My oldest brother possesses a manic energy - he’s one of those people that can accomplish more in a day that most people do in a week. When he was younger, he used that boundless vitality onstage as an actor but nowadays he puts his fervor into his career, his family and, most recently - you guessed it - running.

At first, I was quite excited to hear my brother was running. Who doesn’t want a shared passion with someone they love and admire? He started with community 5k’s and his local running club and seemed to really enjoy his treks through the Minnesota winter getting to know his new neighborhood. For my 40th birthday, I asked him to run a race with me and he flew down for a rainy half-marathon. We chatted the entire way, taking water stops and pee breaks, without any thought to time or speed. When he reached out months later to ask me to run a full marathon - his first - with him on his home turf, I enthusiastically agreed. I hadn’t run a full marathon since before my children were born, but can’t one do anything with enough time and training?

My training season was plagued by illness and injury. I’ve had knee pain since an ill-fated long jump in a Crossfit class when I was pregnant with my daughter. I get periodic injections to relieve the symptoms but this time around, when I really needed the respite, it didn’t take. So I sat on the sidelines for six weeks waiting for ache to dull to no avail. Then a sinus infection, then a bout of stomach flu. My six months of training was halting and overall ineffective. By the time the race arrived, I hadn’t made it further than eight miles on a training run. He, on the other hand, was killing it. He made a pair of running spikes out of old trainers and some wood screws to brave the snow and ice, he joined a speed club and downloaded a training app. He sourced advice from seasoned runners and cross-trained in his basement. Basically he did was he always does - which is not quitting halfway.

My parents and I flew out together for the race. I hadn’t traveled alone with my mom and dad for nearly two decades and it was lovely. They bickered about turn signals and where to park, we laughed at our ineptitude at everything from sourcing a rental car to locating our terminal and generally had our usual fair amount of merriment. When we arrived in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, we picked up my sister-in-law and niece and headed east to meet my brother who had already arrived at the race site.

The race is huge - nearly 10,000 marathoners. The town is a modest college town, but the marathon weekend nearly doubles its population with all the runners, crew, volunteers and spectators. The restaurants and hotels were jam-packed so my brother and I roomed with a friend of his and his wife. Months of preparation and the anxiety of his first 26.2 mile race had my brother jittery. He tossed and turned and huffed and puffed all night, which meant, despite a double dose of sleep medicine, that I tossed and turned all night too. We both greeted the morning with grunts and dread.

It was also cold. I wasn’t anticipating cold. I had packed my marathon outfit with summer vibes in mind since, well, you know, it was JUNE. I had a tank top, running shorts and brand-new socks - in all neon of course - and I knew I was about to freeze my ass off waiting at the start line. I rummaged through my bag and found only one long sleeve item. My favorite cardigan.

This was a dilemma. I bought this cardigan from Target many years ago. It is the perfect shade of beige to go with damn near everything and it has been washed so many times as to be of ideal thickness for it’s primary use which is keeping me warm in the grocery store. It has lived in my car for as long as I’ve had it so that I am always prepared for the refrigerated section. I happened to grab it at the last second so I wouldn’t be overtaken by the concentrated blast of the airplane air conditioning, and now, here she sat as the only solace between me and what the midwest tries to pretend is a season separate from winter. I put her on.

The race is one long straightaway, beginning 26.2 miles from the center of town. Runners board busses and trains for the slog out to the start line and I sat with my brother in my fetching neon and beige combo. They dropped us off at the start line with an hour to spare. We went through the motions of jogging and stretching and taking sips of water. I tried to silently will my body into being capable of running nearly twenty miles further than it had been in years. I adjusted my new socks that suddenly felt very small. I encouraged my brother and his friend to run without me. I figured I could finish by sheer will alone, but I knew I couldn’t keep up with them. The National Anthem played, Eye of the Tiger began and we were off. I had to make a decision - do I carry my favorite cardigan for the next 5 hours or do I drop it at the donation box as I cross the start line? I did my best Marie Kondo goodbye and left her in a box with hundreds of much-more-appropriate-to-discard tops and felt an intense forboding.

The first five miles were great. I got cocky. Maybe I’m just a natural marathoner, maybe I don’t even have to train because I’m just THAT GOOD. Maybe I’ll catch up with my brother, maybe I’ll beat my brother! Without training! I won’t rub it in, I’ll be cool about it.

I notice a slight burning sensation around my ankle bones. Just a little raw.

Mile 6. Really raw, really really raw.

Mile 6.2. Something is very wrong with these socks.

Mile 6.5. These are definitely blisters. I will walk.

Mile 7. Walking doesn’t help, blisters are getting worse.

Mile 7.5. I will take off my shoes and adjust my socks. Nope, too late for sock adjustment. Time for sock adjustment was a while ago.

Mile 8. Med tent for band aids.

Ah sweet relief!

Relief is short-lived. Band-aids do not stick to sweaty feet.

Mile 9. Med tent for band aids.

I do my best to hobble along but I can’t focus on anything but the holes being bored into my skin from my shoes. My socks are useless and I hate them. I call my Dad.

“I don’t think I can finish.”

“I’ll pick you up. We’re at the halfway point. Traffic’s really bad.”

“I’ll get there as soon as I can - but leave if you need to. I can take an Uber.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

That’s my dad. I knew that timing was going to be funky because at this point I had to have been miles behind my brother if he was still running. I’d lost so much time from limping along on wounded feet. And I still had miles to go.

Those last three miles to the halfway point were brutal. Everything hurt at that point from my throbbing knee to my now-bloodied feet. I found my Dad in the crowd and burst into tears, from the pain and from the humiliation. They’d come all this way and I’d quit. I’d quit exactly halfway.

My dad filled me in on our situation. My brother had passed through a long time ago and they had missed him. The traffic was so bad with all the spectators trying to get to the same place along the same small stretch of road, that by the time they arrived, he had already gone through. My sister-in-law wanted to catch up with him, so my mom had left my dad there to wait for me and was driving them to the next spectator point. My Dad and I were on our own for the foreseeable future. Without food or water. He said he had seen a gas station out of the highway that we could wait at and maybe get a Coke. “And a Snickers?” I asked. “And a Snickers,” he said.

The gas station was nearly a mile away so we plodded along, me in bare feet at this point. We eyed it across the highway and it shimmered like an oasis in the desert. As we closed in, we both got a sinking feeling.

“It doesn’t look like there’s a store there,” I said.

“Maybe there’s a vending machine,” he said.

There was no vending machine. Or store. There were just unattended pumps and a piles of firewood stacked next to a sign with a QR Venmo code for a guy named Jake. We found a curb to sit on. We talked about the race. We talked about blister prevention. We talked about my decision to wear untested socks. A guy pulled up and asked us for directions. We didn’t have any but I looked them up on my phone and wrote them out turn by turn on the back of the directions he already had. A group of fishermen pulled up and asked about a restroom. We explained that the unmaintained porta-potty sitting in the dirt was their only option. Someone pumping gas tried to pay us for firewood in cash. We politely explained he’d need to Venmo Jake and we made a suggestion for the best bundle - we were experts on them by then. We took pictures next to the Sinclair dinosaur sculpture in the parking lot. My dad put his sunglasses on the dinosaur’s face. We waited for my mom for three hours. My dad didn’t complain once.

My brother and his friend both finished the race. They were exhausted. My brother kicked total ass and got a great time. I’m really happy for him - he’s turned out to be a way faster runner than me. We all limped the rest of the day.

I don’t think I have another marathon in me - I obviously didn’t have this one. But I’d do it all again - the sorry ass training, the flight out, the sleepless night, the envy/admiration of the people who finished, the quitting - for three hours uninterrupted with my Dad. Halfway wasn’t half-bad.

To my genuine surprise, Tammy got all kinds of defined when I decided to undergo a series of ketamine-assisted therapy (KAT) sessions this summer. As I have belabored on here, I have been dealing with depression for nearly two decades. I’ve tried a lot of different approaches to resolving symptoms - lifestyle changes, medication, talk therapy - but I haven’t been able to do much beyond muzzling it. When I read that ketamine (an anesthetic used in humans since the 1960’s) was FDA approved for treatment-resistant depression, I looked up “ketamine clinic near me” and Google directed me to a brand-new practice offering “psychedelic-assisted therapy” nearby. I immediately filled out the website form requesting a spot on their waitlist.

In talking to everyone that I’ve shared my experience with KAT, they seem shocked that I had zero hesitation is lab-mousing a newly approved treatment with a completely un-road-tested provider. The thing is, I’m not really much of an advice-taker. I tend to go with my gut and hope for the best. It’s not anyone’s favorite attribute of mine but it’s pretty baked in at this point. It took a few months to get in to see the counselor (KAT is quite popular), and another couple of weeks to get my medication delivered, but before I knew it, I was lying on a couch with a sickeningly sweet lozenge under my tongue listening to nature sounds with eyes ensconced in a satin mask ready to taste some colors, or whatever kind of crazy happens when you take psychedelics.

I opted for an integrative therapy approach to KAT, which means that I took the medicine in the presence of a trained psychedelic-assisted therapy counselor. We met for two sessions before the ketamine got involved to discuss my goals for treatment and set some boundaries, like, could she put her hand on my shoulder if I was weeping? The answer to that was a firm no. I’m not comforted by comforting. I’m comforted by avoidance and nervous laughter. I will say that if I ever were to want to be comforted by someone’s hand on my shoulder, it might be hers. She emitted positivity like an LED bulb - consistently, effortlessly and without overheating.

For the actual dosing sessions, we sat and talked for a few minutes ahead of time and then she read me a guided meditation, mostly to remind me to be curious about what I was experiencing and to get grounded enough that even if I thought I was careening into space on the back of a large purple cat, I was, in fact, sitting under a fleece blanket in a therapist’s office. Then in went the sugar pill with the ketamine dab and I got to work swishing my thick warm spit around for twenty minutes. By the end of it, with all my mucus membranes thoroughly awash in horse tranquilizer, I was off to the races.

The first session was cool as shit. I moved through feeling like I was walking on the beach with my feet in the sand to feeling like I was a warm ooze flowing through cracks in a mountain. I felt like I could actually see the music I was listening come alive and I sought to become one with the pan flute. I had this overwhelming sense that I was “ok” and, I gotta tell you, the feeling of a baseline “ok” after decades of a baseline “piece of wet crap” was a profound improvement. I had this thought that I was special, but also not special. Like I was special to my family and the people close to me, but not so special that I need to feel guilty about the fact that my contribution to the overall world is completely insignificant. I found myself saying out loud - as if the ketamine version of myself was speaking to the lucid version of myself - “you’re not the worst, I’ve seen worse and you are definitely not the worst.” Which is really pretty comforting. And accurate. There are definitely worse. I was under for an hour or so and then it just … ended. I sat up and chatted with the counselor a bit and then I caught a ride home.

