Circle the Wagons: The Powerful Love of Women

Originally published March 10, 2012.

Sarah and me–friends since birth

Sarah and I have been best friends on and off again for nearly four decades. So closely did we grow up together, our mothers trading back and forth sleepovers and marching band pick-ups, that we are perhaps as close as sisters, closer perhaps. When life separated us for several years and we fell out of touch, it was that sisterly, almost clairvoyant love that drew us back together again.

I had suffered a devastating break-up. Sarah e-mailed me the day after the split. Only, we had not been in touch for around five years. To this day, we both believe she had somehow, across time and space, sensed my need of her. And our lives have been thus for years, one of us walking in just as the other is about to break.

This is no ordinary connection.  That is not to say, however, that it is uncommon. Women, at least those among us brave enough to love fully, have an uncanny ability, so it would seem, for knowing just when to circle the wagons.

I have not always benefited from this love. Raised to be independent and distrusting of others, I was always reluctant as a girl and as a young woman to lead myself into vulnerability, particularly the vulnerability that comes of the deeply connected relationships that women often share.

It is no small surprise to me that men resist this kind of all-encompassing love. Some think it is smothering. And it can be. Women learn, over time, not to call on too many friends at once in times of crisis, or they will be overwhelmed with attention. How many nights have I found myself fielding phone calls and texts from half a dozen concerned females all at once after announcing to them some recent family tragedy?  Even worse though is when, in recognition of this, I share a crisis with only one or two to be chastised later by the others for not letting them in to offer succor.

Susannah and me: friends and troublemakers

Circling the wagons is something of a professional calling for us, and it transcends the intimate relationships of tried and true friends, those who have followed us through high school and college, through marriage and divorce, childbirth and death of parents.

I belong to a community dance troupe made up of girls and women ranging in age from six to 60. Every week we engage in what we refer to as “group therapy”—a couple of hours of pulse-pounding dance accompanied by excessive tom-foolery. This is where we (the adult women anyway) let go, beyond the eyes of spouses who may know nothing of this side of us—the practical jokes, the tongue-in-cheek commentary on marriage, sex, and child raising, the posturing in front of dance studio mirrors, the banter over who has the curviest figure, the thickest thighs, the most perfect hair. We are so wild at times that new members to the group often aren’t quite sure what to make of us at first, but we convert them eventually to this gathering of “footloose” women. Here we are girls again, more than girls…because most of us were never confident enough, brave enough to be so ridiculous and fun when we were younger.

But this is also a space of deep camaraderie. When one among us lost a foster child back to her biological mother, we circled her with embraces, then turned her tears to laughter. When we prep for performances, mothers and daughters gather to braid each other’s hair, mend dance shoes with duct tape, and coax one another out of nervousness. Here we find the space to be members of a family where expectations are much lower, where we all recognize the staggering responsibilities of work, marriage, and motherhood, and give one another leave to be silly, irresponsible, and mindless…if only for an hour or two.

My dancing friends on “weird sock day”

I do not know what I would do without these women…any of them…from my most intimate friends to the women with whom I dance each week. They fill my life with laughter, and they prop me up when I am too worn down to stand.

They have been there for me when my family has not been. And they have done all this unconditionally.

Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering why, what it is I have done to deserve the love and kindness of all these women, feeling the powerful blessing of knowing there is this invisible circle of support around me always.

When I feel I have erred foolishly in this life, I turn to my old college friend, Susannah, from whom I know I will always get a refreshingly honest and straightforward assessment of the situation…in addition to ice cream or cheesecake. Yet when I fail to take her sound advice and find myself in a fix, I never fear abandonment. “Friends are not the people who are there only when you do things right,” she tells me on a regular basis.

Retail therapy in Venice with Dorothy

Yet I often wonder how many of us know this, how many of us are brave enough to test the true depth of our friendships, to be who we are without fear among the people we love. It is no easy thing. We are all guilty of holding back, playing games, pretending all is well…even among those closest to us, fearful of the depth and vulnerability we might discover should we let go…and fearful, too, of finding nothing, no depth, no connection, no unconditional love.

Humans are social creatures, and abandonment is one of our greatest primal fears.

It is one reason we are so lucky to be women. It is easy for us to look at men and their easy friendships with other men, their perception of “depth” as an intense conversation about politics, and their ability to compartmentalize pain and fear and envy them. And it is so easy for us to be angry with them, too, for failing to connect with us as our women friends do.

A friend of mine said to me recently, “I cannot help being angry with my husband because he does not know me as well as my best friend does.”

This is not so much a failing in the guy. It’s a failing in expectation. He does not know how, most likely, to know that woman as her best friend does. It is outside his comfort zone to go so deep, as it is with most men. They don’t live in a world of women the way we do. They cannot count on their male friends to protect their weaknesses, honor their strengths, and be there for them no matter the errors they make. It is not the way men are socialized, and it is why they need us so much more than we need them. For most men, it is their wives who serve as their only emotional centers, the only place where they can freely be themselves.

Imagine having only one person who offers you safety. Imagine having none.

New partners in crime in Savannah

I made a new friend recently, as I often do on travels, and as we walked back to our lodgings one evening, discovering, after only a couple of days’ acquaintance that we had much in common, including a similar painful life experience, she said to me with a laugh, “Can I marry you?”

I understood the message behind the joke. Because it took me a long time to stop looking to romantic partners to provide the kind of emotional depth and support that female friends do. I will not over-generalize and say that men cannot provide it. But it is rare to find such a man. As a rule, they retreat into their caves when hurting, confused, or troubled; whereas, women sound the alarm, ask for aid, and let the wagons circle. And when those wagons lock around us in times of trouble, there is no getting through until the danger has passed, chased away by the arrows of shared and recognized grief and the awareness that, with friends, just about anything is survivable.

Let Me Act Like I Know What I’m Doing Here

Originally published December 30, 2011.

“Perfect isn’t that interesting to watch. In fact, it can be both boring and exhausting. What we like to see is human.” –Frances Cole Jones

In a book I had to review recently, the author wrote, and not necessarily with contempt, that social media has made us all exhibitionists and opened the way for everyone to make public confessionals.  There is truth in this.  And the result is a lot of noise in a world already overflowing with information.

When I asked some women friends and acquaintances to help contribute to this blog, they balked (even the two who are currently contributing).  The idea of flinging their personal lives onto the Internet for their parents, their friends, their neighbors to read…and judge…seemed a little bit scary.  “What if I offend someone?  What if I make someone mad?”  Of course, having been a journalist and columnist for many years, I know that stirring up the pot is often the whole point.  If you’re not offending someone or making someone mad at least some of the time, you probably don’t stand for much, and you’re probably not making much of a difference in anyone’s life either.

