I've heard you groan when you were prompted to download Xcode. We all do it. It's a 12.88GB monster of an application that brings even my "this-should-be-powerful-enough-to-create-a-small-planet" Macbook to its knees. But you REALLY want to test your website in the iOS simulator and get a more "virtually realistic" experience than just the chrome dev tools.
It's possible.
I wake up and step on the scale. My entire day depends on this moment. It’s not in line with the mindful living or buddhist ideals I’ve been trying to incorporate to my life, but it’s the most entrenched habit and judgement that remains.
Body dysmorphia is a tenacious bitch.
I’m going to start at the end because that’s the bit you care about. So here is the conclusion of this long and tedious analogy: I’m fine.
Ok. Now that you’re caught up, humor me for a little bit and let me explain how I ended up in the hospital 3 days after coming home from Rome.
I’d only been in Rome a few days before taking off for a very swift tour of a few other cities, but when I walked out of the train station having arrived back again in Rome, my heart leapt at the familiar sight. “We’re home!” It cried. A familiar feeling washed over me and I felt my body relax as I easily navigated the way out to the cobbled streets that were completely unfamiliar a week before.
How strange travel is, to change a person so quickly.
Just after college, I started a bucket list. I wrote it in my little journal and gave it some serious thought, taking a few weeks to finish it. At 24 years old, it was born from a young, limited view. I suppose that is the point of a bucket list; to help the person writing it become a more rounded, fulfilled, and aware future self.
Yesterday, I crossed off #25.
I remember my mother explaining to me the sort of man I should marry. “Leslie,” she said when I was around 12 years old and only just starting to look at boys curiously, “The sort of man that is good for marriage is one that has plants in his apartment, can’t dance well, and wears tassel shoes.”
I found out a few months ago that my daughter identifies herself as bisexual, or more specifically, pansexual, but I had to look that up because I really don’t understand the difference. This information was secondary to the suicide threats and other information that flooded the front of the queue of New Things I’m Learning About My Daughter.
The beautiful thing about learning So Many New Things About My Daughter was that I could sit down with her at the table that day, iPad in hand, and look her in the eyes, all of her secrets now in my own mind and heart and still on the device between my hands and honestly tell her, “I’ve read everything you’ve said over the last few months and there is nothing here that makes me not love you. Now. Can we talk openly? Because I’m here and I’m not going anywhere and you’re not in trouble at all.”
My son and I started this bedtime meditation together when he was in third grade.
It was a day he said the whole class got in trouble. Apparently some of the boys were playing with the soap in the bathroom. My son is sensitive, and being the kid who hates to piss of anyone, felt targeted by this lecture. (Apples and Trees, y'all.) He said his teacher was angry and looking right at him but then, my young son explained in air quotes, “chuckled” and was a little nicer.
This. This. This! Go ahead, read it, I'll wait until you're back.
Back? It's good, right? It made me think of you.
40 is about accepting the blame
One morning when my 8year old was in a heap over the horrid inevitability that he would have to go to school again that day, he spat out, “You don’t do anything right! You promised I could skip school and you’re always lying!” It took me a minute to recover. I most certainly was not always lying but to explain this to him right now wasn’t going to get us any closer to him putting on his shoes. That I never ‘promised’ him he could skip school this particular day, wasn’t a discussion point, either. The facts of what I had said, the truth, was we discussed a time we may be traveling and, like the friends he’s so jealous of who get to miss school because they have a plane to catch, we would likely have that experience one day, too. But that was not what he wanted to hear or what he remembered that foggy, dark morning thirty minutes before the first school bell.
