My Jenn-eration

The surest way to know where you are, is to look at where you've been.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:37:00 +0000

Dear Dylan, Ruby, and Hope,

When I started this experiment ten years ago, I wish I could tell you I had some sort of grand foresight about what all of this would become. I did not. Dylan and Ruby, you were so little. Hope you did not even exist yet! Dad traveled all the time for work. We were living in a new town. I missed my friends, my sisters and Grandma. I missed me.

I know that sounds odd and yet that’s how I felt. That I had steadily been this one person for 30 years and almost overnight it had all flipped. Suddenly I was a mother and just a few short months later my own mom was gone. A year went by and I was pregnant again. Life just kept going which is exactly how it should be. Life just keeps going whether you are ready for it or not.

But I felt so lost.

It wasn’t specifically that I didn’t know where I was heading. Honestly, none of us ever do. And spending too much time hand wringing over that isn’t really worth it. It was more like everything felt so upside down for so long that all of the fundamentals, the people and tasks and routines that had made up me for three decades had so seismically shifted in such a short period of time, that I couldn’t figure out where I was. I was lost because I couldn’t make sense of where I’d been. Your early 30s, early parenthood, early marriage, losing parents, moving, any one of those things can be disorienting. Now, do them all at once. So that’s where I was, roughly around March of 2012.

Now you should know that I’m not historically someone who sticks with anything for a particularly long time. That isn’t an unfair criticism of myself, it is just the truth. I quit two different kinds of saxophones, three summer camps, and four jobs. That isn’t to say I don’t stick around for the really important stuff like my family or relationships. But most definitely I can say with confidence that I am exceptionally good at quitting a lot of other stuff. That when it gets hard, or I am close to actually getting good at anything, I cut and run. I excel at this feature.

This blog, which I started quite literally as something else exactly ten years ago, should have been the perfect example of that. My first blog post was not actually a blog post but a thing I was supposed to write for a friend’s baby shower. But it was 2012 and blogging was kind of hitting its stride as a way of women communicating with other women. I sat down and started writing because I needed something or someone to tell me that they understood what I was going through. I needed someone to help me feel less alone while I got my bearings in motherhood and adulthood.

I guess that’s what this blog was always about. Or at least that’s what it became anyhow. This blog was a map. I was so deeply in it in these early years that I couldn’t even remotely see my way back to me. So I wrote. I thought that if I I just kept writing, I could find these little markers along the way. I wrote when it was good or bad or hard. I wrote when I got lots of attention for my writing. I stayed and wrote when all of the attention and clicks left, when like only 10 people would read what I wrote. I stuck around when there was no one to publish anything. I stayed when all of the original bloggers were gone. I stayed and wrote when Daddy changed jobs, when we moved, when we almost moved, when Hope was born, when Bat Bat died, when we sold Grandma and Pa’s house, through Covid, and losing Pa. I stayed and wrote through this strange early middle chapter from when I was a young mom of two kids to the not so young mom of not so little three kids. Life is different now. I’m different now.

So what did all of this become? I guess it became something else along the way. At times, it was a surprising place for other mothers or motherless mothers to gather. Sometimes, it was a space for me to teach you things you were too little to understand, but I knew you’d need someday, like the importance of self-care, boundaries, of being passionate about something, about the power of owning your mistakes, or the importance of just generally making mistakes. Of learning to thrive not just survive because of and not in spite of your own humanity. I hope you’ll read this and remember to laugh at yourself sometimes, or a lot of the time, or learn how grief is not linear. It lingers but that does not mean joy is not possible too. Oddly, grief and joy sort of coexist in the exact same space because all of it comes from the same place where you love deeply. I hope you’ll see that I wasn’t just Mom. I hope you’ll see all of me. I”m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. I know it’s a thing I’ve deeply missed for the entirety of my parenting experience: the chance to talk with my own mother, peer to peer, about what all of this is like. I hope someday you’ll open up this map, you’ll read these imperfect words, and travel back through all of me. Or at least who I was then.

But the point of this is not to go back. We never can, and I don’t want you to get stuck there. Take these memories and lessons and odd little snapshots of our lives together over the past few years and use it for only what it is, something to light the way forward. To think about how you want to go on. Life keeps moving whether we want it to or not. We might not know what comes next but we will know where we’ve been. It’s enough to orient us now, isn’t it.

So it feels like ten is the right time to move forward from this place. In all of the ways I imagined exiting this blog gracefully, never did I imagine I’d be here, wherever here is. Never have I felt more certain and uncertain at once. I’m emboldened by this skin-deep awareness of what matters and what doesn’t. These past few years have somehow led me both simultaneously back to the deepest knowing of myself that I have ever felt, and also the most keen sense of having no clue what happens next to anyone or anything. I’m the one that showed up when it was good and when it was hard and when it was actually okay. When I didn’t know where I was, I learned to lean on my family and friends who remind me that where I am is defined less by where I’m heading and entirely by where I’ve already been and who the hell has been walking beside me this whole time.

Pa always said that if you have brains and a mouth, you’ll never get lost. It was his curt and not so gentle reminder that if you can stop and take stock of where you are and of where you’ve been, then most assuredly you will find your way back home. Believe it or not, after ten years, that’s exactly where this blog led me. I’ll be forever grateful to you for helping me get there.

Love, Mom

The unremarkable splendor of all this living: a love letter to 2021.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 16:26:00 +0000

I’ve been spending these past few weeks rereading many of my own old blog posts. In March, My Jenn-eration will be ten years old. I rarely stick with anything. That isn’t a criticism of myself but more just a fact. I drift from one thing to the next but here I stayed, I lingered and reflected on a particular chapter of my life. If I hadn’t written it down as I did, I’m not sure I would have remembered any of it, the way my grief for my mother felt early on, or the way that sleep deprived, bone deep love of early motherhood took hold of me. All of it, was such a jumble of all the things. I was so deep in the living it that if I hadn’t taken a moment to just step back, well I’m not sure I would be able to recall any of it.

In the life I lead now, in the way I love a parent with Alzheimers, I wonder how much any of that matters. If in the living of this thing, does it matter as much specifically whether or not we recall any of it? The moments happened whether we get to travel back to them or not. That would have been true here as well. Nonetheless, the blog offers me an extra peak back in time I otherwise would not have.

When you travel back, you are afforded the opportunity to notice patterns in your life you might not have noticed when you were living them. In this case, I can tell you that my new years posts for 2017, 2018, and 2019 were all about grief. 2020 was just, well, weird. And anyhow, here we are. We’ve arrived at the very last day of 2021 - the precipice of another new beginning and I am determined to start from a place other than grief.

This year, I want to talk about life.

The pandemic has completely reshaped the way I think about what makes a whole life. And when I look back at my year in photos and memories, it is clear that the biggest moments of this year might have been thought of as small or inconsequential in any other. But the gift of these past 21 months or so, is that more than I ever I hold on laser tight to every small victory. Every chance to gather with my people, every sunset, every great piece of birthday cake, or perfectly crisp fall day, every single one was the best day ever. I am absolutely filled with gratitude for all of it.

In Katherine May’s extraordinary literary achievement that all of you should read entitled Wintering, she writes, “Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty.” May also writes, “Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”

So here in the sparse beauty of this literal and metaphorical winter of our lives, I feel small and raw and keenly aware of what I need: family, friends, and a chance to get outside as often as I can. Those were the best parts of this year, they are the best parts of me, the smallest and simplest celebrations of us. So here it is - my brief look back in photos of 2021. The peak in the rearview mirror reminds me that though I don’t know what is coming, I know what counts.

In January we welcomed a new President and this girl turned seven.

In February it snowed a lot which seemed magical and lovely. There was many sledding trips. We celebrated a 50th birthday and after many months of window visits, we finally got to hug this guy in person again.

In March, the daffodils arrived and so did Ruby's milkshake maker. We took many many walks and got to finally reunite with Phil's mom. It was joyous.

In April we rented a house in Cape May, NJ and spent hours on a front porch in rocking chairs. We were the only ones a beach that looked like this. I have never felt so small and happy. The water was the color of sadness but I actually didn't feel that way. The colors of us popped and danced in contrast on the sand.

The house we stayed in was old and strange and filled with weird rooms which was perfect because we are unapologetically weird. This weird little space that was pretending to be an Irish pub was my favorite.

In May it was Dad's birthday and his first time going anywhere in 15 months. Dogs, kids, cake, a sunny day. Mother's Day in Collinsville, a vaccine for Dylan, long overdue in person lunch with friends I hadn't seen in how long had it been? Too long. Gratitude gratitude gratitude.

In June everyone graduated from everything. It was father's day and last day of school. After seven months we gathered together for a pool party to celebrate Dylan's bar mitzvah last November. It was wet and appropriately silly. It was great.

It was July and Phil and I went back to NYC to celebrate our 15th anniversary and made a pilgrimage to our first apartment together. There were trips to the lake and one to the beach with friends where we stuck our toes in the sand and did nothing at all but enjoy each other and the sun and the waves and that was lovely. We picked blueberries and went back to the beach. We got on our first plane in two years and went to see my sister. So much gratitude.

We started August in Hawaii. It is truly the most beautiful place on earth. We gawked at the sunsets and drank pineapple juice until we turned into actual pineapples. We went home and gawked at CT sunsets. There were lemonade stands and waffle makers and mini golf and beach and then pool followed by more beach and more pool. There was sand everywhere. I loved it.

September came and everything began again. We celebrated Rosh Hoshana in the park in lawn chairs and it was glorious. Everyone started a new school year and I turned 44. We celebrated the conclusion of a year's worth of torah readings on Simchat Torah with the congregation working together to unroll the scroll in the parking lot so that we could celebrate safely. Darkness fell and Dylan read his section by flashlight and that was so cool.

October came and Octobered it up. Pumpkins, perfect fall days, hayrides, apple cider and apple cider donuts. Corn hole which is honestly only fun on perfectly fall days. Halloween and ALL the candy.

November swept in and braces came off for some and on for others. The Pinewood Derby and Phil and I made our return to the theater to see Rent again because you can never see Rent too many times. More hikes and walks, the girls got their own rooms, Thanksgiving, and the last two in our family got their vaccines. Gratitude doesn't even cover it.