But is it all, in the end, just self-serving and self-magnifying noise?  Well, it depends.  There is a place for the public confessional.  I think of Brooke Shields’ book Down Came the Rain, where she talked about her own struggle with postpartum depression.  I think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which chronicled her trials with recovering from divorce, lost love, and daring to love again.  I think of Isabel Gillies’ It Happens Every Day, where she acknowledged her own responsibility in her ex-husband’s extramarital affair.  And I think of Youngme Moon’s Difference, where she talked about the day she decided to stop teaching the way everyone else was teaching and how it changed her life and the lives of her students.  These books fit the category of public confessional, and how glad am I these women confessed.

Their confessions have made me (and others, too, no doubt) feel less alone on this journey called life.  And they have taught me new ways of thinking about and approaching my own existence.  Knowing someone else has tried and failed and tried again…differently…gives me hope in moments when hope seems hard to come by.

Some of my friends and acquaintances will be surprised–those who think I limit myself to great, dead literary authors like William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Elizabeth Gaskell.  But all these books, literary fiction and popular memoir, have something critical in common.  Perhaps no one can set a scene like Thomas Hardy.  And perhaps no one can jar our senses with “hit that nail on the head” meaning like Faulkner.  But they are, in the end, all public confessionals–cutting open the writer’s view of the heart of life, whether achieved through fact or fiction.  And these confessionals change us.

So let me confess….

I started this blog because I realized I had it too good in some ways.

Trained by experience to establish rapport with sources by finding that rock of shared experience that would make them trust me, I have been the recipient of more than a few confessionals over the years.  And what I discovered from that and from the tools of journalism that I have transferred over to my relationships with friends and colleagues is that everyone has a story, many stories most likely, that they are dying to tell, need to tell.  They are just waiting for the audience…the audience that often never comes.  They want someone to walk into their lives who gives a damn, really, honestly gives a damn.  Because life is hard, and life is scary, and isolation is the surest path to eternal torment.

I have received confessionals on a scale far deeper than any Catholic priest’s.  And it has not, as you might imagine, given me a front row seat to the hidden melodrama of people’s lives. Rather, having that window into people’s souls has given me a window into my own.  It has given me the courage to acknowledge my own failures, learn from them, and pass the lessons on.

The assistant instructor at the dance studio where I take lessons twice a week often remarks when teaching choreography she has just learned herself, “Let me act like I know what I’m doing here.”  And we chuckle with some relief, glad perhaps to know that someone else is “winging it” besides ourselves.

I can recall having done the same as a young Humanities professor, teaching the history of early Western Culture, a subject well outside my area of expertise, a subject in which I struggled to stay a step ahead of my students.  They thought I was the expert.  How wrong they were.  Yet I never let on that I had about as much expertise in the origins of Islam as the Walmart greeter.

But I grew up, as many of us do, with the idea that perfection is the goal.  After all, the Bible (a centerpiece of western culture whether you are Christian or not) enjoins us to “be perfect as thy Father in heaven is perfect.”  I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but this world we live in is far from perfect, and if you think God created it, then I guess you also have to figure He wasn’t perfect or that He was intentionally imperfect.  So I think it’s probably perfectly okay and well within your rights if you are religious to perform imperfectly in this world.  It might even be you were meant to do so.

That’s not an easy idea to get used to, however.  Some of my most well-educated and seemingly level-headed friends still strive for perfection, still attempt to hide imperfection even from the people they love most in the world.  How many times have you watched yourself go through the motions of cheerfulness when you did not truly feel it?  How many times have you told your boss you can handle that project, no problem, when on the inside you’re terrified that you have no idea what you’re doing?

We all lie to each other…and sometimes to ourselves for the sake of civility.  But where does civility stop and honesty begin?  It is a difficult question.

I have a lifetime of experience in “acting like I know what I’m doing here.”  I write articles that people trust to be accurate and true even when I myself am sleep deprived and pulling through with the aid of caffeine alone.  I write columns that are supposed to inspire people to get off their rears and do something with their lives even when I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m doing with mine half the time.  A friend of mine remarked to me not long after I’d returned from three consecutive trips that had me zooming through seven different time zones in the course of a month, “I wish I could live your life for a day.”

Really? 

Perhaps it looks grand from where she is sitting.  From where I am sitting, it often looks downright ridiculous.

There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when I felt some not entirely sane obligation to offer the appearance at least of the perfect life.  I thought that, by virtue of the fact I had followed a childhood dream to fruition, it was my duty to inspire others to do the same—to make it look rewarding and wonderful to follow one’s heart.  And it is.  But not all the time.  Not by a long stretch.  Sometimes I feel like I am hanging onto my dreams with a tiny piece of thread that is slowly fraying.

We all feel that way, of course, at one time or another.  But rarely will you find a person willing to admit it, unless you are interviewing her for an article on overcoming doubt.  Most of us, for the most part, still hide behind our carefully constructed and often ridiculously transparent veils of perfection.

An acquaintance of mine said this is necessary, that we cannot bare our souls to the world.  What an awkward place it would be.  He has a point.  You know those people on Facebook who announce to the world when they’re having a nervous breakdown?  Yep, that’s a little creepy, I have to acknowledge.  I’ve “unfriended” a few of those.  It can be uncomfortable, at times, to have a front row seat to imperfection.

But maybe that’s only because we are not used to it.  My jury is still out on that.

And though I’ve never given much heed to New Year’s resolutions, I might give it a go this year.  My new purpose in life will be to be an inspiration, not by being perfect, but by being human…and being very good at it.

The Guilt Diet: How and Why I Fell Off the Wagon

Originally published July 24, 2012

I know a lot about guilt, at least when you consider I’m not Catholic. In fact, I was raised Lutheran, and the great thing about being Lutheran, idealistically speaking anyway, is that not only do you not need intercessory prayer to wipe away your sins, your sins aren’t really anybody’s business anyway. At least that’s what Martin Luther said. All that muck is just between you and God.

Or between you and your mother.

If the Judeo-Christian Diaspora had need for a patron saint of guilt, my mother would be it. No improper action is unworthy of her note. Just the other day, in fact, as I sat across the kitchen table from her, to give her 20 minutes of painful and dutiful conversation, she remarked on my use of a four-letter word in referring to a less than ethical colleague. “Do you talk like that in front of Heidi? I just cannot believe the language you use.”

