Humbug

Ugh.
This is far and away the toughest time I’ve had with Christmas since my mom died. I blame the following combo platter, the emotional equivalent of brussels sprouts in lime jello:

1. As Iris gets older, that missing grandparent becomes more and more obvious. And I’m fucking pissed about it. I’m pissed that she doesn’t get to go out and pick raspberries with her grandma in the summer. I’m pissed that she doesn’t get to bake Christmas cookies with her. I’m pissed that she doesn’t get to know her. And I’m pissed that Mom never got to spend a single minute with her, never even knew about her. And I swear, if one more person tells me “She’s still with you” or “she’ll always be with you” or some similar empty fill-the-uncomfortable-space platitude, I will lose it. No. She’s not still with me. That’s the whole fucking point.

2. This year has served us up a steaming pile of garbage, topped with a giant tub of festering Cool Whip in the form of the return of the Know Nothing Party. I’ve lost a lot of faith in people and am genuinely scared for what is on the horizon. And to circle back to number one on the list, not being able to talk to my mom, who would have been utterly appalled by the phrase “President Trump”, about it has been hard.

I can feel myself retreating and isolating. The first year after my mom died, I worked nights the weekend before Christmas. That was the anniversary of the weekend she came home on hospice, and I fell apart at work that second night. I thought that was impossibly rough, but now I think of it almost longingly; I was able to sleep all day that weekend and Iris wasn’t old enough to know about Christmas, let alone notice that I was not filled with the Christmas spirit. There’s really nothing like feeling guilty for feeling sad.

I’m sure Christmas will get easier at some point, if for no other reason that this is just not sustainable. And we are all healthy and can put food on the table and employed in jobs we like (except for the three-year-old freeloader. We’re going to have to address that in 2017).

As the first blog post in almost a year, this leaves a bit to be desired in the entertainment factor, I know. But I have a sneaking suspicion that not writing anything since the summer, and even then only revising some previous work, may also be a contributing factor in my general malaise. I didn’t even get anything submitted to this year’s Writer’s Read this year for the first time in five years, which feels weird. But I did go back and listen to last year’s, recorded and broadcast from WPR’s northernmost stations, and listening again reminds me that these were no small circumstances, and maybe I can cut myself a little slack for not quite being okay yet.

If you want to hear it (and hear me say “bullshit” on public radio), it’s here at about the 51:30 mark.

Habibi

Fourteen years ago, I was living in Boston and falling apart. My boyfriend had been in a coma for nearly three months, though the doctors were now calling it a vegetative state. They had stopped calling it a coma because there was virtually no brain activity and he wasn’t going to come out of it. He was diabetic and on the day I was returning from a trip home to see my family, his blood sugar had dropped so low that he had what was likely several seizures alone in our apartment, and was unresponsive when I came home late that night and found him.

It was without a doubt the worst time of my life. I felt like I was crazy all the time. I took the semester off from my grad school program and worked at a flower shop, and spent my evenings alone in our apartment chain smoking and crying. I cried a lot. I would start crying on the subway, waiting at bus stops, standing in line at the grocery store. I went to the hospital where he was in the ICU twice a day, until he was moved to a rehab hospital about a mile from our apartment.

The term “rehab” made me hopeful, but really, there was no rehab to be done. I would walk to the hospital in the evenings, through a pretty rough neighborhood. My friends would express concern about me walking there by myself, but I didn’t care. My emotional receptors were so full of grief that there was no room for fear. Nobody ever bothered me, though one time I stopped at a gas station to buy a Diet Coke and cigarettes, and a man started hitting on me. When I told him I had a boyfriend, he smirked and said, “Well, is he good to you?” I snapped back, ‘Actually, he’s in a coma.” His expression changed instantly, becoming full of concern, and he said he was so sorry, and asked if I was okay, and told me to take care of myself.

The hospital did not have private rooms. My boyfriend shared a room with an older man who appeared to have had a stroke. His wife was always there when I arrived, and we would smile and say hi, but that was all the English she seemed to know. I would hear her talking to him and realized that she was speaking Arabic, but I had no idea where she was from.

One particularly bad day, I was sitting next to the bed and talking to my boyfriend, and I became completely overwhelmed. I leaned over the bed, put my head on his chest and started sobbing. Very soon after, I felt a hand on my head and heard the woman say, “Habibi”. I don’t speak Arabic, but I recognized that word. It means “my darling”. She gave me tissues and a little pep talk in very broken English. “No cry. Smile, ‘Hi, how are you’. Habibi. Cry home.”

I can’t imagine what her life was like at the time. Not being able to communicate with the doctors or nurses to learn about her husband’s condition or prognosis after he suffered what appeared to be a debilitating stroke. Not to mention that this was about two months after 9/11, not a great time for people who spoke Arabic in this country. But she came in every day with a smile to sit with her husband and be a bright spot for him, saving her tears for when she went home. And she reached out to me, a girl from a completely different world, whose only connection with her was this shared room and the shared tragedy of a partner who might never come back.

