positive or negative directions.

"There may be no relationship that affects us more profoundly; that's closer, finer, harder, sweeter, happier, sadder, more filled with joy or fraught with woe than the relationship we have with our brothers and sister. there's power in the sibling bond," he says.

I have lived this. My happiest memories as a child revolve around hilarious or close moments with my brothers (please to note: I am not leaving out my sister here as a cut on her. We didn't grow up in the same house so my bond with her comes from a different place than playing Legos or dress up). I have significantly sentimental memories of long car trips, catching sand crabs, of building forts, of jumping on the beds in a vacation cottage by the beach, and, for some reason, of watching Star Trek with them one summer and realizing that as the oldest, it was my job to read the subtitles for them.

But some of my worst childhood memories are of brutal and vicious fights, of cruel things we did to one another, of being locked out of their room or locking one of them out of mine, of putting a CD in the microwave, of being pushed into a tree, concussions, or having toys sadistically dismembered. I'm sure I deserved this as much as every big sister, and more than many.

What stands to reason is that since my brothers were and are (and my sister now also joins in this) my peers in the family, they and I have an advantage of sharing each others' stories in a way our parents never can or could. We lived the same life, in the same house, growing up with much the same lot in life (though my youngest sibling and I not too long ago realized that in some ways we grew up in different families with different parents because the foundation of all of those relationships changed so radically when my parents divorced . . . which happened just as I left for college.) 

I'm not surprised that Kluger says,"The sibling bond can be a thing of abiding love. Our parents leave us too early, our spouse and our children come along too late - our siblings are the only ones who are with us for the entire ride. Over the arc of decades there may be nothing that defines us and forms us more powerfully than our relationship with our brothers and sisters."

I've written poems about this. It's possibly one of the most difficult connections I try to maintain and understand, but when it works, it is . . . well, it makes me feel my rough edges smooth out in a way that happens maybe nowhere else in my life.

I once wrote this piece of . . . something:

I miss them as often as I forget them,

When we are apart, I have to make whole cloth

Without them.

I discount them as often as I believe we

Three were once

Mistaken for triplets, sharing

Toys and triumphs as easily as we doled out

Fists or french fries.

The memories don’t blur, but the

Bright sharpness of elbows pressing against me reminds

Me suddenly of things I have shelved

and rarely dusted off.

(It is what it is as a piece of a poem I once wrote, good, bad, or blahhh, but it is also very, very true)

I believe in siblings. I believe they see me as no one else does, and so maybe I not only get to see them in that special light, but also borrow it and see myself differently through them. I also believe in siblings because as adults we've been able to come together to share some bigger than big things. Happy things that would have been less fun without them, sad things that would have been miserable or impossible without them. What would I have done if I couldn't turn to my sister and my brother when it came time to take care of a dying parent? What would happen if I stood alone in my family?

None of this, of course, is to say that our relationships are idyllic, or even as well knit as I sometimes wish they were. We've all had long moments of ignoring the others. When it has been my turn to do that I've sloshed back and forth between guilt and defiance. When I'm "in" and someone else is "out" I feel angry and hurt by their actions. So, the accidental bumps and bruises of riding in the back seat of the station wagon aren't that different from Kluger's assertion that our siblings are along for the ride, even as adults. I've been there for my siblings when I could and when I realized it was important, and whether that was showing up at wrestling matches, one strange afternoon spent sunbathing on the back deck with Chad hours before he graduated high school, or picking up my nephew from the airport, that's what it means. And they've been there for me. My sister brought her sister here and took me into the mountains. I will never forget that my brother Geoff drove up to my college graduation on the same Saturday as his prom, knowing he would have to immediately leave and drive 2 hours back to put his tux on.