I am 37 years old, and I suddenly decided it was time to grab my four-year-old and hit the road before my mother began remarking on the unusual color of my toenails or advised me it was really not appropriate, given my age (nevermind I have great legs), for me to wear skirts with hems above the knee.

My mother comes by her guilt-inducing tendencies honestly enough. The great-granddaughter of Norwegian immigrants who managed to prosper through dedicated and pretty much non-stop labor in the rich soil of the American Midwest, she was raised on a solid diet of hard work, steel nerves, and eternal faith that anything that could go wrong would go wrong. Leisure time is the next best thing to a sin in this world view, and love is reserved for children who are under the age of back talking. Spouses, adult relatives, pets, and neighbors can fend for themselves unless, of course, they have reached drooling stage at which point you tend to them with a rough and exasperated sense of duty.

When you come of age under this kind of rearing, guilt becomes an everyday thing, hardly noted oftentimes.  You think being reminded for the 923^rd time that it is all your fault your parents had to sell a quarter of the farm to send you to college is normal. And you really don’t think about the fact that the reason you haven’t told your mother you’re going on a European vacation is because you don’t want to feel bad for enjoying yourself and (God forbid) spending hard-earned money on something frivolous like seeing the palaces of the Russian czars or taking a gondola ride on the Grand Canal.

There is nothing healthy about consuming a steady diet of guilt, however. Guilt represses and controls, which is, of course, what it is designed to do, but most of us who have been raised on a guilt diet, whether it’s one of moderate or gargantuan proportions, end up leading lives where duty (however it is defined by the ones holding the guilt strings) holds sway over everything else…including happiness.

And if you think happiness is for the afterlife and not for the here and now, well, you might as well stop reading. I have no argument for the doggedly, miserably faithful. Ecclesiastes noted that “all is vanity,” and “all go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” In other words, we’re all headed for the same destination whether we live lives burdened by guilt or not, so why waste time feeling bad for being who we are and for enjoying the life we have been given?

It is a question I have often asked my mother. She has never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Perhaps that’s because the answer is ultimately that she, like so many people, from priests to politicians, has found guilt to be a handy way of getting what she wants from other people. If you can make someone feel bad enough for pursuing his dreams, perhaps he won’t pursue them and leave you behind. If you can force someone to be devoted to you by reminding her all the time of all you have done for her, perhaps she won’t abandon you, no matter how horribly you treat her. It is the same thing churches and governments have used for millennia—do the “right” thing, and no harm will come to you; no one will judge you; and life will never be hard. You certainly won’t have to make tough choices.

And, in the end, isn’t that why most of us raised on guilt diets stick to them? Much though we may resent the steady ingestion of our unworthiness, it’s far preferable perhaps to having to put ourselves out on a limb and risk censure or ridicule (or maybe disinheritance) by doing our own thing.

I think perhaps it was watching my father that finally made me ditch the guilt regimen. Raised by a rigidly religious mother and a father who was eternally disappointed in him, my dad ingested guilt almost from the cradle. The result was that he was and still is always trying to please with some ragged hope that maybe one day he’ll be good enough. His parents are long since gone from this earth, but my mother has done a fairly good job of assuming their place and discouraging my dad from following his heart if it in any way leads him away from her…even if only for a day.

Guilt like this is everywhere, and sometimes it’s not other people who impose it on us.  Sometimes we impose it on ourselves.  How many women friends do I have who are reluctant to go out for the day with friends or to take a vacation without their kids?  Somehow they have ingested the idea that they are poor wives and mothers if they give any attention to themselves. So they doggedly devote themselves to their duties—taking care of their careers, their spouses, their children—to the exclusion of caring for themselves.  The result is a life of groundhog days.

Not too many weeks ago I was standing in the prettily landscaped backyard of a well-to-do friend who, like so many of us, on the surface has it all.  I could not help but remark, as I watched our children playing together and her husband grilling on the deck, “You have a good life.”

She literally guffawed, “Yeah, right.”

I knew what it meant, and I kind of chuckled, now admiring the new deck furniture she had purchased, pretty green cushions and a jauntily tilted patio umbrella.  “Well, at least you have great deck furniture,” I said.

We both fell into stitches of laughter. Because it was all too true. When we let duty rule our lives too much, we end up clinging to absurdities for our happiness. Maybe we resent our spouses or hate our jobs, but at least we have a really nice car. Or maybe we’re angry we have to work horrible hours, but at least we have a really beautiful house to sleep in. We cover our guilt with salves of pretense.

I’m not sure when exactly I gave up the ghost and decided to start eating life raw and real. Perhaps it was somewhere between my mother remarking, “well, it must be nice to be rich” and me replying, guilt-free, “yeah, it is,” and walking out at Christmas one year when she told me to “get out,” fully expecting I would never be so lacking in guilt as to actually do it. The funny thing about resisting the guilt diet is that the more you call the bluff of the guilt reapers, the more they back off…or at least keep their guilt-inducing opinions to themselves.

Plus, you’ll find out who really loves you. Trust me, it’s not the person who tries to make you feel bad for following your heart or doing your own thing. It’s the person who makes you feel good for being who you are.

I’ve Got It Under Control: A Woman’s Guide to Male Speak

Originally published October 15, 2011

Have you ever noticed that men, generally speaking, don’t like to be questioned? And I’m not talking the “Where have you been for the past four hours?” type questions. I’m talking about any questions. Dare to ask, and you’ll get one of two answers: the “oh shit” stare or the “I’ve got it under control” answer. With my husband, it’s usually the latter. “Are you going to change the oil in my car today?” A simple “yes” or “no” answer is all that’s required, right? Not so. “I’ve got it under control,” he says. What does that mean? Does it men “yes” or “no?” Or does it mean something else entirely?

I know I’m not alone here. One of my best friends, who has been married just under two years, has already had this experience. “Men do not like being probed,” she tells me about four months after their son is born. She has contacted me to try to unravel her new husband’s frequent response of “I’ve got it under control.” She recounts to me how she walked into the kitchen one morning to find a bag of breast milk sitting on the counter while her beloved spouse was surfing on the Internet with his iPad, the baby comfortably asleep nearby. Now as any nursing mother knows, it takes a good 30 minutes to pump out four ounces of milk, and most of us are so time-strapped we’ve even been known to engage in the process while commuting to work. You would think men would be cognizant of the sacrifice. As my friend gracefully pointed out when relating this story, “If the damn milk sits out for more than two hours, it goes bad, and you know how freaking time consuming it is to pump that stuff!”