The word “habibi” will always be a touchstone for me, a reminder that if someone can find humanity and kindness in the midst of their own suffering, there is absolutely no reason to withhold it when coming from a place of abundance. As I see the endless debate on Facebook about refugees and terrorists and policy, I remember this day. There is no doubt that there are bad people in this world. But they don’t get to call the shots. We can still reach out and at a minimum, take those small steps to see another’s pain, acknowledge it and offer some comfort.

Hot Under the Stethoscope

So last week, I was scanning through Facebook and saw a couple of my nurse friends had posted this clip from the Miss America pageant:

A couple of thoughts ran through my head, not necessarily in this order:
-It’s a little trite
-But it’s kind of cool to see nursing represented
-Though really, how exciting is it to be represented in the Miss America pageant, an institution that is about as relevant as buggy whips and “duck and cover” drills?

I probably clicked the “like” button on the posts I saw, and didn’t give it too much more thought. I felt like the sentiment at the heart of her mini-monologue was a reasonably good synopsis of nursing, though, again, a little trite. I have seen so many incredibly moving, honest and real descriptions and discussions of nursing that I didn’t find this clip especially compelling.

So I was surprised to see it pop up again at the beginning of this week. I was even more surprised to see a whole mess of hot bubbling anger brewing up over the apparent trashing of Miss Colorado, RN and evidently nurses as a whole by the yammermouths on The View, the morning talk show that is slightly more relevant than the Miss America pageant. From what I could tell, the women on The View, and Joy Behar in particular, said that nurses were not important, had no talent, and stole stethoscopes from their doctor bosses. Appalling!

A Facebook page titled “Ban The View” or some similarly outraged title had quickly popped up, and nurses were posting pictures of themselves in uniform, with their own stethoscopes, describing how exactly they used their stethoscopes to help them care for patients and save lives. Some of these were pretty funny, and some of them were stern and lecture-y. Then I started reading the comments.

Good, lord, these were some irate nurses who felt very strongly that Joy Behar is a stupid dirty whore who needs to pull her head of her dirty whore ass and shut her dirty whore mouth. And those were the restrained ones. Surely Ms. Behar’s comments must have been horrendous to provoke such righteous fury.

So, the only comment I heard clearly was the question, “Why does she have a doctor’s stethoscope on?” A moronic question, to be sure, but hardly a level of insult that should cause anyone to swear a blood oath against her. There was also a muffled statement that I believe has been interpreted as ‘That’s not a real talent.” One could read that a couple of ways: first, one could assume that she’s talking about the monologue itself. There’s some justification for that take on it, as it’s a pretty uninspired delivery. Second, one could assume she’s talking about nursing. That is not justified, as it takes an enormous amount of talent to be a good nurse. The general consensus among the frothing masses of pissed-off nurses is that she meant the latter.

Her question about the stethoscope is ignorant and ridiculous, and there were some pretty entertaining responses, like from this doctor. Way to be a team player, doc! With regard to her other statement, if she truly meant that nursing isn’t a talent, then yes, that does deserve a response. But you know what kind of response doesn’t really prove that nurses are skilled and talented caregivers and professionals? Calling someone a stupid bitch in an enraged sputtering Facebook post riddled with spelling errors.

I dunno, it seems to me that nurses don’t really have to prove anything to anyone, other than maybe hospital administrators trying to cut staffing and payroll. We certainly don’t have to prove anything to Joy Behar and whoever else is on The View now. We are consistently chosen in public polls as the most trusted professionals. I have definitely heard people complain about individual nurses they’ve had, but when it comes to the things people say about nurses in general, I’ve never heard anything but incredibly high praise. Being a nurse has been a point of pride for me, and that pride is strong enough that I don’t need to get my knickers in a twist over two vaguely insulting and uninformed comments. Nurses, we are better than this.

Respond with that sharp sense of humor that you have honed to get you through your shift, respond with an internal eye roll and “idiot” muttered under your breath, respond with education, just like you do at work. You have enough opportunity on the job to raise your blood pressure into dangerous territory, don’t do it on the internet. We don’t have to get angry when someone says something stupid about nurses. Our work is valued by thousands of people every day, and someday, Joy Behar will value it too.

Apparenthood

Our adoption of Iris was finalized this morning. 9+ months after we brought the biggest surprise of our life home, I answered a few basic questions in a small courtroom and in less than five minutes, a smiling judge declared that we were now Iris’s official parents.

I was talking to a friend last night and mentioned that this was happening today, and she said something to the effect of, “Oh, that’s great, I know that’s something you’ve really been waiting for.” I said, “Well, not really–it doesn’t actually feel like a super momentous thing at this point.” I know that kind of makes me sound like an asshole, and I do have to back up and say that we got a little emotional when it was over, and as with many occasions both minor and major, I desperately wished my mom was there. But at the same time, we have been extraordinarily lucky in that we have been able to check in with her birth parents frequently, and we never had to worry about them changing their minds. This was just a formality. In every real sense, we have been Iris’s parents since she was 24 hours old.