After Journey #1, I was pretty geared up for my second session. Who knew that treating depression could be so fun and interesting? I did the same twenty-minute saliva aerobics and took off for Trip Town. The theme of session #2 was “Joy”. My insides were dancing to the beat of music; I was riding a surfboard on clouds in the sky. I kept having ideas for paintings I wanted to create even though I don’t paint. I felt immense love towards everyone in my life. The baseline “ok”, which had been tentatively flickering in intensity since my first session, burst into a strong glow. I laughed a lot. Again, an hour or so passed, and it was over. I walked out tired, a little nauseous, but feeling outstanding.

My third session was scheduled for a week later. I don’t remember what events transpired in that week, but they sucked. I almost canceled my appointment. I was really worried that taking the medicine when I was so out of sorts would lead to me having a “bad trip” and I was scared to go into a dark place, even though I now had some experience under my belt. I went anyway, mostly because appointments were hard to come by and if I missed this one, I didn’t know when I would be able to reschedule. On went the headphones and the eye mask, in went the medicine. Twenty minutes passed, and … nothing.

I sat up and told my counselor that it wasn’t going to happen today. As you might expect, she didn’t immediately shrug her shoulders and send me out the door. Can’t imagine she wanted a substantially sedated, though somehow still agitated, middle-aged mom in pajama pants wandering around the halls of her office building. No - she was curious. She asked me why I felt like it wasn’t going to happen. I told her that it was Tammy. That Tammy is what I call the voice inside my head that primarily functions as Debbie Downer and Tammy said I didn’t get to detach from life for an hour to go prancing through fields with laughter in my heart. There was too much real shit going on for that today.

“What does Tammy look like?” she asked.

This was a new line of thought. My ketamine-saturated mind took this in. Floated around trying to pin down an answer.

“Tammy is a man.”

Tammy is a dude! Tammy’s appearance hit me with perfect clarity out of freaking nowhere. Tammy looks like the Comic Store Guy from The Simpson’s but with darker hair. And he wears jeans instead of shorts. He’s balding with a goatee, wears shirts that are too small and show his gut and gives the overall vibe that he lives in a basement. Surliness drips off of him like pizza grease.

She then asked me what Tammy sounds like. Tammy’s voice was a caustic mashup of my dad and oldest brother at their most cynical and convicted. Then she asked when I could first remember hearing from Tammy. This answer surprised me even more than the whole animated-character-living-in-my-head response.

“When I was seven.”

Seven. Seven was when I partitioned off some piece of myself to sit on the sidelines and berate me. From there we navigated murkier waters. We talked about what was going on in my life at that time. My mom had gone back to work and my brothers and I were left home alone in the afternoons from the time school got out until one of my parents came back hours later. (Ah, the 90’s.) We talked about how much I dreaded those afternoons. I mean the author of Lord of the Flies did claim to base his character’s behavior on observations of real children and it isn’t farfetched for me to assume his research included the antics of three siblings under the age of 11 alone for hours on a daily basis. We lingered for a minute on the impressively creative, often cruel, ways we treated each other on those long afternoons before leapfrogging to why Tammy might show up amongst those young, chaotic feelings. What purpose did he serve in my life in that time?

One thing Tammy has always done really effectively is to badger me into being as small as possible. To be meaner inside than anyone could possibly be outside. I’d have to say he’s quite accomplished in this regard - no one has actually ever said anything more awful in the real world than Tammy has said in private conversation. Perhaps, I thought, Tammy’s purpose was to toughen me up in an effort to protect me from external pain. If I moved through life without drawing too much attention, without being too squeaky and annoying, then I could possibly avoid drawing the attention of potential enemies. When I thought about Tammy that way - as a part of me that showed up with a very heavy-handed and painfully unorthodox approach to help a younger version of me - I actually felt a spark of kinship towards him.

I can confidently say that I would have never gotten that far into an analysis of the dark-humored backstory of an insulting internal voice if it weren’t for a powerful anesthetic used in tranquilizer darts to take down errant bears. It’s just too weird of a conversation for a sober mind. We talked a lot more about Tammy and how to work with him instead of against him and we talked about other potential parts of my psyche yet-to-be-named. We talked all the way through the medicine session, in fact. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. I left with the unbelievable realization that I had made more progress in understanding my inner critic in an hour than nearly two decades of talk therapy. Cheers to modern medicine y’all.

I set the intention for my fourth, and final, session to be a celebration. To celebrate my newfound ok-ness. To feel gratitude towards all the parts of me: the fun ones and the smart ones and the kind ones and the hard-to-love ones too. To delight in my specialness and to absolve myself of expectation that my specialness will ever extend beyond my very small circle of influence. My journey ended with some lovely thoughts about my mother and her mother and how my maternal line shaped how I view my role as a mother and what a gift I’ve received from the universe to come from a line of women who are gentle and kind. I said a tearful and gratitude-laden farewell to my counselor, who at this point I had grown a deep affection for, and wandered out to the climb in my ride home.

It’s been about two months since my final session and my depression symptoms have dramatically decreased. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t walk around all the time with a smile on my face and a skip in my step, but I do have an internal sense of peace that I haven’t experienced before. I feel like I’m on my own team.

And Tammy’s on my team too. He’s certainly not who I would’ve picked to have been beside me as a protector all these years, but he’s not the worst.

If you were to look at my Year Compass from around 1994, which I didn’t complete because it didn’t exist, but if it had, I would have said that one of the most influential songs of that year was one by Sammy Kershaw called She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful. If you know me these days, you might be surprised to hear I was a wayback country fan - I try my best to avoid it now. But you must remember that this was the 90’s - the era of Garth Brooks, Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks. 90’s country talked about more than just trucks and solo cups - they sang about real life. Notably though, my exposure to country music was a product of the convergence of something called “the radio” and “my mom”. This radio device, found in most cars and inside of many households, played music picked by someone at a place called a “station”. These station people, called “dj’s”, would select songs and then those songs would be broadcast to every radio within a certain distance. I couldn’t drive yet, my mom had a radio in her Camry and country was a musical genre that my mom and I could both tolerate. Dad’s truck was rigidly oldies, but my mom was willing to branch out.

Back to Sammy Kershaw. This song, She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful, isn’t great or anything - just pop country nonsense. If you haven’t heard it, then I’m surprised because it was really popular, but I still wouldn’t recommend it. It’s just that it came along in my life at the exact wrong time as to be very influential.

Here’s the chorus, which is aside from like two other sentences, the entirety of the song:

She don't know she's beautiful (never crossed her mind)
She don't know she's beautiful (no, she's not that kind)
She don't know she's beautiful
Though time and time I've told her so

Isn’t this, like, really problematic? Especially for a teenage girl who definitely does not think she’s attractive, like, at all?

Here’s what the song was saying to teenage Amy.

—-

First, be beautiful.

Wait, don’t try to be beautiful though. It has to be effortless.

Don’t even THINK about being beautiful even though it has just been mentioned a couple of times.

So while you are thinking of anything else but your looks, be beautiful. Got it?

Oh did you fuck it up? Did you think about it? Are you one of those kind of girls??

Oh ok, you didn’t think about it. Good. Just keep being attractive but also really playing it down.

Awesome! Great job.

By the way, you’re beautiful.

AH! Don’t thank me! Don’t acknowledge it in any way. Deny it you egotistical paramour!

—-

Was that what Sammy Kershaw was trying to tell me and a whole generation of women? I have no idea. He didn’t write the song, but I looked it up and it was crafted by two dudes. And I’m thinking it was probably two dudes who thought that a woman should be incredibly good-looking but not in anyway confident. I wish I could swap out the impact from this song for pretty much anything by Lizzo, but alas, we are a product of our times. You can’t help but be influenced by the music you heard from preteen years through your early 20’s. Your brain simply sends logic and reasoning to boarding school and throws the doors open for a decade-long house party.

All of this to say, I really think Sammy Kershaw is to blame for years of internal suffering. I could sometimes scrap together enough self-esteem to think I was looking pretty hot but then I’d remember to tone it down a few notches. What if someone caught me thinking I was beautiful? Then I’d be THE WORST. Even worse than being un-beautiful!

I do realize that there are plenty of women my age who were not quite so adversely impacted by Sammy K. Some of them may have been spared his music entirely. Maybe they had parents that listened to jazz. (In that case, I’m actually ok with Sammy.) Or maybe, Sammy’s particular brand of misogyny didn’t resonate with them. It rolled right off their backs that were somehow both beautiful and accepting of that beauty. I’m sure the lyrics hit me harder because I was already tender there. I was young, I wanted to be adored by someone and Sammy was providing a road map of sorts.

I look at my kids, two in the thick of their most influential music years, and two approaching those years, and I wonder what song lyrics are going to get implanted so deep in their brains that they may be compelled to write a blog about them 25 years later.

I sure hope it’s Lizzo.

Have you heard of perimenopause? Perhaps you have if you are a woman and you have arrived at a doctor’s office and told them that you are concerned at how much more frequently you are creating new expletives for people driving slowly in the left lane or that you fantasize about buying a one-way ticket to anywhere that your family isn’t once a month.

“Oh yes, that might be perimenopause. It can cause some significant hormonal shifts. Extreme irritability, irrational thoughts.”

I wonder how long I will be in perimenopause you may find yourself asking.

The answer would be A LONG FUCKING TIME. Like ten years.

Why did no one tell me that I might become a raging lunatic a few days a month for a decade in my late 30’s? I’ve been effectively dreading menopause with its hot flashes and evaporating collagen since my late teens, but I had no clue that I should have been fretting about the ten years of psychosis that functions as the really lame and I’m-totally-not-buying-the-CD-from-the-merch-table opening act.