But it's not all sunning ourselves and sand crabs, right? There's birth order, favoritism, and what Kluger calls de-identification to consider, and all of those played important roles in our house . . . though maybe not in exactly the expected ways in all cases. Here's the idea - evolution for most animals is to raise one or a very few babies at a time. Some mothers will do this by booting a smaller egg out of the nest (Crested Penguins), or letting hatchlings literally tear each other apart (Black Eagles). Humans aren't so different when we're competing for attention and resources by trying to discover our strongest selling points and hitting on them early, and often. Siblings have to de-identify with one another because if one is a talented artist, the next can pursue art for less than half of the attention the first artist in the family got. We have to differentiate to be worthy and to garner all of the attention in one area, is the idea. "Someone's the funny one, someone's the pretty one, someone's the smart one, someone's the athlete."

Pause. Beat. Pause.

I don't know about all of your families, but this was actually literally spoken out loud in mine. In a hospital room, about 10 days before my dad died. "Chad's the charmer athlete, and Geoff is the funny one. Camille is my southern belle. And Christie? She's the smart one." All of this is ironic and scientifically fascinating all at once. First, I will note some things carefully. None of us is only that one thing that was named. My brother the charmer is also he of a genius IQ, a Midas touch for seemingly almost any pursuit be it gourmet food, music, or writing, and he is and has ever been a gifted athlete. My brother the comedian is actually phenomenally smart and possessed of a singular perspective and a voice to tell it, despite not being interested always in academics. He has amazing determination and resolve, and this combined with his natural gifts have turned him into a fierce and accomplished mixed martial arts fighter. My sister the southern belle is an undeniable beauty, imbued with both the genteel southern coating, and the steel rod for a spine underneath. She is funny, warm, loving, forgiving, smart, spontaneous, sophisticated, scientific, and has a gift for feeling people out. It's not surprising that she is a truly talented nurse.

Now, it's interesting that Chad pinned so much of himself in athletics, because, well, I couldn't. Asthma, bad knees, and lets face it, I'm just not that swift or graceful aside from all those things! Meanwhile, Chad has so many gifts, he could've claimed "smart one." Actually, all my life what I heard was, "Chad and Geoff are gifted, despite some of their learning differences. But Christie . . . well she's such a hard worker." Which isn't exactly the same as being the "smart one," is it? (You could've knocked me over with a feather in that 2008 hospital room when that was said out loud) Meanwhile, in this tangled web of what I couldn't be (umm, I sucked at soccer, and I couldn't please by playing football, cello. It remains a crappy sports gender inequality) if working hard was my most pleasing trait, you bet your boots I was going to market the heck out of it. I wonder which came first - Chad being charming and athletic because I was pursuing an academic life at an early age, or me giving up on sports because it was never going to catch the eyes and therefore claiming school since it was what was left?

Whereas our youngest sibling being the "funny one"  . . . well, to be clear, he is. His tongue is sometimes barbed, but never unamusing. And this bears out exactly with expected birth order. The youngest or smallest has to develop "lower power strategy" (what a terrible phrase for that. It sounds like "Developing nation." So condescending). The idea here is that the littlest one has to make people laugh so they don't lock him in a closet (though I regret to admit, we did this so often that Geoff thought it was a game and used to bring the rope to us!) or belt him. If s/he can charm and disarm and work their way into the hearts of people, they'll be better provided for than if they fight for what they need and lose an unfair battle. So, it isn't surprising that Geoff is, truly, the funny one. What's remarkable is that he is so much more than that, and does fight so hard for what he wants . . . and wins!

This is perhaps one of a large cascade of things about my family that breaks the mold. I won't go into all of it here, but suffice it to say that there are good and hard things about the ways in which birth order was true in our upbringing, and good and hard things about the ways in which it was not true. I can't speak for everyone else, you understand, just for me.

The next fact was really, stop-me-in-my-tracks, stunning. Favoritism isn't just a joke that we've had in my family for years. It's not just my mom buying each of us a t-shirt one Christmas saying "Mom's favorite." It's real and has been investigated. There is evidence suggesting that 70% of fathers and 65% of mothers exhibit a preference for one child over another or others, and that often it's a different child for each of those parents. Some of this is influenced, perhaps, by birth order and gender, but some of it may be better predicted by what that parents values are. Well, I won't say anything about who is who's favorite in my story, but I will say that in a family of two parents, and three children, that means that someone is necessarily and mathematically left out at all times. I don't know that it was me; what I do know is that it's interesting that I wasn't making it up when I was heard to say recently, "There's not enough to go around in a family of three children. Two sounds good to me."