We have spent inordinate amounts of time thinking about what goes in and comes out of her. We have managed diaper changes that required work from both of us to avoid a horrific mess, and frankly could have used a production assistant. We have figured out what makes her laugh harder than one would think possible, and the things she enjoys, and the delighted face she makes when you give her her favorite toy or blanket. We have called ourselves bad parents, sometimes accurately. We have taken her to the doctor and watched her calm expression turn to angry, indignant howls when she registers the first vaccination. We have watched her roll over, sit up, drag herself across the floor like Lieutenant Dan throwing floozies out of his apartment, crawl, pull herself up, and begin standing unsupported. We have celebrated, then quickly bemoaned these physical accomplishments and strength. Seriously, she’s almost walking at 9 1/2 months! We have this kid with a toddler’s physical strength and penchant for tantrums, but with less ability to communicate or capacity for reasonable, thoughtful behavior than a toddler. The liquor store may see an uptick in business from us.

I cannot lie and say that I enjoy every minute of this. I don’t have a prescription for Xanax, so some days I think wistfully back to the days when our house was clean, I could read multiple books in a month, I wrote more than once every four months, I had a garden that was not simply a giant weed patch, and the only thing waking us up at night was the dog growling at some drunk shouting obscenities as he staggered past our house. Halcyon days. But those days were also shot through with a sadness, because we didn’t know if we’d ever get to be parents. And we knew that the reality of parenting meant sacrificing some of one kind of joy for another kind of joy. And that was okay with us, and it’s still okay. More than okay. Because while each individual moment is not always delightful, or enjoyable, or even tolerable, they come together to make a picture of a life that, 9 1/2 months in, I can’t imagine any other way.

Delayed Gratification is Overrated

Left entirely to my own devices, I would spend all of my time writing and traveling. There has been very little time for either this summer. I’m working, albeit only part-time and realistically my schedule leaves very little to complain about, other than the nights and the every-other-weekend business, and working holidays. Still, I have more days off than days working, and that’s never a bad thing. But then there’s school. School, which I would love to be simply a distant memory. As endless papers and projects hang over my head, I daydream about winning the lottery, not so that we can buy an enormous disgusting house with gold toilets and a cage full of white tigers, but simply so that I could quit everything: work, school, any other money or ambition-focused endeavors. And I don’t even hate my current job–I actually like it quite a bit. But while I have never been particularly money hungry, I am most definitely time hungry. And don’t get me wrong, I know I have more time than a lot of people do for those things, and I am grateful for that flexibility. Still, time is really all I want, and there’s never enough of it. Time to finish my own projects, time to garden and work on the house and cook and get out in the woods and take the Circle Tour around Lake Superior and travel the country. Time to spend with Iris and watch her grow up and not feel like there’s something else I need to be doing since it’s my day off and I have a whole list of stuff that needs to get done. Time to write.

I have barely written anything in quite some time. I have a partially finished short story that I really like but haven’t been able to get into the brainspace to finish. That’s pretty much it. Other than these here blog posts, the last thing I completed was the piece I wrote for last year’s Writer’s Read. It was accepted and I was scheduled to read it, but then we got an eight-pound surprise and I had to cancel. I’ve been thinking about it a bit lately, because it’s my last completed piece and because it’s about road trips, and it’s summer and I’m itching to throw some clothes and the baby in the car and head out. Iris will make an enthusiastic traveler, I just know it.

As with so many things, there will be a time for that and I just have to be patient, and it will be worth the wait because the trips we have planned involve seeing people we love and haven’t seen for far too long. But in any case, this thing I wrote makes me kind of happy to read, not because the writing is all that great, but because it’s a mini-anthology of the road trips I have taken, and it reminds me that although I can’t spend my life doing exactly what I want all the time, there are these moments that extend themselves into the day-to-day and brighten everything with their presence.

The Road Taken

Consider the road trip. For some, it conjures images of unpopulated desert highways, Route 66, deep red land and deep blue sky and hot sunshine pouring down as they are propelled forward by a sense of unfettered adventure. The music is good, the company is better, and there is nothing to improve upon.

For others, the phrase “road trip” spawns a shudder as unwelcome memories come rushing back. Terrible road food, endless hours across Nebraska, shrieking children fighting in the back seat, and a willingness to do awful things to kittens if it would buy ten minutes of solitude in an unconfined space.

As with so many things, the truth often lies somewhere between. I have grown to love road trips, embracing the journey as much as, and sometimes more than, the destination. From the time I was a child, on some subconscious level, I have always understood that I would take something valuable and sublime away from those endless hours in the car.

My earliest road trips were taken as a backseat passenger, riding through the night to see relatives in Ohio. We always traveled at night. My parents said it was to avoid the daytime traffic around Chicago, but I suspect this decision was due more to natural circadian rhythms reducing the likelihood that we three kids would be a total pain in the ass as my dad navigated said traffic. Either way, I loved night travel. It seemed magical and precious to pass darkened farms and listen to my mom and dad talk quietly in the front, feeling like we were the only people on earth still awake. I remember stopping at a McDonald’s in an Illinois overpass at about 2 AM. Eating vanilla ice cream cones as we watched the sparse traffic zooming below our feet, it felt like an enormous privilege and I knew that I was a lucky child.

