Last week, I showed up to my friend Jana’s house (where we co-teach our kids three days a week) late and frazzled. The morning had started off fine, but time slipped away from me between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. The kids’ morning routine somehow devolved into missing shoes and arguments about whose turn it was to scoop the litter box. I forgot our eldest had a class at a different house than the other kids, and scrambled to throw together a sack lunch. I ran out of time to shower. As we raced out the door, bickering and angst nipped at our heels. By the time we got to Jana’s house, SO late, I was full-on cranky and ragged and ready to admit defeat.
When conversation turns to finances, I usually have one of two reactions; either my eyes start to glaze over, or I begin to experience bouts of anxiety. I’ve always been good at mathematics, but there’s something about accounting/finances/budgeting/interest rates that I have a hard time wrapping my head around. As a result of this, I put it to the farthest recesses of my mind and try to forget about it. Effective? Well, it sure helps with the anxiety, but in the long run all it is truly doing is leaving me unprepared for the future.
I blinked through tears as the words caught in my throat, “I should report this.” I was 17 years old and school had let out for the day. It was sunny and warm and my boyfriend and I had plans to hang out and enjoy the weather. He was the one who found the envelope with my name colorfully written across it. Someone had slipped it into the open sunroof of his Volkswagen. The words inside were anything but colorful. They were dark, ugly, and mean. They encouraged me to take my own life, they called me worthless. They were authored by three girls I had, up until that very moment, thought were my friends.
When I was still part of the working world, I was forever crafting mile-long to-do lists, oftentimes writing down things I’d already completed just for the thrill of striking them through with a heavy-handed double line. If you flipped through my spiral notebook with the green patterned whales on the cover, you’d see each day’s minutiae penciled carefully into uniform lines—every task from showering to laundry folding to playdating—satisfyingly crossed out as each is completed. I thrived on the feeling of contentment I got from seeing a day of hard work spelled out on the page, tangible and real.
As multi-tasking moms, often times we put ourselves last on the list. As Teri Hatcher wrote in her best-selling book, Burnt Toast, the matriarch of the family often has a tendency to say, ‘please take the good toast and leave burnt piece for me.’ Everyone else’s needs come first, and ours second.
It’s rare when a movie touches a person so deeply that it draws them to tears. Not the kind of tears that are a sympathetic reaction, but tears of the deeply emotional kind. Tears of fear and regret for things that you’ve done or not yet done but regret not doing so. Sometimes a movie just grabs you and makes you think all sorts of what ifs. What if I had just done this? What would happen if I did this right now? Why did I not do this sooner? It was hard to not contemplate these ideas with World Cancer Day at hand.
It’s all over the news, and as the Jian Ghomeshi trial begins, my hands are frigid. Yours may be, too. There are so many of us who have been sexual assault victims. So many witnesses to travesties of justice. Maybe many have decided that now is a great time for a technology-free vacation in the woods somewhere.
Wait.
While I was never a Minolo Blahnik wearing stylista in the city, back in the days of freedom, I used to love to throw on some heels and a chic (or so I’d thought) ensemble. My friends and I would get together, at a local bar. We’d drink cocktails and dance the night away, in a circle, like a ring of shoe and purse worshipers.
I’ve always just been the girl that had separate pockets of women that I connect with – some far away and some that live close. Some of them are from the workplace, and some are parents from school. More often now, many women I know have a larger circle of online friends. We may not be Snapchat-ting all day like our kids, but these online friends are just a quick text away.
I am a determined, independent woman with strong opinions (sometimes to my detriment, to be sure) but I have (mostly) learned along my 40-year journey when to bare my teeth and when to turn my back. And then I had a daughter. I had to think about raising a girl. All of a sudden, I felt the weight of having to teach her how to be all of those things that I wanted to be, too, while still making sure she didn’t choke on grapes or fall out of the stroller.