on a moment.

 
This is not the picture or the moment, and yet it is. My wild girl, all her own.

This is not the picture or the moment, and yet it is. My wild girl, all her own.

Watching Melby and the flickering bits of sun through my half-opened eyes feels like something between a memory and a dream. I rarely feel so relaxed as a mother, as I do now, lying horizontal in the warm morning sand, witnessing my girl dig in the quiet inlet to Hendry's beach. She is catching fish with a stick, wading in the shallow water, except the fish are bits of seaweed she carefully lays across the end of her stick and carries back to me, an offering at my feet.

Usually Melby insists I play in some particular fashion; more often she achieves whatever she thinks she wanted, only to ask for the next thing and then the next, but now, in this peaceful moment, she is content for me to lie watching her. I wonder, again, if I am calm for once because she is playing peacefully, or if she is playing peacefully for once, because I am calm.

And I'm sure, really, that both are true. There is no greater evidence of the complex interplay that is all relationships than the parent-child dynamic that can so quickly escalate to a place of stress and anger or so quickly return to something peaceful. Both parties are culpable and both are responding to the other's energetic output.

Over a month into quarantine, I wouldn't say I'm relaxed, but there is some element of suspended reality that allows me to feel slow in ways I don't normally feel slow. And that, in turn, I think has given Melby some peace too.

She is wearing an oversized red gingham swimsuit-- a hand-me-down from one of our generous older girlfriends. At this point, I can't remember what came from whom, but each new thing we uncover is a treasure, filled with even more meaning because it lived a life before now, it is filled with the wisdom of earlier 2 year olds. The suit puffs out around her torso, a little blue bow clipping it all together at her back. Her thighs are starting to tan and she has her first freckle on her right cheek. 

I feel both in awe of this girl and also slightly terrified by how much I love her. I still can't believe she came from my body, and suddenly it occurs to me that she no longer clamors to crawl back inside me. This revelation makes me want to crawl inside her somehow, to stay attached, feel what she feels, see what she sees.

Sagging with the strength of ocean breeze is a  wispy top-knot in her silky hair that doesn't tell the story of the tantrum that went along with it this morning, but I know. I think about it watching her. How I motioned to put a pony in for her, she screamed NO! and as I, choosing my battles, went to put the brush and hair ties away, she collapsed at my feet, immediately sobbing. I asked her to use her words and she unraveled. She wanted a pony but didn't want a pony but didn't want me to remove the option of the pony. 

I look at that tiny knot of hair and for a moment it is all the twists and challenges of motherhood in one-- not just fixing my child's problems, but giving her the space, the language, the ability to recognize them for herself. To name them. So they have less power over her. So she can call them out into the open and either ask for help in solving them or create her own solutions. But then also demonstrating and teaching compassion-- the ability to recognize someone else's challenges and help without being asked, to give freely.

Sometimes I get mired in the details. Everything I do right is some thing I am also doing wrong. Every line I draw I question. I just want to do right by my girl. And often the moments, the days even, are harder in creating a future I think is right for her.

I crane my neck to look at her more clearly, and she shouts, "Lie down, mama!"

She has started calling me "mom"; she must feel, somehow, how much it leaves me gaping, like the space between us is far too great. She is practicing her distance from me. But in this moment, she calls me mama. She is my baby, not a baby at all, and I listen. I lay back, grateful that today, all she wants from me is to be quiet and watch.

And what else do I have to do?

Watch this girl. She is now and she also, somehow, feels like a memory. She feels like forever.

I push my head back into the sand, and keep my eyes loosely tracking my small fisherman, the girl who grew inside me and is now growing me daily in always unanticipated ways. I feel an overwhelming urge to call her into my arms, to beg for a hug, to swallow her up, but just then she runs down the edge of the water, her arms spread out in the wind, her single stick acting as a divining rod for adventure.

She looks back and almost catches my eye, but then, keeps going. 

 

help.

Nic and I have been having the same argument for nearly six years. 

It unfolds in nominally different ways each time, but usually centers around my feeling that he needs to do more around the house/ give better input about meals or activities for the family/ offer me more positive feedback/ be more engaging/ plan dates/ pick up his shit/ something similar. 

I will begin the rest of this by saying, all those things are likely true. Nic's suitcase permanently exploding week-old boxer briefs and airplane packs of mixed nuts across the entryway of every house we've ever lived in is supremely annoying. He has a unique way of rapidly opening every cupboard and jar and making a huge mess in the time it takes me to go pee. He spends a majority of his time at home just looking at his phone; he will never ever ever initiate an out-of-the-house activity; he brings attention to my flaws and insecurities in a matter-of-fact way which I recognize is both only because I  am screaming about them, asking to be noticed, and which is done in a way that is impersonal above all else, if that makes sense. They are just words. But still none of the argument is actually about him.

Because the point is, he is not perfect; we have this same fight; and then at the end of it all, I realize that all I'm fighting about is the fact that I am supremely, totally bored.

I am bored. I am so bored I could just shrink up and die.

And the fact that Nic is not operating is some imagined perfect way is only me noticing how fucking bored I am and projecting it onto his actions.

I know that if I were not so bored, I would look at Nic's pile of chonies by the door and think Good God, this guy is messy and it is annoying af but I would NOT think Nic doesn't respect me or care about how much work I do around the house and this old pair of striped underwear is a direct affront to me as a person and I should probably scream at him until I'm hoarse.

If I had other things to flush out my idea of myself, my interests, my concept of how valuable I am, then the underwear wouldn't be quite so big a deal.

I have sort of known this for years. I have made zero changes to fix it, except I get to the realization a lot faster these days.

Two nights ago, I was moping around the house-- my state of being far, far, far too often these days, and when Nic tried to drag it out of me, whatever it is-- the sickness, the discontent, the source of my malaise, I said, almost immediately, "I just want to be interesting."

This is the point at which many well-meaning people tell me I just moved/ had a baby/ had a baby that last time I had a baby/ whatever other life changes excuse a person's not being knee-deep in new new jobs, recreational activities, and leisure interests. And they would be right.

But that doesn't matter, because if I didn't mind my current lifestyle— if I were content to be moving slow, figuring it out, adjusting— it would be one thing, but I most definitely mind.