We took a lot of family trips growing up, always driving, often camping. When I was fifteen and possibly at my very most obnoxious stage of life, we took a family camping trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota. My brother, my sister and I took turns sitting in the hated middle seat of our Isuzu Trooper, and each shift brought a fresh round of complaints and questions of why our parents hadn’t considered our comfort and bought a roomy Suburban instead. We were unimpressed with their increasingly exasperated lectures on gas mileage. My turn for both the middle seat and control of our one Nintendo Gameboy arrived while we were driving through the Badlands, so my memory of that singular piece of the world revolves mostly around reaching an all-time high score in Tetris. My parents seemed torn between frustration with my refusal to take note of the beauty around us and relief that I wasn’t fighting with my siblings or complaining about my sub-standard accommodations. But occasionally, I would secretly pause the game and silently stare at the breathtaking landscape. I would like to think that on that day, buried deep within my teenage entitlement and endless complaints, there existed in me a core of awe in what I was seeing and gratitude that I had parents who made sure I could see it.

As a young adult, the purpose of road trips shifted more to relocation than vacation, and my travel companions changed too. In 2004, I left home for what would be the last time with my new boyfriend of four months. Kevin and I were bound for a 300-square-foot apartment in Washington DC, rented sight unseen. The phrase “leap of faith” didn’t really suit our punk rock sensibilities, but it seemed appropriate nonetheless. We spent the better part of two days in the cab of a U-Haul, crossing state lines and talking about the future, which quite literally stretched out before us as we drove through the August heat. We were less sure about the wisdom of this move than we were willing to admit, but more sure than most people seemed to think prudent. We understood that this road trip was bringing us to a completely new stage of life.

As significant as this long, life-altering journey was, the little joyrides, unplanned and impulsive, that we took had their own cumulative effect. The year we lived in DC we took the opportunity to see some of the more atypical spots of the mid-Atlantic area. We drove to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware and swam in the ocean with dolphins playing less than 30 yards away. We went all the way down to the tip of the Chesapeake Peninsula simply because I found a town called Crapo on the map and thought we should go. We explored as much as we could that year, talking and laughing, holding hands across the console of our silver Neon. Although we shared an apartment, our micro road trips gave us a space and time to learn each other in a way I don’t think we could have otherwise.

Almost a year after our arrival in DC, we drove north on the Beltway for the last time, engaged now and heading back to the Midwest. We drove as late into the night as we could. In the middle of Indiana, I began to lobby hard for the authentic experience of a quaint mom-and-pop inn, away from the bland sterility of the chain hotels. I argued my case until we saw a sign for the Sleepaway Mo-Tel, and Kevin sighed and exited the freeway with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. We walked into the motel office and came face to face with the owner, a man who looked like an extra out of any thriller movie featuring deranged hillbillies. Constrained by our respective non-confrontational Midwestern upbringings, we reluctantly paid for a night. Our $35 bought us a filthy room, a bed covered by a bedspread with a pattern that looked like it was chosen specifically to conceal evidence of violent crimes, and a door with only a press button lock for security. After ten seconds of silence and mounting dread, Kevin reminded me that there was a Best Western back by the freeway, pointing out that the loss of $35 was a small price to pay for not getting murdered. I agreed, and we fled.

As we drove away, he let me know that while he understood the retro experience I had been seeking, it was important to remember that there is probably a reason why horror films based in the hospitality industry are set in places like this rather than a Holiday Inn. I had to concede the point. I am still learning to admit when I am wrong, but our early travels together, and this experience in particular, gave me a good foundation for that essential skill of marriage.

Through these travels, and countless more, it is clear to me that a road trip with good company is time very well spent. Watching for deer, swearing at people driving like idiots, white-knuckling it through blizzards, car dancing to Lady Gaga, arguing, singing, laughing, while learning to navigate new territory. Whether through flat brown plains or red canyons, there is value in the journey.

Bloom

Spring finally arrived. I’m pretty sure I wrote the same sentence last year, when I thought surely the next winter would be easier. All of a sudden, everything is so green that it looks fake, like a diorama with Easter grass. My drive home from work along Highway 2 has become vivid and bright, and I’ve seen two bears so far, a sure sign of spring.

We had my mom’s memorial service two weeks ago, and I feel like missing her has crashed even harder over me since then, if that’s possible. Maybe the build-up to that and thinking about what I was going to say kept reality at bay to a certain extent. Maybe the coming of spring and thinking about gardens and planting and hope has made it worse. Mom was a gardener. I have spent a lot of time this winter and spring thinking about my gardens and how I was going to do it right this year, fix my mistakes from previous years and put in my vegetables and do her proud. Time has, as always, been the problem. I started seedlings and my seedlings lived up to previous years disappointments by being pathetic little weaklings that stopped growing at 2 inches, shriveled and sad. The bed for the garden is covered entirely with crabgrass. Nothing is in yet. I went to a greenhouse last week and spent way too much money on the most beautiful annuals, because I am planting for two this year. If the weather cooperates, I will make some headway on all of this tomorrow.