Yes, I do. Her husband, however, does not, or so we think at first.

My dear friend began to question the man: “What are you going to do with it?”

He became frustrated, told her not to worry about it, that he was “handling” it.

And my friend wondered, What the hell did that mean?

Being the direct kind of creature she is (after all, she’s a woman), she said, “What do you mean? Should I warm it up? Where are you going to put it? Do you need an ice pack?”

Of course, that line of questioning, unbeknownst to her, was going to get her nowhere. All he said was, “I’ve got it under control.”

My friend’s response to that was to take the milk pack off the counter and put it in the refrigerator.

So what does the “I’ve got it under control” answer mean anyway? Because it obviously does not mean “I’ve got it under control.” The unrefrigerated bag of breast milk is a case in point.

We must dig deeper because, as my friend noted, “Men are masters of avoiding and diverting.”

And mental sleuths though women are, we really cannot read minds. And how indeed are we supposed to figure anything out if these men don’t answer simple questions?

Never fear, ladies. I have the answers.

Because this phenomenon is not unique to husbands and boyfriends. My dad does it. Hell, my lawyer does it. But the reality is, to a man, there is no such thing as an innocent question. Unfortunately, women unwittingly ask simple things like the following, expecting simple, straightforward answers:

1) Are you going to fix the tractor today?

2) Why is the milk sitting out on the counter?

3) When are you going to remodel the basement?

4) Where would you like to go on vacation?

They seem like innocent questions, yet they can stifle the male brain for hours. Why? Well, the reality is that men, generally speaking, find questions threatening. Though women have often been blamed for “reading into things,” I would like to suggest, ladies, that the gentlemen are projecting. Never heard that term? Time to take Pscyh 101.

The trick is to share information about yourself first. It loosens them up, makes them more comfortable with the concept of talking. Or ask the question in a way that takes their opinions into account, gives them an opportunity to share expertise (i.e. instead of “why are you doing this,” ask “what do you think about doing this.”)

So, let’s try the above questions again, keeping the male brain in mind:

1) I really like the tractor. It’s fun to drive.

2) That’s interesting that the breast milk is sitting on the counter. What do you think about breast milk sitting on the counter?

3) It will be wonderful when the basement is finished. I am dreaming about how it will look.

4) I’d like to go to Egypt on vacation. What do you think about that? What do you think our chances are of getting shot?

Just remember, under no circumstance should you ever use the word “feel” when asking a question. Never ask “How do you feel about going to my mother’s for the weekend?” or “How do you feel about our relationship?” The word “feel” gives men the willies, no matter how it’s used. You will never get any useful information out of man by asking how he feels. Trust me.

If you get the “I’ve got it under control” answer, that’s a clear indicator you’ve just achieved communication failure. Because what “I’ve got it under control” really means is “when you question me, it makes me feel like you don’t trust me and don’t believe I can handle things.” Of course, it might also mean, “I forgot to put the breast milk back in the fridge, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to admit I screwed up.”

So, ladies, remember: share yourself, and give him an opportunity to offer his expertise, and you’ll get a lot farther. He might even take out the trash for you.

Counting Beans and Hunting for Empty Egg Cartons at Midnight…And How To Be the Best Mom Ever

A rare moment of traditional motherhood–decorating cookies with Heidi

Have you ever done your kids’ homework?

Come on, I know you have.  Sometimes you do it because the project is so clearly over the head of your child or any other child of his or her age on the planet that you question the teacher’s sanity in assigning it.  My seventh grade science teacher is a prime example of this. She used to assign the most complicated engineering projects to us that they all essentially became grand competitions between all our fathers to build the best “Rat Mobile” (i.e. the fastest moving object powered by a mouse trap) or strongest structure made out of drinking straws and fishing line. That was when my builder father taught me the power of triangles….

However, I digress.

Last night was my turn to break the rules.

After having been delayed on a return from Chicago for more than 24 hours by bad weather, I finally arrived just barely awake at my daughter’s babysitter just before 10 p.m. I grabbed the already pajama-dressed darling and all her accoutrements, tossed her in the car, and dragged into our house 20 minutes later only to find her backpack full of instructions for school the next day:

“It’s the 100^th day of school tomorrow!!!! Please make sure your child dresses like someone who is 100 years old and brings in 100 small items in to count in groups of 10 (like Skittles, buttons, or paperclips!).  Also, we are making caterpillars this week.  Please send in empty egg cartons for this project ASAP!!!!”

Am I the only one who wonders why kindergarten teachers employ so many exclamation points? Having worked in marketing and advertising for years, I’ve always lived by the anti-exclamation point rule: If you need to use an exclamation point, you’re not actually conveying information effectively. You cannot excite another human being about your product or service by simply employing the use of a line and a dot.

It is at this point in the evening that I realize following the rules is not going to benefit Heidi in the least. It is more than 3 hours past her bedtime, and I already know I’ll be up all night answering work e-mails and writing articles.  I put the kid to bed and begin working on her homework myself.

A friend calls just as I am counting out 100 dried beans.

“Hey,” I say, “Can you stop talking for just a minute? I need to count beans.” There is an awkward pause and silence on the other end of the line. 

After parceling them out in groups of 10 because even at age 38, I can’t count to 100 effectively at midnight after flying two hours, driving two more, and having about two dozen things on my brain that, awful mother as it may make me out to be, I find vastly more important than bean counting.

“Okay,” I say to my friend, “go ahead.  Tell me about your date. Oh, wait, do you have any ideas for how you would dress if you were 100 years old??”

Together we come up with a shapeless sweater dress, shawl, string of pearls, and (courtesy of my friend) a grand idea to draw wrinkles on Heidi’s forehead and cheeks the next morning.

Now it’s time to empty the no doubt already past expiration date eggs in the fridge out of a carton, so Heidi can start making a caterpillar for a science project.  For a moment, my brain drifts to the W-2s I’ve not yet sent into the IRS and the feature article I need to write on growing Forest Stewardship Council-certified lumber. “Stop it!” I counsel myself. “Focus on finding Heidi’s missing ‘Dick and Jane Jump’ book.”

“I didn’t realize the 100^th day of school was such a big deal,” says my single working mother friend whose daughter is the same age as Heidi. She has called to tell me she must cancel our yoga/meditation retreat weekend because she’s too stressed out to go.