I mind. I mind.

I am a horrible stay-at-home mom. I love my girls. I give them so much love; I make them good food; I keep my house clean; I plan fun activities; I create developmentally appropriate spaces and invitations to play; I love being with them. I am good at it on a superficial level. Except I am crawling out of my skin. I am just so motherfucking bored.

I feel like my brain is literally atrophying from not being engaged. I can't remember anything. I feel physically and emotionally unmotivated. I am constantly exhausted.

It's not a baby. It is a spiritual crisis.

I need to get started. I need whatever it is that lights a fire under my ass and inspires me to write or move or dance or plant or grow or whatever else. I need that cascade. I need the energy of movement that begets movement.

Certainly I would like a job at some point. Certainly we need income. But I don't just want something to pass the time. I want something that ignites me. 

And I have literally no idea what that is.

I feel embarrassed writing this in some regard and also, it is so totally me that I feel also assured in doing it. The way I find the resources I need is often by these sweeping appeals. People feel connected to me, to my often blatant misery or lostness, to my self-criticism, my flaws, my worries. People like me, because I am willing to like and listen to them, because I can see a part of myself in literally anyone. And so I often find what I need where I don't expect it. Or, I guess, exactly where I do.

Before I make my big request, that also bears mentioning.

I moved cross country with a newborn and a very demanding 2 year old and I have to say: I did it because people helped me. People came out of the woodwork to hold my kids or take them on walks or to the zoo. An old coworker I hadn't seen in maybe a year or more came to literally pick up a truckload of trash from the alleyway behind my house. So many people brought me food. And wine. And food. People showed up at my house early on a Saturday and helped me pack all my shit away in wooden boxes bound for California. People listened to me rant and constantly asked how I was and gave my heart space and my body space.

I still fell the fuck apart. I was so frazzled and anxious. But I made it here, regardless, and I made it because people helped me and they helped me because I asked and even when I didn't ask overtly, I did with my desperation.

So before I ask for more, thank you. Thank you for being a person, who reads these words and finds some commonality or maybe also just gawks at how transparent/ verbose/ trivial/ whatever I am. If you read the words, I know it's because you relate, somehow. If you take time to be here, it's because you are also me, somehow, and that is true whether you feel solace or judgment in response. Thank you for being that person, either way, because it makes me feel alive. Thank you for being a person, maybe, who offers to help, who says something, who comments, who is part of this. Because what I need, ultimately, is to feel not alone. I need to feel connected, to myself, to the earth, to the people around me, and every bit of that that I get helps. It makes me less bored. It elicits that firing of neurons that makes me someone alive, now, in this world. It makes me human.

That was my aside to say, thank you for being human with me. That is the one thing that happens semi-regularly that makes me feel alive in the exact way I am seeking.

And now, for my request. I need help.

I need to do something. And I don't know what it is.

I'm not asking for a job. I'm not asking to pass the time. I'm asking to move/ do/ learn/ be/ grow/ start. I am a firm believer in the cascade-- how you begin one thing and it can snowball into something lovely you never anticipated. I wish I knew what I were asking for. To kayak with you? To go on a backpacking trip? For you to teach me to knit? To volunteer with you? To have a job in your cafe? To do the writing for your blog? To draw the cartoons for your yoga teacher manual? (This one I've actually done...) I don't know what it is! I don't know what it is. But if there's a spot in your life that needs filling, or maybe even just a spot that has space somewhere near you, consider me.

I wish that could happen organically. But I have gotten too far away from it. I've thought too much and sat too long and fretted too much and now I'm sitting here with nails chewed down to the quick and a raging case of anxiety and what I need a spiritual awakening. 

I hope you understand when I say that. I think many people won't. I think whomever I'm hoping to reach with this will.

Everyone else is walking around summarizing their years in hopeful or resigned words, and all I can think is, whether tomorrow is the first of the year or a debatable decade or just a random Tuesday, I have got to switch shit up. I am dying inside. I feel like a polar bear trying to live in the Sahara. I feel like a butterfly trying to carry a piano. I am just not living right. I am not living who and how I’m supposed to be. I am fighting it and fighting it and have gone so long not doing or being whatever I’m supposed to do or be that I can’t even see straight. I need help.

And I will reiterate, again, this isn't about a job. I'm afraid people will respond and try to get me to do remote clerical work for them.

This is not that. 

Though I'm not sure exactly what it is.

All I know is, I keep saying that I'm lost here. 

But I'm not really. What I am is stripped bare enough of my routines and daily noise to step back and pay attention to how done I am with the life I've been living. 

When whatever transformation comes that I've been waiting for, I honestly don't think I'll look any different. I'll probably still live here. I might still be a stay-at-home mom. Maybe I still won't make any money. But I won't be bored. I won't have to pick the fight. Because I will feel all the ways in which I am valuable and interesting and engaged because I will be living them.

I just have to find out where to start.

If you know, if you know at all, please tell me.

And in the meantime, sorry Nic, for yelling at you about the underwear. It’s not about the underwear.

But also, please, pick them up.

on trusting.

I woke up at 1:30 am, overcome by a wave of nausea, accompanied by several hours of consistent contractions.

This is it, I told myself.

I didn't panic that Nic was gone, that I was alone, that it felt uncomfortable. Instead I felt relieved by its arrival; those tight waves in my belly felt like the most long-awaited friend, and there was something about experiencing them alone in the quiet darkness, atop my freshly washed sheets that felt serene, primal.

While versions of this have been happening intermittently throughout the past two weeks, this time it felt different. I felt like I knew. I timed contractions for a bit, I peed too many times to count, I thought about future phone calls with the pediatrician in which they asked for my daughter's birthdate, in response to which I'd say, 7-27-19. Eventually I coerced myself back into a few stretches of semi-restless sleep, because if Melby's birth and the last two weeks have taught me anything, it is that, despite how exciting things may seem, sleep is of utmost importance.

I allowed myself into a relaxed wakeful time by 6 or so. Nic is flying, but passes through Charlotte twice today-- just a quick 1.5 hour flight home to Louisville from there. We chatted and I said I'd check in at both junctures. I didn't want him to preemptively miss any work, but more so do not want him to miss the birth of our second child. I texted my doula and friend, Erica, not to say anything concrete except, stand by... maybe. I took a shower and went so far as to dry my hair.