My theory on why I’d never heard of this before it decided to crash my sad, but well-rehearsed, mental deficiency concert series is two-fold. The first is that there doesn’t appear to be a super effective treatment that Big Pharma (feel free to put on your tin foil hats with me) can make a bunch of money off of. The treatments I’ve heard so far are: anti-depressants, hormonal creams made of yams and various herbal supplements. I already take anti-depressants, Peri Meno (what I am calling the Hype Man) laughed at the audacity of a yam cream and, despite my love of herbal medicine I’m pretty sure I’d have to mainline chasteberry into my femoral artery to see an impact. The second leg of my conspiracy theory is that menopausal women - with their grown children and established careers - are dominating the narrative. All us ladies in Peri-Land are too distracted running carpool and begging for raises to notice specifically how we are being driven to madness.

Also, hot flashes and parched vaginas are undeniable. Most of the perimenopausal symptoms can be chalked up to us being a pain in the ass.

So when I arrived at my beloved gyno’s office recently complaining of a period so heavy that I needed to use a puppy pad in addition to an arsenal of feminine products to protect my sheets and clothing, Peri Meno was again discussed. After a thrilling internal ultrasound, there was talk of various squatters living off the remains of my uterus and the process for eviction. It all made me feel, well, old. I didn’t have much of a reaction to turning 40 - I’m still in decent shape and some of my hair remains brown - but removing an organ because it just can’t hang anymore was what got me feeling middle-aged for the first time. It’s not the worst, I mean a lot of women, including most of the ones in my family, have had to sayonara their baby box. But walking through a waiting room full of pregnant mamas with a diagnosis of “broken uterus” got to me. I’m not a public cryer. It’s my personal preference to reserve that emotional reaction for driving alone or sitting on the floor of a shower, but I wasn’t at home and my beloved Stacy was 300 yards away in the parking lot. Thankfully the receptionist responded exactly how I needed her to in this desperate moment - with annoyance-tinged indifference and an absolute refusal to make eye contact. I was half-expecting and fully dreading sympathy and a “Bless your heart” so her rudeness actually gave me a brief jolt of indignation, just enough fuel to dry my eyes, pay my co-pay and make it to Stacy where I could get in a proper sob.

Now that the initial shock has worn off, I am wondering what else Peri and his audacious troupe of fly dancers has in store for me. There is a weird vein protruding from my left leg. I get nauseous after most meals. I have a hernia. It appears that my eyelids are arguing with my forehead and now want to see if my cheekbones will take them in and let them live in the basement. I fear that I don’t have enough time, nor enough energy, to wade through the answering services at the various specialists that I should probably be scheduling with if I want to end up intact by the time the random sweating begins. I realize that I finally understand why “old people” are always talking about their various maladies because I am genuinely interested in a conversation about polyps.

I could do without the Hype Man and the distraction he brings to my hopefully slow march into agedness, but I suppose this is a new chapter that I will learn some important lesson from. For right now, I will simply preach the gospel of perimenopause to my small tribe of 40ish women.

Beware ladies, the Hype Man cometh.

Every once in a while the weather, or timing, or my daughter’s desperate requests to “please, please, please let me be a car rider today” necessitate a sojourn into the special kind of hell that is the drop off line at my children’s school. Today was one of those days.

My children’s elementary school is in the middle of a busy college campus. It is surrounded on all four sides by roads - a little island of instruction among streets heavily traveled by students who have had driving privileges for less time than I’ve been growing out my bangs and are likely hungover.

There are three entrances in which a child may enter said school. A front entrance, which may be accessed by car - AKA the “drop off line” - which also happens to wind through the main parking area for the school. This detail is important for later. Then there is a rear entrance, ensconced by what is called “the patio”, which is for walkers. It’s a bit of a misnomer to say walkers because the majority of those students are actually getting to school by car. There is a sanctioned parking lot across the street from the school where parents park and then escort their mouth-breathers to the patio entrance by foot. They are shepherded across the busy street by the world’s most cheerful crossing guard Rhonda, and, since this is a very popular option, often greeted by lots of other parents going to and fro. My personal favorite way to get to school is walking from the house to the patio so I can feel all virtuous about the start of my day but I also ike the parking and walking option. for days when I’m feeling lazy.

The third entrance remains a mystery to me because it’s the bus entrance. We live so close to the school that this option has never presented itself. I think they go in through the playground. The bus entrance is actually irrelevant to this story, but I didn’t want you to think I was being inaccurate.

So, assuming your kid isn’t taking the bus, you, as the responsible party for getting an elementary school student to school, are given two allowable options: drop off your kid in the car line at the front door or walk in the patio door from wherever you came from. Notice that the rules do not allow for driving your child to the patio nor do they allow you to walk your child through the car line. Why might these be the rules? Call me crazy, but I think it is because for most people, the idea of children and vehicles co-habitating feels somehow unsafe.

Our story begins in the car rider line, so let’s set the scene for that. The driveway into the school is a right-in, right-out situation. Meaning you can only turn right into the driveway and only turn right out of the driveway. There’s a little triangular piece of concrete dividing the driveway alerting drivers to this fact and some far too-subtle signage, but all those polite reminders apparently get chucked out the window of one’s Tahoe Limited when you’re running late for Pilates. So rather than being right-in, right-out, the drivers turning right into the car rider line are often confronted with the moral quandry as to whether they should yield to the rule-breakers attempting a left turn. As a person who grew up around the addiction community, I would contend that the decision to yield should be considered “enabling” and would strongly advise against. It’s awkward, but if you avoid eye contact and glue your vehicle to the bumper in front of you, it can be done.

This morning, however, I was distracted. We just recently replaced my distressingly underperforming European SUV with the greatest automotive creation of all time - a minivan - and I decided that my beloved black lab, Ruth Bader Groansberg, should come along for the inaugural ride to school in our new glorious masterpiece of Japanese steel. RBG was doing what she does, being TOO CUTE, and snuggling across the laps of my kids in such a way that I had to repeatedly turn around and allow my heart to melt, which resulted in me letting my guard down long to allow an Escalade from the other direction to start their creep across. Just then an impatient college student behind me decided that the three-minute delay being thrust upon him by our children’s educational experience was too much for his important life and opted to pull into the opposing lane of traffic and shoot through the rapidly shrinking gap between the Escalade and my sweet new ride, whom we shall henceforth refer to as “Stacy”. He made it, thanks to the Escalade slamming on their brakes, but barely.

Asshole.

At this point, we were minutes from the start of the school day. Stacy’s clock read 7:36 and the first school bell rings promptly at 7:40. As desperate as it may seem, I knew from experience that we would be fine as long as no one had a Stage 5 Clinger refusing to disembark lurking in the shadowy cars in front of us. What I wasn’t prepared for was the loss of faith in the system of all of the parents around me. Almost on cue, they started peeling off in various directions. In front of me, they were snagging empty spots in the parking lot. Behind me that were lurching across the road to park - poorly I might add - in parallel spots in front of an adjacent sports venue.

Anarchy.

All the while, those of us following the explicit guidance to use the correct entrance for your mode of transportation were steadily moving forward in line. But once these interlopers got their doors thrown open and their kids hauled out, there were no more rules. We were no longer just in a car rider line - we were in an obstacle course of human life. Cars and people, specifically anxious and irrational parents and sleepy and confused children, battling for on-time educational supremacy. I could no longer focus only on the bumper in front of me, I had to look left, right and left again to see if some moron was going to pop out yanking their little cherub into my path of travel. These people had all lost their damn minds. They opted to play Frogger, with their children, in the dark, for….what? To avoid their kid being tardy? I imagine the minutes before they made the decision to whip into whatever vacant space they could find and hurl their children into oncoming traffic were filled with cheerful chatter and the Encanto soundtrack. But then, suddenly, they see the clock hit 7:37 and a switch flips. “Oh well, I guess I’ll go from doting on these tiny people that I love more than life itself and instead play Squid Game with them in this parking lot because I wouldn’t want them to be late for the Pledge of Allegiance.”

I managed to gently twerk Stacy to a safe stop in front of one of the Safety Patrol-staff cones by 7:38, feeling a feeling that is whatever is one rung above smug on the ladder of self-righteousness. We had made it, on-time and intact, without breaking any rules. I lifted my right hand, somewhat in triumph but mostly to press the little door open button that invites Stacy’s graceful, yet sturdy, side door to glide open and present my children to their destination and … nothing. It did not open.

The young safety patrol man, well-versed in the many Stacys that cross his path every morning, promptly made an external attempt. Nothing.

My son is not happy. Safety Patrollers are fellow fifth-graders. This transgression could get back to his people.

“MOM! Open the door!”

Well, maybe you have to unlock it before the little door open button works?

Ok, I will look for the unlock button.

7:39.

Anxiety, that cruel bitch, forces my mind blank. The unlock button should be on the door near the window things. But there’s like a bunch of stuff over there. A lot of buttons. And I can’t think. I press the door open button again because at least I know where that one is. The Safety Patroller attempts the handle again. Ruth sits up and moves herself next to the door.

“Grab Ruth!”

My son violently pushes Ruth towards the back, taking his justifiable irritation with me out on her. I find the unlock button. Hallelujah! The door opens. I grab the dog. My son runs out of Stacy like she’s on fire. My daughter somersaults over my hand gripped around the dog’s neck to get out. There are no goodbyes, no “Have a Great Days!” Just panic and shame. I hit the door button (again) as the Safety Patroller does same. The door stalls. I give up and he closes it for me.

The bell rings.

Sigh. I turn right out of the school and nearly rear-end an SUV that is parked within 10 feet of the exit on the side of the road with its hazards on as a frenzied mother hustles her progeny to the front door. I shout, to myself of course, that “entitlement is not a reason to turn on your flashers lady!!” and swear unconvincingly that I will never again be tempted to enter into this lawless hellscape again.

Gifford Pinchot may not be a household name for you, and admittedly until I had a forestry class or two under my belt, I didn’t know a thing about him either. But Pinchot’s influence on public land policy in the early 20th century still permeates our lives to this day. He is credited with defining our modern view of “conservationism” and his philosophy of protecting and managing public lands for the greatest good resulted in the federal government’s acquisition of millions of acres of forests throughout the U.S. and landed him the job as the first-ever director of the U.S. Forest Service.

Pinchot was groomed from childhood by his parents to use wealth, education and connections for betterment of man. His parents endowed the Yale University School of Forestry and their method of wealth creation — importing and selling Victorian wallpapers in the States — was once described as having “…created no slums, fouled no rivers, corrupted no politicians, wasted no valuable resources and enslaved no workers.” That seems like a pretty good legacy to leave behind I suppose.