There’s a little magical thinking/voodoo element to all of this. There’s a part of me that thinks I’ll feel better once I get the garden going, plant the annuals and arrange the pots around the house, that I won’t have the waves of sadness that take over and slam the brakes on a perfectly productive day. This is not reasonable. I know logically that grief winds itself out through years, lengthening and stretching beyond what those who don’t know any better would deem appropriate. But it’s hard. And it’s hard for other people to listen to. They want to hear that you’re Doing Okay and Bravely Moving Forward. I want to be doing those things too.

In any case, it’s a little telling that this is my first post in months. And while I don’t want this to turn into the “I Miss My Mommy” blog, I can’t say it won’t come up again. But I want to try to get into a different stage of things, one that feels more in line with honoring memory than staying mired in this funk. In that spirit, here is what I read for my mom at her memorial. It was hard to write and harder to get through, but it was worth it.
—-
The writer Michael Perry, in one of my favorite books, said that we are not given such a measure of grief without first getting an equal measure of love. When I found out that my mom had a brain tumor, I was about to get in my car and drive home from work. I fell apart, and as I was driving over the bridge between Duluth and Superior, crying and angry and scared, I remember thinking, “I kind of wish she had been kind of a crappy mom, and maybe this wouldn’t be so hard.”

She was not a crappy mom. She was pretty much the best mom anyone could hope for. From those teenage years when people start complaining about their moms, on through adulthood, whenever my friends would vent about their mothers driving them crazy or being controlling or unreasonable or critical, I just never had anything to say. Mom was none of those things. She was nurturing and loving, supportive and fun and funny.

Mom was very involved in our lives and activities as we grew up, but she always seemed to be enjoying herself; it didn’t seem like it was a chore or something she felt obligated to do- with the exception of sewing dance costumes. She was a leader for my Brownie troop, and she and the other two leaders would organize fun activities for us in the park across the street, then once all the girls except their own had been picked up, sit out on the deck of our house with a pitcher of margaritas. She was a parent chaperone for Jennifer and Sean’s class trips to the week-long environmental camp at Wolf Ridge and came home both years talking about how much fun she had had with the other parents. It was really fun for us to have her involved in our activities, because she was having a good time doing it.

Mom was always, always our biggest advocate. When I was in fifth grade, I got braces and glasses within the same week, then decided to go for the trifecta and get myself a perm. On my first day back in school with my new look, it took less than five minutes for my classmates to start making fun of me. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remember it now, but it felt absolutely overwhelming, like I was being circled by a pack of wolves, and I started crying and shut myself in my locker. After a minute or so, my best friend yanked open the door, pulled me out and marched me down to the office, where she called my mom while I kept crying. Mom was there in minutes and stormed into our classroom, interrupting the teacher and delivering a scathing lecture to the class before taking me home. I was embarrassed, but at the same time, it felt so good to know that I had a mom who would go to such lengths to stand up for me, and I was proud of her. And nothing like that ever happened to me again.

I always loved hanging out with my mom. The mental health days, when she would let me skip school once a year and take me shopping and out for lunch, the week she came to visit me when I was an exchange student in Norway, the two-day drive in the U-Haul when I moved out to Boston, our annual tomato canning sessions the last couple of years. The year or so Kevin and I lived with Mom and Dad in our house in Ashland—most married 32 year olds aren’t real psyched about living with their parents, but it was actually really nice to spend so much time together. After that, even just the casual stopping by, drinking coffee in the kitchen was great. The big memorable times, like all the time we spent together getting ready for my wedding and her sewing my wedding dress are memorable, but those everyday, throwaway times together are a big chunk of what I think of when I think about Mom, and I miss those times a lot.

Mom put us, her family, at the very top of her priority list, but made sure to take time for herself and pursue other things that she valued. And that was important for her to do as a parent, too, because she showed us how to give that kind of love without losing yourself. She set a great example for us in a lot of ways. Every day that I’m at work in the hospital, I think about what a fantastic nurse she was and I hope I’m doing as good a job as she did. When I have a choice to stand up for something I believe in or stay quiet and go along, I know what Mom did, and what she would want me to do. I’m trying to be the gardener and the cook that she was, but it’s a process—she was pretty amazing at both. I know that my marriage is as good as it is in part because I grew up seeing the wonderful example of my parents’ marriage, which taught me what a marriage could be like, what to look for in a partner and how to be a good partner myself. Most importantly, four months into parenthood, I am working and hoping to be the kind of mom to my daughter that Mom was to me. There is no getting around it, I am heartbroken that Mom and Iris never got to meet, and I think about it every day, the joy that my mom would have gotten from being a grandma. Iris has three wonderful grandparents, but she is missing an amazing grandmother. The best I can do is to share with her all of the things Mom loved that will always remind me of her: the shadows on the snow on a sunny day, her favorite tree, standing in a field by the Brule River, the sounds of the spring peepers, the prettiest beach rocks and sea glass. And I will try to carry everything my mom gave me into raising her, so that she will grow up with my mom’s spirit and love. And for all of us, in thinking about what my mom would want from this day and from honoring her memory, I know this: she would want us to cry a little, laugh a lot, and love unconditionally.