Eventually Melby did her morning calls for MOM! and JUICE! from the cracked door of her stuffy room and I went in and scooped her up with the arms of a woman about to gift her with a pristine baby sister. We laughed our usual morning laugh and she nestled her head into my neck, so full of love, and said it again, her whisper of morning adoration, "Juice."

And then, after 6+ hours, the contractions stopped.

Apparently this is normal. Everyone, everything tells me, it is normal.

And yet, as usual, my brain is full of worry, judgment, and doubt.

One of the things I've been grappling with the last few weeks is the belief, the fear that my body doesn't know how to do this. Before Melby was born, I cherished so vehemently the belief that one's body just does the exact right thing, just exactly when it's time. And then, in real life, everything went haywire, and now I'm left with this lingering feeling that maybe my body is just flawed somehow.

I don't believe that really. I don't. And yet it's hovering there, so easily reinforced by a labor that keeps starting but doesn't progress. It's there with all its ugly friends, who say unhelpful things to me about this whole experience.

I have decided, just now, to leave them all here. I am going to get them out, and then, who knows? Erase them. Burn them. Exorcise them.

Here they are:

I am afraid of Nic not being here. I am afraid in a way that has very little to do with logistics, with his body actually being present or not present at the birth, but in a way that his potential absence digs at some deep feeling of loneliness I carry around with me always, that no one is ever close enough, committed enough, loves me enough, thinks I am enough. I am afraid of seeming silly by calling him home too early, asking him not to go back to work for no reason. I am afraid of him not seeing the process and that having some hugely negative implication that I can't even begin to articulate but only exists as a phantom feeling of doom in my body.

I am afraid of the logistics. Afraid of figuring out the timing of when someone comes to be with Melby; I need it to be at the exact moment I need it. No sooner, no later. I don't want to labor with anyone else in the house except Nic, but I also don't want it to be time to leave and not be able to. I'm afraid of not having the right food for Melby, not having left all the information. I'm afraid she'll be asking for a bandaid or toothpaste or that particular lotion and no one will understand and she'll cry both because I'm not here and she's not getting what she wants and my heart will break from just imagining that. I'm afraid of buying too much food and having it go to waste, but also not enough and everyone not having what they need in my absence. I'm afraid of there being laundry in the laundry basket and dirty dishes in the sink. I'm afraid of waiting two more full weeks and losing my goddamn mind.

I'm afraid it will be awful again. I'm afraid my midwife won't be there. I'm afraid I'll be exhausted and unable to own the moment. I'm afraid of how tired and crabby I already am without a newborn to take care of. I'm afraid I won't seem powerful. I'm afraid I will give into fear. I'm afraid my body has no idea how to have a baby. I'm afraid I'll succumb to some preemptive intervention, because I'm tired of waiting and that will throw things off their natural course, create even more problems. I'm afraid of Nic looking at me and thinking I'm weak; I'm afraid of how much I want to impress him in this experience-- I want to seem fierce and clear and capable, so we can both heal from last time.

I'm afraid of looking at myself and thinking I'm weak, not because I think I actually am, but because I've chosen to give in to fear as a way to live my life. I'm afraid this experience is a glaring microcosm of the misery I've chosen as a lifestyle-- one of doubt, of fear, of negative self-talk, of the self-fulfilling unhappiness of all those things. I'm afraid to let go and be something different. I'm afraid of what happens when I give up the narrative of not liking myself, of being "crazy," of suffering. I'm afraid of suffering and I'm afraid of not suffering. I'm afraid of it all being my fault.

I'm afraid of it all being my fault.

That I am miserable right now, because I have a seemingly legitimate excuse to be miserable, and I am diving into it, swimming around in the gory resplendence of an almost universally-accepted reason to complain and stress and drink up attention. I'm afraid of how terribly personal I've made all of this.
So now. Take that. Burn it. Rip it up. Incinerate it. For the love of God, MOVE ON.

Because it all might be true, it all might be valid, it all might make sense, but it is getting. me. nowhere. It is definitely not getting this baby out of me.

Which leads me to something I've been thinking a lot about lately. As I've been calling it: the unquantifiables. And by that I mean, I've been thinking about the things we can't list on paper. The things to take into account when everything might seem right, but still it's not right-- you might find the house with every feature and square inch of space you asked for, but it doesn't feel like home. You might choose the job with the most money and prestige and best schedule and benefits, but it doesn't fill your soul. You might find a potential partner who checks every box you could have imagined, but still you don't feel drawn to them.

There are things to be accounted for that we can't often actually count or name. It's come up in many conversations lately. I feel like I'm at this point of trying to button down my life, somehow. Tally it up, see if I've hit all the marks, if I'm doing well. Do we have enough money? Own enough things? Have the right titles? Weigh the right number of pounds? Lift the right amount of weight? Can I check a bunch of boxes to say I'm doing well, I'm happy, my kid is healthy, my relationship is good?

And the answers to all of those questions differ, but also, the answers don't matter at all. It's not something that can be charted. Because the real assessment, at the end of the day, is all my own. It's how I feel about it all while it's happening that matters; it's how engaged I am, how present, how comfortable, how joyful, how at ease. It's a lot of things I can't quite put a mark next to, take a picture of, or write on a list.

Which is a very long way to say: part of me believes I am also not having this baby yet, because I have a shit attitude. Because I am wallowing in those aforementioned fears and anxieties, because things start happening and then I flood that happening with anxiety and fretting and fear, instead of just letting it flow, and I'll be damned if this little girl wants to come into the world that way.

So let me challenge my own ugliest self for a moment and assert what I actually believe to be true, what I feel at my core, when I strip away all the drama:

She will come when she comes. She will come how she comes. Everything will be fine-- regardless of the logistics-- because at the point of its eventual unfolding, it will be whatever it is and the only option is to move through whatever circumstances present themselves. 

While I am indeed carrying this baby, doing the work, I did not create the cycle of life. I did not create the rules of science that lead to conception, I did not imbue that creation with the magic of all of those unquantifiables-- attitude, energy, intention-- that eventually lead to the actual implantation of a baby. I am not the creator. I am not in charge. I was not in charge of the moment this baby came to be inside me, nor am I am in charge of the moment she joins us in the outside world. I am a channel of expression, a vehicle for perpetuating life and love, but I am not the boss of it.