But if the question isn't who does this, just who does this in observable ways, then I wonder . . . is this an argument for only-children? I know that Kluger wants us all to see our siblings as the people who helped us learn to develop relationships in ways that impact us over and over in our lives. And I'm not sorry for mine. Hey, I wish my jewelry box didn't get chucked into the heater, making it impossible to retrieve my earrings. But I'm sure my brothers wish I hadn't been such an insufferable know-it-all. I'm not sorry I have them, or the addition of my sister. My therapist put it this way when we discussed my family for other reasons, "If you could change it, how would you be different and would you be giving up things you like about you." Umm, yes. Overwhelmingly. I'm a bothersome, bossy, know-it-all but I like that I can devour information and take it with me. I also like that people can count on me to get things done.

And, I would add, and have already written deeply about this, the facts of my family are these - there was love, but not without issues, and what that has meant for me is that I learned early, I learned profoundly, how to make my way outside of my family. How to not just strike out on my own, but to get wherever I was going and make for myself in that place another family to count on. There is a very real way in which I might not have the friend-families I am so often awed by if I hadn't had the bio-family I was sometimes disappointed by. I wouldn't give that up. I just wouldn't.

But, when I think of getting ready to plan kids that I want to raise, I'm no longer as sure that two is the magic number. I have a friend who recently decided to NOT have more children. She has a daughter that she loves magnificently, and when she told me this, she admitted it was "selfish." She said she felt she was supposed to give her child a sibling, and I countered that bringing a child into the world not for the fact of him or herself, but to do a job for her firstborn wasn't healthy either. Finally, what she said was, "It's a crap shoot though. I could have another child and they could be close, or I could have another child and they could care less about each other. " Yes . . . and, I would add, all of the reasons she has decided that doing another year of pregnancy, followed by a year of tending to an infant are not what will make her blissful and glowing shouldn't be discounted. When parents are happy, and stable and feel comfortable with the life they're making for themselves, they are undeniably more able to provide content, stable homes for their children. This much I know from my view outside of the parent circle.

All of this is a moot point for me, at this stage, because I am who I am and trying to turn back the clock even as a mental exercise, yields little reliable information but it makes much more deeply interested in the decisions my friends make about kids and building their families, and in the argument for siblings being the other pieces of yourself vs. never having to fight with them in the first place.

Maybe the point is this: my parents were, in a moment that held a world of pressure and lightheartedness all at once (it's impossible to describe the conversations that happen when someone is dying, or how you find yourself in those conversations. It just is.) able to boil each of us down to one, succinct characteristic. They stand in front of us, and for so long, above us knowing us by making choices for us and seeing what came of them. We know each other on a playing field where we all see each other level. Our parents were the soccer coaches, but we were the players. There were different roles in that game, but because I stand level with my brothers and my sister I can see them differently, and as more than one thing. We're all smart. We're all funny. We aren't all athletes, but hey, I'm sorry, I can't be good at everything. (It should be enough that I make award winning soup!) To be sure, we have different gifts and struggles, but there is more of us that is alike, as a unit, than different. Someday my sister and I will talk about being mothers together, and my brother will walk me down the aisle, while the other walks with my mother. I can't deny the power of those relationships, the shared stories are powerful alone.

But, it doesn't change the unanswered question of what I am capable of as a parent. I can't assume I would escape the statistics and manage to somehow not damage my kids through favoritism. It is true that I am often a 1% case when it comes to how medical knowledge understands this person we call Christie, but let's be honest - psychologically it's not hard to trace my path, eh? I suppose, much like my friends who have recently had children, I would have to see how that all plays out. Maybe, like my friend above, I'd discover that having parts of my pre-child lifestyle back were more crucial than raising a second child. Maybe like my other friend I would arrive, within three months, to the conclusion of, "I love this child so much it's indescribable. And, I'm also not a stay at home mom."

