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  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
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  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

Can you imagine if, back when we first went into lockdown, we had been told exactly how this was going to progress? Like, oh no the kids aren’t taking a break from school — it’s over for the year, and everyone will be doing a weird online thing instead that involves daily Zoom meetings and not only will you have no differentiation between your work life (unless you are considered an essential worker, in which case your work will be a daily dice-roll involving an ever-less-comfortable series of company-required masks) and your home life but your kids won’t either. Businesses aren’t closed for this week and next, they’re going to be closed for months, and no one will really understand how things will re-open except it’s for sure going to involve a lot of worry and oppressive-feeling government regulations. While we are all taking solace from saying “when this is all over,” the truth is it won’t be over for a really long time and maybe ever and the only way life can move forward is if you either commit to self-quarantine for however many months/years it takes to get a vaccine or choose to run the risk of infection. Oh, also the federal leadership is going to be horrifyingly inept and pretty much the opposite of reassuring, which was probably the most predictable thing of all but still extremely shitty to experience.

It would have just been too much, really, and I suppose that’s why we all went on as long as we did believing that something was going to happen to make all of this go away. I know I did, anyway.

I’ve been wondering when I will see my mom and aunt again, and what it would feel like if we said fuck it, let’s just hope for the best and have a hand-washing-oriented visit, and one of them developed symptoms afterwards, and I was the cause? I’ve been worrying about my kids, who are so weirdly quiet and resigned during their school hours, and wondering what is this doing to their development.

I’ve been missing my before-life so much, and wishing I had been more grateful for what that really looked like, and all the things, big and small, that I was so easily able to do. I know life is not always going to be like it is right now, but neither will it go back to how it was. It’s going to be different and some or maybe a lot of it is going to require some major adjustments, and the best we can do is to keep going because there will still be so many things to be grateful for. But also it’s okay to just take a minute or a day to wallow in the acknowledgement that wow, this just all really fucking sucks.

Today is our wedding anniversary, which really and truly snuck up on me this year. Wait, what month is it? My brain has socially distanced itself from calendars.

John and I have been married for 19 years, which alternately seems crazy (nineteen??) and like a giant no duh because I feel like I have known him forever. I mean, I obviously haven’t, because I am not — checks jowls, chin hairs, wrinkled belly, bottomless well of cynicism — nineteen years old, but we have been part of each other’s lives for a real stretch of time now. Through the young carefree years, through the terror/ecstasy/boredom of early parenting, through career gains and losses, through sickness and health, through smooth easy stretches and the rockiest terrain imaginable.

We were at the cabin last weekend and I caught sight of John outside, standing there talking to Dylan. He was smiling — that great smile, the way his hazel eyes crinkle at the corners — and I was just struck by how dear he is to me. Wearing the same red flannel shirt I’ve seen a million times, his beard and hair now shot through with silver.

He can be unfamiliar in some ways now, a man whose passions and politics have evolved over time in directions that are utterly foreign to me. Then again, I too have changed, I have followed my own paths and addiction has led me in the same dumb damaging circles over and over through the years.

There are times when the space between us feels insurmountable. But they do not last. We always seem to find our way back. To me, it feels like coming home, when the ice melts and we go back to our silly pet phrases and eight trillion shared habits and memories.

I can’t know what the future holds, whether we will make it another nineteen years, past the children leaving home and into whatever that life looks like. But my god, we’ve made it this far, nearly two decades of being intertwined, falling apart and coming back together. So many unpredictable twists and turns — here we are living in a global pandemic, for crying out loud — and he is still so dear to me. I love him fiercely, I love him grudgingly, I love him when it’s easy to love him and when it’s hard. It has and always will be worth it, this great and complicated love I am so lucky to have found.

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