I am not a victim. I am not in suffering. How many times I have looked back and realized the thing I resisted, often most vehemently, the thing that I fought like it was attacking me-- in this instance, waiting, not knowing-- was just the exact thing I needed, that it had its place, that it couldn't have been more perfectly planned, and, indeed, it wasn't. At least, not by me. 

When we tried to get pregnant the first time, it took a handful of months. It is surely sacrilege, borderline painfully offensive to suggest that that small amount of time was difficult for me. I know many families suffer through so dramatically much more to conceive. And yet, it was still hard-- the waiting.And then, after however many months of waiting, plus however many months of growing, our Melby arrived. And every single day of her life, I have understood that whatever waiting, whatever exact movements, both in terms of conception and literally every other moment of my life, were right because they resulted in her. I waited for that girl; I moved here to create that girl, every single second of existence has been the right thing because she is my daughter. Nothing has ever felt more crystalline to me. Her cherubic face, her wispy hair, her defiant tone, her silly attitude, her engaged mind, her always remembering, her head in the crook of my shoulder: everything about her is so right that I am reminded, I am not in charge. I could never plan such a divine unfolding.

This isn't a religious statement necessarily. It can mean whatever you want. It just means: I relent.

I don't have to fill everything with meaning. I don't have to try to guess about the implications of small moments in a tremendously far-reaching orchestra of existence. Each pang doesn't mean labor. Each moment of comfort doesn't mean "nothing" is happening. I am too small to see the bigger picture; I just have to remember that it's there. And trust it.

I need to trust it.

My job is this: to make space, to welcome change, to accept the unknown portions of the unfolding. That's my unquantifiable.

Whenever I get wound up so tightly, I feel like I work through all this mentally and at the end of it, the message I need to give myself is: I AM NOT GOD. Whatever that means to you, personally, I think the message is clear. I am not the master of the universe, I am not science, I am not nature, I am not in control of every moment and system and chain of events. My job is to relax my body, breathe into it, and get out of the way.

She will come.

My baby girl will come.

Baby girl, I have spent so much time worrying and trying to control that I've spent very little imagining you, loving you, welcoming you. We are so excited for our second girl, for a sister, for a whole new person we will not insist is one thing or another, but just allow to be. We are excited to have you be a part of our family. We are excited to hold you, to love you, to make space for you. We are excited to see your eyes for the first time, touch your skin for the first time, to introduce you to our world. But I will stop trying to rush it.

I trust that you will come when you're ready. I trust in a much bigger picture than I could ever imagine. I trust in your safety, my own, the evolution of things, the process, our love, the rightness of things. I promise to stop talking about it any other way. 

I trust our place in things. I trust us.

See you soon, little girl.


on my 35th birthday

Somewhere around 23, I started baking all the time. I worked in bar, baked cookies and cupcakes on the regular, and brought them to work in a hat box I'd decorated with some matte vintage wrapping paper that was covered in peaches. I doled out my treats to regulars and people I wanted to charm with the universal allure of sugar, eventually earning myself the all too appropriate nomer, "Cupcake."

I can't remember how many times I tried, or really, if I'm honest, if I tried at all, but at some point, I decided that, despite my love of baking, making pastry dough specifically was out of the question. It was not something I'm good at.

And so it remained. Every time in the last 12 years I have served a homemade pie or tart, it has been with store bought dough-- an affront, really, to the pride I take in making sweets from scratch, like my mama, but, after all, dough was, I said, just not something I'm good at. And to be clear, I have made a shitload of pies.

Two weeks ago, just that many days before my 35th birthday, I was preparing to make a savory tart for dinner, store bought crust in hand, when it suddenly occurred to me that a lot had changed in 12 years-- I had moved states, learned to cook not just passably but pretty darn well, developed a consistent work out routine and generally become a much healthier person, developed an emotionally stable, fulfilling relationship, had a baby, was about the have another baby, and overall more or less gotten my shit together-- so maybe I should just try making the dough.

So I did.

And it was the most goddamn flaky, shortbready, buttery perfection of dough a person could ever imagine.

I was shocked and not shocked and mostly aghast that I'd spent 12 years not making dough because of some story I told myself at one moment in time and then held onto like it was the last puff of air in a life raft keeping me afloat in what now turns out to have been an empty baby pool. For the love of god, why? Why did I waste so long cherishing an idea about myself that turned out to be totally untrue?

I do it often. I live through a symphony of voices in my head that tell me so constantly who I am and what I cannot and the truth of the matter is, I really don't believe a lot of them.

So today is my 35th birthday. And on the cusp of it, I felt it suddenly imperative to perform some sort of ritual for the occasion. I had a flash of an impulse to reach out to a person I am friends with on social media, with whom I actually have almost no real life relationship with, and yet, that's what the impulse told me so I followed it. And she kindly entertained my weird request and said the actual most perfect thing.

She suggested: "Light the candle for yourself and your life all the way up until this moment, all the yous at every past birthday and now. The intention of the practice (any practice you choose) is an honoring of your past and present self. When closing blow out the candle with intention to let go of anything you no longer need at this time of rebirth" along with some extra info about how to meditate looking at the candle.

And so I did. I lit my $3.99 Trader Joe's candle, sat cross legged on my yoga mat, and started at a flame while I told myself:

I honor Beth, who was a happy, easy baby, who, according to my mama, just slept and ate for two full years. I honor Beth, who turned two only to "start talking and never stop," Beth, who changed her clothes so many times a day that mom stopped washing them, who knew just what she wanted. I honor Beth, who went to school, loved school, and made best friends with a girl named Lauren, always swinging her hand vigorously during assembly to comfort her when she was sad because she missed her parents. I honor Beth, who loved playing the rice table, who dressed up as a bee on Halloween, who pretended to sleep at naptime so she could be first to choose a sticker to put on her lunchbox. I honor Beth, who was desperate to have homework like her sister, who begged for a neon three ring binder just to pretend she was doing work, who cried when school was out.