It was December and everyone had all the birthdays. There was Hanukkah, our return to the Wadsworth and the Festival of Trees, sledding hot cocoa, hugs and movies under blankets. If being cozy were an olympic sport I would gold medal in this. We attended our first school concert in two years. It was remarkable. Did we ever take this for granted? What a thing to hear our children perform such beautiful music together.

So was it all this good and joyous? No, of course not. But that's the gift of these days. We get to choose what we remember. To be honest I'm not as grateful for the remembering of it all. Quite candidly, more than ever I am aware that the remembering of it is something that can be taken from me at will. But I'm grateful for the reminder of how precious the remarkable un remarkableness of all of this living is.

I wish you a season and year of the same. Happy New Year friends.

I hope you'll take these words and go forward.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 15:10:00 +0000

I’ve been spending some time going through what is now nearly a decade of blog posts. That seems utterly unbelievable and yet for the bulk of my time as a parent, I’ve been writing it down. In those early years, I wrote about different things and I wrote differently because I was different then. It has been absolutely lovely to travel back in time through my own words, and revisit who I was, and who we were as a family, over the years. When I started all of this, I’m not sure what I expected. At first, I thought what I wanted from this blog was a chance to pour my own heart out, but what I found was community. Other people came, and left comments, and shared their own experiences as mothers and parents and oh, how that filled me up, especially when I felt unsure, or alone. I was writing in those early days for me, but I realize now what a gift this space will be for them some day. It will be my gift to my children. As someone who has parented almost exclusively without my mother and often without my parents, the central question that has haunted me throughout the years that I could never ask her was, did it feel like this for you? Now, when my own children transverse these sacred parenting waters, whether I’m with them in body or spirit, whether I remember or not, I know they will have at least some of the answers to these questions. I’m deeply comforted by this.

I came across an old post that I’d written six years ago on the occasion of Dylan’s eighth birthday, where I stopped to write down some reflections about who he was then. It is an absolute gift, a perfect time capsule for me and for him someday. Unbelievably, Hope will be turning eight in just a few short months. Many of those early posts are about our moments together as mother and baby. But now, on the remarkably inauspicious occasion of being just three months shy of her eighth birthday, I need to jot down these reflections of who she is right now because it is the most wonderful moment. My father teaches me every day that moments slip away from you. None of us get to hold them any longer than another. So I’m writing it down. As I sit snuggled inside on this chilly fall day, it is my hail mary attempt at something that even closely resembles permanence.

The thing I say the most about you, Hope, is that I named you well. You are in fact the perfect embodiment of Hope. You are almost always filled with so much energy and enthusiasm for almost everything. To just be in your orbit and watch you spin, quite literally fills me with Hope. You love Gravity Falls and have watched every single episode multiple times, belly laughing through each episode in a way that is both endearing and contagious. You love Mabel and I feel like if a television character existed in real life you would be friends and have matching rainbow sweaters and security guards made out of waffles. At recess, you love to play gaga and play with a competitiveness that is foreign to me. You are unafraid to play to win. In this way you are like Dad. I am glad of this. You love your kitty friends at school too, meowing your way through life (much to Ruby’s chagrin!). Your favorite pokemon is Skitty, and you love to meow like her and get your belly scratched like her. You call your bed cozy town, and you snuggle there with elly the elephant and her twin, love bunny, heart, avocado, donut, unicorn, ladybug, barkley and all your other cozy side characters.

You write original songs like a true artist and sing them with the heart of a pop star and angel. You sing till your heart will seemingly burst open with all of the emotions that these songs summon in you, tears streaming down your face. You are always so full of all of these different emotions all of the time. Sometimes the love just literally pours out of you. You are interested in space and science and potions, and tell me that fall is the best time of the year. I quite agree. You love to craft and draw and create. Every single inch of the walls in our house is covered in an original piece of artwork that has been scotch taped to the wall. These visceral markings of your childhood are one of my most favorite things. When you grow up, you can’t decide if you will be a chef or a swim instructor or a pop star or the owner of the XO. You are considering pursuing all the things. Your visions for owning and running the XO cafe as an all day tic tac toe themed breakfast establishment are remarkably descriptive at just 8 years old. Both Dad and I could truly see you working to make this a reality. You love video games and minecraft and Mario Kart. Toad is your spirit animal. You leave it all on the Rainbow Road.

You are so full of questions and simultaneously, random facts, that I can’t imagine how it is possible that so much information can ever swirl inside one body and how that one body can ever rest with so much going on inside of it. But amazingly you do, and at night I love to watch you sleep. You are truly a wonder and a gift. I feel so lucky that you chose me as your mother.

I have this unhealthy desire to hold you back because you are my last little one. Letting you grow up, as you should, means moving on from so many of the toys and cartoons and activities that marked our lives for the past ten years. But time just keeps advancing and running, it is the water through our fingers. We can never hold on to it no matter how hard we bear down. It’s best not to try. As I look at your brother, taller than me now, he is so much still that little boy from all those years ago but also becoming his own person as he should. I’m grateful to have written down who he was and to know him now. And so when you read this many years from now Hope, you too will stand at this strange intersection of who you were and who you are becoming, as we all always are. Here are at these crossroads, I hope you’ll take these words, and go forward.

It's not our job to do it all. So why does the Internet keep telling women it's ideal to try?

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 15:08:00 +0000

Join me over on Medium where I've written a post that reflects on ten years since Anne Marie Slaughter's original 2012 piece "Why Women Still Can't Have it All." Nearly a decade later, women are still thinking they need to do it all, mostly because the Internet wants us to believe it is our job to do so. I reflect on this toxic and antiquated narrative. I think the tones of this piece will resonate with your readership, highlighting how social media is holding us back from making progress in the modern mother's quest to be recognized for who she is, not what she does.

Dear Moms: thank you.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Sun, 09 May 2021 20:05:00 +0000

Mother’s Day, right from the very beginning, has always been complicated for me. Maybe it’s because my very first one was so upside down, so sad without my own mother, so beautiful and joyful to be a mother myself to my newborn son. But mostly it always feels complicated because as any mother will tell you, the business of mothering is a 24/7 job. We never stop caring or fighting or loving. It seems odd that we should celebrate something all encompassing only one day a year, and do so with such simplistic frivolity. More than that, we often honor Mothers specifically for what they do for others. I love my children more than my own life. But I bristle whenever I receive cards from them thanking me for what I do for them (which is a lot!) but mostly because it’s a reminder that I’m doing too much for them (which won’t help them down the stretch) and because it makes it seem like our connection and love for each other is tied to things that are actionable, which I would hope they would not be. But there appears to be no special holiday where we honor the unique space of loving others and separating it from what they do for others. I don’t know. I think I”m overthinking this, which is par for the course.

Anyhow, this past year was a lot. While I’m so grateful to science and vaccines and masks that are slowly allowing us to return to some semblance of normalcy, I would be lying if I said it’s been difficult for me to shift out of survivalist mode. Seemingly overnight, at least around here we shifted from a stay home message to a do all the things message and I’m a bit emotionally and physically taxed from that one. The right thing then was to lock us in. The right thing now is to let everyone go. I can make this transition without batting an eye, right? Mostly. Mothers will because that’s just what we do. Even when it’s hard and tricky for those we love we just keep plowing through.

I was talking to Ruby’s soccer coach this morning and he was telling me his general strategy for every game. Regardless of who shows up on the field with you, don’t think, just move forward, just keep pressing forward. The game never changes. Get the ball in the goal and play on. But today I can’t move forward without honoring who has been on the field with me this past year. The moms who showed up in my text messages to offer support, let me vent, celebrate long distance victories, the ones who I put on seventeen layers and a mask just for the chance to walk in the snow with them, have a cup of coffee from six feet away on their driveway, a quick call in the Covid testing line, a virtual happy or karaoke hour. To each of you, today and everyday I honor you not for what you do but for who you are. I love you not for what you do for your kids or even for me but in each and every way this year, in gestures big and small you have revealed your hearts and character: you are fierce, and kind, and salty and funny. You are non judgmental and relentlessly loving. And you are dedicating yourselves to raising more good people like that. Cheers.

Recently, I was talking to another friend who also lost her mother many years ago. She was musing about whether she looked like her Mother at this age. Of course there were some similarities, but mostly what I was reminded is that she like all of us, is most like her Mother in her absolute relentlessness. This is what we carry on from them. Just that: the ability to carry on. You never ever quit this year. Not on yourself or your kids or your job or your friends. I'm truly in awe of you. So to the most relentless, bad ass bunch of woman I know, Happy Mother's Day. And thank you for helping me through this year. I'm forever grateful to you.

And to the one who loved me relentlessly right from the start, cheers to you too.

Rachel Hollis' Instagram is The Bad Place

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 16:17:00 +0000

Women, mothers, pull up a chair.

I wish to have a word with you about Rachel Hollis, toxic positivity, and women as a commodity.

Do you know Rachel Hollis? She is a self proclaimed motivational speaker and life coach. She has nearly 2 million followers on Instagram, has published multiple NY Times bestsellers, and runs her own business, has a product line in Target, a clothing line on QVC, her own fitness app, and sells out large convention size stadiums where people pay $40 for a general ticket or up to $200 per person for a VIP pass that will give them things like “digital swag” (those two words together form a new one that has an unclear meaning to me), and video playback on all speakers. Rachel Hollis is a business and the thing that she is selling? Why that’s you.

It wasn’t always this way. As one of the few bloggers still kicking around that started out nearly nine years ago, many of us old folks can tell you how quickly the landscape of personal essays and blogging changed. At first, they were quaint and relatable. Many of the women I read were women and mothers just like me. Their lives were richer and more complex than the whitewashed stories of parenthood that many of us had been fed. We struggled, we poured our hearts out to each other. It was a legitimate community.