Because I really almost certainly can't have children, these choices are unlikely to be thrust on me suddenly by biology. I stand apart, able to consider the logistics of when and how to raise children and bring them into my home, and can probably even choose, to some degree, who they will be and where they will come from. It's a specialized vantage point when considering future parenthood. So, when Kluger puts forth that siblings are the dress rehearsal for your life what I think is, "not having siblings is just a different rehearsal for a different show."

Ok, before I close out, let me say this to all my many, many mommy friends. Whatever moments of favoritism have been in your house or not been in your house, please don't be offended by this. I know you all love your babies in ways I can't possibly fathom. I've seen it in action. I also know better than perhaps anyone else that how you act may or may not match up to every feeling you feel at any given moment. Just think about this talk and this book, that's all.

"It will be ok"

Somehow I managed to convince myself that I was ok with all of this through Christmas. And then my mom left, and my act dropped (hard). I put my best face on when I flew to Boston, but in that week there were countless conversations about my severance agreement, COBRA insurance, and finally, at what point the money will run out and I will have to leave Colorado (and move in with them). Reality became very real that week. And this last topic settled over me like an Eeyore cloud. I can joke all the day long about moving into someone's basement, but the reality is, I might not be able to make it through this on my own.

Scratch that. I already can't do this on my own. I needed help to understand my severance. I needed help from not one, but two different friends to polish my resume and cover letter. I needed a ride to and from the airport and I need almost daily reminders to stay positive and see my lay off as an opportunity. A chance to find my way to a better me.

But, the thing is, it's painful for me even to ask for those kinds of help.

I have lived life, for too long probably, as my own unit. I take care of me. And although there have been wonderful examples of people doing amazing things for me (some that they don't even know!) there have been some very memorable pieces of evidence that when I let someone in and start to count on them, they let me down. So taking care of myself, as much as possible, has seemed like the best policy for most of my life. This has been true for me, financially, for half of my life but has been true in other ways for longer than that. I left home more completely than most do when I left for school. And I also took the responsibility for the financial burden of that education at that time. So I count that as the moment of my independence. But the truth is that before that, I had been on my own in other ways. I had more financial responsibility than my peers, if not total financial independence. And I had other responsibilities too. I often found myself in conversations with adults where it became clear I was the grown up in the exchange, and I had had to be much more emotionally self-sufficient than I want my future, hypothetical children to have to be. I wasn't unloved, or uncared for, but some of the resources available to me were impoverished.

In much the same way that working too much to pay some of my bills in high school paved the way for me to know how to work four part time jobs in college at any given time, not having the ability to get what I needed at home paved the way for me to make families of the other people in my life. This the the blessing that was disguised in my first home and it's discontent - it taught me to get my needs met elsewhere. In high school I was part of a very tight group of five friends. We shared everything with each other, and looked after each other in deeper ways than most teenagers do. And these many years later, I am in touch with all of them, and one of them is the family member I visited in Boston. The very same one who initiated a conversation about me moving in if it comes to me not being able to make it on my own. Stick a pin in that - we'll be back to it.

This was the beginning of a long trend for me. Pretty much everywhere I go, I find myself joining other people's families or making ad hoc ones of my own. I have not one but two non-biological families in New Jersey, which was a place I did everything I could to reject on the cellular level for a full quarter of the time I was there! I went through a terrible break-up with my fiance after moving here to Colorado, but found that his best friends of more than two decades were more than happy to keep me in their family, even as he refused their overtures of support. I have family in NY, Texas, Seattle, Virginia, Illinois, Florida, Oklahoma, Connecticut, and Maine. And I have friends here in Colorado that are reaching out in ways that tell me that if I'm not yet in their family circles, they certainly think I'm worthy of their time and care.