Grey Towers was the Pinchot family’s magnificent “country home” inspired by French chatêaus. It originally housed 43 rooms and featured two turrets, and to my untrained eye, looked an awful lot like a castle. Most of the grandeur of Grey Towers today can be attributed to the influence of Gifford’s wife, Cornelia, who modernized the home and fancied up the grounds in the 1930’s. It was donated to the Forest Service in the 60’s by Gifford’s son and it remains the only National Historic Landmark to be overseen by the Forest Service.

My job at Grey Towers that summer was to manage the absolutely stunning landscape that surrounded the house. For such a grand and proper house, the landscape was hardly formal. Vines crept up the side of the turrets and plants of all varieties sprung out along the base of the home with varying heights and textures and colors before melting out across the hills and into the forest beyond. There were several outbuildings and cottages scattered throughout the 102 acre expanse, each with their own cutesy garden surround. It was as if the Pinchots subscribed to my philosophy of design, which I affectionately call “Shit I Like”. It’s when you find something you like and you find a place for it. A more professional person might call it “eclectic” and a more honest person might call it “haphazard” but I think me and Cornelia Pinchot just like to tuck a few surprises around for folks to find.

It was a graduation requirement to complete an internship, so I wasn’t there out of the goodness of my heart nor was I there because I was the kind of student who pursued internships in order to impress a future employer. I was doing it because I had to and the only other internship I had been offered was to work on a landscape crew in Atlanta where the workday started at 7 am and the heat index varied between “miserable” to “unbearably miserable”.

The internship paid very little, but it did provide housing. Housing was a modern cabin on the grounds of Grey Towers and the other three interns I was to be spending my summer with were already there when I arrived. There were only three bedrooms, and as the last to show up, I was not so lucky as to be in a single. I met my roommate first, a girl named Nicki. She was one of those kind of people - they’re usually women - that appear to be trying to make themselves as small as possible in every situation. Just crossing legs and arms and retracting necks into spines until they are the most diminutive version of an adult human possible. Based on this observation, I figured she may be pretty hard to get to know. There’s nothing I love more than getting in deep about whatever messed up twists your life has taken but it’s tough to get into that headspace when your conversation partner folds inside of themselves when you ask where they’re from. No problem though - I didn’t need a new best friend - just someone who wouldn’t use my toothbrush.

Next to meet was the other landscape intern, a guy named Pete. My first impression of Pete was that he was awkward. Subsequent impressions solidified this assumption. I think Pete was just constantly thinking about something else, so when you’d try to engage him in conversation, it was like you had to knock on the door of his subconscious first. It always took a few moments for him to get to the door, and when he got there, he seemed surprised to see you. But overall, a nice guy.

A few hours after my arrival, the last intern emerged. Another girl, this one named Marisa. Marisa came across to me in this moment like a middle-schooler away at camp for the first time. She had been in college for a year or two, but hadn’t ever left home. She seemed to be very overwhelmed by the prospect of taking care of herself that summer, which was why she had been in her room for so long when I arrived. She needed time to process all the responsibilities she now had on her own.

I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed at this point. I was coming from a southern party school and I was kinda hoping to make some bad choices with my housemates that summer. Stay up late, drink too much, make some memories. That fantasy was fading fast. These kids all seemed like squares.

I spent the next few days after work exploring Milford to see if I could drum up another crew to hang with that might be a little more my speed. The town seemed to cater to wealthy retirees and aside from registering to participate in the Ladies Garden Club Dried Flower Competition at the end of the summer (the theme was Wizard of Oz), I was no closer to finding any new companions. I did find out that you can only purchase full cases of beer in Pennsylvania - no chance for a 6-pack - and discovered that you absolutely CANNOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES pump your own gas in New Jersey. I was also greatly disheartened by the sheer number of stray shopping carts in the parking lot at the local grocery store and allowed these factors to convince me that everything about the northeast was patently terrible.

The divide between my expectations of this summer and the reality of it slowly formed a gulf that I filled with a bitterness that was then projected on my housemates. I found myself less and less enchanted by their idiosyncrasies, but no one more than Marisa.

One night, Marisa offered to cook for everyone. The menu was tacos and she insisted that she didn’t need any help. When we arrived to the meal, it consisted of cold flour tortillas, shredded iceberg lettuce, store-bought salsa and some very white and very dry chicken. It has been nearly twenty years and I still remember this meal with vivid clarity.

You see, I was raised in a household of culinary excellence. The first bite of many meals was followed by a discussion of how it might be improved upon the next time around. Perhaps more salt, more acid, a little less done. Recipes had notes in the margin, particular substitutions or minute improvements. Not once was I served an unwarmed tortilla. We were total snobs. I just didn’t know this at the time.

So when I decided to engage Marisa and my other roommates in a discussion on how Marisa’s next taco night might be improved, I was being pretty insensitive. Middle-aged Amy realizes that this was a young girl, away from home for the first time, trying to gain a new skill and do something nice for her new friends. But 20-something year old Amy didn’t see it that way. 20-something year old Amy wanted to fix everything she saw wrong with Marisa. And it started with asking her how she cooked the chicken.

“I boiled it.”

BOILED IT? YOU BOILED IT?

She might as well spit in my face. I had never heard of such a thing. Not once in my life had I seen anyone put a chicken breast in a pot of boiling water. Isn’t that how you make chicken broth? By taking chicken body parts and putting them in hot water so as to make the hot water taste like chicken body parts? I was so confused. Horrified. I couldn’t let it go. I don’t know how long I ranted about it, but it was long enough that Nicki told me to chill out, which probably took every ounce of her courage to project.

I wish I could say it stopped there, but it didn’t. I became obsessed with all the things Marisa couldn’t do. Laundry, driving, basic money management. It was if her lack of life skills was a personal affront to me. Like she reflected poorly on the women of the world by being so woefully inadequate. She should’ve told me to stop being such a bully, to go easy on her because she had overprotective parents and why do I even care what she does? But she didn’t. She tried really hard to impress me. And that’s what sticks with me twenty years later. Is how hard she tried.

A few weeks after taco night, she asked to cook for us again. I remember Pete telling me that day during work to “Go easy on her.” I didn’t wait for her to call us down for dinner this time, I wanted to be there when the sausage was made. And on that stove, in that little kitchen, was a pot filled with a boiling orange liquid and several bobbing white chicken breasts.

What is THAT?

“That,” Marisa explained, “is orange juice. It is flavoring the chicken.”

I reacted poorly.

A couple days later I was riding in one of the utility carts with Pete and I tried to engage him in yet another venting session about Marisa’s shortcomings as a young adult. He listened without comment until we stopped and then turned, looked me dead in the eyes, and said, “You’re just being mean to her. She’s trying her best and you’re just being mean.”

I felt about 1 inch tall. I felt like a complete asshole, because I was acting like one. I’d love to say that I left there and immediately gave Marisa a heartfelt apology, but I was terrible at admitting fault when I was that age. (I’’m actually pretty great at it now. I’m wrong like ALL THE TIME.) Instead, I acted uncharacteristically perky and helpful towards her every chance I got. Laughed extra loud when she barely cracked a joke and offered to share every meal I had. She was a kind person and she gave me another chance, despite my inability to own up to my own faults. We actually spent the last few weeks of that summer as sorta-friends. She invited me to her room one night to listen to her play guitar and sing a song she wrote. I showed her how to use a grill. And I managed to convince all of them to loosen up and join me at a dive bar I found in the next town over.

So who cares if someone boils chicken in orange juice? At least we made some memories that summer.

Two weeks ago, I posted an ad on Nextdoor.

I was selling some cherry nightstands that I bought from my brother when I got divorced which he had bought from his neighbor when he got married. They never actually matched anything and lacked adequate storage space to stow my husband’s cPap machine. Replacing these nightstands had become Furniture Priority #1 after our Maine Coon, suffering from an untreated mastication addiction, had punctured one of the machine’s tubes — an incident that nearly cost him both his home and his life.

My husband took first stab at replacing our bedside accessory by ordering a set of new custom nightstands from a darling Canadian woodworker on Etsy. These nightstands took 12 weeks to arrive, came unassembled, required three separate postage payments upon delivery, weighed approximately 7,000 pounds, were not returnable, and appeared to have been constructed to accommodate the needs of a very tiny person with a very tiny room who needed very heavy nightstands. With hopeful disregard for the obvious diminutiveness, I set one up and went so far as to stage it next to the bed, but the sight of it seemed to bring on such a strong shame response in my husband that I quickly relocated it to a child’s room, placed it’s unassembled companion in the garage and will likely sell them both when enough time has passed that we can laugh about it.

I then ordered regular human-sized nightstands from Anthropologie, complete with a satisfaction guarantee and ample cPap storage, and proceeded to list for sale the post-divorce, undersized-drawered cherry ones on Nextdoor.

The first response I got about the nightstands was an inquiry as to their dimensions. Which was a very reasonable question and one I wish we had thought to ask our Canadian woodworker friend. In my case, this gentleman decided that my nightstands were far too large for his space and he wished me well. I considered offering to sell him the set of spectacularly undersized nightstands currently secreted away in dark corners of my home, but was soon distracted by another message in my inbox. This one came from a woman named Samantha. On this particular selling app, a person’s picture is attached to their message so I could see that Samantha was a pleasant-looking woman who enjoyed cocktails with her friends and looked great in a visor. I admired this about her because I, like many other gaunt people of Scottish descent, look like an asshole in a visor. She looked tan and fun. She also offered to take my nightstands, at full asking price, with total disregard to their dimensions.

After confirming our mutual intent to move forward with the sale, I got distracted by some child or animal in my vicinity and then temporarily forgot I was even selling nightstands. So I missed her urgent response asking to meet that very day as she only came into town once a week and today was that day. During my silence, she proceeded to resend her message 13 more times with each iteration belying an ever deeper conviction that the Nextdoor app was no longer functioning and her messages were not getting through to me. Upon returning to my phone an hour or so later and realizing that Samantha only got out once a week and that she thought an app that fully functioned in one moment could spontaneously collapse and then be miraculously fixed by sheer willpower intrigued me. She looked pretty put together in her picture — and fun to boot with all the cocktailing and visor-wearing — but she seemed like someone who may need a hand navigating this transaction. When I finally responded and she noted that she wasn’t sure if the nightstands would fit in backseat of her Honda Civic, I decided then and there that I would just bring them to her.

