Stories You Don't Know You Have

The Teenager comes back today from Paris, and I can't wait to see her. I imagine she is brimming with stories that she doesn't even realize she has.

It's like that, sometimes, that you have things to say that you didn't even know until you sit down with another human and start talking. Maybe the conversation is lubricated with booze, perhaps not, but you suddenly realize that there are things to discuss that were humming in the background for awhile.

I have friends that help me do that, and I am just now realizing it. I feel like the winter sort of threw me off a little; the lessons of Dane's death faded, and I let things slide back into the way they were. As a recap, the way they were was taking things for granted and making excuses.

Yoga philosophy talks about the stories we have about ourselves, the things that we say that hold us back: "I am not a traveler," or "I hate crowds," or "I am never going to be able to ____." I have been thinking a lot about these stories lately, the ones I have about myself (and other people) and thinking about where the truth lies. Usually not in the story. Usually somewhere hidden. And then the rest of life hides away behind the story, and we get into the rhythm of That's Just How Things Are, and then we pay our taxes and die after our requisite average life span.

But I am looking at my stories, and I have sunshine and friends, new and old, to thank for that. This week I have been left to my own devices, and rather than being a quiet, sad time (minus the first Sunday, which started with an argument with a neighbor and just went downhill from there), I have managed to spend some time out in the world with strangers I didn't immediately want to kill, and I got to step back and re-evaluate a bit.

This is awfully vague, I know. It's still early, and I am still on my first cup of coffee, and I may or may not have just cleaned the bathroom with a chemical so noxious that I am a little dizzy. It's okay. I feel like I am slowly wending my way through the labyrinth into the next stage. I am ready to look forward to something (or someone).

For now, though, I will finish this blog, drink another cup of coffee, and clean the house for The Teenager's return.

Do you feel a similar unfolding in the spring? 

I Believe In Ladybugs

I believe in ladybugs.

I throw salt over my shoulder when I spill it.

I am immune to black cats, having owned one myself, and I don't set much stock in the rumors swirling around the bad-luck potency of the number 13.

I believe in the power of the moon, as it moves the ocean, and we are, all of us, 90% water. How could we not be swayed?

When my nose itches I wonder who is talking about me, and who is coming to visit when my ears tingle. Or the other way around. I can never remember.

I believe in the irrefutable power of the first kiss. That flutter means something, and if it's not there, well, that means something, too.

I can tell you for sure that when a bird flies into a house, someone is going to die.

I believe in signs and symbols. I think the universe talks to me, if I can just shut up enough to listen.

Today at the coffee shop I force myself to go to at least once a week, right after I hit "send" on an application for a job that I really, really want, this ladybug landed on my coffee.



S/he circled the rim, playing hide and seek as I tried to snap a photo. When I finally got this picture, s/he fluttered down to rest on my sweater and got cozy until I stood up to leave, when I finally placed him/her on the table.

I believe in ladybugs.

Do you?

Single Parenting: Don't You Yell At My Child!

It's funny, but it is only just now sinking in that I am a single parent. How strange is that? I would read articles online about the struggles single parents face and think to myself about how hard it must be for all those single parents out there. Which is ironic, because with one parent of the parenting team dead you don't get much more single. I have been a little slow for the past 24 months, but I finally got it.

I am actually a single parent, and it sucks in one really unexpected way: no one will ever share my child with me the way Dane did.

Yes, dealing with financial worries and plumbing and the stupid fucking computer and discipline and The Teenager's crushes is really hard. Yes, I have friends around who will give me a break and willingly take The Teenager when she is being awful or will let me sit at their kitchen bar or table and drink really delicious cocktails or work in peace when I just can't take it anymore. Yes, the practical parts of being solely responsible for the life of another person is sometimes crushing and requires huge sacrifice, but that's not the hardest part.

The hardest part is that no one will ever share The Teenager with me on a cellular level. No one will ever look across the room when she does something amazing and feel the same kind of pride I do. No one will love her the way I do. The only other person who was there THE WHOLE TIME is now in a box on my dresser. The only person that shares the birth story (and, well, the conception also) is no longer here.