I shouldn't be surprised that people want to offer their help, but I am. And I'm not only humbled by it, I'm . . . embarrassed to need to even talk about accepting it, much less actually take someone up on it. It makes my skin prickle to ask for a ride to the airport. It makes my insides ache to ask someone to help me tune up a cover letter. So what wound will come of needing financial help?

But the truth is, there is a very finite window, dictated almost entirely by the amount of my severance, that allows me to continue to be financially independent while job hunting.

Having to borrow money or move in with someone seems to me like the very worst thing that could ever, ever come of this. But it's a little silly to realize that I have helped other people in this way. (I had someone I didn't even know all that well living with me for a month while he found his feet in the summer of 2009. and another person was given a place to stay for three weeks later that year.) And I would do it for any of my family members (where family is a broad term for me) in a heartbeat - something my friends and family have hastily reminded me for every form of help that has been offered. My first instinct is to reject people's offers of help. My second instinct is to keep rejecting it. And my third instinct is to logically remind myself that it is my pleasure to help others, especially my friends and family, and that denying their offers is a way of being selfish. I had this conversation with my ex so many times, and in so many ways that even I am tired of hearing myself on this subject. How many ways are there to say, "People weren't meant to do everything on their own?" or "Doing it on your own isn't working." or "You push people away and hurt them when you won't let them help."

Well, there are at least 6 months worth of different ways to communicate this message because that's how long he and I have been having this conversation. So, there was a cruel symmetry when he, last week, pointed out that maybe the lesson I need to learn from this is to accept help and let people hold me up.

I wanted to slap him (just a little), but really, what I wanted was to stop myself from having to hear or face up to those words. He didn't say it unkindly. And he's not wrong. I just don't want this to be true. And it had been resounding in my head since my bestest friends had set a date with me to draw a line of trying to make it on my own with the formula of:

waning severance/savings + part time work + unemployment = not making ends meet and no full time job in sight


That line was drawn at an alarmingly soon date and calculated on the basis of numbers. I'm hoping for a different outcome and aiming for it by a rigorous job search.

I've had a deal with whatever universal powers there are for 15 years now. It goes like this, "I know I was made in such a way that I can't take prescription pain killers. Fine by me. Clearly, with the substance abuse issues in my family history, this is a good thing for me. So, just don't give me pain I can't handle on my own. "

This deal has worked, surprisingly. It has worked with countless broken toes, and a broken foot. It worked with a car accident resulting in a hairline fracture of vertebrae in my neck. It worked when my impacted wisdom tooth was removed. It worked when I had sinus surgery reconstructing one quarter of the face underneath my face, and two knee surgeries and the injuries that precipitated them.

I feel so lucky to have had that work out so well. So, being who I am, I feel like it's WRONG to ask for more. But I'm trying to overcome my crippling sense of pride to ask for another deal. I want to send out the request that if I am willing to learn the lesson that I can't do everything on my own, and set aside my pride, and accept help people are offering (which, really, has been overwhelmingly awesome. Everything from part time work to sending me job postings to help with my resume and getting it into people's hands to reduced rates on services I was previously paying for. Not to mention several offers of, "come live with me!") could it just be possible for me to learn that lesson without being in such a financial hole that I have to leave the life I built here? Could it be possible for me to keep living on my own?

Deal? Ok, let's shake on it.

My Boston fam told me that inexplicably written on the calendar on a day this year was written, "It will be ok." I have that same phrase entered into my calendar on the day we chose to re-visit me moving in with them.

The giving of thanks

I have four bags of mini-potatoes in my house.

Normally there is just no way that purchasing this many starches and having them here and readily available for munching would be a good idea. But food rules sometimes don't work at the holidays. The dilemma is that if I add up all the holidays, parties, nights out, weddings, baby showers, birthdays, Super Bowls, etc. there are in a year, I'd have to throw in the towel on roughly two months of every 12. I'd have to give up on 1/6th of my year, and then dig myself out of that the other 5/6ths of the time. Not a good plan. For instance, I can't throw out my food rules and good nutrition for all of Christmas and New Years.