Generally speaking, sellers never deliver. There’s the obvious reason that the buyer may decide they don’t want your wares and then you have to schlep them back, but also the very real possibility that they could be a murderer. But instinct told me that this Civic-driving-once-a-week-to-town lady wasn’t going to turn me into a Dateline special. So I offered the concierge treatment. She texted me directions, thanked me profusely, warned me about her dog and then I was on my way.

Her place was actually a carriage house behind a nice Cape Cod in the middle of nowhere. The route to her house took me through every patch of idyllic farmland in the tri-county area and then snaked me through the woods and up and down gravel roads. I reached her place, confirmed by the barking of a dog, and knocked on the door. She hollered me in and I was greeted by Fritz.

Her previous warning about Fritz had not been an ominous one — more of a disclaimer.

“He barks,” she said, “but then he’s going to love you to death.”

As soon as I opened the door, Fritz was on me like white on rice. Fritz is perhaps one of the more conventionally unattractive dogs I’ve seen outside of internet memes. He had the full-sized body of a brindled pit bull, but some cruel joke of breeding cursed him with a bug-eyed, apple-shaped head of a Chihuahua.

I busied myself petting Fritz and lying about how handsome he was instead of directly interacting with Samantha in order to stall the eventuality of her discovering I had parked my car halfway down the driveway. What had made perfect sense only moments ago upon my approach now made me feel flustered and childish. Despite the driveway and house being exactly as described in her texts, and her explicitly telling me to pull all the way up to the house since I was there TO DELIVER HEAVY OBJECTS, I still stopped halfway up. My neurotic brain had been yelling at me that this was the wrong house, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and my panicked solution was to park 100 yards from the house because…well I can’t really grasp any reason why I would do that. Samantha couldn’t either apparently and, baffled by my idiocy, asked, “Why did you park way back there? I told you to pull all the way up.”

I don’t know lady. I don’t know. Awkward is the only life I’ve ever known.

I sheepishly got back in my car and drove it the last bit up the driveway with Samantha looking on disapprovingly and then unloaded the very large nightstands into her very cluttered, but also very adorable, little home.

“You’re a lot prettier than your Nextdoor picture,” she said next.

“Oh. Well, thanks!” I replied. Then realized that accepting a compliment without immediately detracting from it was very un-Southern female of me.

“My hair looks terrible today. I didn’t get a chance to do anything with it.”

Phew. Saved it. Now she would see that I knew my place in this world.

She didn’t seem to hear this. She just looked right at me and said, “You should change your picture on there. It’s really bad.”

Now I was curious. How bad was this picture? I’ve never been accused of being without vanity so the thought that I would publicly post a terrible picture of myself is somewhat surprising. As she fumbled with figuring how to pay me through Paypal, I pulled out my phone and looked it up. Not that bad, I didn’t think. But I made a mental note to change it anyway.

Huh, I thought. I’m really surprised that I’m not at all offended by this stranger’s declaration. I’m actually really pleased. No one ever says anything that brutally honest to me. The only critical feedback I ever really get is that I’m too sensitive for critical feedback. I felt in this moment that not only could Samantha see me, but that she was going to tell me what she sees. Maybe what everybody sees. I wanted to stand in the doorway of her little carriage house and just get hit with the truth for a little while.

So I did. She did most of the talking. It didn’t take long for her to tell me she was divorced, that she really didn’t get along with one of her kids and that she would be getting some really nice furniture soon because her piece-of-shit ex was finally going to let her at the storage unit where all her old good stuff was squirreled away. I couldn’t imagine her fitting one more of anything into her house but I nodded encouragingly. Periodically interspersed in the diatribe about her divorce and family dramas were questions about me. I attempted to respond with my brand of deferential politeness, interacting in a way that is unoffensive, accommodating and more about buying time to figure out what someone else wants to hear than actually conveying emotion or information.

She wasn’t having it. After unsuccessfully sidestepping a question about my relationship status she said, “Wait, you’re divorced? But you’re so young!”

“Yeah, I guess so. It’s pretty sad. Ha!”

The “ha” was an auto-response I use to smooth things over. I felt I had misstepped by using the word “sad” and inadvertently made her feel uncomfortable with my vulnerability so I needed to backtrack and let her know that being divorced and young, while sad, was also totally ok with me. Don’t feel sorry for me lady! I think being sad is actually funny! My life is one hilarious joke!

Samantha’s face said “Nope.”

“It’s not sad. You’re just divorced. Why are you saying that it’s sad? I’m divorced, I’m not sad. Don’t say it’s sad. Just tell me to mind my business.”

“Ha!”

Another auto-response.

But wait a minute. I’m allowed to tell someone to mind their own business? That’s something people do? That’s something women do?

She shifted. “Well, tell me about the nightstands. Are you redecorating?”

“Um…” I start to respond.

“Don’t respond to that!”

Oh! It was a test!

“It’s none of my business if you’re redecorating! You don’t know me. You drove these things all the way out to my house and hauled them in and then I’m going to hold you up from going home to your family asking you about redecorating? Seriously, tell me to shut up.”

I’m in love with this woman.

It has become obvious that I need this person in my life. I feel like there is extra warmth from the sun on my back as I stand in her doorway absently petting her weird ass Frankenstein dog. The universe has set this in motion. We were supposed to have a cat that chewed tubes on my husband’s cPap so that I would have to get new nightstands twice so that I could meet her and she could change my entire outlook on life. I look around her living room and imagine myself sitting here, drinking coffee, talking about life and soaking up lessons on how not to give a f#*!.

I can’t help myself. I ask, “Can I have your number? I want to be friends with you.”

I said that. I said, “I want to be friends with you.” I don’t think I have ever asked someone to be my friend. My fear of rejection is the strongest muscle in my body. I feel as if I’m drunk on the adrenaline of someone finally telling me how it is without being afraid I’m going to fall apart. She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know I tend to fall apart. She thinks I’m normal!

Her Paypal payment goes through, she agrees to send her contact information and we part ways. I receive a message through the app about an hour later. It’s Samantha sharing her number.

I don’t respond right away.

She sends it several more times.

Recently, my husband and I headed out for a weekend trip to Nashville. He had business there and I came along for the ride.

Well technically, he came along for the ride since I nearly always drive. I get motion sickness on a playground swing so car trips are no fun when I’m not steering.

We made it about two hours into our five hour journey when we decided to stop for lunch. We were debating whether to continue on to a larger city further down the road with more dining options or take what we could find in the middle of highway purgatory along the way. In the height of the debate, I spotted a sign for Taco Bell and made my play. I only rarely get my husband to agree to Taco Bell, but that day I felt hopeful. He was in a good mood, with all those weekend getaway vibes, and there were no children around to take his side in opposition. While I understand his hesitation - it is guaranteed indigestion and the staff act as if they’d rather be prepping for a colonoscopy than taking your order - there’s just something about Taco Bell that I love. Perhaps it’s the mystery of whether you will get anything close to what you actually ordered or the shock of new and ever-more disgusting taco meat and snack chip combinations, but it all just feels like a treat to me.

The Taco Bell was actually located in a food court of sorts, flanked by a Burger King and Popeye’s, all inside a large truck stop 200 yards off the interstate. Taco Bell was far and away the most popular that day, with a line snaking through the food court’s lobby of dirty tables and scattered chairs nearly to the door. I was disappointed to see a large group of boys wearing matching basketball uniforms ahead of us. Not because I dislike athletic teenagers, but because they were probably all paying separately and making requests for extra sauce.

I’m sure it’s a sign I’m getting old, but kids make a lot of special requests at restaurants. Perhaps it’s because it’s one small area where they are allowed to flex a little. Personally, I was raised under the strict guidance of a father who dictated to my brothers and I throughout childhood that under no circumstances would there be any “special orders” at a fast food restaurant. There was no option to request any variation to any item that was not explicitly stated on the backlit acrylic hanging behind the cash registers. I fear that my father’s approach to ordering off the menu will likely die with his generation because I, like many of my peers, let our kids exert way too much preference in those settings. My compromise has been to allow my kids to order whatever they want, but that they have to do it themselves. That way they are the ones that appear difficult, not me. It’s all very passive-aggressive.

In the end, these kids weren’t too bad. In my rush to judgement, I forgot that young people are Taco Bell’s key demographic as their colons are still capable of gently passing whatever magical meat-like substance lies within those hallowed tortillas. They knew the menu, they knew the prices and they weren’t afraid of the purple Mountain Dew. We were able to place our order, two crunchwrap supremes and two beef burritos, and were headed out the door and back on the road, ready to binge some true crime podcasts and lament about how we should not have eaten Taco Bell without direct access to a restroom.

We walked to my nearly brand new car, a SUV of European origin that I call Bernice. I had parked her proudly in the outermost row of cars so as to reduce the chances of another vehicle parking alongside and an errant door opening into her sleek facade. As I approached, I observed that she did not chirp in recognition like she usually does. My Bernice is equipped with some sort of voodoo computer where she can sense my presence with a whisper from the key inside my pocket and unlock with a confident grip around her driver’s side handle. But not today, she sat silent - almost standoffish. I held my body closer to the door and gripped her handle even tighter as if to say “Look Bernice! It’s me, Amy!” Still, nothing.

I set down our bag of Mexican-inspired delights and dug the key out of my pocket and firmly pressed the unlock button. She responded but I could sense hesitation. I climbed in the driver’s seat, wanting to quickly turn her on and get the air conditioning going. It was nearly 80 degrees outside and humid. I pressed the ignition button and an error message appeared on her screen. “No key present,” it said.

No key present? No key present?? There’s a key right here! I held the key up to her screen. She ignored me. I tried to press the ignition button again. I shut the door and then tried. I made my husband shut his door. Tried again. Nothing. I opened the door. This time the alarm went off. So I shut the door. The alarm kept shouting. I locked the doors and mercifully, the alarm stopped. But Bernice was adamant in her defiance. She refused to acknowledge the key’s existence. I held it up to every surface I could think of but she would. not. start.

We fished the manual out of the glovebox and plowed through the table of contents. We found that the key could possibly have a dead battery. My husband beelined for the truck stop and sourced a replacement battery. We pried the key apart, replaced the battery and tried again. No dice.

Moving on. The manual said “The key may need to be reintroduced to the vehicle.”

Yes, I said “reintroduced”.

I went through the “reintroduction” process a dozen times. It involved holding the impotent key up to the steering column and moving it millimeters at a time while pressing the ignition button over and over. Nothing. I gave up the self-help experiment and called roadside assistance. The representative on the other end of the phone sounded like he was 18 and was very clearly reading from a script. Yes, we replaced the key’s battery, yes we tried to reintroduce the key to the car.