“Yes, the 100^th school day thing is quite pervasive,” I remark as I zip up Heidi’s backpack, confident I have accomplished all requisite tasks…that is until I see a stack of permission slips and paperwork I’m supposed to fill out.

“You know, men couldn’t do this,” my friend says. I remember the last time I saw her. She was sitting in her home office in space alien pajama bottoms, hair in a ponytail, dark circles under her eyes, Disney Princess paraphernalia scattered about here and there, losing her shit on a conference call with colleagues after suffering through four hours of sleep the previous night.

“I am exhausted,” she tells me. “I get up every morning, fight with my daughter to eat her pancakes, tell her repeatedly she has six minutes to get out the door, drive her to school while I’ve got my headset on and am talking to a customer halfway around the world, drive back from school, sit on tele-cons for 8 hours, try to squeeze in a trip to the gym, not that I need it since I don’t have time to eat anyway, pick up my daughter, struggle to make something resembling a home-cooked meal with the help of a slow cooker, pull out hot glue guns and colored paper for the latest school project, play games, do storytime, bathe her, get her to bed, back to the office to catch up on e-mails until 2 a.m., then do it all over again the next day.”

This is the life of a working mother. And honestly, it often doesn’t matter if we’re single.  I can’t recall my life looking all that different when I was married, despite my father’s injunction, “You need a husband….”

Maybe. What would he do?  I suppose he might do a better job than I of reading Dr. Seuss’ What Was I Scared Of? (Though there is something disturbingly entertaining about recounting the story of the glowing green pants that run around all night in the woods.) And no doubt he’d do a better job of cooking dinner. It’s pretty easy to beat rice krispies served alongside raw broccoli and carrots. 

But, as a rule, men just don’t take life as seriously as we do.  Maybe it’s a gift that they’re okay with the little ones heading to school with homework undone and hair unbrushed. Society is more forgiving of men if they are 10 minutes late to pick up their daughters from ballet.  They get accolades galore if they show up for Christmas concerts and school field trips. I show up for parent-teacher conferences, doctor’s appointments, and interviews with clients so that I can pay the bills that cover food, home, and, hopefully, college education. Forget retirement.  That’s never going to happen.

And that’s what cuts to the core…when my daughter looks up at me tapping away on my laptop, as she builds castles from Legos on the floor at my feet. “Mommy, when are you going to retire so you will have more time to play with me?”

How does one answer a question like that? The only way I know how is by counting beans at midnight and caring whether or not she shows up at school with her requested Styrofoam egg carton. And sometimes I fail at these things. I drop the ball, fall asleep at the wheel, miss the deadline, forget to send tennis shoes for P.E.

But one thing I never forget is love. The morning hugs and tickles to draw her out of bed. The promises to be there no matter what, even when she’s grown. The good night tuck-ins and the sometimes blissful crawling into bed beside her to hold her sweet little sleeping body next to mine as she clutches stuffed bears and kittens and whispers in her dreams, “I love you. You’re the best Mommy ever.”

And I am. If you don’t measure it in miscounted beans and lost library books….

In Search of the All-Purpose V-Day Gift for Men….

Originally posted by Deborah Huso on Feb 6, 2012 in Men, Relationships

That dreaded holiday is approaching again. No, not Mother’s Day, though I think Valentine’s Day has got to run a close second. Who hates Valentine’s Day more than a single girl without a date? A woman who has been married more than two years….

And here’s why. It’s not because we don’t like a bouquet of red roses, guys. They’re very pretty and all, even if they are all dead within a week, less if you decide to get the day-after-Valentine’s-Day special at Kroger (um, yeah, I’ve gotten those). There is something admittedly symbolic and decadent about that particular standby gift, if you even bother to get it, which a surprising number of long-term significant others don’t. Some of them don’t even bring chocolate. And if you aren’t smart enough to know there is some consolation for a girl in chocolate, you have no business dating or being married.

You see, we dread this holiday because we resent the fact that it’s so darn easy for the guys. Unfairly so. Order the roses from the florist and maybe add in some artisan chocolates too boot. Bam. You’re done.

Meanwhile, we’ve been sweating bullets for at least a month in advance, scouring all the “what to buy your guy for V-Day web sites,” floored in some way that a silver whiskey flask or a progressive alarm clock are considered romantic gifts…or something he’d even want. How many times does he hit the snooze button in the morning anyway? And would a progressive alarm clock change that for him? And do you really see him standing there pouring his favorite malt into the tiny hole in the top of that flask? That’s the kind of OCD stuff high maintenance women engage in…minus the flask. They’re trying to figure out how not to spill that French martini in the perfectly lovely (but top-heavy) glass they just bought for it.

But where, ladies, is the all-purpose V-Day gift for guys??? Where is our dozen red roses and a box of chocolates equivalent?

I’m fearful it doesn’t exist because, being the research-intensive journalist that I am, I’ve been doing some homework on this subject at the behest of female acquaintances. Now, I haven’t done anything quite on the scale of the Gallup poll (But who answers those surveys anyway? That’s right—little old ladies with too much time on their hands—not exactly an accurate cross-section of America), but I have been polling. And the unfortunate reality is that no two women seem to have the same answer, and most of them have about a dozen “this gift might be a good one if you can afford it” suggestions that don’t even begin to offer the ease and convenience of red roses.

The first person to whom I turned my polling was my oldest and dearest friend Sarah. I knew given the fact that she is married to a chef who has a number of high level hobbies we women don’t understand (like duck hunting and motorcycling…or something along those lines) that she would have to have some good suggestions. This woman has been through the gift giving ringer. As I recall, her husband once requested a very special duck hunting backpack, the only kind of duck hunting backpack with which he could properly engage in the sport, that cost a mere $180 bucks. (And they wonder why we have to buy our purses at TJ Maxx.)

Her top all-purpose male V-Day gift suggestion was a pair of Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones. “Men adore these damn things,” she told me, “probably because they can’t hear their wives bitching at them while they’re wearing them.” A mere $300, ladies, to enable your S.O. to do what he already does so well—ignore you.

Another female friend I posed the “all-purpose male V-Day gift” question to pursed her lips, shook her head, and then said, “Food and sex. Those are the only things I can think of.”

But that’s better perhaps than what fellow contributor Susannah offered up, which was “Do we still exchange gifts after 13 years of marriage?” She never really answered the question exactly, but I’m guessing it was likely “no” after the tirade she gave me on men and flowers.