Rachel Hollis started out around then too. Her earliest Instagram posts looked this and honestly, I could relate:

Over time, she began to carve out a range of different online personas. She was a party planner, and a chef suddenly with a cookbook. Rachel Hollis was a food blogger until she wrote a series of fictional romance books. Suddenly her online self shifted again. She was about love and glitter. But it wasn’t until early 2015 when she posted a picture of herself on Instagram in a bikini, and talked about her stretch marks and their beauty and how grateful she was to them and to her stretched body. The post took on a life of its own. Rachel Hollis was everywhere talking about body shaming and women loving themselves and again she shifted, smartly so. What women wanted was to feel accepted. She had found the lightning in the bottle. This was where the money was. She could convince women and mothers that she was them, she understood their struggles to accept themselves and love themselves. But then also sell them something. She began to tell her growing followers that amidst all this self love, they were in fact made for more. The implicit statement in saying that someone is made for more, is that a) they are currently not enough, and that b) women must be made for something. That their mere existence as a thinking, loving sentient being was simply not enough. They must have an action plan, a to do list. They must live in a beast mode of constant progress and also constant joy. If they aren't succeeding, if they aren’t happy, it’s because they aren’t choosing it enough or working hard enough.

Can you just imagine mama bear, if someone actually said this crap to one of our kids? You would quite correctly rip them a new one. You would tell that person that our beloved children are fine exactly as they are. That we don’t love them because of what they accomplish or how hard they push themselves. We love them. Period. End of sentence. So why on God’s green earth are we letting someone talk to us this way?

But there isn’t much money to be made in the proposition of telling people that it is perfectly okay to not be an expert at something, to not have run that latest marathon or accomplished the cross fit class. We have to keep pushing. Always. Women are never allowed to rest. EVER. Because there are people out there like Rachel Hollis getting rich off the idea that she can whisper in our ear to get up, always. Keep choosing relentless happiness. If it all isn’t working, that’s on you. She hints and often states outright that as you are is exactly not enough. And then sells you something that she says will lead you to a place you will never ever reach. Because her brand is not about helping you achieve a goal. It is about making you feel constantly hollow so that you will seek out her and her products and her speakers and her books. If you give her enough money then you can find happiness. You need to do more. You need to hustle harder. The happiness and success is almost always there, but just not quite. We are almost always just not exactly where we need to be. It’s a toxic message, and deeply injurious to the emotional well being of women.

As a longtime not at all even remotely successful blogger, those who were there in 2012 and 2013 know who stayed true and know who changed to go where the money was. And I want to be clear and say that I don’t fault people for changing. None of us are who we were nine years ago. That’s the natural evolution of things. And I also don’t fault her for the “hustle” or evolving to go where the money was. We would never fault a man for that and I don’t fault her. But I do fault her for consistently selling the product and the general brand of women needing to do more and choose more. Because maybe you just worked an 18 hour shift at the hospital and you come home to dirty dishes or a crying baby, or your first grader who will be up in two hours and need to be homeschooled. Imagine that woman taking her first mental break of the day on Instagram only to be assaulted by the message that if she isn’t happy it’s because she just hasn’t worked hard enough. She whispers again and again to all of us, you haven’t achieved your dreams yet solely because you don’t want to. That’s on you.

Blech.

There are infinite reasons why you should stop giving this particular person and her brand and other self help people out there your money. Please, please stop buying these products. Stop lining her pockets with our own insecurities. We are enough. Regardless of what we look like, or achieve or do. But if all of that isn’t enough, there’s also this:

She supports fraudster and known harasser Tony Robbins.

She is a devout Tony Robbins disciple. Robbins is a professional huckster who is the world’s oldest traveling carnival barker. He’s been telling people for years that they are weak, and not enough. That they need his products to get back up on their feet. He’s also been accused of widespread sexual harassment and mistreatment of women. No one who aligns with this man is looking to empower women.

She steals content.

This one has been known for years. She regularly steals content for her social media feed. What is most pernicious about this particular theft is that she continues to often steal from lesser known bloggers without giving them credit for their work. She could lift them up. She could give them a boost. She doesn’t. Occasionally she steals more brazenly from people way out of her league. Here she steals from Glennon Doyle by changing Glennon’s famous “We can do hard things” quote to “You can do hard things.” It’s petty theft at its most petty.

She is a consistent cultural appropriation offender, and regularly denigrates the BIPOC population.

Last year, she got in hot water for putting “Still I rise,” on her Insta and attributing this quote to RACHEL HOLLIS and not Maya Angelou. This week, she made headlines for referring to her cleaning lady as “the woman who cleans toilets.” When commenters attempted to explain how insensitive and diminishing it was to describe her housekeeper that way and to work a bit harder to acknowledge her privilege, she doubled down saying she was privileged and it was because she works twice as hard as everyone else. Who else would work as hard as Rachel or get up at 4AM like Rachel? If that makes her unrelatable so be it. Relatable was never her goal (which is utterly hilarious because 2012 Rachel and 2015 Rachel would like a word). But when BIPOC commenters again tried to tell her how utterly tone deaf her post was her social media team began actively deleting their comments. She also compared herself to Oprah and Malala and Harriet Tubman as another unrelatable groundbreaking pioneer. This is a thing that actually happened.

She regularly throws her own team under the bus.

But when she gets in hot water for these posts, her go to line as it was during the Maya Angelou kerfuffle is to blame the women that work for her. They made the post, or they told her to take 4 days before responding to the comments of women so hurt by her words. It really wasn’t Rachel’s fault anyhow. It was their fault. She lacks all accountability while she builds a veritable empire on the backs of women by telling them that they aren’t accountable enough.

This last social media debacle to be honest is the most refreshing because for once Hollis tells us exactly what she thinks of women. They can’t relate to her because they don’t put in the time she does. They can’t relate because they don’t know her level of success and they will never work hard enough to experience it. I expect when it comes to understanding what it means to do hard work, the woman who cleans Rachel’s toilets would like a word.

Anyhow, just look at this stuff she is filling up our minds and timelines with. Look at it? Don’t you see what she is selling? She is selling you some fictional version of a woman who will never ever get off that treadmill. The person, the dream, the body, the life she wants will forever be out of reach. And if and when it all remains just out of reach, she will have no one to blame but herself. And if she feels sad about that or about anything else, this too is her fault. She just didn’t choose happiness hard enough.

So please, please unfollow this woman. Stop buying her stuff. Tell your friends. When you do, you will send a message to the publishing houses, Target, and QVC and the wannabe hucksters lurking to get in on this grift, that women and their hearts are precious and wild exactly as they are. And they most certainly are not for sale.

It's Not a Pandemic Wall.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 19:52:00 +0000

I’ve been inching closer to the anniversary of the date when I knew it was all changing with an increasing sense of dread. That day, in my mind, was March 9th. I was playing soccer with the girls in the field outside my son’s school while he attended basketball tryouts inside. Just then the email came through from my father’s Assisted Living community saying they were closing their doors indefinitely because of COVID. There would be no more visits, no hugs, and no idea what comes next. I looked at the girls joyfully playing in the last light of the day and snapped a picture of the evening sky. I wanted to remember what it looked like when I knew their entire world was about to change.

I’ve read lots of pieces recently about the pandemic wall that many of us are feeling one year in to quarantine but to be candid, that isn’t quite what I’ve been feeling lately. Until I read these words on Claire Bidwell Smith’s instagram the other night: “This month marks nearly everyone’s anniversary of some kind of loss.” It’s this exactly. Bidwell Smith is an expert on grief, and of course here she accurately describes that what I’m struggling with right now is something I’ve felt before. This isn’t some sort of race I’m running where I feel tired in the middle or towards the end. I’m in mourning. I feel grief and loss.

Whatever your life was in March of 2020, it’s different, you are different and none of it is coming back exactly as it was. I’m saying this to you now maybe not because you need to hear it but because I need to say it. That’s part of my process of making space for this new grief in my life. I need you to understand that people who mourn and grieve are not permanently sad. It isn’t like that. It’s just that we learn to carry it with us. There is a before, but not an after. Just a during. There will be no after COVID. There will be just be who were were before we had to give our young children a crash course in mortality before first grade, and wear three masks to buy bread, or hold onto the cold glass of a window pane just for the chance that maybe the person on the other side of it would feel your warmth and love through osmosis or magic or sheer will. There is no end point to those experiences. That is just our world now. We are forever changed for it.

I know a lot of us have been binge watching television during quarantine, turning to Netflix and Hulu as weeks turned into months. Maybe WandaVision or The Crown was your guilty pandemic viewing pleasure. But mine? Mine was Little House on the Prairie. I have been watching Ma and Pa Ingalls for exactly 12 months. I have yet to see the same episode twice.

Little House is one of those television phenomena that appears to have been on the air for 700 years. There are endless original episodes and TV specials and equally fascinating, I promise you that you can turn on your basic cable package at almost any time of any day and find at least one episode airing at that time. In the beginning I felt a kinship with the Ingalls because for the most part, they were on their own. When it was good, when it was bad, they mostly just had each other. That felt relatable. And of course there is so much sadness and drama in Walnut Grove. And as the months of the pandemic dragged on, it was the way they just kept going through all of it that felt oddly comforting. My middle child kept asking me, why do you keep watching this show where everything is so sad and tragic? And my response was always the same. They endure it! That’s not tragic at all! They endure!

Eleven months into doing very little else other than ordering groceries online, and watching Little House, I felt confident I’d seen most episodes until one aired that I’d never seen, and it floored me. The town of Walnut Grove discovers that their land and all of their homes and businesses actually belong to some wealthy outsider. All of their years of enduring were for nothing. All of it belonged to him. I assumed they would band together as a town and shoulder this latest painful pitfall, figure it out and keep going. In this episode the people of Walnut Grove do not bear this latest burden. The loss of their beloved town is too much to bear. Their collective grief changes them, and how they respond. They spread dynamite all over the town and blow the whole place to bits. They burn every last piece of it down. I’d never felt more connected to my television brethren. In the beginning you make the best of it. And in the middle you endure. And wherever I am now? It doesn’t seem to be the end, maybe the second late middle of the pandemic, but not the end. I just want to blow up whoever I was and start again. Maybe I already have.

I am a different daughter. There is a fierceness to my love. I fight for him with this guttural instinct that I didn’t even know was there, even when he doesn’t know that I’m there, or that he’s worth fighting for. I have an appreciation for our relationship. There is nothing transactional about it. I get memories, and just the chance, maybe, to be with him once in a great while. I actually don’t know what he gets from it. I’m comfortable with that. The point of fathers and daughters is a tethering and loving without purpose. You are bound up in each other and COVID and time and disease can’t break it. I feel this in my bones. I spend more time relishing the chance to hold his hand and look into his eyes. I started my 40s worrying about how to fix it all, but I am different now.