“We’ll have to send a tow truck out to take it back to the closest dealership.”

Great, right? No problem. We’ll tow the car back and get it fixed. Did they have a car to borrow in case it took awhile?

Brief hold. Nope. No cars to borrow.

Ok, what about a rental car? Perhaps there is someplace nearby?

Longer hold. Nope. No cars to rent.

“We can offer you an Uber voucher.”

So we conceded. We’ll get it towed back to the closest dealership, wait for them to evaluate it and then take an Uber. Three hours. To Nashville. Then we’ll take a plane back to Atlanta. Then we’ll take an Uber back home. Then we’ll drive back to the dealership that is not actually close to our home at all and get the car which is by then hopefully fixed.

The representative informed me that I would be receiving a text shortly with a confirmation from the towing company. My husband and I glared back at the Taco Bell that was our unraveling. We migrated to an outdoor concrete table whose umbrella had given up long ago and ate our Crunchwraps, now soggy and lukewarm.

The text arrived. “ATKINS TOWING WILL BE ARRIVING IN 260 MINUTES.”

260 minutes? That’s like a parent describing their child as 48 months old. Just rip the band-aid off and tell me we’re never getting out of this place.

This revelation threw my husband into action. We were not going to wait four hours at this truck stop if he could help it. Crisis is where he shines. Once, on Fourth of July weekend, his boat rental reservation was canceled and he sourced a boat from a nearby redneck within 2 hours. The man had made it himself using spare parts and lawn chairs for seats and it was most assuredly never going to make it past any mechanical inspection, but it floated and he and his friends had a great time. He dug out his phone and dialed every contact he could think of. The tow truck driver he met three years ago, the import mechanic who is friends with his college buddy. He managed to find a tow that would take the immovable Bernice back to Our Town so we wouldn’t have to make our way to a dealership in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t have to wait on him either, just hide the key in the tailpipe and take off. Excellent. Now to find a ride to Nashville.

Guess where you can’t find an Uber for a 200 mile trip? At a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. So we started calling hired car services. Places that rent stretch Hummers and “party buses” to the prom crowd. No, no, no. We made at least 20 calls. My husband finally got a guy on the phone who said he had a willing driver, but it would be awhile. The dispatcher was Nigerian, and he spoke quickly with a thick (to my untrained ear) French-tinged accent. My husband’s accent is thick too -southern as it can be - he’s one of those people who says things like “knee high to a grasshopper” without irony. Needless to say, the two of them could not understand each other at all. They addressed this dilemma by simply repeating the same information, with the same heaping helping of their native jargon, at increasingly greater volumes with increasingly greater irritation. We had moved into the food court lobby at this point, driven in by the heat and a teenager blaring obnoxious music from his lowered ride, so that everyone could experience our frustration firsthand. The cause of their discord was that the dispatcher was unwilling to confirm an actual time that his driver would be available until he confirmed our credit card went through. We were unwilling to cough up the credit card until we knew whether we were getting a ride in a few hours or a few days. They pushed back and forth against each other - ego and pride battling ego and pride - before we gave in. The other guy had all the cards and he knew it. No one else was coming to get us.

After forcing us to hang up so he could check that our credit card payment had processed, and then sidestepping our return calls for another thirty minutes, he finally confirmed a time - it would be another hour - and shared the driver’s contact information. When the hour came and went, we tried the driver, who was also Nigerian and apparently very irritated due to being stuck in notorious Atlanta traffic who informed us it would likely be another hour.

By this point, I had browsed the truck stop wares so many times that I could’ve offered tours. I was surprised both by the quantity of knives they sold in a single day and also that no one had opted to purchase the divine crystal dragon screaming “Unique Wedding Gift” from the glass display by the register. I had figured out who the owner was, a middle-aged gentleman who was surprisingly kind to his employees and seemed to genuinely enjoy engaging with his customers. He went from gently directing a young woman on the proper way to restock the snack aisle to conferring with a contractor on issues he was having with the automated lottery ticket machine to ringing up the ceaseless line of customers without pause. This truck stop was his orchestra and he conducted it masterfully.

What held my attention more than anything though was a young girl, about my son’s age, sitting at a table in the food court lobby scrolling through videos on an iPhone with glazed-over eyes. I had deduced that it was her mother managing the Burger King and some other family member blasting the obnoxious music in the parking lot. She sat right in the middle of the chaos, staring at the phone propped on a small pillow, wearing a loose t-shirt and oversized pajama pants. She was on the edge of restless, periodically looking up from the videos to confirm her mother was still there. Once, a family came in with a small dog, at which point she scrambled from her chair to ask the owner if she could pet it. I held my breath a little as she approached them, worried she might be rejected and that little spark of enthusiasm in her would fade, but humanity and well-behaved small dogs prevailed and she got a brief respite from her tedium. Periodically she would get up from her post and visit with the relative outside, sitting in his backseat with the door open listening to explicit lyrics and inhaling whatever it was that he was smoking. Eventually, her mother took leave from behind the Burger King counter with a purse slung across her chest and she and the girl walked outside to climb into the car with the young man.

That little girl had likely pulled a longer shift than me, but my husband and I were apparently in line to close up the shop. It was early evening and cooling down by then so we purchased a styrofoam cooler, a 12-pack of beer and a handgun shaped bottle opener that said “Georgia” and moved ourselves outside to wait for our ride. It finally arrived, five and half hours after our fateful Crunchwrap sojourn, and I rushed myself to his black SUV to get the hell out of there. My husband (wisely, as his bladder is the size of a peanut) opted to make one last bathroom run and left me to make nice with the driver. I thought it was odd that the man did not get out of his car to help with our bags, but you know, he had a rough day too. I hefted the bags into his vehicle and slid across the backseat, leaving the door open for my husband. The driver turned to me and said, “I cannot drive you to this place.” while pointing at a map on his phone. Then he got out of the car, opened the trunk and proceeded to remove our bags from the vehicle.

Shit.

My husband arrived as he was unloading the bags and was, not surprisingly, very upset. As it turns out, the dispatcher has fibbed slightly on the commitment he was unloading on the driver. He sold the job as a 150 mile round-trip, which meant the guy would get home in time for a late supper, instead of what it actually was - a 400 mile round-trip that would get him home well after midnight. In a final act of desperation, my husband offered the driver an extra two hundred dollars in cash. Literally showed him the cash and then said it was his as soon as he dropped us at the hotel in Tennessee. The driver paused, weighing the options, and nodded his head in agreement.

The driver then stated that now the only thing holding him back from taking us on to Nashville was his desperate desire to call his dispatcher and give him a piece of his mind. We agreed that he had been wronged and a harsh tongue-lashing was most assuredly necessary, but asked that he hold off until we got to our destination. He grunted his response and replaced our suitcases in the back of the SUV. We weren’t a minute down the road when my husband’s phone rang. It was the dispatcher. He wanted to talk to the driver. My husband grudgingly handed his phone forward and the two men engaged immediately in a verbal battle. The heightened emotion their conversation demanded forced our driver to reallocate mental energy from his pressing responsibility of operating a moving vehicle on a heavily-trafficked interstate to scouring his vocabulary for deeper and more cutting synonyms for the words “liar”, “crook” and “jerk”. The first task he abandoned was neglecting to glance at the side view mirror as he angrily changed lanes in what appeared to be a punishment to the vehicle for the dispatcher’s transgressions. We were honked at by no less than four other motorist’s in the span of his ten minute long conversation. A conversation that led to the driver abruptly hanging up and tossing the phone back to my husband.

“Don’t answer him again.”

We didn’t. The driver’s cortisol levels didn’t drop though, or he just forgot that there may be other cars in adjacent lanes, because he continued to change lanes with reckless abandon, which was scary but didn’t reach gasping and handle-grabbing terror for me until he cut off a tractor-trailer. At that point, I took action. My remedy, honed by years of trying to avoid conflict, was to start chatting to the guy about his family, his pets and his life before the U.S. in Nigeria - anything to distract him from his anger. Nervous small talk is my super power and I wielded it mightily until he was more interested in complaining about the negative impression Nigerian scammers have burdened their fellow countrymen with than grinding across multiple lanes of traffic. When we finally floated into the turnaround in front of our hotel, we had missed our dinner reservations. We managed to talk ourselves into a spot at the bar of a pretty nice restaurant and passed the rest of the evening with pleasant conversation and without significant event.

As terribly frustrating as that day was, we were goddamn lucky. Unlike that little girl, sitting there all day, imprisoned in a food court lobby by circumstances completely beyond her control, we had every opportunity to get out of that truck stop. We had phones and reliable partners and some cash in our wallets that gave us options, albeit infuriating ones, for every challenge that came our way. I wouldn’t have said it that weekend, but looking back from a distance, I see how easy can be blind to your own privilege. We do it all the time. It’s almost habit to stay focused on life’s inconveniences and fling shrapnals of irritation all over the people around us, as if we are the only ones that matter.

In case you’re wondering, we did find out what was wrong with Bernice. Apparently the prior three months when the message appeared upon start up to “Upgrade System Software”, she meant it.

When I was 19, I lived in a house with three other girls. Two of them were named Emily.

It was a Craftsman-style house from 1910 and architecturally-speaking, the coolest house I’ve ever lived in. It was also close to a bus route, had adorable curb appeal and the tiles in the bathroom had little sailboats on them. Not sailboats on tile in a tacky “beach-house-maritime-theme” way where you would also expect to see a painted board proclaiming “Life’s a Beach!”, but sailboats on tile in a posh, Old-world British way. The landlord made us come to his house in-person, all together, to sign the lease so that he could tell us, in-person and all together, that under no circumstances should any of our boyfriends ever co-habitate with us in that house. Also, no pets.

About a month into fall semester, one of the Emilys bought a Great Pyrenees puppy. This puppy was a white ball of fluff and slobber for about a nanosecond before it became a glacial mountain of fluff and slobber. It is difficult to hide a dog from your landlord when it is of average size, but it is extremely difficult to hide a dog from your landlord when it is essentially a small horse. We spent many months playing “hide the fluffy pony” from the fuzz before eventually getting caught during a surprise mailbox repair. The dog went to live with that Emily’s boyfriend, along with that Emily for the most part, and we kept ourselves busy with hiding the kitten that we had acquired that had not yet been discovered.