I am not currently dating anyone because I am a hermit and strangers are awful so how will I ever meet someone, but in the event that a miracle occurs and I suddenly become less critical and judgmental and meet a dude to date, he will not understand that when I say, "I just want to poke her in the eye!! What a jerk!!" that he is not really allowed to say, "I know! She's a total jerk!!" Dane could say she was a jerk and get away with it because underneath there are all those little cells that make her part of us in a very physical way, a way that prevents us from meaning too deeply what we say when we call her a jerk.

A stranger, some new dude, won't have those cells. He won't know on a cellular level about the time when she cried for five hours straight and almost fell off the bed because she refused to just LAY DOWN AND GO TO SLEEP. He won't get how compassionate she is, even when she pushes the dog away, because he doesn't really know her. He won't know when she is nervous just by looking at her hands, or how happy she is by watching her walk.

And when she is being 100% teenager he might be tempted to criticize the way she thinks, acts, or dresses, but he won't have the right to do that. To be clear, no one really has the right to do that, but some dude thinking he can waltz in here and insert commentary should probably just waltz right back on out of here.

Dating after divorce (really, the more common form of single parenthood and the whole reason for this blog, as a friend of mine is going through this right now) is probably very much the same, especially when your ex- is a shitbox. My friend's ex- is a dangerous shitbox, so in addition to being on edge when her kid is with the ex-, many states away, she has to deal with knowing that her boyfriend is happy the kid is away for awhile. I don't think it is possible to describe in words how deeply hurtful that is. It's also not grounds for a sustainable relationship, knowing that the person you are with is biding their time until The Kid is out of the picture.

Newsflash: The kid is NEVER out of the picture. Maya Angelou said that having a child is like consenting to have your heart walk around outside of your body, and I can't find a better explanation of this type of love. The kid may be off at college or in the world, but they are forever a part of you in a way that is real and true and inexplicable. When someone insults The Kid, they are insulting you, even if you are the healthiest, most non-striving parent who is not living through their child. And the insult is not a flesh wound; it's deep, slow to scab, easily re-opened with the smallest conflict.

I have another single parent friend who deals with this by just never introducing her boyfriend of many years to the kids. Or rather, they have been introduced, but the contact is minimal.

Are you a dating single parent? How do you deal with this thorny issue?

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Spark It Up: NaBloPoMo

Today is April 1st, and already I have been the victim of a very well-played practical joke by my friend Andrew Odom. Turns out, you can't actually believe everything you read on the internet.

I'd like to say that this is an April Fool's Joke, but what I am about to write is true and a bi-annual occurrence. In April and November, I commit myself to writing a blog a day for 30 days. Formally known as NaBloPoMo, the official span is just in November, but I think April is a great 30-day time to do it as well. I wrote my book in 30 days in April 2012 (took another year and a half to edit and publish), and every time I force myself to the discipline of keyboard and blogging, it tends to spark things up a bit, something that is necessary right about now.

I can say in all honesty that I am not even remotely excited for this at this point; everything about my being has tended to the sludge-like, the monotonous, the tedium of daily routine. I feel like molasses uphill in January; yoga has become a chore that I have to get through (and I always feel better after, but still), and although my mercenary writing life is fine, my personal projects have come to a standstill as I actively avoid looking at what I am supposed to be doing.

So I read Steinbeck's six tips on writing, and this is what stuck:

"Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised."

His rules mostly apply to his fiction, but there is extreme value in this rule. Abandon the hope of being done; writers know that a) it's never done, and b) even when it's finished it's still not "done." Just one piece of my own writing daily is my goal, even something beyond this blog. A paragraph. A line.

I am in a funk, no doubt, and 30 days, two more days than rehab, may be enough to get me out. At least until November.

Bloggers, won't you join me?

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Why Don't We Do What We Should?

As a former educator I have been thinking about persistence and motivation for twenty years. As a human, I suppose in some form or another I have been beating myself up with this topic my entire life.

Why don't we do what we should?