She did provide one likely suggestion though: “How about I don’t criticize him for 24 hours?” A nice intangible gift that keeps on giving…at least for a day. It would probably outlast a box of chocolates now that I think about it.

But still, I’ve not come any closer to fulfilling my quest. Suggestions of super light kayak paddles, ATV outings, and super-duper hiking boots abound. But we all know, as we’ve all been there, that we’ll purchase the wrong thing no matter how much research we engage in. I tried for years to comprehend my former spouse’s hobbies in an effort to give the perfect gifts. I’m pretty sure I failed every time. I finally just gave up and stuck gift cards to Advance Auto and Bass Pro Shops in his Valentines. Not much thought going into that, but then exactly how much thought is going into the roses? That’s if you even get roses…or a card. I’ve gone plenty of years without either.

So maybe it is back to the old standby. No, not the Victoria’s Secret gift card for him (though it will do in a pinch). I’m talking sex. As a friend of mine said with a shrug, “Sex is easy, but it’s always well-received. I never get any complaints, and it’s the gift that gives back.”

Maybe so. Some guys will do the laundry for it. A few will even mow the grass.

And heck, don’t we have enough to worry about without having to come up with a V-Day gift he won’t return the very next day or stuff into his closet behind all those shirts you’ve given him over the years that really bring out his eyes but which he says are far too feminine? (And since when is forest green a feminine color?)

But you know, there is some small and wicked part of me that just once would like to see men go through the retail gymnastics that we do for them. How do they get off so easy? Flowers, chocolate, a nice bottle of wine, sweet smelling lotion, a pretty necklace—and we smile and tell them how much we love their thoughtfulness. Is it thoughtful? How much thought did they put into it? And maybe we are just too darn easy to please. Um yeah, you read that correctly. Women are very easy to please in the gift giving department, at least those who’ve been around the block a few times are. We’ve decreased our expectations to the point that if a guy even remembers Valentine’s Day, much less gives us flowers, we think he’s king of the hill.

I’m not the only female though that longs to see them sweat as much as we do.

After much puzzling on this whole subject of what to buy the men in our lives, Sarah finally said we needed to start demanding more ourselves, give them a taste of what it’s like to search frantically for the gift that tells them that not only do we love them but we understand them, we get them.

Do they do this for us?

And then inspiration hit Sarah like a bolt of lightning from above, as she came up with a scenario for the women blighted by too much painstaking shopping at Brooktone and Cabella’s to try in an effort to give the men in our lives a taste of what we go through for love of them:

Do you have an iPod? I think you should ask for an engraved one and ask him to make you a playlist that best reflects you and your relationship. Actually, get him to make several playlists that symbolize your time together…. Now that will get him thinking! And doing something besides buying roses or chocolate…

Although I think you should ask for Shari’s Berries, too….

Information Control and Perception Management: 9 More Rules of Dating for Really Clueless Men

I am writing this post at the behest of numerous girlfriends (and a couple of guys, too, believe it or not) who have indicated my “Nine Rules of Dating for Clueless Men” post needs an upgrade—a serious upgrade. As one of my close girlfriend’s boyfriend put it, “Dating is all about information control and perception management.”

Understand that I am not advocating “game playing.” Rather, I’m cautioning you to remember that first impressions are hard to undo. Very few women will give you a second chance if you roundly screw up on date number one. And pretty much every single one will bail if you continue to screw up on date number two.  Because then your understandable anxiousness at meeting a new person is no longer an excuse. If you’re still acting like an idiot on date number two, you probably are an idiot and need to take up rock climbing or something instead of playing Nintendo all weekend and expecting it to improve your social skills. Read on….

1.  Jean shorts and pleated pants are a no-no. And honestly, this is probably the case for women, too, though I’m still trying to convince a girlfriend of mine that I really can pull off Daisy Dukes.  Seriously, there is no man on the planet who looks good in jean shorts (and if you’re wearing jeans, please make sure they are fitted—you are not going to entice any woman to your bed if you’re wearing baggy jeans). And with regard to pleated pants…honey, they make you look fat. Unless you are seriously skinny, you cannot pull them off…or should I say on?
2. Toss the tighty whiteys. If I need to explain why, you probably need to invest some time reading fellow contributor Susannah Herrada’s post, “Sex, Suitcases, and Tighty-Whiteys.” Seriously, your date’s only experience of tighty-whiteys is likely seeing them in her dad’s laundry basket in the 1980s.
3. No serenading without an invitation, please. I don’t care if you can croon on the scale of Luther Vandross. Do not trap your date in a car in a parking garage and serenade her to the radio if she hasn’t requested firsthand experience of your vocal abilities. It’s awkward, and if she’s polite enough not to bolt at that very moment and make a mad dash for her car, I promise you, she’ll be spending the rest of the evening trying to figure out how to ditch you without traumatizing your ego. If you play guitar, you can get away with a little more, but still NOT on date one, or two, or three.
4. Do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it. Pick her up on time. If you say you’re going to call, then do it. If you make plans with her, keep them. This is just basic respect. And if you don’t respect her enough to do the basics, you don’t respect her enough to be dating her. And if you fail on the basics persistently, any woman worth her salt is going to dump you anyway.
5. Save your BDSM proclivities for later…much later. Trust me, you will never have the level of intimacy on a first date that is necessary to make it anything but unacceptable to slide your hand up under your date’s blouse and twist her nipple. As a girlfriend of mine put it, “This is not a radio dial. Twisting it to the right is not going to increase reception.” Or get you another date….
6. Don’t regale your date with endless stories about your ex. First, it’s just not polite. And second, it makes it look like you’re still pretty invested in all that baggage you’ve got strapped to your left ankle. As a male friend of mine puts it, “The only time I ever talk to a girl about my exes is when I’m about to have her join their number.” (Note: this rule does not apply once you’re in a long-term, committed relationship and you are into deep sharing mode—but deep sharing falls under the “information control” tab in the initial stages of dating.)
7. If you have Facebook pages for your cats, you shouldn’t even be dating. Enough said.
8. Do not ever tell your date, “You look really good for your age.”  You may think this is a compliment, but it’s not. If you think your 35-year-old date looks like she’s 29, then say, “You look like you’re 29.” It’s all about semantics, gentleman.  Learn how to use them.
9. If your date has bigger balls than you do, it’s time to reassess whether you should be dating at all. Strong and confident women like strong and confident men. If you aren’t brave enough to be yourself, disagree politely when you think she’s off-base, and stand up for yourself or for her when it’s called for, you should probably go back to building Facebook pages for your cats….