I’m not the same friend. I show up in my friends text messages and use my iPhone like a catholic confessional. I pour out my deepest darkest secrets to them in text form. I try to imagine if I would actually say any of this to their faces. Maybe I would, but I haven’t had to really wonder that for nearly a year now. So I just reflect my deep gratitude for the virtual space to confess. I show my gratitude by sending virtual “hugs” even though I have no clue what that means. A hug is arms and bodies entangled and close and hot breath and a commitment to each other’s personal space. Nothing virtual can mimic that. I offer to pick up things for them at Target. Sometimes I park myself in their driveways, hoping for a brief masked catch up. People who listen and people who understand, people who you want to commit to hugging must never be forsaken. I’ve come out of this feeling like I’m pretty sure I would die for my friends.

I’m a different mother and not necessarily a better one. Last March I was all about putting my best foot forward, and putting a creative spin on this! But now we just play roblox for seventeen hours a day and I’m brutally honest with them that sometimes it’s not always alright. The point is to know that life and death are two sides of the same coin. I remind them that they are built to survive hard things and do not need your mother or father to keep going. That they are forged in steel now. Whatever happens to the rest of us, they will go on. I have no idea if this is the correct thing to tell objectively still young children, but a consequence of my journey through my pandemic portal is that I appear to be fundamentally unable to lie to them anymore. They’ve lost a whole year of their childhoods and they won’t be getting it back. At a minimum, they should be rewarded with the truth for that.

What kind of wife am I now? I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask my husband. I know I’m not who I was a year ago and certainly not who he married 15 years ago. I’ve got rougher edges and a sharper tongue and quite a few more pounds. I like to believe that he’s still here because he wants to find out. And that a good marriage has enough elasticity to weather change and hard times. Our marriage is different. We crave our time apart from each other mostly because we’ve so much time together, although not really “together.” We are almost never apart from our kids and haven’t been on a date in six months. For our fifteenth anniversary, I expect we will be relearning and rebuilding and that’s not such a bad thing. No one and nothing stays as it was. But I can still say he’s the best man I know, and that there’s no one I would rather walk through a once in a century pandemic with. And that I look forward to seeing who we’ve become together.

Your timeline will be flooded this week with lots of looks back at who and where and what we were exactly one year ago, and I promise you, that will sting. Give yourself some space to mourn who you were, who we all were. I know that we will laugh and smile and love again. And that though we can’t conceptualize how, some semblance of a life will take shape around us that looks nothing like what it used to, but will be some sort of beautiful new normal. This new landscape will be reshaped in part by us and our collective grief. The grief changes who you fundamentally are, and you in turn change to adapt to it. You make space for it, in your very DNA. You are different now. We all are.

We aren’t at some sort of pandemic wall. We are crawling perhaps through the other side of the portal. If you don’t recognize yourself on the other side, forgive yourself the right to feel a little time to be sad about that. Pick up that sadness, figure out how you want to carry it, and adapt to it, reflect on how it will and has changed you. That’s what life is not after COVID but during. We don’t move beyond it. We grow and change to shoulder it.

Gen X Is Not Okay.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 02:59:00 +0000

You really ought to check on your Gen X friends.

It is difficult to articulate what this middle is like right now for us. We are caring for the parents above us, watching this pandemic ravage their mental health as they stay isolated inside, but simultaneously worried that if we try to hug them or comfort them or encourage them to leave they will catch a deadly disease. At the same time we are trying to shepherd our kids through this thing too, somehow ensuring that they don't grow up to be permanently scarred and weird because all they know are screens and adult conversations and that is not a childhood. We are doing all of this while we hold the line on businesses and jobs and careers. We are twenty years in. We are the ones with enough institutional knowledge to keep the office or that business afloat right now. We are 15 years into a marriage and at best, two away from needing a new roof. We are holding ALL of it up.

But watching everything unfold yesterday just about nearly broke us. Throughout all of our adult lives we have been handed so much horse crap, like the Bush v. Gore decision, or even the Iraq war, and each time we were told to trust the system, to respect the rules. Pay your student loans. Show up for work on time. So to watch a bunch of boomers and millennials in cosplay light that on fire from our remote desks while we homeschool our kids, make dinner, and do a socially distant welfare check on mom and dad, was just maybe too much to bear. There is a great line in the movie Singles: “Somewhere around 25, bizarre becomes immature.” Like are you kidding me with this? Did this asshole really just break into the capital dressed like a fucking red white and blue elk and get away with it? I can’t. Where are the consequences? Where? Honestly Generation X has no time or patience to find out.

All this is to say, we won’t ask for it. Well, I guess I am. We’re trying to hold the line here as best we can on literally everyone and everything. But the one thing we are known for is being both completely judgmental of while simultaneously swallowing down everyone else’s crap and right now we don’t even have the time or strength to even reflect ironically on how fucking crappy all of you all are. Can you just keep democracy running? Would that maybe be too much to ask of the rest of you right now?

Anyhow maybe just check on us okay.

Parents of 2020: Take a Bow

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 21:35:00 +0000

I wanted to write a special note to the parents out there and just let you know that you did such an awesome job this year. This was the year where we couldn't hide from our kids who we really are anymore, or what we really feel. 2020 was a brutal reminder to parents everywhere, that one of our core responsibilities to our children, is to live and feel and experience this world in a way that is authentic. To model for them what it means to feel happy and sad and angry and hungry and weak and overwhelmed. You did such a fantastic job this year, modeling and giving them permission to be a feeling person in this world.

Parents of 2020: take a bow.

What a phenomenal job you did trying and failing miserably to homeschool them. It was genuinely awesome the way you lost your temper again and again, and had to figure out how to constantly keep composing yourself. What a great job you did showing them that all teachers are special, magical creatures akin to unicorns.

I love the way you started having a glass of wine at night, and then two at night. And then one at 4pm and another at 6pm and then realized if you drank that much every night you would have to go to bed at 7pm. It was truly awesome the way they showed them how to learn, adjust, recalibrate, and self moderate.

You did such an awesome job of teaching them how important it is to stay in touch with friends and family always, no matter the reason and distance. You taught them that when everything else falls away, they are always all that matters.

You taught them critical life skills, like how to use a twistie or unclog a toilet. You didn’t slouch on new skills either. You gave your first men’s haircut and did a horrendous job. That was so awesome how you tried something new and sucked at it, and taught them the importance of solid self confidence, a good hat, and an even better barber.

I absolutely love the way you cancelled all of their birthday parties and celebrations and taught them to focus on finding joy in their accomplishments and small gestures of kindness rather than dwell on what didn’t happen.

You were also so completely great about dwelling on the stuff that didn’t happen and giving yourself and them time and space to openly pout and be sad about that. That was terrific, the way you showed them it was okay to mourn what wasn’t.

I love that you showed them what came next. I love the way you persevered, even when you didn’t know what challenges each new day would bring. I love how you showed them that your job was to rise each day, even if you were in yesterday’s clothes and three days without a shower, no less equal to the task.

Except on the days you didn’t! I love how you showed them that sometimes, fighting a new day might just as well mean sleeping in and taking a bath and watching netflix till your eyeballs fall out. Sometimes you rise to the fight. Sometimes you sit it out for a day. You save up your strength. That’s okay too. It was great how you didn’t get out of bed for that week in April. Seriously, that was pretty special.

This year you showed them gray hairs! So many gray hairs! I loved that you left them gray, or didn’t leave them gray, and reminded them that being a woman in the world is about learning to choose what makes you feel beautiful and happy, not letting others define that for you. That was so awesome how you did that.

I absolutely love the way you hid in the closet or the bathroom, seeking any refuge you could away from them. That was seriously so smart. I love how you prioritize your own care and needs. That was wonderful for them to see (or not!)

I love how you walked with them and without them and with your friends and your partner and your thoughts or just the birds. I love the way you walked for miles and miles these past few months, forcing air into your body and reminding yourself and them to breathe and take these days one step at a time. How simple yet deceptively smart.

I love the way you showed them both how to work out really hard and that you don't need a fancy gym to do that, but also how to really enjoy tasty food too. Ice cream is a food group and this is a hill I will die on. I like the way you showed them that too.

I love the way you fought for what you believed in, teaching them all sorts of words that they shouldn't know yet. It’s great that they will think it is normal to yell obscenities at cable news. How wonderful to teach them to be passionate and engaged in the stories of the day!

So I just wanted to say great job for losing your temper, or crying at breakfast. The way that you flipped off that person at the stoplight, that was pretty awesome too. I liked the way you laughed, cried, swore and just generally unraveled in front of them, sometimes all at the same time - impressive! It's awesome the way you are modeling and giving them permission to be a feeling person in this world.

Parents, you seriously crushed it this year.

Onward.

Dear DoorDash Doppelgänger

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 14:07:00 +0000

I know that other people developed hobbies and stuff during quarantine, but I spent my time doing extremely important things like conjuring up a fake relationship with someone who accidentally used my email to order DoorDash. Please enjoy this 1,800 word description of this alternate reality. Also, if you know Jenn in California, tell her I say hi.

Never Underestimate the Mothers

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 17:23:00 +0000

I remember the very first moment I knew I was pregnant. I hadn’t taken a single test yet undeniably, this was a thing that I knew. I felt different in a way I had never felt before, in a way I couldn’t even articulate. My husband didn’t believe me and of course who could blame him? I was being silly. Why did I think I was pregnant? Because I had slept a little later that morning, or had devoured that cheeseburger at the airport? Maybe. But I was different. I was changed. And six different home pregnancy tests later he believed me. Indeed, I was. We were expecting our son.

The thing is that women always know. We know our bodies, we know our children before we even know them, we know when people are trying to lie to us, or intimidate us, or control us. We know what it feels like in our gut when someone comes for one of our children, that feeling when our minds go blank and all we can think of is the feeling of hot rage and mixed with the cool steady calm that guides us toward that child. Nothing - nothing will harm them. Not mine. Not yours. We will keep them safe. From that very first day that we all knew we were about to become mothers none of us were the same. And it’s funny how we never even talk about that. But how I also know I would literally die for any of your kids. And how I know you would for mine. That’s the thing about mothers. We calmly do our jobs and pack lunches and wear our masks. We’ve got our heads down and we are just trying to get all of us through this thing. But the thing is. We know.

