These are some of the things that make me happy. In no particular order. I’m starting with Chanel make up because it was a recent big investment. I left all my make up in NYC and spent an afternoon at the Chanel counter in L.A.
Coffee makers in hotel rooms. They really get me. 
I recently took a Spinning certification class. It’s a love-hate relationship. Believe me. 
Taxi rides. Also love-hate.
New York City driving back from the airport. I still get goosebumps seeing the city lights.
Have you ever needed to keep writing to just… keep writing? Tonight is one of those nights. My thoughts from the day are a cyclone. At one point this afternoon I thought I needed a good cry–where is a good cry when you need one, anyway? Sometimes making dinner will have to do.
We started the day here with a lot of screaming. M. Me. Just screaming to get out the door. Early. On a Monday. And pick up coffee and donuts for a meeting. It was an ambitious task. We weren’t ready for it. We are denying M the stroller for school drop offs and she’s not happy. It took several attempts, much tears, threats and bribes for both us of to get into an elevator to leave the building. And then there was a forgotten phone to come back for.
My early meeting was confusing. You know when you feel like you missed a memo or forgot a really important project was due? That’s pretty much me at all meetings. WHAT ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT? often runs through my mind. Sometimes I say it out loud.
When I returned home after the meeting, oldest still in school, latte in hand, ready to write, my 2.5-year-old twins were five minutes behind me. Even with the babysitter here, they don’t leave me alone.
On to school pick up. More crying. I reprimanded her in front of her teachers. I felt like an awful terrible disgusting person. M continued to cry. On to soccer. I was the only mommy holding hands with one of the players on the field.
Bath time. Dinner. Watching Annie. All interspersed with the crying, whining, battling of three little children. Then hugging, kissing, reading, snuggling, puzzle solving, nose wiping, more hugging. Begging for more time before bed. Sleeping.
Writing. All day, I felt like I was having a bad day. My ego was hurt at one point. I was disappointed by something. Then by someone. My children didn’t behave. I lost patience. I couldn’t get loose from the emotional tug of my day. The ick.
And then writing. Putting it down, getting it out, seeing it. Finally some of the vague, unnamable fears and disappointments crystalize. So. That’s what that was about.
Every so often I take something literally. Sometimes I miss the joke because I believe the ridiculous premise. (I will believe really ridiculous premises.) When I thought about what made me “stand taller” this week, I reflexively squared my shoulders. Something people are always telling me to do.
This weekend we were at the Emmy’s in Los Angeles. My husband was nominated on a writing team. I don’t talk about that a lot. (I TOTALLY talk about that all the time!) But it’s true and I am so proud of him.
I had so much anxiety building up to the event that I almost didn’t want to go. Give me a break, I said almost. I bought a beautiful dress. (I bought, like, five beautiful dresses. Three can’t be returned. That’s another story.) I bought shoes. Many shoes. Several clutches. Jewelry. Makeup. Expensive toothpaste. Yet, I still had a tight uneasy feeling about going. You see, I hate being in a crowd. Of beautiful people. Of beautiful, well dressed, celebrity people. I was completely out of my element, out of my comfort zone and out of my mind with nerves. I hate that.
I’d like to get something out in the open. As much as I like compliments (a lot), I am not asking for any here. Objectively, I know I looked good. Enough. Good enough to not stand out as the girl with the ugly dress. In other words, not bad.
This is about the feelings on the inside: how I think, feel, imagine, fear and project I look and what everyone must be thinking of me. It is far more important and very fragile. It is what doesn’t change with Chanel powder and SPANX.
You know how people always say actresses are airbrushed in the those magazine cover photos and they don’t really look that perfect in person? Yeah. Um, they look that perfect. I’m sorry. I imagine hours of hair and makeup professionals working on you helps. But every actress I saw looked skinny and gorgeous. Yeah, I was pissed too.
In every sense, I wanted to stand taller. I sensed myself wanting to disappear into myself. So I pushed my shoulders back and forced my confidence up. I demanded of myself that I be in the moment and be visible. I stood so far up that I felt dizzy. I posed on the red carpet. For my husband. (I posed for a picture taken by my husband.) Still, I was on the red carpet. I felt exposed, vulnerable and silly. Again, this is about the inside. The photos tell a story. I am glammed up and out on the town. My dress fits and the color is lovely. My make up, expensive and adequately applied. Someone (with poor eyesight, the sun in her eyes, and perhaps a daytime drinking problem) may have thought I was a celebrity on the red carpet. I felt like an awkward intruder on Planet Perfect.