Blogging for Dollars

I was kind of stunned recently to learn how many people actually blog full-time and make a living at it. I thought it was, like, Dooce and Matt Drudge, and maybe another terrible person I hadn’t heard of, and everyone else brought in twenty bucks a month or something from little banner ads. I am often woefully behind on things like this and fear I am entering into early old ladyhood, expressing astonishment at technological advances that are five years old and misinterpreting textspeak. But in case you are also behind the times, it’s true: a bunch of people make a shitload of money by blogging. From what I understand, the blogs that provide serious income for their authors tend to fall into categories: the mommy (or handful of daddy) blogs, the fashion blogs, food, fitness, and my favorite, the lifestyle blogs.

Of course, I thought for approximately 6/10 of a second about how I could hop on the gravy train myself, but let’s be real here. Apart from the fact that six people read this blog, there are a number of reasons why I will never be able to build my Northwood Transplant brand into anything remotely financially viable, beginning with my inability to give the people what they evidently want. I don’t really want to write a mommy blog, because I’m disinclined toward both hilarious poop stories and talking about recharging my soul, and I’m not funny enough to write something that holds up with the best mommy blogs. When we’re asked parenting questions, both Kevin and I kind of shrug and say “I dunno, we just try things til they work.” We’re blessed with a generally very content, happy and charming baby and take no responsibility for that. Three months in, I think it would take some major cojones to start sharing parenting wisdom and philosophies, and much as we love her, a three-month-old just doesn’t provide a lot of blog content other than “Look how damn adorable my kid is!”

The very thought of me writing either a fashion or fitness blog is awesome in its absurdity. I would like to be more fashionable, but as a nurse, I basically wear glorified pajamas to work. On many of my days off, I don’t leave the house except to walk Shane, and view black yoga pants and a gray cardigan as quite a stylish ensemble for doing laundry and lying around reading. I have approximately three outfits that are reasonably attractive and effectively hide my thunder, to quote Tobias Funke, which makes them appropriate for being seen in public.

I’m the person who should be following fashion blogs and taking notes, not sharing my pathetic sartorial choices with the world.

The same can be said about fitness blogs and me. My current fitness regimen consists of the aforementioned dogwalking and some tiny little floor exercises to try and correct my janky hips so I can go back to yoga. Once in a while I’ll get a wild hair and go to town with a resistance band for some upper-body exercises for about five minutes, then spend the next two days complaining about my sore triceps, like I use them anyway. I have big, big plans for improving my fitness level sometime soon. I also have a stack of unread books and magazines on my coffee table and over 50 movies in my Netflix queue, and I can eat popcorn while I do those things.

I like cooking very much, so a food blog wouldn’t be totally out of the question. But I am a cook, not a chef. I love trying new recipes, but I don’t create many new dishes on my own because when I have done so in the past, the results have generally been…not good. A lot of the food bloggers adapt recipes, and that’s fine, as long as the adaptation is significant. But I tend to do things like get a recipe for muffins or quickbread or cake and add chocolate chips to it. That doesn’t make me a chef, it makes me someone who thinks all baked goods should have chocolate chips. I have one recipe I came up with on my own: peanut chicken with red peppers, onions and garlic. Mix together peanut butter, soy sauce, brown sugar, rice vinegar, and a bit of sesame oil. Adjust amounts to taste–it should be a little salty. Add boneless skinless chicken thigh chunks and marinate 1-24 hours in the fridge. Cut red peppers and onions in larger pieces, however you like, and coarsely chop garlic. Saute chicken in a pan with a small amount of oil. In a separate pan with a very small amount of oil, cook the peppers and onions, adding the garlic partway through cooking. It’s best if there are some blackened areas on the peppers. Serve together on garlic naan. Also suitable for a camping meal. You’re welcome.

The lifestyle blogs kind of blow my mind, because they combine so much into one perfect vision of how your life could be. Despite myself, I get sucked in. I too want to dress like Zooey Deschanel in “500 Days of Summer” and make a beautiful asparagus-gruyere-leek frittata for breakfast before I ride my 1960s Schwinn that I rebuilt and painted in a mod design to the farmer’s market, where I fill the basket with in-season strawberries so I can bike home and bake perfect pies while wearing an adorably retro apron. Later in the afternoon, I will knit my own curtains and remake hideous thriftstore furniture into impossibly stylish and useful hutches for my gorgeously mismatched china that I collected from flea markets, before rearranging my lamp collection and taking artful photos of my French bulldog with my Rolleiflex. I suppose I could just make shit up and write that blog; however, we’ve already discussed my fashion problem, so that part is out. My hot new breakfast these days is a NutriGrain toaster waffle with peanut butter and jam, and although the jam is local, I doubt this meets the standards of the lifestyle blog readership. Kevin hates cooked fruit, so if I make a pie, I’m eating a pie, and there’s nothing very stylish about eating an entire pie. I do knit, but I’ve been working on the same scarf for about eighteen months and take a pretty half-assed approach to following patterns or completing projects. I will freely admit to having no vision when it comes to ugly old furniture and if it can’t be saved by a coat of paint, it’s dead to me. My plates are mismatched, but they’re cheap and ugly and were bought in a depressing Goodwill. I have yet to find the lovely little flea market of yore, full of treasures that can be picked up for a song; the flea markets I’ve been to mostly feature hobo-looking dudes selling old Happy Meal toys. I actually do own a Rollei and occasionally think about putting it to use again, but I never do. Instead, I take pictures of the dog and the baby on my iPhone camera, which is fine, but hardly artful. Lifestyle blogs are meant to be aspirational. I sincerely hope no one is aspiring to eat peanut butter and jam on a toaster waffle in the car at 5:30 in the morning on the way to work.