As the spring semester wound down, things with that Emily’s boyfriend started to unravel and she came back, along with the giant dog. We got back into the business of making sure the coast was always clear before letting the dog out for a piss and hedging our bets that we could charm our way out of a serious consequence if we were to get caught again. One afternoon, there was a knock at the door and we opened it, fearing that our luck had run out, to find a woman standing there with a box of puppies. Four puppies, in fact. She wondered if any of us might be interested in one?

I’m approaching middle age and I’ve had a fair number of interactions with people over the years and can tell you that I have never met another person who was approached at the front door by a person wielding a box of puppies. It’s surprising that it doesn’t happen more often because I’m not sure if there is a more effective technique for offloading unwanted dogs than going door-to-door. Because when faced with a box of puppies, there is only one reasonable response.

And that response is “Awwwwwwwwwww.”

So we took all four puppies.

Fortunately for us, our landlord, and those puppies, we only had about two weeks left on our lease before we were all peeling out for the summer. The sheer amount of excrement produced in that time period was other-worldly — and we ended having to take our couch and all the rugs to the dump — but I wouldn’t trade walking around town with my roommates with four nearly identical yellow lab-looking puppies for those two blissful weeks for anything. It is the closest I will ever be to a celebrity. It was spring, we were young and we had pure unadulterated cuteness at the ends of our leashes. When the dust settled at the end of term, a couple of the roommates realized they weren’t cut out for motherhood yet so one dog found its way to an ex-boyfriend and one ended up with another ex-boyfriend’s mom. I kept mine and the girl who shared the sailboat-tiled bathroom with me kept hers too.

I named her Bella Fabulous because I thought she was both beautiful and fabulous and I loved the idea that the vet would call out “Bella Fabulous” in the waiting room at visits. I was right, they do call out their full names, and I will never have a pet without a middle name again.

I think I took Bella to the dog park everyday for two years running. I took her by myself, I took her with my friends and I even went on dates there. I crate-trained her, I took her to two different obedience classes and I got professional photos of us taken. If I was going somewhere, Bella was going somewhere too. When I got married for the first time and moved to a big city, Bella and I ran or walked together on the sketchy trail that went by our first house everyday. She went from fiercely friendly to fiercely protective without hesitation when I needed her to. I never felt unsafe when she was with me. When my then-husband and I drove out west to “find ourselves”, Bella rode in the backseat.

One night when he was working late and I was home alone in that first house in Colorado, I heard what I thought was a person walking up and down the stairs of our front porch. Bella sat beside me as I cowered on the couch cursing myself for being such a wimp. When I gathered the courage to scope out the noise, by looking from the lit interior of our house that didn’t yet have any curtains upon the darkened yard, she put herself between me and the door and growled. Then, when I pressed my face against the glass of our front door to see better, because it was so dark I couldn’t see even six inches into the murkiness, and I saw a man’s face pressed against the glass staring right back at me, she didn’t move. Then when he started to bang, bang, bang his head against the glass, she used her body to push me away from the door as I tried, unsuccessfully, to scream. She stayed next to me, with all her hackles up, as I stumbled to the stairwell — the only place in that tiny house without a window — and told the 911 operator that there was someone trying to smash their way into my living room with their head. She sat beside me as I heard that person open the gate to my backyard. The gate that led to stairs that ended near the back entrance that hosted a dog door large enough for a human to easily crawl through. A fact I had confirmed a day earlier when I locked myself out of the house. I listened, time frozen, as he made his way down those steps and watched in horror as he began to flick at the flap of the dog door, testing it. Only then did Bella leave my side. She sprinted to the door and barked and gnashed at his advances until it got quiet again. The police arrived minutes later and caught him limping down the alley behind our house. He couldn’t walk normally because he had a sword shoved into his pant leg. Apparently he’d been watching me for awhile from the darkened yard before he approached the stairs. When the victim’s advocate called me the next day to check on how I was doing, she let it slip that he had recently served time for attacking a woman. I don’t know where I’d be without Bella that night.

It‘s worth noting at this point that there was another dog there that night. Sadie, my then-husband’s absolutely stunningly beautiful Husky mix. Sadie was on her back when the dog flap was disturbed by the potentially homicidal intruder, impatiently waiting for that person to rub her belly. Sadie was gorgeous, but she was only ever in it for Sadie.

I experienced my first serious bout of depression when I was about 23 after being sexually assaulted by a colleague. I cried on the floor a lot next to Bella after that. She’d look at me with her big brown lab eyes and I felt understood. I’m not so much of a crazy dog person that I think she actually knew what I was upset about, but I think she understood that I didn’t need to be alone in those moments. We left Colorado — for a lot of reasons but mostly because my depression was too heavy and too much for my then-husband to handle alone — and Bella rode with me in the front seat the whole way home.

We decided before we left Colorado that we would take six months the following year to attempt a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. For him, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. For me, it was a concession for the fact that my mental breakdown likely stole his chance of living out west. We trained Bella and Sadie to heel behind us, off-leash, so that they could accompany us on our 2000+ mile journey. In order to pull off a six month sabbatical in the woods without any income, we opted to live with my parents and save our every penny. Their home was already host to two dogs at that time and only God knows how many cats. One day, while I was out of the house taking full advantage of my landscape architecture degree to sling poorly-made fast fashion to suburbanites from a strip shopping mall, my mom opened the front door to a client only to have all four dogs take off after a cat who had been shamelessly sunning himself in their front yard. The cat made it to the safety of a very substantial patch of shore juniper in the neighbor’s yard with relative ease, leaving all the dogs to wonder what to do with their newfound and completely unexpected freedom.

I can tell you now that it did not involve returning immediately to the house with pained looks of contrition.

The driver of the Honda Accord who innocently took a right turn onto Churchill Drive that day was not expecting to happen upon a pack of recently liberated canines. She surely thought, as she slammed the brakes of her reliable sedan and saw three dogs whiz by her front bumper, that she had avoided the whole mess. But in the split-second before relief could wash over her entirely, there was a thud and a yelp. I’m told my mom and her client were there in moments, my mom carrying Bella back to the house and her bewildered client doing her best to corral the other three very poorly behaved and unsympathetic escapees.

Don’t worry, this is not the part in the story where Bella dies.

The bumper only caught Bella’s hip. It resulted in an injury that I was told meant Bella needed a hip replacement. A hip replacement that would cost every dollar that we had saved towards hiking the trail. We opted for a second opinion. The second opinion came from a vet that my then-husband’s family had used for years. A trusted, no-frills kind of guy who cared deeply about animals and tolerated their owners. His statement to me was, “Yeah you could replace her hip but it’s expensive. I can just fuse the joint together. She might limp a little and maybe get arthritis earlier, but she’s not exactly a show dog.”

This was true. Bella had started her life looking very much like a regular yellow lab but by adulthood took on the look of a yellow lab whose gene pool may have been limited to immediate family members. Her physique was a bit …well… lumpy. And her head was definitely very undersized.

In any case, we got her hip fused and he even threw in a dental cleaning. It costs about 10% of the cost of the other surgery and we were back on our way.

Or so we thought.

Whether it was the result of the car hitting her or neurosis brought on by the trauma, I’ll never know, but Bella would not stop licking her tail after the accident. She lived in a “cone of shame” on and off for a month, because every time we took it off, she started licking again. She licked all the hair off, and let me tell you, a dog’s tail without hair is nausea-inducing. We took her back to the crusty vet and he offered to lop it off for us. “She’s just going to keep doing it. I can leave her a little mudflap to cover up her butthole.”

So he did. He cut her tail off except for a little nub that perfectly concealed her butthole. She stopped licking it and we hiked the trail. Without her or Sadie. Bella couldn’t have done something that strenuous after the accident and it felt unfair to take Sadie without her. So they stayed with my parents who probably deserve a lot more gratitude than we ever gave them. We came back and we did a lot more things, including having two children and getting divorced. Bella was with me for quite a few more crying-on-the-floor sessions through all that for sure.

When I think back on my life so far, I think a lot about Bella. She was there, right alongside, for a lot of big stuff. Good stuff and really hard stuff too. She protected me, she soothed me and she made me laugh. I’m grateful for that mudflap because she could still wag it so I never had to guess how she felt about something. Bella was almost 16 when I put her down — she had developed terrible dementia and stumbled around our house confused and afraid. It seemed too cruel an end, but it always does.

We just got a new dog. A black lab named Ruth. She’s got those same brown lab understanding eyes and she is as sweet as they come. I know I’ll mark the next phase of my life by her presence. The adventures of our blended family, living in this house and in this neighborhood, the older children leaving and going to college and my younger ones going to middle and high school. She seems like an incredible dog and I love her so much already. I don’t know if she’ll ever save my life from anyone or accompany me on a cross-country adventure, but I’m sure we’ll do lots of cool things.

Oh, and her middle name? It’s Bader.

When I was growing up, I spent a season exploring the Christian faith by attending a Methodist youth group. My primary motive was hanging out with my friends and getting exposure to boys who didn’t go to my high school and therefore might see me as more desirable than the ones who had been present for all phases of my awkward adolescent years. The group was made up of mostly nice kids and we got to finish out our Sunday evenings singing in unison, which to this day remains my favorite, and most missed part of attending church services. It was a good experience and I’m glad I did it. One reason is that is where I heard a phrase that has stuck with me for the last 20 some odd years.

“We are God’s hands and feet.”

The mention of God to some may seem completely normal and to others feel preachy. I know this from having attended AA meetings. Some people are completely comfortable talking about God as a omnipresent being that is an actual force in their daily lives. Some people think those people are lunatics. Personally, I’m not sure. I have a hard time imagining there is anything out there spending any amount of energy determining whether or not I’m hitting green lights on the way to my daughter’s horseback riding lessons or my son’s soccer team is going to win a game, but I’m not completely devoid of the conviction that there is something bigger than me, bigger than us, working at a level that we can’t comprehend.

I’ll just say this — that saying has just stuck around in my brain for my entire adult life and I’ve always found comfort in it, even though my belief in God has been all over the place.

I think the meaning behind the phrase is likely that we are meant to be God’s tools on Earth. We are supposed to do his/her work, just like our hands and feet do much of our body’s work. If I were getting quizzed by my youth pastor, that is the answer I would give as to the meaning of that phrase simply because I would want to answer the question correctly. But that explanation is not at all what I personally interpreted. And my personal interpretation is the one that has given me so much comfort over the years, so that is the one I’m going to attempt to explain.