I want this to be a story from an honest place. It is about a 40-year-old woman who remembers hiding her face during choral concerts in grade school. And who doesn’t feel so different today. On most days, I need a lot of reassurance. It’s not such a pretty story. (I just asked my husband if it were “okay” to include a photo here.) Yet, for me the truth is more important and more graceful than any measure of beautiful pretending I could achieve.
Sometimes, sharing my deepest truths helps me to stand taller. While I may not be certain that I am enough on every occasion–at a black tie affair, at preschool pick up, or at the grocery store–I know that the truth will be always enough. It is what I have.
Today, I am linking up with just.BE.enough. I am so impressed with them.
When I was 13 I thought the world, the universe, and God specifically, had it in for me. Either I had done something in this life to deserve the name calling, the threats, the laughing and the ridicule that I met with every day, or I had been born defective in some way. It was not unusual to hear “There’s fat Wendy” as I walked through the junior high hallway. It was not unusual to hear that or worse. This was my lot in life due to genetics or fate. Less than other people and never going to be good enough. That’s what I thought.
When I was 14, I thought the same. Fifteen, same. And for every year after that for a long time. Punished for something I couldn’t understand, I carried a shameful secret and was treated that way in return. Always chunky, awkward, bookish and shy, I was the perfect target for cruel children and teenagers. At first I cried easily and often. And then I learned how to live in my own world. There was an alternative; I kept that in back of my mind. But I learned to pretend, fantasize, disappear. And eat. I ate to cover my mistakes, the hurt. When I was laughed at on the bus, I walked briskly home from the bus stop. I did’t cry. I dropped my books on the stairs, ran to the kitchen. I lifted the lid on the heavy ceramic cookie jar, feeling the vibration of its scraping the lip of the jar, reached in, replaced the lid, leaned back. Ate. At last, I was okay.
I believed in God from a young age. I was scared of Him. Certainly, I had manifested some offense to deserve this treatment. I learned to make deals with Him, to hide from Him. Please, please don’t let them be waiting for me at school today, and I promise I’ll be good.
In high school, I was the fat friend. I was a good friend, this is true, and I had friends. But I was sad and lonely and wished I could trade places with my pretty friends. Even for a day. I was not as good as they, and it was not hard to find people to remind me of that. I was the third wheel on dates because my friends felt bad for me, but the boy always looked at me with disdain in his eyes. I was smart; I knew what was going on. It was so much worse that way.
We often hear people speak of their past, a past that might have been unhappy or unfortunate, and they say they wouldn’t have changed a thing–because all those things made them who they are today. I would change everything. I would in a second. I spent my thirties trying to undo my teenage years. If I could be pretty, thin, funny, popular enough now–it would erase who I was then. The things that happened to me. It won’t matter to whoever it is we think keeps score of these things. I’d come out even or ahead if I could just get it right.
I say that. Yet I know who I am today. I feel a great deal of pain for other people. I care if someone is being ridiculed. I am not perfect, and I have done my share of harm at my weakest, most insecure moments. It is easy for me to join a group in gossiping about, or worse, ignoring another woman. But I try to let empathy and compassion guide me more and push me harder than fear. I am competitive and have a deep need to be recognized, to win an unseen, unknowable prize. Everything in me shakes at having to back off, but I am learning in a very real way that supporting others opens all the good in the universe. It comes back to me tenfold. I trust there is a loving Creator. And that he hasn’t singled me out. I struggle, but I come back, slowly, eventually, to a place of faith, however weak. I don’t want to be a source of pain; it matters to me that I might make someone’s day easier by holding a door, smiling, sharing a burden. It is my ideal; it is not always my reality. This familiarity with humanity, which has come at a cost, is the instruction, the gift of my past. It is the thing, if pressed, I would not change.
This post is an entry in a writing contest at Suess’sPieces. The prompt I wrote from is “When I was 13, I thought…”
This is my living room right now. Yes, those are paint stains. No, that’s not a real baby lying on the floor. No, I cannot deal.
We really like crackers here. H is singing a song about them. To the tune of “Tomorrow” from Annie.
This was after our pediatrician appointment. The doctor was very disappointed in our bratty behavior. By “our” I mean my.
Please find me at Lauren Nicole Gifts today with a guest post–also check out her hand made jewelry! Thanks Denise for the opportunity to work with you! “Who’s Your Nanny?”
“I miss my childhood,” my husband says as we drive the two hours upstate to his family’s house. He is describing his memories of growing up in rural Hudson Valley, with the occasional bear in the yard, extended family living no further than a few houses away.
I nod and “mm-hmm” a lot, lower the volume on the radio to show my husband I am listening, but I have already heard these stories. He describes the holiday meals and traditions that have fed his own obsession with Thanksgiving. By now I am well acquainted with his fanaticism around all-things-Thanksgiving. We always have Thanksgiving at our house. Always, so don’t ask again, okay? Regardless of the number of guests we are hosting, we have food to feed no fewer than 20 people. For a month. And these people should really like pie.