I’m glad for those bloggers that have been able to make a career out of their blogs. It seems like a pretty awesome life. But I like my tiny little blog where I get to ramble on about whatever strikes my fancy, and I don’t have to be on all the time, or always funny, or stylish or fit or fashionable, and I can sit and write in my fleece pants before I go reheat some Chinese leftovers for dinner.

Birthday

Today is my mom’s birthday. She would have been 60.

It’s a relatively warm and sunny spring day today. She and my dad might have gone out to the ice caves, depending on the size of today’s horde of tourists, taken a sauna in the evening, then had her traditional birthday bonfire, conveniently ridding themselves of last fall’s brush pile. She would have made her own birthday dinner, probably some kind of pasta or a lamb roast, and maybe a cake or key lime pie. She was a phenomenal cook and loved to experiment with new recipes; we will never again eat as well as we did on those family dinners (or sit around the table laughing about the occasional titanic fail, like the Thanksgiving of the Legendary Revolting Whitefish Liver Stuffing). It’s warm enough outside, they might have sat on the little balcony outside their bedroom and looked at the stars before bed. Too early this year to hear the spring peepers that she loved, but maybe they could have heard the new kids playing out in the barn.

I’m going to make a creamy chicken pasta tonight, and a salad with the maple balsamic dressing that she liked. Then I’ll have a glass of wine, raise a toast and if it’s not too cloudy, go outside and look at the stars before bed. Happy birthday, Mom.

Heart-Openers and the Stages of Grief

I have had it with this winter. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a bad case of spring fever, and I know I’ve never had the kind of seasonal depressive mood that is beginning to set in. Weeks on end of frigid temps and windchill advisories while caring for a small infant lend themselves to a unique trapped feeling, and I would love to be able to get out of the house for some simple fresh air, running a quick errand, something other than work.Much as I love my days off with Iris, I find myself pacing and aimless, too irritable to see any one task through to completion. I get out of bed in the morning with the best of intentions, plans to work my way through my project list, but by afternoon I will generally find myself sprawled on the couch, watching a movie I don’t care about while Iris naps. If I can make it through to a complete blog post now, I will consider it a major accomplishment.

I suppose that a lot of my general crankiness and malaise can be traced to grief as well. Every single day, I am reminded of what has been lost with my mom’s death. I run into childhood friends and want to give her updates on their lives. Something happens at work and I want to talk to her, my original nursing mentor, about it. I find an amazing recipe I want to share with her. Most of all, I watch her granddaughter growing, beginning to smile and babble, and it is unbearably painful that she is missing it.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the Five Stages of Grief theory is kind of bullshit. The people in charge of such things have amended it somewhat, saying people will move back and forth between the stages, or shift through one so quickly that it appears as if it was skipped altogether. Whatever. I’m getting to be a pro at losing people close to me, people dying way too young, and my process seems to follow its own pattern: Shock, anger, out-of-control crazy hysterical sobbing, anger, taking charge and getting shit done, anger, hollow sadness, anger, and if prior experience holds up, a sense of unnecessary tragic loss that never really goes away. Notice anything standing out here?

Anger is easy. It doesn’t hurt so much to be angry. It feels righteous and a little powerful, but it bleeds into the rest of my life. Death just stirs up so much; people left behind create narratives around the person who is gone, and some of those narratives turn that person into a saint, and some create a closer relationship between the deceased and the storyteller than actually existed, and some paint the storyteller in a much better light than that of reality, and some create a portrait of the person who is gone that more closely matches the personality and values of the storyteller, and some are pretty accurate. I’ve always been an irritating stickler for detail in a narrative, and so witnessing my mom described by so many people in so many different ways is weird, and hearing descriptions of her and narratives that don’t ring true is more of a trigger for me than it probably should be. I am trying to move past this, to learn how to brush it off and not let it tear me up so much; I know that it shouldn’t affect me and that we all need to do what we need to do to get through our grief. And I don’t have the right to be the one to tell everyone how to feel or think about my mom and her death; no one does.