We know what you have done. You have messed with our kids.

We, who stayed up and watched you sleep that night when you had a fever. Who pumped breast milk every hour till our nipples were raw. Who made your baby food from scratch. Who stopped eating seventeen different foods to see which ones you were allergic to. We are the ones who are learning the new math, and driving you to that soccer tournament six hours away. We will draw your bath when your heart is broken and we have nothing else to say, and who hold our breath when you do your job and leave us like you are supposed to. We, who research every damn video game you ever play, who worry about who you spend your time with and worry if we are enough, we, who haven’t slept in months….

Did you know this? Did you know that the mothers don’t sleep anymore? None of us. Not one of us. We don’t close our eyes anymore. We can’t. We can’t bear to because when we do we see the faces of our children and of all the children and know deeply that all of the moments we spent telling them to follow the rules, care for others, to not bully or shame others, that all of that every day is just tossed on fire at public rallies where the President tells them that Covid doesn’t exist, doctors aren’t heroes but are thieves collecting money from Covid patients, masks are for pussies, running busses off of roads is good, beating up people is good, making fun of people is good.

Our children’s lives have been stolen from them. And it fills us with a hot rage because everything we have ever done since the moment we met them has been about protecting them and teaching them right from wrong and he’s stolen it from us. And now the mothers know what we must do.

We must vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Not because we are all Democrats. We are not. But because we are all mothers who cannot lie awake wondering how we spent so much time pondering things like Fortnite and non organic Cheerios and tackle football only to have a pandemic coupled with a President and First Lady who have literally said they do not care, that what is not happening isn’t real, and that your reality does not exist, and even if it does fuck you.

I read once some sort of urban myth about a car that overturned on a woman’s children, and that the woman, filled with adrenaline and a mother’s love, flipped over the car and rescued the children herself. And it is the image that runs through my mind most often now.

There is only one path out of this thing if the mothers will ever be able to go to sleep again. Please vote for Joe Biden. Please crawl through broken glass to do this. We have always known we would do anything possible for them, before we even knew them. We must be calm and steady, but guided by the hot rage and adrenaline, that fire we first felt inside of us when we knew we were different because of them, and that tells us they are in trouble and we must protect them.

This year has taught me how much I don’t know yet also crystalized those few tiny kernels of truth which I will take with me to the grave and this one I know with certainty.

Never, never underestimate the mothers.

Ring the bells that still can ring.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 19:18:00 +0000

As I approach my 43rd year, I have to be honest and tell you that I’ve been struggling lately. That for most of my peers - those parents that in every way possible are in the trenches right now, it is genuinely hard. In the spring, I felt like I could get through this thing. And maybe in the summer too. But as I watch all of us scrape the very bottom of whatever we’ve got left in us to parent and teach and work and just generally survive but also put on some sort of moderately positive face for our children and parents, well honestly that’s been hard lately.

One of my all time favorite quotes is from Leonard Cohen's 1992 song, Anthem. In it, he describes:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

As I close out 42 and look ahead to 43, it's requiring me to dig deep this year, to ring the bells I still can ring. And looking back over the past year, it seems indeed there was so very much to celebrate.

The kids made me a cake.

And we played with parachutes for no particular reason at all.

There were hayrides and I forgot that in the middle of all the chaos we sat next to each other and that more than I realize it, he's always right by my side.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with solo cups, excessive pie, and the most epic round of Headbands ever played.

There were hugs. So very many hugs.

It was Hanukkah and as the days grew shorter, we filled the evenings with so much light.

We went to the lake in the morning on the weekends even when it was cold, because fresh air and water make everything better.

We held a Special Persons Dance for the Girl Scouts. In hindsight, I'm grateful that we didn't realize how precious and fleeting it would be soon after for the rare opportunity to just gather together, and be silly.

This was the night I realized everything was changing. That's why I took this picture. I wanted to remember where I was when I realized that. But I should have taken it because it was a beautiful evening sky that night.

We started regular lessons with the kids grandmother over FaceTime during homeschool. These lessons would cover everything and anything from royal tea etiquette to the Mayan culture to tallest buildings. Occasionally, costumes were involved. It reminded me how utterly precious and special and amazing grandmothers can be and also teachers and how damn lucky we are to have a grandmother that used to be a teacher.

We had a zoom birthday for Phil. Friends sang to him and though everyone was far away it felt strangely nice to be altogether!

We started faithfully reading Harry Potter to the youngest. I know lately it seems like J.K. Rowling has lost her mind along with the rest of 2020, but these books are fanciful and wonderful and it's been an absolute gift to see each one of my children find such delight in these stories.

Going to school started to mean this. That was weird.

Friends and neighbors spontaneously left us notes in our driveway and hearts in our yard. We felt loved.

We finally taught the last one in our family to ride a bike.

With 5 people eating three meals a day at home we also broke all of our regular glasses and started drinking water out of champagne flutes. YOLO.

It snowed on May 9th. I was worried that the buds just beginning to pop out for Spring wouldn't be able to withstand the cold and weight of the snow but they did and that was a wonderful surprise.

Summer finally arrived, and when it did we picked nine pounds of strawberries and ate them all unapologetically. They were delicious.

After 105 days of missing him terribly, I got to spend Father's Day with Dad.

We went to the beach with friends that are like family. I never wanted to leave. Also, we ate all of the lobster in the state of Connecticut. We were equally unapologetic about this fact as well.

We thanked God for the gorgeous weekly bounty that is the summer CSA at Sub Edge Farm. In a year where there seems to be few things that you can consistently count on, showing up week after week and getting my little red bin filled up with fresh vegetables seemed equal parts reassuring and miraculous.

We played basketball until we couldn't see the hoop anymore. When we bought this house one of Phil's most important criteria was the pitch of the driveway and whether or not we could put up a hoop. I applaud his ability to foresee we would one day spend literally all of our recreational time on this home court.

We went to a Bar Mitzvah in our backyard. It was one of the most beautiful services I've ever attended.

And we found rainbows in our front yard.

We went back to the beach and I got to spend time with my sisters there. Man do I feel lucky and grateful to have these two in my life.

I woke up early one morning to watch the sunrise. I know it might sound completely stupid and obvious but that's just an insanely awe inspiring situation that literally happens every single damn day and I have no idea why we are all not watching more sunrises.

We had ourselves an end of summer beginning of school year 80s party because in general, everything is better with costumes and 80s music. As you can imagine, it was amazing. We are considering making this a weekly ritual.

It's so interesting to look back on these moments, the way we so truly turned inward these past few months. Not that we were alone so much. Just the way we gave up so quickly all of the stuff that we thought made a life. It's not that I don't miss it. I do. I don't know. I guess it's complicated. Maybe that was the imperfect offering of this strangely brutal year.

The road we take to Sub Edge each week I like to call the road where anything seems possible. It is long and expansive and open with nothing but corn stalks on one side and pasture and sunflowers on the other. It is wide blue skies and possibility. Who knows what 43 will look like. Part of me is afraid to hope and wonder about what could be possible next year. Part of me says learn the lesson of 42.

Stay humble. Stay open.

There is a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in.

Parenting in a pandemic has taught me this: the grown ups aren’t coming and the point of everything is to fall apart.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 12:43:00 +0000

It is summer. The woman, mid-life, bathing suit at mid-calf, emotionally deadened enough to her bizarre current state of reality where she really feels nothing beyond the mid-point of her still beating heart, climbs slowly into the lake. The water is cool but not cold. It soothes her hot, pale skin and surrounds her fully. Here in this moment, there is not noise or Twitter or barking candidates, global pandemics and recessions and worries and constant planning. In this moment, held by nothing but the arms of the lake’s ripples and her own weightlessness, there is nothing but the glorious silence and stillness of the water.

As she comes up for air, the silence is punctuated by reality. The beach is full of wet sandy feet. The water is full of noisy children. Her own children tug on her suit and she scoops them up, big and small alike. She reminds them that no matter how big they get, they will always be her babies. Besides, in the water we are all weight less. We are not weighed down by our bodies or realities or secrets or the general trappings of life, here in the water.

She scans the lake, searching the water for a person or persons she knows to not be there. For her own mother’s arms to cradle her once more as she did in that very same lake years ago. There are many things that mark this season of her life, but the most singularly defining feature is the feeling of searching for grown ups that will know what to do. The searching and the longing never ceases. Though she knows they aren’t coming, and though she knows the person she is searching for is regretfully herself, she never stops looking for the adults to show up, to make it better, and most importantly tell her what to do. It is the thing we text ourselves at night when we lie awake. That we whisper to each other at the pool, in masks from 6 feet away.

When? When are the grown ups coming to help?

As a woman of a certain age, at a certain point in her life, this time frame of middling is often the perfect storm. I’m at an age where I need to really pay increasing attention to my own health. Yet my children are still young enough to really need me. And my father is just not well enough to also need me.

Everyone needs help. But no help comes. It is only just me.

I stare at the weathered picture of the family in the lake. My mother is holding me and I’m clutching her for safety in the water and she is there ,her arms fully encircling me. Somebody else, in that moment, is holding me up.

My God, what must that feel like when somebody else bears the weight of it all.

At night, I lie awake turning every choice over in my head until I push past the point when sleep is an option. Decisions about next year’s schooling, and about what is safe and what is fair and what to do. What if sleep never comes again. What if I just lie here indefinitely, waiting for answers and rest, fatigue and questions suffocating me at night.

There are many moments where I find myself missing my mother, but one of my most frequent longings is to speak to her as her equal. Not as her daughter, but as mother to mother. That we would pull up alongside each other, toes dug into the sand at the lake and I could ask her, is this what it’s supposed to feel like? Is it supposed to feel this hard?

I imagine she would say yes and no. That there were of course hard edges to our childhood that she worked to gloss over. That she was careful to shield me from her adult reality. That it is normal to feel like your identity is so misplaced you cannot find it and that perhaps more worrying, you lack the energy or desire to go looking. But there is a new layer to all of this in the era of COVID that I expect she would acknowledge is freshly difficult. The layer of life and death consequences that exists with almost every single decision we make about groceries and schools and vacations. That every single moment has an element of disaster preparedness to it, even the seemingly casual ones. Even the, let’s throw on our flip flops and head to the pool starts with, did you pack the masks and sanitizer and, how does the lot look? Does it look too crowded? Every moment is so packed with risk. Maybe it always was and we just didn’t know? Maybe the entire problem with our lives right now is all of the knowing. Ironically, I do not know.