I check that our three children are still napping in their carseats. It is early summer and we are heading up for swimming and barbecue. There will be a lot of messy food, half-inflated pool toys and never enough napkins to do the job.
My own Thanksgiving tradition as an adult, after my parents’ divorce, was meeting my father at a midtown restaurant. I didn’t mind it. I liked the easy, sophisticated feeling of holiday dinner at a restaurant. When you live with parents who end up divorced, chances are holidays were never such a blast to begin with. I’m just guessing. I loved the special holiday menus, the wine, the cold night air that hit my face when we left the warmth of the restaurant, saying good bye to my dad at the subway entrance. I liked heading home alone in a cab, the city streets empty, the long holiday weekend in front of me. Thanksgiving felt solitary and open.
I tried to keep this tradition of restaurant Thanksgivings with my husband, once my father moved to Florida and remarried. We went out to dinner one year and my husband proclaimed it was the most depressing holiday he’d ever spent. We brought our elderly neighbor a piece of pie. I thought it was a great success. (We have some issues.) This was years ago and before kids. All Thanksgivings since have been almost identical: turkey, sides and pies from Fresh Direct, family and friends who are in town, wine, tv, kids in pajamas. There is a place for everyone.
We have lived in five New York City apartments since our last restaurant Thanksgiving. The settings change but the traditions grow roots. Could I go back to eating turkey dinner at a local establishment, having nothing to clean up but the kids? I could. We won’t. But for the record, I could.
The kids wake as we exit the Thruway. Almost there. My husband smiles as we pass McDonalds and turn onto the rural route his house is on. He is lit with his memories. Mine are hidden. It is not a bad thing.
RemembeRED is a memoir meme. This post is a response to a writing prompt.
Outside our window is one of my favorite sights–the Empire State Building. For obvious reasons (like, I love this city, and I am so grateful for once to not be facing a brick wall in Manhattan), this makes me very happy.
On rainy, humid summer days, the view is transformed. Fog covers most of the city so that the skyline seems to have disappeared overnight. I wake up early to close the windows to the rain and it is a different city.
The Empire State Building is gone from sight these mornings. This is what we see.
We are used to this–the infamous New York landmark disappears on foggy days. The mist obscures everything across the river as well. We feel isolated and alone when we are, in fact, surrounded by buildings. Not unusual, always jarring, it has been making me think about not seeing what is in front of us (I’m being both figurative and literal here. Watch out yo.). How does an 80-year-old skyscraper disappear for hours on a rainy morning? What do we say of a city haunted both by the invisible and the invincible?
Every anniversary of Sept. 11, two beams of light reach high into the night sky from downtown Manhattan. We were crazy fortunate to have an unobstructed view of this Tribute in Light from our last apartment. (I was exaggerating previous comment on brick walls. But only barely.)
The lights burn into the September sky. Breathtaking and ethereal, they are a reminder for what cannot be forgotten–the gaping hole in the New York skyline, the raging rip through our history and heart.
I am not qualified to make this post a tribute. There is nothing profound that I could add to the discussion of what Manhattan was like on that day almost 10 years ago, and what it has been like here since. I wanted to leave after September 11, 2001. I worked downtown and I was desperate to be anywhere but there. I was terrified and broken and shaken to my bones. We stayed for various reasons (jobs, apartments, inertia) and then left six years later when our first child was born (for space, for money, you know the drill). By then, of course, I didn’t want to leave. Not one bit. For weeks before we moved, I stayed awake into the night (pregnant insomnia, thank you) and wished I would never be robbed of the beautifully lit scenes outside our living room window facing north from 35th Street: The Chrysler Building, The MetLife Building, the rooftop water towers, the roof gardens.
I am no one special here. Yet, I am as unique as all New Yorkers. Our stories are heartwarming, horrifying, inspiring and boring. We, like our city, are contradictions. New York is not a perfect place. Here, in the city that drives the world’s economy, where billions of dollars are made in hundreds of industries, where art and fashion become “Art” and “Fashion,” there are people living on the street. We walk over and around them. There is no way to make sense of this. (I don’t accept capitalism as an explanation. There is no moral sense to this.) There are invisible people here–here in the smartest, brightest, most dazzling city in the world. And they will never be seen.
The Veterans Affairs Medical Center is visible as well outside our apartment window. Despite our being at war for the past ten years, those who are serving and have served our country aren’t first to be exalted in our collective mind. We are grateful and sad of course, but we don’t laud our troops the way we do celebrities. Or reality tv stars. I watch people entering the building downtown and wonder who they are. We don’t recognize them. They too, seem to exist outside of sharp focus.