I honor Beth, who started to feel anxious sometime far too young, who feared desperately, constantly her parents dying, who grappled with something she could only name "the empty feeling." I honor Beth, who was so young and uncomfortable and smart. I honor Beth, whose whole world was so small and she didn't even know it.

I honor Beth, who went to highschool and fell apart, who longed to be part of something, to be something she was not. I honor Beth, who demonstratively cut her wrists, threw up her food, discovered how to write the saddest words, listened to angry music, and felt lost beyond all reason. I honor Beth, who sang and danced in sparkly sack dresses as her only respite from whatever imagined misery she suffered. I honor Beth, who was constantly wanting to be loved, to be wanted, Beth, who could not yet possibly understand what that meant. I honor Beth, who got a trashy tramp stamp, who had horrific acne, whose body she sought both to destroy and make sense of at the same time. I honor Beth, who always did well in school, even when shit was hitting the fan.

I honor Beth, who made a bold choice and moved to Berkeley. I honor Beth, who dyed her hair, wore gummy bracelets and combat boots, who smoked clove cigarettes and ate donut holes at 2 am. I honor Beth, who drank and compromised herself. I honor Beth, who was lost. I honor Beth, who loved a boy who loved her back. I honor Beth, who loved a boy who loved her back, who died. I honor Beth, who graduated in 3 years, kept a full time job, learned to love writing, expanded her world view just ever so slightly. I honor Beth, who met her best ever friend in college.

I honor Beth, who got a shitty English degree and immediately became a waitress in San Francisco. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love. I honor Beth, who was desperate for that boy's love and that boy's love and that boy's love and that boy's love. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love, who accepted far too little, who valued herself not at all. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love. I honor Beth for every restaurant job and bartending gig and alcoholic drink and shitty choice and lost moment of her entire life. I honor Beth, who learned to love to dance without inhibition. I honor Beth, who formed loving, crystalline, healthy relationships despite all her bullshit. I honor Beth, who found her solace in writing. I honor Beth, who secret smoked cigarettes for a thousand years. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love.

I honor Beth, who one day went to yoga. I honor Beth, who tried. I honor Beth, who had trouble being still. I honor Beth, who earned a degree, during stolen hours, that licensed her to run a preschool. I honor Beth, who found something pure and clear in being with children that didn't exist in the rest of her life. I honor Beth, who always worked hard.

I honor Beth, who one day married her best friends in their backyard and then went home the next day to, hungover, talk to a boy named Nic. I honor Beth, who recklessly and immediately decided she loved him. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love, but who also knew when something felt different. I honor Beth, who invited someone relatively unknown into her life, thinking she could be open, but she still fucked it up. I honor Beth, who kept fucking it up but forged ahead anyway. I honor Beth, who left her whole life to move to Kentucky for the boy, who didn't quite love her yet.

I honor Beth, who fucked it up, who didn't understand yet. I honor Beth, who stuck with it, talked it out, conceded in very small increments to growth. I honor Beth who worked in the most soul sucking childcare facility imaginable, who tried to make it better until she realized she couldn't. I honor Beth, who moved on, who grew with each job she had, who escaped the endless allure of the restaurant industry. I honor Beth, who learned to live an everyday life, to feel instead of drinking, to slow down. I honor Beth, who began to do yoga regularly. I honor Beth, who found vulnerability scary. I honor Beth, who became too committed to health, who let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. I honor Beth, who finally became a little less desperate, who felt secure not because of some repeated reassurance or promise from her relationship, but because it was, simply, healthy.

I honor Beth, who decided to have a baby. I honor Beth, who decided to have a baby out of wedlock. I honor Beth, who struggled with childbirth and postpartum. I honor Beth, who named her daughter after her sister. I honor Beth, who feels at once the best mama to her baby girl and also a constant failure. I honor Beth, who is bored at home and also who would have it no other way. I honor Beth, who dreams of a terrifying future where she is connected and powerful and useful in ways she cannot yet imagine. I honor Beth, who is about to have her second daughter, who lives in fear but also certainty. I honor Beth, who is 35 today. I honor all the joy, disappointment, frustration, hope, excitement, fear, and confusion she feels.

I honor Beth.

I honor Beth, who spent 12 years not making pie dough because she thought she couldn't. I honor Beth, who, one day, decided to try again anyway.


I tried not to feel sad about how much of my life I've spent selling myself short, living in desperation, ravaging my body, entirely fucking shit up. I feel like way way too much of the misery I’ve carried through my life is just from stories I tell myself about myself. It’s a trickle down. It’s years of so desperately grasping onto that life raft that I’m afraid what will happen if I let go, even though it’s pretty darn clear now that we’re on dry land.

But I was meant to honor those moments, that person. I had to tell myself again and again.

I honor all those moments, because not in spite of them, but because of them, I am at this exact moment in time today, and I would have it no other way. I would have it no other way than to be alone, in bed, exhausted at the end of my, in some ways, pretty great, in some ways, pretty lame birthday.

I blew out the candle.

I release anything keeping me from making the dough; I no longer need you, and yet I honor your place in bringing me exactly here. Thank you.

I am 35.


The baby grand piano had two small picture frames nestled in its lip and an almost weary, toothy smile that stretched open into our living room-- its presence, in retrospect, somewhat grandiose for the modestly-sized room that otherwise only contained seating and a TV that, as a far as I was concerned, only ran TGIF.

I played piano for years, never well.

Our teacher, Mrs. Reisig, had one long, wiry hair that leapt either out of her chin or eyebrow-- which I can't remember-- but I do recall obsessively watching it and imagining ways in which I could create an element of surprise and extract it from her face without her noticing. My sister and I were incredulous about that hair; at what age did you stop noticing parts of your face?

I remember thinking she was very, very old, a perspective developed out of having actually no perspective or life experience at all, at maybe just 10 years old,  but I'm sure I'd be horrified to learn now that she was likely in her late 30s or something, an age in dangerous proximity to my own, which reminds me I should start to check for rogue hairs on my face.

She only charged $6 for a lesson. The price, even in the mid 90s, was outrageously low; she did it, I remember my mom saying, because she loved it. What there was to love about a stubby-fingered child stabbing out Für Elise without an iota finesse, I cannot imagine, except to joyfully recognize that there is a place and skill and passion for each person and I am simply glad I do not have to inhabit them all.