Out of the Mouths of Babes: Why Children Are Emotionally Smarter Than We Are

Not everyone within my sphere of influence agrees with how I raise my daughter. I’ll admit, there are things about my parenting that look a little risky. Not the least of which is the way I don’t protect her from the realities of life.

For example, I cry in front of her. I have done this since she was very small.  Thus, she has come to see tears as a natural expression of sadness, which like any human emotion, is a temporary state. And she knows instinctively, so it appears at times, what to do with another person’s sadness….

“Mommy, why are you sad? Who has been mean to you?”

And I will explain in the best terms I can for a six-year-old to grasp.  And Heidi will put her soft little arms around my neck, plant my cheeks with kisses, and say perfectly reasonable and comforting things like, “Sometimes life is complicated, but it will be okay. I will always love you and be here for you.”

Profound yet so simple.

I asked my friend, Bill, the father of three, how my daughter knows to say these things that adults are so often incapable of saying, “Children are pure and untainted,” he says. “Honesty and sincerity come naturally to them.”

And then life breeds it out of them. Sometimes parents do, too.  I know my parents did.  Their efforts were well-meaning.  They thought they were doing the right thing, both in protecting me from their adult troubles and in teaching me to protect myself from letting others see me.

But the thing is—kids have emotional intuition on a scale that most adults do not. No one has to tell them that Mommy and Daddy are worried about how to pay all their bills or that Mommy and Daddy don’t love each other anymore. They may not know what is wrong, but they know something is. And then they act out and fret themselves silly the way children who are afraid and uncertain will do—maybe they will misbehave at school; maybe their grades will plummet; maybe they will have anxiety attacks.

My parents never fooled me. And their efforts to protect me often had the opposite effect.  I tried to fix complicated things that were broken. When Dad didn’t give Mom a Mother’s Day gift one year, and I saw how upset she was by it, I changed the card on the rhododendron I had given her to read Dad’s name instead of my own. I figured it was much more hurtful to her to be neglected by my father than by a little girl. She saw through my ruse, of course.

And then when I couldn’t figure out how to fix the things I didn’t understand because no one was explaining them to me, I would cry…only to be confronted with admonitions from both my parents to quell my tears, not to alert the world I was vulnerable.

Trust no one, my parents words and actions told me. Rely on yourself. Keep your true feelings to yourself. Don’t let anyone know they are getting to you. Then they hold power over you.

I do not resent my parents for any of this. They did the best they knew how.  They raised me as they had been raised. Granted, it took me nearly 20 years to train myself out of that mode of thinking, to be fearlessly who I am before the world, to let people in even at the risk of great pain, to both give and receive love and solace openly.

Honesty and sincerity still work in this world…if both sides are willing to offer them up.

When I’ve had a rough day, and I snap at my daughter for being too chatty and asking too many questions of my exhausted brain, she will frown, look me in the eye and say, “It hurts my feelings when you yell at me.”

How many adults would do this?  Most would walk away, resentful, and give me the silent treatment for the rest of the day for wounding them.

Not Heidi. No way is she going to let anger fester.

And I recognize what I have taught her—honesty, straightforwardness no matter what.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve had a stressful day. I did not mean to yell at you.” And I kiss her on the forehead. She is satisfied. Everything is as it was two minutes before.

Heidi knows people get over shit.

If they allow themselves to….

But hardened adults that we are, wounded by life, torn asunder by love gone wrong, protective of what little hope we have left, carry our resentments, our anger, our pain under lock and key, where it festers and corrodes, slowly destroying any chance we have left of unfettered joy—the joy of being who we are and letting others love us for it.

Heidi knows, even at the tender age of 6, what pain and trouble look like. She has seen her parents divorce. She has seen her mother hurt. She has seen elderly relatives sick and fading, slowly losing their minds. She comes home from school some days and tells me plainly about a boy who pushed her on the playground or a girl who called her a mean name and asks my advice. I tell her, “Keep your distance from people who hurt you. Surround yourself with good people, people who make you feel good about yourself.”

I did not come to this wisdom easily. I have learned it from long and difficult experience and from deeply kind and loving friends like Bill, whom I’ve known since childhood. When I commented that openness and honesty, though I strive for them, often leave me in the lurch when it comes to human relationships, that too many people seem to find those qualities threatening, he remarked, “Be true to yourself, and you will draw good people to you. Don’t waste your time on people who can’t take you exactly as you are.”

It was the same advice I had given to Heidi hours before, just spoken a little bit differently.

May my daughter remember it always, even once she is gone from me, that she may not waste time, as I too often have, on people who are afraid of themselves and, therefore, afraid of her.

What I’ve Learned From Loving (and Dating) Men With Baggage

Before I get called out for my blog post title here, let me make an acknowledgement: I’m a hot mess. Not a hot mess on the scale of Rihanna, for example. That’s blazing hot mess. I’m more like a just above luke warm hot mess…on an average day anyway.

Thus, you won’t find me judging men who are hot messes, but I will comment, particularly since men are so darn fond of denial. The first time I ever told a man he was a hot mess, he gave me that famous deer in the headlights look, chuckled a bit, and became thoughtful for a very long time. Uh-huh. Wheels turning. Maybe I AM a hot mess, he was thinking.

Of course, he is! As my friend Sarah points out, “Let’s face it: at our age, there’s gonna be baggage. No way to avoid it.”

So dating and falling in love in one’s 30s and 40s is not about avoiding baggage. It’s more about deciding how much baggage you’re willing to take on…in addition to your own, of course.

“My preference is a carry-on bag,” Sarah says. “I’ll let a man have that one for free. But if he’s got extra baggage, I think there should be a handling fee, just like the airlines.”

I couldn’t agree more, particularly since I’ve had the foolhardy experience of falling in love with men dragging steamer trunks.

The worst part is if you’ve got someone traveling with a steamer trunk, you often don’t know it. That’s because, in this day and age, they disguise the trunk as a cocktail table or other piece of interior decor—an antique conversation piece that they claim is empty. It’s just there to enhance the eclectic design of the room.

Um, no shit.

Maybe steamer trunk is the wrong word. More like Pandora’s box…because women being women, we rarely give up hope entirely. And because we’re naturally more curious than men about the contents of personal baggage, we open the steamer trunks, find them bursting with paraphernalia, but by the time we shut them in a desperate act of regret, it’s too late. The guy’s shit has flown the coop and, more often than not, squarely landed in our laps. (You might want to refer to my post “Emotional Diarrhea” for more on how that feels.)