Take this blog, for instance. I haven't written a single entry in three weeks. It's not that I have nothing to say; what's in my head could fill an editorial calendar with daily blogs for months. So why don't I write?

And yoga. As I twist myself into pretzel-y shapes at yoga this morning, a class that I love but still had to drag myself to, I was even considering why it is so hard to push ourselves to do even the most basic of things we know we should do. Some of them, like folding laundry and putting away the clean dishes, are just mundane tasks that are no fun, but even those simple things take no time and yield small pleasures like clean clothes and eating utensils. In our house, we will sometimes nearly empty out the clean dishwasher by using the cups, plates, and spoons (always spoons), piling dishes in the sink until we can't take it anymore (which is a long time if you are a teenager, less long if you are her parent).

I don't think I will ever fully embrace folding laundry or emptying the dishwasher, but there are important things I am not doing. Knowing that yoga makes me feel better and writing is deeply satisfying, why is it still so hard to do it?

For me at least, this goes way beyond laziness or lack of motivation.

Reflecting on myself, The Teenager, other people around me, and the literally thousands of students I have taught, I have come to believe that it is a complicated mixture of fear and insecurity that keeps us from doing the things we love.

Fear

There has long been a theory that human behavior is motivated by two things: fear and love. Fear is a powerful block to pretty much anything in the world, just as love is a powerful motivator. When I don't write, or I don't throw myself fully into yoga teacher training, it's not love that is holding me back. It's fear. What if it doesn't work? Or *gasp* what if it actually does? What if all of my wildest dreams come true? Then what?

I can't turn this blog into a motivational speech. All I can do is speak for myself. If I actually do all of the things I say I want to do, the world will open up in ways both frightening and powerful. There are days when I am just not ready for that; I am not ready for the responsibility of living up to the life I say I want. Then there are days when I look around at the routine I have built for myself and shudder to think of me doing the same thing, 20 years from now. Both imaginings are rooted in fear, one of not living up to my own expectations and the other of  living up to my own expectations.

See how I did that?

Insecurity

Fear's bastard cousin is insecurity. This is the anti-cheerleader in my head, that bitch who follows me around chanting about how I can't possibly think that my writing is good enough and who do I think I am? It's the one that looks in the mirror and judges things others miss. It makes commentary on my walk, my voice, my face, my writing, my progress in yoga. It's judgmental and loud.

Insecurity is rooted in instability, in the idea that at any moment the world could change and things could be different. It's why we have bedtime routines for kids and take our dogs for walks at the same time every day; the routine is reassuring. But what happens when the routine is suddenly, violently changed and everything you knew to be true and planned for is swept away?

Get over it, right? It has been two years since Dane died. Move on, yeah?

Unless you have experienced a similar death, it is hard to understand what it feels like to have everything you planned for change in an instant. As to the stages of grief, I am still struggling with acceptance in that it is still very difficult to reconcile the life we had planned and the life we have now, especially as we are still not 100% settled and are still moving around a bit. Even becoming a mother was easier to adapt to; yes, I became a different person in many ways with different priorities, but at least there was planning and time to adapt. Even two years After The Crash the idea that everything could be gone is still ever-present.

Insecurity is also deeply tied to fear. As I get ready to send The Teenager to Paris for a week, I have had to work hard to not give in to every awful fear I have about what could happen.

So insecurity makes me clinging and grasping in some ways, holding on to what stability I have. It's like all of the balancing poses in yoga. First you have to hug into the center of yourself, and then when you feel stable you can expand outward. Like a turtle, I am not sure how stable I feel yet, and because of this it is very difficult to expand outward.

It has taken me three weeks to write this, which speaks to how hard it is to admit and to also put into words. Hello, everyone: I am a raging ball of fear and insecurity. Not necessarily a confident introduction.

But the first step is to admit you have a problem. Hi, my name is Suzannah, and I am deathly afraid of both success and failure and deeply worried about losing the tenuous grasp on reality that I have worked really hard to cultivate in the last two years, one month and 11 days.

Hi, Suzannah. Keep coming back.