I dig my toes into the sand by myself, watching the water carefully and rhythmically pull in and out before gently breaking against the shore. In the picture, the woman in the lake is playfully pointing at me to turn around and face forward, face the camera but I don’t comply. I’m stubbornly facing her. She is my forward. She is my future. I am their present.

She fulfilled her promise, a life as good or slightly better than hers for her children. But what’s the point of all this if we can’t at least build something as good if not better for them? That baby in the picture had it better than these masked children by the water. Am I to assume that the point of all of this is just the loving of them? It hardly seems like enough.

The water does what it is supposed to and and dutifully fills in the hole my youngest has just dug at the sand’s edge. In a world where I expect almost nothing from no one, the predictability of this lake’s gentle waves, are particularly endearing.

Maybe the whole point of it always was never to build anything but actually to learn to be okay watching it wash away and fall apart. Maybe that’s what the woman in the lake wants to tell me but never will. That the point of being their mother is not just about letting go. It is about the total erasing from the picture. That you should smell this salty air and kiss their sunscreened heads just above their masks and feel this water slip between your hand sanitized fingers because one day, you too will disappear from this lake. And none of this worrying will have mattered. And that is exactly how it should be.

This Mother's Day, Please Don't Fix It

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Sat, 02 May 2020 13:53:00 +0000

Come join me and the Today Parenting Team where I'm talking about my deepest wish for all of us moms this Mother's Day...

The Toxicity of the Quarantine Snake Oil Salesman

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Sat, 18 Apr 2020 23:09:00 +0000

Could we have a brief chat about something I've been seeing pop up all over my FB and Instagram feed?

Here is what I can say for sure about this time of life: nothing. I can say absolutely nothing for sure.The only thing I can say with certainty actually, is that absolutely nothing is certain right now. What will happen today or tomorrow, when schools will open, when I will be able to hug or visit you, when I feel predictably sad, or happy, or predictably anything at all with any kind of regularity. The one gift I’ve given myself these last few weeks, and the one gift I’ve given my children without apology, is that whatever they are feeling or needing to do right now, whatever they think they need, is exactly right.

I’d like to talk to you about the real snake oil salesman of quarantine. I’m not talking about the odd sort of COVID truthers who think this is all a hoax or something of that ilk, but more about the folks who have some very specific messages about what you should be doing or feeling right now. They have lots of platitudes about how crisis reveals who you really are, and that you are the sum total of this moment. That somehow your quarantine habits define you. They reflect your worth and the quality of your life experience. They whisper in your ear that you are doing it wrong. This is your time to change your habits, your life, start investing in yourself. To radiate positivity and joy.

There has always been something particularly pernicious about these self-help folks and the way they seem to prey upon women In particular. They claim that they love you as you are. That they are against the media's ideal of how a woman should be in the world. That you don't need to look, or act, or parent in any particular way. But at the same time, they feed you very specific glossy images about the way a woman is supposed to feel all the time. You do you. Except you should always be happy. Or bettering yourself. It is the very specific girl on girl nature of this crime. Men should yell or shout or own the space or whatever. Women need to get better at literally anything. Marriage. Motherhood. Your goddamn morning smoothie. Quarantine. Women it would seem you aren't even doing quarantine right. So here is what you should be feeling or doing right now. It's a goddamn crime I tell you.

I’m not anti healthy habits. I’m not against being happy. But I am against someone telling me that right now, I need to invest myself in feeling anything specific at all. Today I woke up and wanted to clean. Last night I was anxious. Tomorrow the sun will be out. Maybe I will be happy. Maybe I won’t.

But the idea that I have some sort of control or responsibility or need to invest in some sort of living your best life plan right now is really getting under my skin. Anyone who is posting anything on the Internet right now telling you that this moment is about anything other than allowing yourself to feel whatever the hell it is that you are feeling right now is, I maintain rather strongly, a) being dishonest about their own individual daily life choices, and b) trying to sell you something.

Maybe you had a glass of wine with dinner. Or maybe you need to give up alcohol right now. Maybe you are working out ten hours a day or you haven’t exercised in ten days. Maybe you need to text and call and Zoom until your WIFI gives out in despair. Maybe you need to go dark for a while. Maybe you are all of those things depending on the day of the week. That’s not the point.

I just wanted to let you know that if in your travels among the wilds of the Internets you come across someone like this, someone who thinks right now is the time to be or feel or buy or look or do any particular thing, I would actually like you to do something for me.Block that person. Unfollow them. Hide them.

The only thing self care ever really means is listening to yourself. The rest is garbage. And whatever you need or are doing right now to get through this insane situation, is exactly right.

As you were. Go on with your bad self.

Goodbye to the house that used to be a home.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 03:01:00 +0000

There is an odd sort of emotional exhaustion to quarantine. Though we go nowhere, I find myself doing a lot each day and so at night I’m the kind of tired when I just sort of fall into bed and sleep overwhelms me. There is no gentle drifting. I am just awake and then asleep and then awake again. It’s a very jarring, sort of matter of fact process. And in between occasionally I will stop and really notice certain things if for no other reason than during this very busy and very not busy time, it seems to be a season that has afforded me more time for all the noticing. The laundry in my neighbor’s yard blowing in the breeze. An actual woodpecker in my tree this morning. The way that my grapefruit smells after I first cut it open.

Have you ever cut a grapefruit for someone? Has someone ever taken the time to cut you a grapefruit? It’s actually an extremely precise and painstaking process where you have to make sure you go in between and on the side of every single piece of white fleshy fruit that tethers the juicy goodness to the skin. Whenever I would wake up in my parents house in Florida, I would almost always awake to a freshly cut grapefruit. My mother, being my mother of course, had a knife and spoon set designed exclusively for grapefruit cutting and eating because she was a person that always had things like grapefruit spoons and pickle forks. You could say a lot of things about her, but be damned if she wasn’t always going to use the right cutlery at the right times.

She would greet me in her striped bathrobe and we would eat grapefruit and look at the water behind the house that was truly the house of her dreams. My father would be in the background, puttering around as dads often do with paperwork or something in the garage, checking his camera or refining his tennis game. I can’t explain it but when you were there with them in that house, you were safe. It was one of those places in the world where when nothing made sense, you knew you could go and there would be my parents, playing the roles they had been destined to play their whole lives: steady, loving. Making plans for the day. Cutting grapefruits. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been longing for that place in my mind lately, the one where everything is steady and makes sense.

I remember a card my mother gave me long ago when Phil and I moved into our very first rental house together. “Have fun making it your own,” she wrote.

Oh, indeed she did.

It was at that house that my mother opened the door for the very first time to meet the man who would one day be my husband. In that living room, she held my son in her arms for the last time before she died. It was there that my father took my children fishing and swimming. It was in that bedroom that I watched home movies with both of them. It was where I would sit on the patio at night long after she was gone, listening to the dishwasher whir as it washed my childrens’ baby bottles and flipping through her recipes, searching for her in their crinkled pages and the Florida night sky. It was the spot where my father read my children the very same bedtime story he read to me as a child, with the same hilarious delivery eliciting a new generation of laughs. It was there that we prayed at the altar of the sands and the waves, collecting shells with my mother, and making castles with my father. It was there where, even for a little while, that I got to see them live the life they had always wanted in the sunshine, by the water.

My mother would often remark that a house is just a bunch of walls but home is wherever your family is. This house used to be their home, but is now just memories and stuff. I was supposed to wake up in Florida this week with my sisters to pack everything up and say one last goodbye. But instead a bunch of moving men picked through what was left of their lives without us last week, boxing up family albums, dishes and golf clubs. There was no time for ceremony and sentiment. Everything went on the truck or on the curb. The movers arrived here in CT yesterday with the contents which will remain in storage for a while until we can sift through it. I can’t see very much inside the packed unit other than a car seat that was used to drive around vacationing grandchildren in what now seems like another lifetime, and their well loved beach chairs. I can’t really reach any of it and of what I can, it is of course now useless. An oddly fitting end to the house that used to be a home.

Phil is fond of telling me often whenever we are reluctantly preparing to leave some place - a wonderful vacation or time with family, an amazing restaurant or whatever it is - he loves to remind me that no matter what, we can always come back. As someone who has a hard time with change and goodbyes, I've welcomed his optimism. Maybe we won't. Maybe we'll never be back. But maybe, just maybe we will. And that tiny sliver of hope has made it possible for me to move on to new people and places and things. I'm not afraid to let go anymore because I let myself believe that somewhere deep down inside I just might not have to. But this time in the silence of quarantine and the quiet rhythm and comfort of lies we tell ourselves, this one is different. They don't live there anymore. And the person I was when they did is gone. Sometimes you come back. And sometimes you move on.

This season of life is of course filled with so much pain for so many and so in the scheme of things, saying goodbye or not getting to say goodbye to a house hardly ranks anywhere near the top of hard goodbyes right now. So I head downstairs in the home my husband and I have built together. I Facetime my Dad. I check the weekend weather to make sure it will be favorable for a visit to the cemetery. In the kitchen, I cut myself a grapefruit, carefully separating the fleshy inside from its leathery exterior. It is sweet and sour and juicy and tastes like sunshine. Though entirely worthwhile, I am struck by how the process of carefully pulling the whole thing apart can be such a delicate, and messy endeavor.

Notes From The Underground: Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 02:13:00 +0000

We’ve been home for two days now. It’s the weekend and so I guess so far life doesn’t seem that unusual. But tomorrow when it’s Monday I expect things will start to get real.

Ruby tells me that she believes God does everything for a reason. I am and have always been entirely unconvinced of this, but I sit with her long enough to see where she’s heading with this and she tells me she thinks this is God’s way of telling us to slow down. I’m not convinced God had any hand in this. But I can’t deny that perhaps this is an unintentional silver lining.

We did nothing this weekend. Although I suppose I did the kind of nothing that is actually more something than most of the nonsense I pretend is something on most weekends. I took nine separate walks this weekend. I used every single dish, cup and fork - twice. I FaceTimed 8 different people. I started a new book. I cooked all of our food. I played six games of Uno. There were no sports or hebrew school or Girl Scouts or visiting with family or restaurants. There was just….us.