The thing is, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. My most favoritest ever. It's not about the food. I mean, it's not NOT about the food (especially since I grew up eating some of the best stuffing and pumpkin pie around at this time of year), but for me, what I like about Thanksgiving is that it's for everyone, equally. Every family has the opportunity to figure out what kind of holiday they want this to be (with maybe one caveat for the families that are subsisting in poverty and not able to make ends meet). A day to watch football? A time for all to gather round the TV and make fun of the parade? A formal holiday with crisp table linens and napkins in laps? A time to name things that everyone is grateful for? All of these are possible ways to bring Thanksgiving into your house. It doesn't matter if you believe in God. And if you do, it doesn't matter if that God for you takes the form of Allah, Hashem, Buddha, or JC. No one has to buy gifts, or figure out of their card is PC enough to fit all situations. There's no wrapping, and no returns. Just people who like each other deciding they want to spend this day together.


To be fair, my mom would point out that for every thing I name that makes this holiday awesome by not having to be done (hanging blinking lights!), she can come up with a task she has had to do to pull this holiday off in style in the past: buying and carrying in a heavy turkey, stuffing it, getting up early, early, early to stuff said turkey and cook it slowly. But since I never cared about the bird or eating it (and then went vegetarian for 12 years) I'm conveniently leaving that part out.

What I like is people who like each other sharing this day in whatever way seems like the best way to appreciate each other and the day. I do like the food, but for me it's more about the relaxation, and as an adult, the true enjoyment of sharing the preparation of food with others. For a couple of years now, I've been unofficially trading Thanksgivings back and forth between my mom's house, and my sister's house. I've enjoyed the differences in traditions and celebrations, the chances to catch up with separate branches of my family, and the food in both places. My mom's Thanksgiving is very much about her working quite a bit to have a very nice meal where everyone sits down at the same time, whoever everyone is. Although we wear jeans, that's relatively new at my mom's Thanksgiving so when she wants me to help lay out a table cloth or set the table, what I remember is the earlier Thanksgivings in my life where I wore dresses and tights. We do still sit down all together and say a blessing, jeans or no. So, I'd say it's a slightly less casual secular Thanksgiving. Not a formal meal by far, but a lot of work is put into presentation nonetheless.

My sister's Thanksgiving is a turkey of a different color. It bears saying that the first time I was there, the whole kitchen was torn up and two saw horses and a particle board were part of a makeshift table we prepared and served food on. So, a little different than the Thanksgiving I grew up with in Connecticut (smile). I remember calling my sister before that first trip to Texas and asking her if she had expectations for what people wear to her Thanksgiving. I laughed when she said she had three expectations about that particular Thanksgiving:

1. That everyone contribute a dish, even her youngest, who at the time was 6.
2. That her husband get the kitchen sink working before the meal (which we were actually having on Friday)
3. That everyone put clothes on and not be in PJs.

I laughed, but it's important to note that there was actually one child on that Thanksgiving who waged a brief and failed attempt to remain in PJs. And yes, the sink went in and got working before the meal . . . just. It was epic. Because everyone had to take turns in the kitchen to prepare food, and because absolutely each and every person at the meal made part of the meal, regardless of their age, other jobs (sink plumbing!), interest in or talent for cooking, it was much more about getting everyone's dishes done than about serving them nicely. I really enjoyed taking the focus away from perfection and presentation and putting it on contribution and collaboration. It made the meal-prep no less time-consuming but very entertaining. The food turned out great (as did the sink) and I noticed how everyone was very excited to eat, check out each others dishes, and see how their dish would be received. I still remember my oldest nephew tossing pecans and marshmallows while making the sweet potatoes (and trading stories about each others siblings. Ha!), my oldest niece talking to me very seriously about green bean casserole, my youngest niece's face when her pumpkin pie came out of the oven, and my youngest nephew asking for help with his chocolate pie. It was a great meal.