So I’m trying. Last night I went to yoga to try and get rid of some of this pent-up energy and stress. My friend Sarah teaches yoga, and I absolutely love her classes; she is funny and down to earth, kind and welcoming and encouraging without pushing. She focused on heart-opening poses in last night’s class, and I was excited when she announced that would be our focus at the beginning of class, but it was the toughest yoga class I can remember. I struggled through a lot of the poses and after the last asana, when we moved back to a seated position to do some grounding before shavasana, I felt nauseated, with a pounding headache. I think some of my difficulties came from my lack of activity over the past few weeks, but there was definitely an emotional component to it as well. Yoga was something my mom and I did together fairly often, and I feel the loss of her every time I go to class, but I think the way I felt last night was kind of a kick in the ass. It’s pretty apparent that I’m trying to slam something shut by being so pissed off about these situations I can’t control and that don’t ultimately matter in terms of the close relationship I had with my mom or all of the traits and values and passions that came together to create the person she was. And today I have my sore muscles to remind me of the consequences of settling into that anger for a nice, long stew. I’m not going to be able to get all zen about my mom for a very long time, but trying to live inside her memory and the things I know to be true, and letting go of the rest of it, is the best I can do for now.

That’s Enough, Internet

I can’t remember whether the Internet was this aggravating in its infancy, back in the days of Netscape and Webcrawler. I don’t think so, but I have been known to be wrong. It’s entirely possible that back in the glory days, amidst all the Blink-182 fan chatrooms and hotmail accounts that were actually being used, there were approximately a billion people writing blogs made up of enumerated lists explaining the steps one should take to be mentally healthy, realize their dreams and live a perfectly balanced life. There may well have been another billion writing another kind of list blog, crafted to explain why all the judgment (real or imagined) passed on their particular major life decision is misguided and misplaced and honestly, the author is the one who has it all figured out and he/she pities the narrow and rigid viewpoint that doesn’t allow The Haters to realize that. As I was busy going to ska shows and nurturing my debilitating crush on the devastatingly cute drummer in my dorm, I may have missed the nonstop manufactured outrage, often based on outright lies, spread like old rancid pork grease all over the Internet. And maybe if there had been social networking sites, people would have been posting links to news stories about someone setting fire to puppies or eating babies, with no apparent purpose for sharing other than to spread the shock and horror far and wide.

It’s possible that was all there and I just wasn’t paying attention. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t make it any less irritating now.

The list blogs, my god, the list blogs. I get their popularity: the first type offers answers. They provide easy step-by-step instructions to fixing your messed-up life in simple, bite-size pieces. I don’t even think they’re always wrong; I often find myself agreeing with the items on the list even as I’m rolling my eyes. But the problem with these lists, and the reason that they are so popular, is that the solutions they offer are very, very shallow and never demand the real kind of self-reflection that is actually going to lead to any kind of improvement one wishes to make. They are the ultimate feel-good quick fix and are about as valuable in terms of actually helping people achieve any real goals as a Scientology auditing and E-meter reading.

The second type of list blog offers validation and vindication when you find the one that matches your life and worldview, or alternately, righteous indignation when you come across one shitting all over your choices. These blogs can really drum up a lot of discussion and finger-pointing, which is why they become so widespread and are read by so many people, regardless of how poorly written they may be. I really, really, really think we all need to stop caring what some jackass with a tumblr account thinks about the decisions we make, whether they are praising those decisions or demonizing them, and we need to stop trying to convince other people that we have it all figured out.

Sometimes the Internet gives us gifts, too.

Re: the manufactured outrage, it really just makes me tired, so I’ll just say two things. One, if you read something that sparks that “Holy shit, this cannot stand” response, check snopes.com before you pass it on, so you don’t look like a gullible idiot looking for things to get pissed about when you share the asbestos-in-tampons story, or the one about Obama getting caught with his real Kenyan birth certificate at the DMV. Two, if this is a real thing and it really is outrageous, maybe choose your words so as to sell your case? Maybe skip the following terms: communist, nazi, traitor. The world is full of appalling things, no doubt about it, but I would love it if we could skip the huffiness and ire so as to gather our resources for the things that are truly appalling and discuss them in a way that is designed for resolution and improvement, not shrieking and finger-pointing.

Finally, to the people who link to the most shocking, upsetting news stories they can find, the ones that have no underlying point, the stories that are meaningless in their sheer horror and in no way spark a thoughtful debate about larger societal issues: Stop it. I don’t want to see a video of someone throwing sacks of kittens in a river (that particular story actually ties in nicely with the paragraph above as well, start with snopes.com). I don’t want to read a story about a man who killed his whole family, then himself. I don’t want to watch a news clip about a guy who ate his neighbor’s dog. Why are you posting this? It makes you look like a fucking ghoul. Unless you are trying to start a conversation about pet overpopulation and shelter options, or PTSD in military veterans, or the sorry state of mental health care in this country, which is not the case in the vast majority of these posts that I see, you are rubbernecking and trying to get the rest of us to do it too. Knock it off. It’s gross.

So please, Internet, rein it in on these things. It will cut down on content, but hey, you can fill the holes with more tweets and photos of the utterly hilarious shitshow that is the Sochi Olympics.