I guess the plan is to keep coming back. The key is to feel the fear and insecurity and do it anyway (like sending The Teenager to Paris or writing this down). I spent the first year after Dane's death saying "yes," and that has changed; these days I have to force myself to go out of the house, to explore, to engage, to say "yes" when I just want to go home and take a nap. I am getting bogged down in the minutiae of daily living and find myself thinking if this is really it for the next ____ years until I am dead.

That, as they say in the parlance of the 12 Steps, is stinkin' thinkin'.

Still working on steps two through 12 on this path. Thoughts and suggestions? What works for you to move past whatever holds you back?

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Cream Cheese Tarts With Lemon Marmalade

It's winter. Not the depths of winter, technically, but we got seven inches of snow yesterday, so here in Baltimore, we are IN IT.

I love winter. It's annoyingly true. While others grumble about snow days and kids staying home, I like nothing better than to have The Teenager all to myself for the day. Yesterday at the height of the storm we hiked down to Golden West for the Lisa Marie (a pancake with a strip of bacon fried in it, topped with peanut butter butter - not a typo, a real thing -and served with maple syrup), plus hashbrowns for good measure. We let the dogs run up and down the alley, off leash, until they found a kitty and chased it, then we made snow angels in the middle of the road.

So snow days are my thing.

Especially when you have this just lying around in your cabinet:



This is a jar of epic, three-day organic lemon marmalade that I made last week. It is tart and sweet and faintly bitter from the pith that gives it the pectin to set up all by itself.

I have five of these. That's a lot for two people to eat, one of whom doesn't actually like lemon marmalade. Logical choice, for me, is a lemon cream cheese tart. Individual tarts because a whole tart is too much but maybe individual ones will be more manageable.

An easy, gluten-free pie crust, a luscious, creamy, whipped cream and cream cheese filling, and a thin layer of juicy lemon marmalade. Drizzling it with chocolate may be overkill, but I am going there.

Come with me.

Cream Cheese Tarts With Lemon Marmalade

Crust:

5 tablespoons butter (softened)

1/4 cup sugar

1 room temperature egg

1 cup AP flour (I used gluten-free)

1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions: Cream butter and sugar with a hand mixer until smooth. Add egg and incorporate thoroughly. Combine flour and salt in a small bowl and then add into the wet mixture a little at a time until it is just mixed. Shape dough into a ball, then wrap in plastic and flatten. Pop in the 'fridge and chill for an hour.

When it's chilled, remove from 'fridge and flour your work surface. Turn out dough and roll until it is between 1/8" and 1/4" thick (I use a wine bottle to roll, but I suppose a regular old rolling pin would work as well). For individual tarts, you could rush out and spend lots of cash on individual tart pans, or you could grab some wide-mouthed Mason jar lids and flip the lid so the metal faces up in the center of the ring (instead the white underside).



Place your tart dough in the lid, pressing lightly into and up the sides of the ring. Make sure you make your dough circles just a bit wider than the ring so that there is enough dough to go all the way up to the top of the metal ring.



This recipe made eight of the wide-mouthed lids and three of the regular lids. Perfect if you have small children who need an even smaller tart. Chill in the freezer for half an hour (wrap lightly in plastic wrap).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake mini crusts until lightly browned and dry, about 15 minutes (about 30 minutes for a full-sized tart). Keep an eye on them. If they start to bubble up, you can prick them lightly with a fork, or you can line each crust with aluminum foil and use pie weights to prevent bubbling (or just use rice. I use the same rice over and over. I let the rice cool after each use then store it in a jar for the next time. This lasts indefinitely, or until you move and decide to throw it out.). Your crust should be a lovely golden brown color. If you are using pie weights or rice, remove them in the last few minutes so the whole crust can brown.

Let crusts cool completely while you make the filling.

Filling:

1 8-ounce bar of cream cheese, softened

1/4 cup of sugar

1 cup of whipping cream, whipped until it forms peaks

optional: 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and one tablespoon of sugar to add to whipping cream

Directions: Cream the cream cheese and the sugar together until fully mixed. Whip the whipping cream (and optional sugar and vanilla extract) in a separate bowl until the cream forms stiff peaks. Beat the cream cheese and the whipped cream together. Spoon into cooled crusts and chill for at least an hour.