Like most of us, I don’t know what comes next. But I do know that more than ever friends, we will need each other. So I’ll try to check in with you and maybe once in a while, you can reach out and leave a comment or a note and tell me how your heart is. At the very least, a global quarantine has a way of reminding you that pretty much our only job is to care for each other’s hearts, and walk each other home.

So in no particular order, here is what I’ve learned so far:

I will be seven hundred pounds by the end of quarantine. Today I ate some beef stew and washed it down with macaroni and cheese. We are existing on something called Mermaid cereal which is made up entirely of chemicals and I’m convinced is so unnatural and potentially toxic it may actually be useful in fighting the virus. I’ve sent a sample over to a local lab just in case.

I am closely and rapidly evolving into a puppy that must be walked several times a day. Each morning, afternoon, and night I feel this sense of urgency to go for a 15 minute walk to nowhere. I walk just to walk and notice things and breathe air. There are buds on the trees and it’s too early for that which is unnerving. But also there are buds on the trees. Spring will be here soon.

Call people often. Text, call, facetime - do all three. People are lonely and scared and want to know that someone else is also feeling all the things. Reach out to someone else every single day because caring about others makes the time go by faster.

Don’t think too far ahead. I literally can’t. I started to the other night and ended up watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey at 3AM just to calm myself down. Stay here now. Figure out right now, or the next hour. Or tomorrow. I wouldn’t attempt to figure out more than that.

Really great moments are worth everything now. Today I had an awesome game of Uno with my girls. It was that perfect time of day in the not so early and not so late afternoon, when the sun is streaming in, and the house feels warm but not hot and when everything feels bathed in good things. We were laughing at each other and it was wonderful.

Tomorrow is Day one of Mom School which is a threshold I swore I’d never cross. Historically almost any new mom that I meet, if she tells me that she homeschools her children I automatically know that I can’t be friends with her. Mostly because I find that these people are like delicate special unicorns that are just far better human beings than I will ever be. I know I can never be friends with these women because I am not worthy. Tomorrow, I have to make the world’s saddest attempt at this. There is a zero percent chance this doesn’t end in any other way than all of us extremely hating each other.

At least we have Mermaid cereal.

Anyhow, I’ll check in with you guys again soon. Because that’s what friends do.

Sending love and strength and the wisdom to not eat everything in your fridge before the next grocery delivery.

It's hard to be a parent in 2020.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 16:29:00 +0000

Come join me over at Medium where I'm talking about why it's hard to be a parent in 2020.

Six years of Hope

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 17:18:00 +0000

Six years ago, I wrote these words on my first weekend home together as a family of five:

“We brought Hope home with us on Saturday.”

Indeed.

It is true that Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of of central and eastern european descent) name for the deceased and Dylan and Ruby follow in that tradition. Dylan is named in honor of Phil’s Aunt Dora and Ruby for my mother Ronni. But Hope was to be my hat tip to her Sephardic (middle eastern) heritage. She is named for the living. We honored her great grandmother Helen and her grandfather Lewis and her grandmother Linda to come up with Hope Leigh.

Right from the start, Hope was a symbol of life.

I think I might have mentioned this before, but my c-section with her was one for the record books. It started routine, but turned into a nearly three hour ordeal, requiring a separate procedure to deal with old old scar tissue from my previous sections before they could even begin to unravel her from my body. A c section is a strange process on a good day. You are numb from the waist down. Your body is working overtime, but there is a giant sheet and a lot of heavy narcotics preventing you from being fully aware of just how hard you are working. And when it comes time to actually have the baby the doctor tells you will feel some tugging. Not pain. Just tugging. What a strange metaphor for parenthood it really is. The way you are kind of numb but so viscerally alive, the way you are so keenly aware that a part of you is being pulled ever so gently away from you. That this is exactly how it should be and so it is, right from the start.

I was watching videos of that day this morning and I forgot just how utterly wrecked physically I looked after those three hours. I’m holding her and she is calm and I’m calm. I’m of course heavily drugged in the video but so calm. None of it matters. We are here and holding each other. I’m grateful. It’s funny really how busy and chaotic life can be sometimes that we forget how easily, how essentially, all that we ever really have to do is hold each other up. Right from the beginning when I could barely pick my own head up off that gurney, there she was, holding me up. Reminding me that we chose her name for lots of reasons, but mostly because we wanted a living reminder every single day that so much of life is just the part where we dream and believe in the possibility of better days.

Hope is every emotion ever that you might have experienced happening all at the same time walking around existing at once in the body of a kindergartener. One of our most favorite things about her is the way she greets everything - I’m telling you EVERYTHING - with an unprecedented amount of enthusiasm. Hope we are going to the car wash! We are going to eat cake! We are going to watch Paw Patrol! You are going to inherit your sister’s old clothes! She is a constant reminder to live and try for no other reason than that’s what we’re doing here in the first place. What is life if not a constant fight to stay awake - alert to every single opportunity to love, to smile, to sing, to celebrate. In every way, she is the very human embodiment of Hope.

I bought her a card today that said that when I am with her it feels like being close to the sun and it does. This is how it felt on that freezing cold January morning when I finally held her close to me. She was light and warmth. We held each other as if it was our only job (and actually that really ever is our only job) and made me feel like it would all be alright.

So today you are six.

You love My Little Pony and pretending to be a popstar and telling corny jokes and guacamole.

To me, to everyone who knows you, you are an actual ball of walking sunshine.

What a gift it is to us to stand in your warmth.

Happy birthday Hopie.

2019

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 19:05:00 +0000

To be honest, nowadays I find myself writing less and less. Maybe it’s because the kids are getting older and it’s complicated. Or maybe it’s because I’m getting older, and it’s complicated. But there is something about the close of one year and the beginning of a new one that almost always compels me to say something, to have some sort of written reflection of my place in this world. Something that forces me to pause when every part of me, if only for self-preservation, just wants to keep plowing through the next few days. To keep getting on and getting through as all of us must and will do.

I want to write something to you about what this year has meant to me, to each of you - and the only word that I keep coming back to again and again is grief. 2019 for so very many people I know and love was a year of grief. I can’t tell you that’s all there was. Honestly of course there was more. Beautiful wonderful moments! But oh the sweet and utterly brutal grief of saying goodbye to who we were, or imagined we’d be.

The Rabbi tells me at Friday night services that we can’t move on to the next moment until we leave the one we’re in. And yet I’m not really sure how to leave you, 2019. Because as anyone who has ever loved and lost really knows, you don’t hold grief. It holds you. It chooses you. It chooses when it will find you and surprise you. It decides when to loosen the grip and not the other way around.

And yet, the calendar is forcing us forward. I don’t know that time heals all wounds. I know it certainly changes them anyway. And so my wish for you, for myself, for everyone I love in this season of change, is not necessarily a healed heart, but perhaps a quieted one. A reflective one. May we find the courage and wisdom to seek out spaces that support keeping our tender hearts safe while they heal. May we cultivate a community that is patient with us because moving on and moving forward are, in and of themselves, pretty painful and grief riddled processes.

May we celebrate every win big and small because we’ve learned over the past year there is always plenty of reasons to be sad. Savor that great cup of coffee. Hold on to that hug just a little bit longer. Laugh at every dumb dad joke. Eat the damn piece of cake. If you are wondering if you should tell that special person in your life that you love them, the answer always, is yes.

Take everything you can when you can and hold on for dear life. 2019 offered us nothing but the simple reminder that nothing is promised but that also, in every moment, there is promise.

I love you all a lot.

And I wish you a new year filled with peace.

Searching for Mom

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 23:33:00 +0000

Join me over at The Washington Post where I'm talking about navigating the new frontier of my children being old enough to Google me. Embracing my own digital footprint is an uncomfortable but necessary process. Sharing it with my son as he carves out his own digital future, is a moment of personal growth for both of us.

Family vacations are a lot of things but perfect isn't one of them.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Wed, 29 May 2019 20:21:00 +0000

We are fresh back from a few days away together as a family. I often think that if you could perfectly summarize what it is like to build and grow and love and live within a family, vacation is in and of itself the perfect encapsulation of all the things.

There are so many special moments together.

There are SO MANY MOMENTS TOGETHER.

We were fortunate to travel to an extremely lovely spot and I can’t underscore that enough. But it was so lovely that for the first time ever my husband and I experienced the very odd sensation of feeling that so many of our fellow travelers were nearly all the time Instagramming all the things. In fact my children and I stumbled upon an actual photo shoot as we wandered into the pool early one morning. The woman was wearing a bikini that was not particularly G rated and arching her back in the waterfall next to the tank where my kids were gawking at sea turtles and sharks. I felt like I was imposing on her photo shoot. I genuinely needed to remind myself that the point of the pool is the wetness and all the swimming and the playing. The point is not the picture. At least not for us right now.

There were plenty of folks on vacation with us who were clearly on a working trip. Working as influencers to sell fashion or experiences or a certain lifestyle and quite candidly there was something sort of out of body about the whole thing when you see someone actively trying to sell or capture a moment that you think you are actively living. You sort of feel like, is this really a beautiful day in a beautiful pool, or is this the Instagram version of that? People were hashtagging the hell out of this situation with #tranquility and #livingwithacapitalL and inspirational quotes and so much prettiness. Yet there was something about everyone trying, seemingly so hard, to capture how utterly indulgent and fabulous this moment was that made me question how truly fabulous everything actually was. After all, everything looked picture perfect. But what truly makes a family vacation great?

I have wonderful memories of my own family vacations from when I was kid. These reflections are peppered with pictures of the places we visited which never ventured into the overly exotic territory. They were usually run of the mill, family-friendly destinations that featured free breakfast in the hotel and a beach not too far away. What I remember most is the stories we crafted as a family, woven together mostly from accidental adventures we had on each of these trips. There was the time we hooked up the car wrong at the drive in movie on the Cape and had to hitch a ride back to the hotel in the tow truck. Or the time my father got locked in the bathroom in Montreal. Or that one beautiful blue morning when a bird pooped on my mother's head in New York City. In every way, I loved these moments because they featured a rare thing: my parents, briefly unencumbered by the trappings of regular life, free to give me and my sisters more of their attention than they normally could, and free to create new stories, and stay up late telling the old ones.