At home, I would practice diligently, as I did all things. I did them so they were done, so I could check the box, but I feel quite sure I never loved it, and, if anyone was truly listening, they heard that in the music, because music does not lie about love. But it seemed the right thing to do, maybe simply because it's what I was doing.

My mom, I think, loved the piano, even though she was maybe no better at it than me. She had a series of songs she knew by heart, which she'd play regularly, usually one in immediate succession to the other as if they were one long song. I sometimes think of that now when I put my daughter to bed at night, singing her a collection of lullabies, one right after the next. Just as the spaces between words are only imagined, perceived by the listener dependent on their understanding of the language, the transition between songs is only perceptible if one knows the songs as individuals. An 18 month old surely does not; she must think I drone on in one endless song each night-- a medley of quiet hymns that will end up embedded as a musical lump in the deepest parts of her brain. I hope the hidden memory is a good one.

I could not summon a single song my mother played now, but if I heard them, my body would know in the way that sounds, like smells, can send you whirling back to an exact moment in a long forgotten time. The moment, most often, was one particularly quick, almost frantic song-- or at least that was how she played it-- that incited me and my brother and sister to run in circles around the ottoman in that front room, chasing each other gleefully.

Some years later, the grand piano transformed into an upright. With so many bodies in one house, we needed the space, but the pictures on the piano stayed. They were two small frames, not more than 2 inches tall each, made of brushed gold with felt-covered backing, a vestige of a time when things were made to last instead of thinly masquerading as the item they purported to be before they joined the piles of trash that are so much of the rest of our lives. The pictures were of a boy and a girl, and I remember thinking, specifically, for maybe too long, that the girl was a woman. I now know she was only 7, but something about her seemed composed, graceful in a way that I was certainly not, and likely never will be. She had a perfectly-formed brown bowl cut and wore a navy blue dress with a sharply-pressed white collar. She smiled, but demurely, her lips closed. All the physical traits are actually irrelevant, though they paint a picture. What matters is that her eyes looked self-possessed. They looked present, in the way surely only a woman could be.

I don't remember when I learned she was my sister. It seems like I always knew, and yet I didn't. It was never a secret-- there was never some big reveal of information-- and, yet it was also not something we sat down and talked about explicitly. So for however long, until I put the pieces together, she was a woman sitting on the ledge of this piano and that piano, which I played regularly, but not very well. And in that way, she was a part of my everyday without even really noticing, a fixture, an undercurrent, in my daily experience, just as she is now, every time I say my daughter’s name.

on my love life.

In a dream, my childhood babysitter told me to write about my love life. Sarah Songer was funny and loving; she fed me Fudgesicles, she had the best sticker book, and most importantly she so effortlessly drew the most beautiful people on command. They were perfect, I thought, except that she always drew them with serious faces, when I felt they clearly should be smiling. So I would erase those tiny pursed lips and draw in a smile, sure that I could equally effortlessly make my replacement upturned lips match the quality of her drawing. I could not.


As an adult, infrequently, she comes by my parents’ house and drinks a bottled coke— made with real cane sugar— that my dad keeps stocked in the refrigerator in the garage. Despite my almost being 35, she still comments, almost every time we cross paths, that she’s amazed I have boobs. I now have a partner, a 16 month old daughter, a baby on the way, and I own a home, which is all neither here nor there, not a specifically important list of personal qualifications except to say generally those things happen after boobs and not before. I mean, I got boobs, or some minuscule version of them, over 20 years ago.


I never really understood her commentary until I also had the experience of watching someone, who was emblazoned in my mind's eye as a child, also grow. And then I understood: people are, often, or we believe that they stay, exactly as we first knew them to be. So to her I am a Fudgesicle-loving 6 year old, who's afraid of having to sleep under the dining room table as punishment for misbehaving. It’s so often not the boobs that aren’t growing at all, but our perception.


Sarah arrived in the dream, out of where I don’t know, and when she said “love life,” I dream laughed out loud, not out believing my life to be humorously devoid of love, but because the specific phrase love life resonated so little with my experience, past or present. Love life, to me, elicits some idea of an ongoing quest for partnership that includes actual dating and maybe drinks and definitely flirty floral dresses and ballet flats. I have always been more into tennis shoes.


I never dated really. I was terrible at it. One of us was always too in love from the get go, and it never worked. My actual loves were three. I would count maybe a handful more as significant in my romantic experience, but wouldn't deign to embarrass them or myself by admitting so here.


Diogo was my first real love, my first everything. He came into the restaurant where I worked in Berkeley during college-- a predominantly vegetarian spot with counter service, where I worked my way up to the position of assistant manager, topping out at a luxurious ten dollars an hour plus the pennies of tips college students let clamour into the metal bin sitting afront the register. I always smelled like salad dressing and french fries, and he rarely looked me in the eye.


I thought he was rude, in fact I was sure of it. I remember taking special note of how rude he was, until one day, another regular, who was, unbeknownst to me, his friend and roommate, said, "My roommate speaks really highly of you." I have no idea what I did at that counter that might have made a boy admire me. I learned, later, to my shock, that he just thought I was a babe and he wanted to make out. At 19, I had been kissed, really kissed, only once before-- a single time at camp when I was 17. I was not a babe. I wore vintage cat-eye glasses-- genuine deadstock with my very paltry prescription tailor-made to fit-- and jet black hair, finished by bangs with a deep swoop, both costumes for my discomfort. I was fat, maybe, kind of, and definitely insecure. I could punch in an order on that register without even looking, but surely that was not something to admire.


All it took, though, was those few secondhand words of validation for my opinion of Diogo to shift completely. His shyness was suddenly intriguing, his stoic silence painfully enticing. We flirted across the counter each time he ordered a sesame tofu salad by basically doing nothing other than knowing we liked each other.


One day, somehow, I knew. I knew it was my day. I packed my most beautiful outfit to wear after work-- two layered vintage slips over jeans and covered with a chunky sweater. Tennis shoes. And, indeed, that day, he asked me if I'd like to "talk" after work. My first date, if you will.