When I think of the phrase, “We are God’s hands and feet”, I think about how different our hands and feet are. Both useful, but incredibly and fundamentally different. Related and purposeful, but most often operating independent of each other. I think about the entire body as representing the whole of humanity and that maybe I am just a tiny little muscle in the pinky of that body. That I have a very important function to the tendons and bones and muscles that I am attached to, which are attached to other tendons and muscles and bones, and we all work together to make up a part of a hand that is doing the job it is intended to do. I think that my function is to be the best little pinky muscle I can be. And when I think about my life that way, as an extreme extrapolation of being the “hands and feet of God”, then I don’t sink as far into the feeling that the world is better off without me. Because even though a pinky muscle on its own isn’t much, the little muscles that I’m attached to would be quite negatively impacted if I weren’t there any longer. And I couldn’t just be replaced by an elbow or some stomach lining. They need me. And that’s something.

For example, my mother will never have another daughter like me. In my case, she literally only has one daughter, but even if she had 10, we’d all be completely different.

It is my voice that will be the only one that ever sounds like me. And the words I say with that voice, and how I say them with my particular cadence and brand of humor, will only ever be mine. And the love that I have for her, which is absolutely equal in value to the love my brothers have for her, is unique because it is from me. My brothers can’t replace me if I am gone. My dad or their dog can’t replace me. I am my mother’s daughter and that is all there is to it.

This line of thinking has always been comforting to me because it helps me reset. I stop thinking of my contribution to the entire body of humanity, which is completely overwhelming and exhausting, and instead think of my unique role in the lives of the people who are attached directly to me.

What struck me today about that phrase is that not only is it important that I exist so I can make these unique contributions to the lives of folks close to me but that I don’t provide these contributions any differently when my hair is deeply conditioned.

Stay with me.

I realized that I am actually no more or less capable of doing the most important jobs in my life — the ones that really matter to me — like caring for my family, listening to my friends when they’re upset or working hard at my job when I am ten pounds heavier or ten pounds lighter. The most important functions I have on this earth are actually wholly unaffected by how I look while doing them.

We’re just so hard on ourselves about our image. Women in particular. We forget that the most valuable things we do, as part of this great body of humanity, have a million times more to do with doing our best than looking our best. What matters is the work we do, not what we look like while we’re working.

I think part of the reason we’ve gotten so hard on ourselves is because in the last 20 years or so, we’ve been bombarded by images of what the rest of body of humanity looks like all the time and we, as these little pinky muscles, were totally unprepared for that. The interesting body parts get all the attention and we have to see them paraded across Instagram or Bravo doing things that seem much bigger and much more glamorous than whatever it is we do. We think that we ought to strive to be the nose or the eye or the navel. We ought to exercise harder or moisturize differently. We think those things because those are the things we have control over. We don’t give much thought to the fact that the navel may have been born into a different part of the world, into a different family, with different genetics that made it uniquely suited to being a navel. The navel probably doesn’t think about that much either. The navel might forget that the vast majority of how it got to be a navel is from a giant network of coincidences and circumstances that it had no control over, and in a misguided attempt at being helpful ends up telling you that you can be a navel too if you can just change these things about yourself. And if you listen and you take it to heart, then you just might get distracted from the very important work of being a little pinky muscle.

When that happens, I imagine that all the little muscles around you are shouting “Would you please get your head out of your ass and focus on being a good pinky muscle? We could really use your full attention here.”

That’s what the world needs from us. They don’t need a bunch of wannabe navels, they need a solid pinky muscle.

We are God’s hands and feet.

We look different, we have different functions, we have different abilities. We are all uniquely built to do our jobs — big or small — to the best of our ability and we have to try, despite all these distractions, not to get drawn off course trying to be something or someone else.

My youth pastor died tragically young. He was an excellent human and did a fantastic job of caring for his family and the kids who showed up on Sunday nights to pass notes in the pews and loudly sing “Lord of the Dance”. Whatever little part of the body of humanity he was, he did it with gusto. He might not buy into my interpretation of the particular wisdom he shared with us one warm evening decades ago, but I like to think he’d appreciate that I remembered it all these years later.

A pretty significant silver lining to this pandemic, and subsequent forced slowdown of my career in favor of my children’s education, has been the time to, as my counselor friend says, “do the work”.

After over a decade in therapy, I’m finally incorporating a lot of the practices that have been espoused to me time and time again. Self-compassion, mindfulness, gratitude. And they’re helping. There is a big part of me that wishes I’d paid attention much earlier to save myself from the anguish of so many bad habits, but I’m not sure there was ever an intersection of time and wisdom in the way that there is now. My career may be suffering, but for the first time since my depression surfaced from the tar pits of my soul in my early twenties, I have hope that I am actually changing my neural pathways. Neural pathways that have been deeply honed to champion exclusively masochistic self-critiques in every situation from parenting to daughtering to partnering to grocery shopping to ordering a goddamn pizza.

As I crawled out of adolescence, my inner critic was just one of many voices directing me. I had external forces — my parents, teachers, coaches — providing guidance. But as I aged, their influence quieted and my internal monologue took center stage. It used their voices, distilled to the shrillest and darkest version, in order to command my attention and hold it, vice-like, until I acquiesced or snuffed it out.

As I navigated the freedom of young adulthood, I vacillated between embrace and rejection of the voice’s direction to mixed results. At times, rebellion led to great adventure and self-discovery, others to heartbreak and immorality. Having spent my childhood doing my best to avoid ever experiencing consequences of my actions, I progressed into my twenties unable — due first to a lack of awareness, and later to a lack of proficiency — to acknowledge my own contributions to negative outcomes and the courage to address them constructively. When I couldn’t secure validation from my partner or my parents or my bosses, I resorted to endorsement from my own toxic and addled inner critic. The more I relied on its counsel, the more powerful and frightening it became. Its condemnations seeped further and its recompenses more demanding. Weary from the constant admonishment, I drowned it in alcohol and exhausted it with over-exercise. A cycle of dizzy distraction followed by stints of captivity in a dark hole of depression developed. Rinse and repeat for years.

Then, my son.

He arrived and the hole contracted. Not slowly, but all at once. Completely evaporated. All the way to the surface I rose. I had purpose and direction. My inner critic was impressed, the external critics were elated.

Who says a baby can’t fix things?

He fixed my marriage, my relationships with friends and family, my internal brokenness. In his purity, I was made whole.

Then, his sister. My heart grew immediately to fit her perfect shape. No longer in a hole, no longer on the ground, I was on a hill. A hill that allowed me to look down on others.

I found religion. I ate local and organic. I wasn’t just acceptable, I was superior. No longer judged by myself, I could now stand on my hill and judge others. A new kind of high, a new kind of drug.

What I didn’t know was that I had not been healed. I’d simply been distracted by the glory and busyness of new motherhood. The pattern of my childhood — of avoiding conflict, tough decisions, hard conversations — to maintain appearances and elude pain had not been broken. It was etched on my insides and the births of my children merely covered it with sand. But the wind blew, like it is destined to do, and the sand drifted away and there it lay — bare and raw.

My daughter was six months old when the voice erupted, loud and cantankerous, angry at being suppressed for so long. I resumed in earnest the desperate search for validation of my every choice to defend against its now unceasing denunciations.

It could be anything. A raise, a compliment, a laugh.

Anything from anyone to say that I was good enough. That someone thought I was fun or interesting or pretty. That I wouldn’t ruin my children with my darkness. That I was desired and worthy.

Once I tasted it again, the sweetness of someone else’s acceptance of me, and the way it stuffed the critic’s mouth until its protests were muffled and weakened, I craved it more and more. I would contort myself into anything to get it. Be whoever I needed to be to please. My appetite for it disoriented me until I no longer recognized my own hunger for it and I would take any scraps that were thrown my direction.

It couldn’t last. The appetite grew too big — it consumed everything until there was nothing left to swallow.

My marriage ended. My family left disappointed. My friends left confused and divided.

There was shame, unrelenting shame.

No more validation, only condemnation. No one knows what to say when you are covered in the cancer of failure. All you can hope for is pity or avoidance.

With nothing left outside to fight against it, the inner voice became my only voice, and it said, over and over, that there was nothing left for me out there. No one needed anything this mangled and broken. The world was better off without my blackened and ruined soul. The kindest thing I could do was to just leave everyone alone — to spare them from my nauseating existence.

Back in the hole, deepest this time, covered in so much dirt. The hill a mirage, a blurry distant memory.

There was no rapid ascent out of the hole the second time. This time I was broken and armed only with my hands. In the rare moments when the voice exhausted, I started to dig, clawing out one handful at a time, shoving the soil beneath me. What I didn’t know was that there were others, standing above, digging one claw full at a time to reach me.

We met somewhere in the middle of the gulf, the sun finally touching my face again. I’d been down there so long that I didn’t look the same anymore. My body was battered and I had grown paranoid of my own mind, enraged and bewildered by that incessant inner voice. My drive to shut it up by sourcing validation in any way I could nearly ruined my life, and then, at my lowest, my voice tried to kill me.

I was angry, so angry— at myself, at the mess my life had become. At the inability to quiet the voice and also at the voice’s inability to make me listen. Someone had to be at fault and there was no one left but me. So in that hole, I separated me from me and blamed the voice.

And that’s where I’ve lived since I destroyed my old life. Bitter and combative at a part of my insides that I feel like failed me.

It is only now, since I’ve begun “the work” that I have realized that the inner voice is actually me. It is not an outside evil spirit or a manifestation of a villain from traumatic childhood experiences. It’s a twisted, neglected, overgrown and unkempt part of me. It doesn’t need to be destroyed, it needs a friend. It needs someone to acknowledge when it is wise and protective. It needs gentle correction when it devolves into petty judgement. It needs me to accept that I have failed and have been failed, that I have been hurt, and I have done the hurting.

It needs me to own my whole story, the complicated chaos of it. It needs me to really look at the hard parts of my life and face up to where I fell short, and have the character to change the thought patterns that led to the behaviors that led to the failings. It needs me to both accept and not accept the parts of me that do not function the way I want them to. It needs me to continue being considerate and thoughtful but stop short of allowing my consideration to warp back into a validation addiction.

It needs me to know that I only get one life and I don’t have to spend any more time imploring someone or something to tell me that I deserve to live it.

It needs me to do the work and accept that we are in this together. It’s not me against myself anymore, it’s us against the world.