As summer closes, I am thinking of two truths. Each is disturbing, comforting, complicated. There is that which we do not or will not or can not see regardless of how long it is in front of us; there are those places and people no longer with us who burn always in our minds.
I turned 40 last this year (prove it). There was a party. Friends. Champagne and cupcakes. I didn’t fall off my bar stool flashing my underwear to the place; in this way it was different than my 21st birthday party.
The day after my 40th birthday party, I noticed my boobs looked a little weird. Even in my favorite tee shirt. With a bra. And by “weird” I mean “like someone else’s.” This didn’t happen overnight. It may have something to do with my three children.
Mysteriously, around this time, other body parts as well began to appear “weird” or, as I like to say “other worldly.” In spin class one day (because I have gone, like, one day in the past year), I looked in the mirror behind me and thought, “whose old lady legs are those?” It was the mirror behind. me. You get it.
My hair, which I have been coloring since my twenties, is almost entirely grey. Except for the jet black ends and the copper red middle. The roots are grey. Boxed hair color kits were a good idea at 25. Questionable at 35. Now at 40 (did you say something?), my eyesight is weaker than even my upper body strength. I can’t be certain the color I dyed my hair last. I have a clue from the stains on the bathroom wall that remind me of my favorite tv show. Dexter.
A few years ago I was concerned about a “thing” on my face. That’s the best I can do: it was a thing occupying space between my left ear and mouth. It came. It stayed. I learned it was an “age spot.” Just recently I had it removed by my brilliant and brave dermatologist. This week I invested in concealer to cover the scar after someone asked me, “What’s that thing on your face?”
My mother in law visited this week. “You’ve done something different,” she said. “I got a hair cut,” I said. I had major Botox therapy, I didn’t say. But it’s true. My forehead has been set back 20 years. It looks so young it wants to smoke Parliaments and listen to Indigo Girls.
I have never had age anxiety. Weight, face, nose, body, sweat and hair anxiety–yes, yes, yes, yes, good God yes, and I-thought-I-should-get-a-perm, yes. But never did I worry about getting–or looking–older. This fear is new and deserves some thought–as well as a lot of cash–thrown at it.
It is not aging that scares me. To be honest, the alternative to aging is less attractive. I don’t have a comfort level with death. Some people do; I think that’s awesome. If I am stuck on a sinking ship, I hope it is with one of those people. Getting older–being closer to 50 than 30 now–has illuminated a world of new vulnerabilities: of body, of lifestyle, of legacy. All that is easy and comfortable and blessed for me today will be different and perhaps gone in the future. Can you blame me for wanting to suspend this process that steals life’s luxuries, such as walking briskly without pain, or carrying two children and a bag of groceries up several flights of stairs?
There is a poem by my favorite poet, Jane Kenyon, called “Otherwise.” Here it is:
I got out of bed/ on two strong legs./ It might have been/ otherwise. I ate/ cereal, sweet/ milk, ripe, flawless/ peach. It might/ have been otherwise./ I took the dog uphill/ to the birch wood./ All morning I did/ the work I love.// At noon I lay down/ with my mate. It might/ have been otherwise./ We ate dinner together/ at a table with silver/ candlesticks. It might/ have been otherwise./ I slept in a bed/ in a room with paintings/ on the walls, and/ planned another day/ just like this day./ But one day, I know,/ it will be otherwise.
I don’t like to imagine it, but as Ms. Kenyon (who died young at age 47) so devastatingly points out, one day will be otherwise. I don’t know what that will be or mean or feel like, what my children will think or remember of me. For now, I like to think my smooth forehead and ability to run after my children with ease are both indicative of time standing still. If I try and wish and work hard enough, neither will leave me.
Here is a weird picture of me one recent morning.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. — L. P. Hartley
I have been trying to be present this summer — for the days of rising with the sun; tantrums in lieu of diaper changes; wet bathing suits stuffed and discovered later (thank you sense of smell) in strollers, under beds; screaming scenes as I drag my children from the playground sprinkler back home for baths and dinner. I am trying to be aware of the endless, sticky, less-structured days as they pass. I am also trying to stay awake.
While my children are little, each year seems like a different country. Each season is met with bigger hands and feet, increasingly sharp wit and minds. They know more, they do more, they are truly more themselves each day. (They don’t really sleep more. I guess that’s high school.) Crawling, swim diapers, scooters, naps–these will all be things of another country one day. I am afraid I will not remember that language, or that architecture.
Before we race toward school starting, then holidays, I want to post a few of this summer’s pictures. It’s been a long summer. A good one, but I try to stay honest with you and with myself–next year, there will be camp!
(This was supposed to be wordless. I suck at that.)
Mama One to Three 