After my shift, we sat in the corner of the restaurant. He tipped his chair back the whole time-- an offense, as an obedient private school girl-- I still find unforgivable, but I was so enamored I didn't care. I don't remember much of what we said, except that I discovered he had two dictionaries in that backpack he always wore-- an English one and one with Portuguese translations. He was 21, from Brazil; he spoke English fluently, but, like me, was a writer, and anguished regularly over the most appropriate translations of words, the nuances, the grammar. He was the kind of person who would say "With whom are you going to the party?" because it was grammatically correct, even though, I explained, it just sounded weird.


And that is who he was in a nutshell. Brooding, precise, reflective, curious. There was a meticulousness about his mind and his love that captivated me endlessly. On our first real date, he took me to jazz show at a local music school and bought me an apple juice. He worked, I learned, with children with autism; he played jazz saxophone but listened to hip hop, always on vinyl; he rode a skateboard most places; he wrote incessantly; he paid attention to me with the same carefulness he did words. I loved him.


After one month, I lost my virginity to him. He was clinical about that first time in a way I almost needed. He told me what was happening, who we were. At the end, I looked at him and embarrassingly said, "Does this mean you're my boyfriend?" and he, so gentle with my heart, assured me he had been mine long before.


Maybe a year later, he moved back to Brazil. Before he left, he stuck a typewritten story he had made for me on the refrigerator. At the top, scribbled in his very linear handwriting, a note: "This is on account of my loving you forever..."


We were not not together but we were not together. He was in Brazil. I had only been infrequently outside of California. We wrote disjointed emails and sustained phone calls with poor connection. Though just 15 years ago, the technology was seemingly 600 years old, especially when you were definitely in love with someone who lived on a continent you barely comprehended the existence of; there could never have been enough closeness.


One day, he told me still loved me.


Then, he died.


I almost can't tell that story again right now. Surely it only makes me sad in the way a movie makes someone sad; surely I don't still feel it. But honestly I have no idea what's true in that situation.


The abbreviated version is his roomate, the same roommate who had told me of the high speaking, said I needed to get in touch with his family. It sounded ominous, and I distinctly remember saying to my best friend, as we padded down the Berkeley campus to my apartment on University street, everything would be fine as long as he hadn't died.


A week later, finally, just weeks before finals, before graduation, I found out he had.


He was driving on a windy road. Another car took the turn too wide and crashed into his car head on. The steering wheel crushed his lungs.


I communicated with his dad and his sister for years, maybe, too long, grasping to hold onto pieces of him, asking for stories to breathe newness into the things I knew about him, as if adding moments to my knowledge of him kept him alive that much longer. The thing I think of most often is his dad's story of going to identify the body and how he introduced me to the word suadade.


I drank a lot of alcohol. I cried a lot. I got his words tattooed on my arm. I am not sure it's something I even truly reconciled, but mostly just pushed away.


Some time, maybe a year later, I convinced another boy to love me. Not to lessen the importance of that relationship, but that statement is about the sum total of it. His name was Charlie; he was the inverse of Diogo. He was not brooding or reflective; he was a sweet corn-fed boy from Kansas City, who seemed very happy to smoke pot and watch skate videos for his whole life. There was a levity about it that was relieving to me. We worked at a restaurant in Ghiradelli Square together, and, I think, quite literally, I spent the better part of a year convincing him to love me. If you had asked me why, in the midst of it, and I'd answered honestly, I think I could only say because I had begun.


Eventually he did love me, and then he loved me so much it overwhelmed me. We were together almost three years. He gave me whatever I wanted. He wanted, really, nothing. I was bored and had dreams about marrying him that felt like nightmares. One Christmas he gave me his grandmother's diamond ring. Two weeks later I broke up with him.


That feels like a terrible story. Much less ceremonious and respectful than my love for Diogo, but also, it's the truth. I don't remember much about our days together, our what or our why. We had fun. It was silly. I probably stayed with him a year longer than I wanted to, because I loved his mom so much, but that was that. It was a too-long, light-hearted transition out of recoiling from Diogo's death. It was not meant to last.


Recently, I saw a person who looked and moved and spoke so much like him it was eerie. In a fit of nostalgia, after years and years without contact, I sent Charlie a message to say just that. "No way he was that good-looking," he replied, quickly. I laughed and left it at that. That exchange was our relationship in a nutshell-- sweet and funny and easily left behind.


I don't want to think about the years following.


They are years I'm glad I had, for perspective, but also which I could not possibly be paid enough to repeat. They are years I hope my daughter has the respect to keep to herself should she woefully experience the same. They are years that convinced me I would be alone forever. I would not have a partner. I would not have children. I had resigned to it, not pitifully, but with some determination. I had decided my life might look a lot different than I'd anticipated, but it would be okay.


Then came Nic.


I will maybe mostly skip that story, the beginning I mean. I will skip the romantic part of it-- or the part that, to me, felt like romance, because our stories these days are much different in retrospect, and the romance is not actually my point in this instance. The beginning of the story was made of mutual friends, margaritas, and social media. Nic lived in New York. I lived in San Francisco. Yet somehow, despite the distance and seeming absurdity of it all, maybe a year after the first mention of him, we ended up talking on the phone, regularly.


After several months of regular communication, in which I became fervently sure I loved him, he came to San Francisco to visit. I have written now, too many times, that moments before getting him from the airport, my girlfriend said, as girlfriends do in dramatic moments of anticipation and excitement, "What if you're about to meet the father of your children?" but I will write it again, because, I did, and he is.


He twirled me in the airport, and six months later, I moved to Louisville, not really because he wanted me to, but because I felt like I couldn't not. Three years later, I gave birth to our first daughter, Melby.


I cannot help but wonder if dream Sarah wanted me to write this to clarify, something about what I believe love to be, about us. Nic and I are not married. That's not what's definitive about our relationship, but it is significant. I cared for some time, before and after Melby. I cared, because I was raised in a very traditional household. I cared, because my parents care. I care, because it's a gesture, because taxes, because society, because the word boyfriend sounds juvenile and underplayed, partner, though totally apt, doesn't seem to resonate with people here in Kentucky, and husband is not actually true. I still care, somehow, because it's hard to shake deeply instilled ideas of how things should be done.


But I have never cared out of any sort of belief that Nic is not one hundred percent committed to me. This fact about our relationship is only significant, because I believe it conveys something fundamental about who we are. We are not big into ceremony. We don't give gifts for holidays or birthdays. We don't really go on "dates." We don't have any anniversaries to speak of. There is very little fanfare surrounding love in our relationship. We are, just, in love, whatever that means.