Top with your topping of choice and chill for another 30 minutes. I am using lemon marmalade, about a tablespoon per tart, but guess what? Jam of any sort would be delicious, or slather the tops with hot fudge sauce. If you do that, be sure and finish with a bit of fleur de sels.



To serve, unmold from the Mason jar rings. You should be able to slide the tart off the lid, but if not, serve it with a dollop of whipped cream, a smile, and a strong cup of black coffee.

Spring is just around the corner.

 

The Birth Month And Looking Forward

I love birthdays. I am a whole-hearted supporter of the Gala Birthday Week, at a minimum, and even support extending it to a Birth Month celebration. This does not mean I will necessarily treat you like a princess for the whole month, but if that's what floats your boat and you choose that vision, I am not going to stand in your way during your birthday month (maybe the others, but that's a whole other story).

I don't work on my birthday, and I don't do anything I don't want to do. Yes, this extends to cleaning up after myself, bathing, etc. For 24 hours I don't allow myself to feel obligation to anyone but my own frivolous whim. In past years, this has looked as mundane as cleaning horse shit out of a pasture and then sitting in the sun while my sweet horse laid her head on my shoulder and napped. It has also looked like swimming with whale sharks and spending all day in bed, utterly naked and drenched in sex (and crumbs from all meals eaten between the sheets, delivered to me by my beloved, of course).

It's like a mini break from reality. For 8,640 seconds, once a year, I just let myself be.

It seems pretty simple, no?

Unless, of course, you are me. Then you put a ton of pressure on yourself, thinking about so many things you could choose to do with your 8,640 seconds that it is exceptionally difficult to make a choice about any one of them. It isn't paralyzing, not yet anyway, but it does add a certain amount of stress to really identify what it is I want on that particular day. And it is hard to make plans because what if I make plans with people and then I wake up and don't want to do it and then feel bad for cancelling? I can't expect people to be at my beck-and-call on that day (although I have to say that I have an EXCEPTIONAL group of people in my life, and for many years, this has actually happened. While no one turns down something amazing if they are invited on my birthday in favor of sitting around, waiting in case I may or may not call to do something, for the most part, the people I have chosen to surround myself with have been very accommodating and have sort of stayed on standby for me. And I love them for that, more than they could ever know. Makes me feel like way less of a freak. But I digress).

So. This birthday, which is right around the corner (Pi Day, so I feel a special kinship with my man Albert Einstein who shares my birthday), I am going to shake things up a bit and actually make plans. Not so many plans that there isn't space in between for awesome non-plan things to arise, but enough so I have something to look forward to. I do believe that sometimes, in the absence of a steady stream of predictable joy, one must grab a bovine by the calcium deposits on the head and go ahead and schedule that shit. This is why people buy season tickets to sports teams or schedule a summer vacation in February. Having something to look forward to is the thing that helps when the joy evaporates and you are staring down the barrel of a crappy week or fighting with your spouse or hating your job or whatever. It allows you to look ahead to something better. Manufacture a little pre-paid joy.

This looking-forward-to-things is not particularly yogic. Yoga philosophy pushes mindfulness and being in the moment no matter what the moment is. There is some serious benefit to that. First, all of the emotions you have you get to really, truly feel. Love is lovier, joy is more joyful. Grief is griefier, but feeling it and letting it wash over you is better than shoving it in the Closet of Suppressed Emotions to burst forth at a later (and seriously inconvenient) time. And being mindful also cultivates gratitude and peace. You are neither reliving the past (depressing) or worrying about the future (anxiety-causing).

But MAN. Looking forward to something is plain old fun. And I am down for some plain old fun with a side of cocktail and food. Maybe some new duds. Definitely a pedicure for my seriously basic feet. Time to plan ahead and manufacture a little bit of joy.

What do you do for your birthday? 

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