I say that, like I've ever had a bad Thanksgiving meal. (Though that one was particularly memorable, in food as well as in company) I have never liked turkey, though I don't dislike it either. Everything else - delish. I do like cranberry sauce, pretty much any vegetable that is dished up, most mashed potatoes, and let me not understate this, my mom's stuffing is THE BEST. I also need to be honest - I adore pumpkin pie. Over the years I have worked really hard to enjoy these things in moderation. One plateful, not four. More vegetables than anything else on my plate, no need for bread if I'm having stuffing AND mashed potatoes. Drink lots of water. Basic tips like that.

So, I'm excited to try all of this out at a new Thanksgiving table this year. For the first time, I am celebrating a major holiday in Colorado. Since my mom is coming here for Christmas in just three weeks, it seemed silly to buy a ticket and go there for Thanksgiving. Initially I thought I might just spend the day by myself, cook a yummy meal (Risotto and soup crossed my mind. So did nachos. I'm serious. ) and watch movies. That would have been completely fine, but I ended up with a better offer. My very good friend, the same one who invited me for a mini-cation up in Steamboat Springs invited me to her house for the giving of thanks. she's been to enough of my parties to know I can cook, so we kind of skipped over the niceties "oh thanks for inviting me! what can I bring?" and went straight to menu planning. Turkey or pork tenderloin? What kind of pie? Since part of our friendship was forged when we used to work together and I would bring her pumpkin bread, I assumed that it was assumed that I would bring that! So, now that we're just a couple of days away and my recipes are researched I'm getting excited to cook. I did my initial shopping last night (hence the potatoes) and will likely do my final shopping tomorrow morning. Here is what I think I am making:

• Pumpkin soup. This would be my first slow cooker recipe. (sidenote - anyone want to share slowcooker recipes with me?) I'm honestly thrown by how easy the recipe is - it seems like a trick! -  so I've also been looking up a butternut squash soup just in case.
• Pumpkin bread
• Roasted cauliflower
• I will probably also bring roasted brussel sprouts. And my host and hilarious friend is making another veggie. this gives me a chance to fill a plate that is mostly veggies
• Either chocolate chess pie or apple cake. Or BOTH!
• fork mashed potatoes with fresh herbs
  

It's actually funny that I'm making the mashed potatoes. For yeaaaaaaarrrs now, at my mom's it's been my job to ready the potatoes for making. My mom has a a bit of a gross-out ick-factor with washing and peeling potatoes. So, I've always done that, and then boiled and readied them for whipping. This recipe that I'm making this year is not a uniform whipped potato, but rather one with skins, fork mashed so that they're "real" with herbs added for taste. Butter, yes. But with all those flavors, no need for cream. They were a hit with my nieces and nephews so hopefully they'll go over well this year too.

I'm sure this sounds like a lot of food I'm making, overkill even. But thanksgiving is a little about that. My hope is the pumpkin bread will get tucked away by my host as a gift for her (since she has done so much for me). I can't really prepare for this meal without making a dessert. I may not even eat dessert, but making one has always been part of my mindset for this holiday since being three and watching my mom turn out pie-crusts and grease and flour pans. The potatoes and veggies will take me an hour for all three recipes so I'm so not worried about that.

I want to contribute. I want to be an adult helping to make this meal. I'd rather put more time into cooking than eating. I want to say thank you to my friend for giving me a weekend away and for having me for this holiday. And, I think this might be a good way for me to test some recipes and then post them here. (Would readers like that, I wonder?)

So, those potatoes will get made and brought, and left behind. I will not bring them home. They will find a better home with my friend and her family. I will eat protein and veggies, and yes, I will have some carbs too, though I will probably save some for drinking rather than eating them all in a pile of potatoes on my plate.

Final note: in addition to the four bags of potatoes, there is a can of whipped cream in my house. Such an item usually does not survive more than 24 hours despite my best intentions. I am determined it will accompany me to my friend's with no needs to hastily and shamefully replace it on the way to her house so I am writing it here to commit to restraint!