For better or worse, the two longest term romantic relationships of my life have been with men dragging steamer trunks. The first one at least acknowledged on occasion that there was something in the trunk: twice divorced parents, childhood emotional neglect, parental brutality, etc.

The second one, however, was always sitting on the trunk, legs crossed, looking smug. He was so good at hiding his baggage that he actually convinced me for a time that I was the one with excess checked luggage plus a rather weighty carry-on. (And I will admit, I always overstuff my carry-on. I hate baggage fees.)

One day, however, I gave him a hard nudge, knocked him off his “decorative” steamer trunk, unlocked it, and lifted the lid wide open. I got hit hard with more dirty laundry than I’d ever seen in my life. Fortunately, by that point in my life, I’d learned what to do with clothes where you just cannot get the stains out no matter how hard you try: throw them out and update your wardrobe.

The interesting thing about this last experience of loving a man with excess luggage, however, was that he seemed even more shocked by the contents of his steamer trunk than I was. (I gather he had probably not unpacked it in a long time.)

And right now, I cannot help but wonder if he’s actually trying to launder and repair all those old musty shirts and slacks and torn up underwear or if he’s just locked them all back up in the trunk again and thrown away the key…hopeful that the next woman won’t be smart enough to find it or will at least believe him when he says he’s cleaned up his act…ahem, I mean baggage.

In the meantime, I’m quietly lugging my own overstuffed carry-on. It’s on roller wheels. (It became too heavy to carry via shoulder strap years ago.) I always worry I might have to unzip it and share some small tidbit of the past with another passenger on this trip called life, and that scares me a little because, once opened, my overstuffed bag, is hard to get shut again. Sometimes I have to sit on it. And, even then, the seams threaten to burst.

Which is probably why another friend of mine and fellow contributor, Susannah, is quick to point out the other reason one should never settle for a man with more than a carry-on bag. “After all, you want him to have a free hand to help you with your luggage, too….”

Building a Holiday-Free Zone: Struggling to Go Guilt and Family-Free

Eating gelato in Venice on Thanksgiving Day

A friend of mine whose had some pretty sad experiences over the holidays, ranging from ending her marriage one year to losing her mother to cancer another, told me recently she was making her home into a “holiday-free zone.” “No turkeys, Christmas trees, or mistletoe are getting into this house,” she proclaimed.

I regret to say I fully understand.  I haven’t exactly had the best run on Thanksgiving/Christmas seasons myself. Long married to a man who eschewed much celebration of Christmas because it reminded him too much of being tugged back and forth between divorced parents as a child and having long been a member of a dysfunctional family extraordinaire (i.e. relatives who can sit at the same dinner table for an hour or more and never make eye contact much less speak), the holidays often seem to me more like something to “get through” than to enjoy.

The last couple of years I’ve found creative ways to escape the holidays. I spent Thanksgiving 2011 in Venice, Italy, where there was not a sign anywhere that Americans across the Atlantic were gathering around extended dining room tables carving succulent birds and spooning cranberries onto the fine china that’s pulled out only twice a year. And Christmas 2012, I was so desperate to escape family drama, I opted for taking my daughter to Disney World as an excuse for not showing up to the holiday dinner table.

So far my daughter hasn’t minded…or at least hasn’t noticed.  But I wonder sometimes if that’s because she just hasn’t had much experience with the Norman Rockwell version of Christmas.  And honestly, do any of us?  At least since passing the age of 12 when we started to notice that maybe our aunts and uncles really weren’t that fond of one another and that Grandma so-and-so hadn’t spoken to her son’s wife in five years?

Another friend has troubles at Christmas because her mother can’t bear to be in the same room with her father. They are divorced but can’t make nice even for a day.  And honestly, why should they have to? How is it the holidays have become this obligatory family-free-for-all, where if the relatives aren’t engaging in shouting matches over some 20-year-old spat, they are at least sitting there sullenly wishing they were home instead watching football or reading a good book?

I have some acquaintances who hold what they term “a dysfunctional Thanksgiving.” It’s a gathering of friends, not family, over a prodigious feast and is open to anyone who would rather be there than at a family dinner table. Not surprisingly, it draws quite a crowd.

Christmas at Disney World

I haven’t decided yet how I’m going to establish my own version of a “holiday-free zone” this year. Granted I’ve already started putting up a few Christmas wreaths here and there (though I’m truly debating whether or not to drag the 9 ft. tall artificial fir tree out of the basement and spend 6 hours decorating it while stepping precariously from step ladder to step ladder).

I might just send my daughter off to spend Thanksgiving with her father’s dysfunctional family and curl up in front of the fire with a cup of hot cocoa and a good book. As for Christmas, I found myself eyeing some winter trips to Austria and Germany that, as luck would have it, fall right over December 25.

And in an effort to avoid the over-the-top Christmas cheer already showing up in shopping malls and department stores, I think I’ve figured out a way to order all my gifts online and have them delivered to my doorstep…or someone else’s. Heck, with any luck, I might even be able to avoid wrapping paper, ribbons, and Scotch tape.

Though to be quite honest, it’s not the decorations that get to me so much or even the hours and hours of gift wrapping.  It’s the childhood memories of traditions that will never be again that often make my Christmas blue.

I know my grandmother, who now lives in a nursing home and is suffering from Alzheimer’s, will no longer oversee my creation of Lemon Cloud. Nor will I ever watch her and my mother roll out dough for flatbread and lefse anymore. Dad and I will never sit together competing over who can make the most elaborate bow to plunk on a gift, and I’ll never climb into bed with my giggling cousins and store contraband soda pop in frosted bedroom windows for midnight snack.

And in the midst of all that loss, I struggle with how to shape the holidays for my daughter, wondering if I would even be doing her any favors by trying to recreate the holidays I thought I knew as a child, holidays where my parents and grandparents may have felt just as displaced as I do now.

Perhaps, in the end, it’s better to scoop her off on a Christmas Caribbean vacation or to spend Thanksgiving reading books in front of the fire. These are traditions that can keep going and going, that don’t require loads of extended family, that don’t rely on rituals that will die when the grandparents die, and where the holiday décor and baking isn’t associated with a sense of loss.

Because I don’t want Heidi feeling one day, as I do now, that January 2 cannot get here fast enough. No, I want her to feel confident in celebrating the joys of the season without the guilt-ridden obligations of family or the sense that her life is somehow inadequate if it doesn’t include a spouse, two kids, and a dog.