It has evolved so much for me since those first days of translation-filled longing for Diogo. Love life once sounded like those imagined dates in floral dresses, a glass of sangria in hand, knees touching nervously in a bar over a barely touched skillet full of potatoes, and now it looks a lot like being the first one to peel themselves out of bed and gesture to make breakfast. Years ago, I read about our particular union as viewed through the lens of the Chinese zodiac-- combining our specific years and months of birth and our potential compatibility as determined by those elements. I distinctly remember the words, "a lot of togetherness," which basically described a relationship which always took work, which did not necessarily mean something negative, but just exactly that, a relationship that required constant attention.


That prediction turns out to be the truest possible descriptor of us. We work at our relationship, always. We are constantly talking, checking in, reassessing. We apologize, we make amends, we work to accommodate and understand each others' perspectives regularly. No stone is left unturned. If I, in my deep-seated training as a contemporary woman, act out of passive-aggressive frustration, Nic will not relent until I tell him exactly what is bothering me. Often I don't even know. I have pushed so deeply aside all the small annoyances out of some belief that it's better, that I cannot even recognize what is bothering me, until, through so many haphazard accusations and assertions, which I can now quickly recognize as untrue, I arrive at, "You left your suitcase flopped open in the front room, when you clearly know it's important me to keep the house looking nice, especially when it seems like my entire 'job' is baby and house, and that makes me feel disrespected!"


This is, to be honest, the source of my passive-aggressiveness, ninety eight percent of the time, or something quite similar, so I am now able to recognize it much more quickly. But the point is that instead of accepting my nonsense at face value, Nic constantly asks me to be honest and the work in progress is learning how to do that, even for myself, and then, in turn, doing the same for him. The feeling is not nonsense at all, but burying it and acting out something else, other than the truth, is. It is a waste of everyone’s time.


I firmly believe I could have an easier relationship with probably many other people. I also believe being with Nic is fundamentally the most important thing I could do if I ever want to grow as a person, partner, or parent. Not because he knows more than me, but because his fervent insistence upon honesty, transparency, and self-awareness invites me to look at my own bullshit. One hundred percent of the time when I am mad at Nic, it's because he's making me see something I already don't like about myself.


This is not to say he's not often annoying or circuitous himself, but even those things, did they not reveal something within me about my own self, would not be so irksome.


I went to a Kundalini yoga class in Santa Barbara once. Kundalini, for the uninitiated, as one time described by the very teacher of a class I was taking, is "the weird yoga." It's repetitive movements for a truly uncomfortable amount of time and weird sounds and breathing in a way that's supposed to move energy, just generally nothing like the downward dog of Lululemon fame. Many practitioners wear head-coverings and all white. At this specific class, I was already feeling out of place, when in walked a very scruffy white guy in a turban, gauchos, and lots of jewelry. He was chanting loudly and laid down his literal piece of sheepskin as his mat.


His total brazenness and/ or comfort with himself, which it was, it couldn't quite yet tell, made me extremely uncomfortable, and so, of course, he cornered me after class to talk to me. I can't remember why or what he said, but I discovered then that he was actually just comfortable with himself in a way I found unnerving. He made intense, yet somehow totally not inappropriate eye contact with me the entire time he talked, and he introduced himself by some name I cannot recall, but followed it with, "That's my spiritual name." I replied, not trying to be funny, "I'm Beth. That's my birth name."


None of this is important, except that then he said something, again, in what context I'm not sure-- maybe there was none, "There is no other," which was to say, whatever we're battling, wrestling, succumbing to, mourning, chasing, trying to make fall in love with us, is also just us. Every single moment and person and experience in life that elicits something in us, that touches us enough to trigger a spark of emotion, positive or negative, is just something we're working on ourselves.


There is no other.


And I believe that totally, entirely, absolutely to be true. It's not to say other people are not responsible for their actions or that they're entitled to be dicks, but our reaction to it is ours alone. The end.


And somehow Nic is like the khakis-wearing, beer-drinking equivalent of this person-- someone who insists I look at myself and become responsible for my own actions. A mirror. My other, who is no other. And that sounds like pretty much the least romantic thing a person could ever write, but I think for me, it's the ultimate. I feel like I'm in this very miserable, maybe never ending process of reckoning, but I also think if I didn't do it, I maybe still would be that six year old with no boobs afraid of a table. And I just want some fucking boobs. I want to grow up, even though it's hard.


We are expecting another baby in late July. I always wanted another baby, but I'm still scared shitless. And yet I am also, actually, the most totally confident that Nic and I as a team can raise the best possible babies ever, because we work together, and we complement each other's understanding, and, just as a couple, we are always working to grow as parents, and also we are just pretty cool and fun.


And so, I guess, this is love.


It took a tremendous amount of life experience and words on the page to get here. My dream babysitter insisted I sit down and write until I arrived at the realization that the person I have committed to loving, the one with which I started a family, a whole life, the end game to my "love life," is the person, who ultimately insisted I love myself.  Not in a trite, Instagram-quote, kind of way. But in a true, coming to terms with exactly who and how and where I am and who and how and where I am capable of becoming/ going and that that simple acknowledgement is unconditional love. And giving that to ourselves is the only possible way we could give anything even resembling real love to someone else.


I tried to write this in my dreams last night, to get it all out. My brain was so busy I couldn't sleep for hours on end-- an infrequent occurrence these days as I drag myself through the always-so-tired stage of pregnancy. I told Nic this morning I was taking a personal day. I don't leave him with Melby often, not because he's not more than capable of and happy to be with her solo, but when he's home from stints of flying, I like to be together as a family. Today, though, I had to leave. I wrote for hours. Then I texted him and said I was coming home even though I wasn't done.


Nah, he said.


Keep it up. Get it done.


A fervent insistence upon honesty, transparency, and self-awareness.


I have never felt more capable of being, of owning and embodying and evolving, every single thing I already am. So often, we change, but our perception doesn’t grow. I am so grateful to have found someone, who insists, for the love of God, for my own sake, that it does. This, this is love. This is the story of my love life.