We've got plenty of pictures from those trips alright. Most of them are not unlike the trips themselves, not especially perfect or fancy. But always able to evoke a visceral feeling of the way the rental house smelled that summer on the Cape, the way the upholstery felt in the back of my father's Oldsmobile, the sound of his laugh, or my mother's smile. It wasn't all perfect and because my memories are of being the kid but reflecting on them now as the parent, I'm conscious of how much was probably going on behind the scenes that wore them out, the driving and packing and logistics and general adulting that doesn't disappear on a family vacation. But as a parent I'm equally conscious of how much it matters to give my own children that same experience. Not especially glossy memories. But more of my attention. And oh those stories.

That women in the bikini that day- I wish I saw the final product. I’m sure those pictures were amazing. We also took some photos in the same pool that day. Here they are.

We had to leave soon after. A kid that was not mine pooped in the water. As children will do. Even in extremely pretty places.

They had lots of yummy food and we indulged! In this picture we are enjoying some nachos and ice cream for lunch because vacation is for eating odd things at odd times. Also there appears to be some sort of unwritten rule in our family that one of us must close our eyes in every photograph.

We took a delightful boat ride to a nearby island. As we got on the boat the staff told me that the island was all cash though we had been staying on a cashless resort. We were nearly on the boat and not going to double back to the room for our wallets so we took three kids to an island with two packages of peanut butter crackers and one bottle of water. On the way back to the hotel no one spoke because we had effectively glued their mouths shut with peanut butter. My husband and I, though we regretted this temporary period of dehydration for the children, did enjoy this brief moment of silence. We also went snorkeling! We saw some fish! And Dylan found a $5 coupon and an empty pina colada cup in the ocean.

At night we all slept in one room which, as anyone who has ever travelled on vacation knows, means that no one sleeps at all. There were many people. There was no sleeping. We did have an impromptu 10PM dance party when a DJ started busting a move outside our balcony one night. Goodbye bedtime! No sleep till Brooklyn!

There was a beautiful view, and time with my people. Also there was so much time with my people. We were sweaty and unkempt. Sometimes we weren't!

We're home now. We've got some sunburns and an unhealthy yearning for bacon and chlorine 24 hours a day. We've got some shared gratitude about how nice personal space can be, and we've got some great stories about our late night dance parties, peanut butter sandwiches, basketball after dark, swim up bars, and lizards that bite. More than our pictures (with most of our eyes closed), I know that's what we'll take with us.

Are you planning a family vacation this summer? I can't wait to see your pictures! Or not! Share with me all of the beautiful stuff, or the not beautiful stuff. Our vacation was beautiful and hard and fun and long and short. It was all of the things except perfect. I hope your photos capture some or all of that. And if they don't, that's fine too. Don't worry so much about capturing it so much that you forget to get in it.

Go write yourself a story about your family, one vacation, and one ridiculously imperfect memory at a time.

#vacation #ispent96%ofmyvacationreapplyingsunscreen #myfiveyearoldsnores #sunsets #ihaveanextremelypainfulsunburnonthebackofmyarms #mypeoplearethebestpeople #alsopleasestopspeakingtome #getmehometomyownbed

What I Want You to Know About 1994

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Fri, 17 May 2019 14:09:00 +0000

For reasons still unclear to me, I stayed up way too late last night waxing overly philosophical about 1994. Inspired by that Gen X piece in the New York Times, I hope you'll give it a read.

Click here for time travel.

You are a walking miracle.

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Sun, 12 May 2019 13:50:00 +0000

This morning I was gifted with a rock, some seeds, and chocolate. Also this card which, both its words and the image completely leveled me. A circle, a wave.

My god look at what all of you have done. Isn’t it simply amazing?

The way you work, or the way you stay home with them, the way you rock them all night or sit by the phone waiting for them to call, the way you do it all on your own or are humble enough to ask for help, the way you cook them all that nutritious food and the way you lovingly work to pay for the takeout pizza, the way you bottle feed and breast feed them, the way you plan for every IEP meeting, and every college application, the way you hold their hands and hearts every damn day and promise them it will all work out when you are never really sure. The way you love them when it’s good and bad and everything in between. Just the way you love them.

I was super weepy this morning as I looked around the table at my family. I’m not even sure why but I guess like everything else I’ve found with this experience, I wasn’t really in charge of my own body. One day you wake up and your boobs drag on the ground and you pee when you cough and you cry when someone hands you a rock. It’s seriously wild stuff. And I reach into the pocket of my bathrobe and pull out a crumpled kleenex and I’m blowing my nose and crying because I love them and crying because I don’t seem to be able to control whether or not I get to cry, and crying because in that exact moment I became my mother. My mother who cried at everything. Who never left home without a wrinkled kleenex in one pocket. Moments and people leave us. Sometimes it all gets wiped away. But I’m telling you that Mothers, they never do. Always with you. Always.

Seriously every damn day never forget that you are all walking miracles.

Happy Mother’s Day guys.

Forever Young

noreply@blogger.com (JennM) — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 14:49:00 +0000

Your transition to the middle of parenting happens swiftly and silently like most other phases. You don’t remember when the baby starts sleeping through the night, or when they started talking in full sentences. Or when one day that stroller, the one you fretted so deeply about which one to buy - well one day cobwebs spring up around it in the garage where it lies, unused and untouched. You aren’t a mom pushing your babies in the stroller anymore. You’re not that mom anymore.

The thing about parenthood is that just when you gain your footing in whatever moment your kids are in, they change and so the whole experience sort of feels like you are perpetually bracing yourself, constantly searching for some sort of solid ground. There are these brief moments where the water seems foolishly calm and free of ripples. But even then you know that’s not how all of this works. The stillness is the exception. Parenthood is entirely about riding the waves.

Here now in the middle I’ve got tweens which is a new thing because tweens (and I’m guessing teens too) don’t talk to you that much. They are so full of all of this stuff, they are just brimming with near explosive emotion - anger, love, rage, curiosity - they are literally about to burst from all of it, and yet they just simmer, a device in their hand, and a parent who desperately wants to know more safely at arm’s length.

My best moments with my now nine and eleven year old happen at the most inconvenient and unexpected times and I don’t get to pick or plan them. Maybe suddenly they want to open up to me in the dark when I just want to say goodnight and walk away. Maybe that’s when they want to let me in. Or in the car right before they jump out. They reveal themselves and their hearts and their worries and questions in drips, puzzle pieces that I try to assemble in my mind as I lie awake worrying about them at night.

The thing about your children growing up is that you have to trust them. You have to trust them to navigate this utterly gut busting complex emotional minefield of lunch and middle school and social media and all of it. There are more moments that they are away from you then they are with you, and you have to hope that all of the stuff that you put into them during the first 11, 12, 16 years - is that still in there? Were they listening? Anyway this isn’t like tying their shoes. There is no hard and fast way to know if they really got it. If they internalized how much you love them, how much you need them to trust their instincts to guide them toward good and through difficult decisions. To remember that your love doesn’t get revoked when they make bad ones.

I guess that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. As we talk seemingly less, as more of our days become about meals and activities and homework and video games, I’ve been looking for some sort of proof that all of this stuff Phil and I have been whispering in their ears, some sort of evidence that they might have been listening. And one freezing December night, Ruby left me one such breadcrumb.

I’d bought us tickets to the symphony to see Leslie Odom Jr. perform. She’s obsessed with Hamilton and the thing is big kids don’t really want or need lots of toys anymore for their birthday or the holidays. And after all of the devices and the video games, what is there left to give? Experiences seem to matter more. The performance was dazzling for lots of reasons. He’s terrific of course, but even more so the chance to get one on one time with our middle child was particularly gratifying. When he finally came out for the encore I found myself staring not at him, but at my girl watching him.

May god bless you and keep you always…

It was the opening refrain from Forever Young. When my kids were little I bought an illustrated version of Bob Dylan’s song and I would read it to them almost every night, often serenading them in my terrible voice. They would roll their eyes and yell Mom, stop! Your voice is awful! And anyway it’s a mother’s job to serenade her children with her terrible voice and illicit infinite eye rolls and believe me, I did my job.

I haven’t read that book to them in years. Somewhere in the shuffle of life and changing bedrooms and adding a third, the book got lost and you wonder sometimes as moments get farther and farther away from your present, did any of it ever even happen, or matter, or count?

But I happened to be watching her that night as he started to sing and I actually saw her face light up. I saw that moment of recognition. She remembered all those nights where I whispered in her ear and sang with my terrible voice and prayed out loud to god and anyone that would listen, that she would stay forever young. And she turned to me and with tears brimming in her eyes and now mine fully running down my face, she exclaimed Mom, it’s the song! I know this! It’s the song you used to sing to us!

I’m telling you this because you don’t get many moments like this nowadays. In a world with them that is filled mostly with grunts that pass for hello and requests for video games and inhaled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and so much angst that we couldn’t possibly understand even though we do and even though we thought the same of our parents and even though they did, what I’m telling you is all of that stuff that you’ve been pouring into them from day 1 is still in there. Even when they don’t tell you or talk to you, even when you feel completely unsure of yourself and of them you can feel anchored by the fact that it’s in there. Your love, the way your arms felt around them when they were small, the way you tell them you are proud of them and sure of them even when you aren’t really sure of anything, least of all yourself. They hear you. Honestly I believe this and it comforts me. They are listening.

At the Oscars the other night, Regina King in her acceptance speech said, “I am an example of what it looks like when love and support is poured into someone.” Indeed the middle of parenting seems much less clear. There are far few markers and milestones than the beginning. But I guess my job is to keep pouring in the love, and to hope that even when they won’t acknowledge it, or you, they feel it. That even when none of us are sure what happens next, this will always be enough.

And that Bob Dylan song? I’m rereading it again this morning. I wonder perhaps if all those nights ago I wasn’t just reading it for them. I guess it was always about me too.

May your hands always be busy

May your feet always be swift

May you have a strong foundation

When the winds of changes shift

In these middle seas, I’m not looking for an anchor anymore. Anchors stay in one place. I’m looking to find contentment in the consistency of the tides.

And to stay afloat amidst all of it.