Stan, if by any chance you’re still out there, I’ve never forgotten that particular turn of phrase. It’s just so wonderfully perfect, and often remains true to this day. For instance, the utter and RELENTLESS shitshow of setting up a photo in which I appear with my own children.

When I take a photo of JB with the boys, I often do it when they’re not looking. Or I ask them to look up from whatever they’re doing and quickly snap the photo. I don’t pose them, is my point, because posing is a fucking nightmare.

Photos of me and the kids? Almost always posed. And then this happens:

“Guys, can I — guys! GUYS! GUYS. Pay attention. Stand over here for a second so I can — GUYS!!!”

“Okay, Riley, you stand here, and Dylan, you — Dylan. DYLAN. Hello? Okay, can you — RILEY COME BACK HERE.”

“All right, I’m just going to stand behind … Riley, don’t do that with your tongue. Riley. RILEY. Okay, Dylan — Dylan?”

“Jesus, you guys. Okay, smile at Dad. Smile at Dad. Come on you guys, Dad is right there. Can you just … Riley. Your TONGUE. Put it BACK. In your MOUTH.”

“Dylan, if you don’t stop picking your nose I swear to god.”

“Okay! OKAY EVERYONE — what? Can you wait to pee for ONE SECOND?”

“One! Two! Three! SMILE! Whew. Was that really so har — what? He was what? Oh god.”

“Seriously you guys, come here. Huddle up. Look at me. Listen, I just want one photo. One photo. It shouldn’t be this difficult. Stand still and smile for one second and I swear I won’t bother you again. You can run around peeing and nose-picking for the whole rest of the day. Just one photo. Are we together on this? Are we a team? Okay high five! TEAM SHARPS!”

“RILEY YOUR TONGUE.”

“Last try. And then I hurl myself off this mountain. Last try. I’m a broken woman. You’ve broken me. Just smile at the camera. Or don’t. I don’t care any more. Life is unmanageable chaos, who was I to think otherwise. Entropy descends upon us all.”

“Dylan please open your eyes. For the LOVE.”

“You know what, I –”

*click*

“What do you mean, look at it and tell you if it’s good enough? It’s good enough. Whatever the shit is on that camera roll, it is now officially good enough. I hate everything and everyone. Let’s go.”

All that paddling, but the amazing part is when I look back on the image — even just minutes later — I only see the surface. The happiness of our outing rather than the shitty experience and imperfect results of the dumb picture session. Photos are truly a miraculous thing.

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Like this, but deeper, louder, everywhere.

We never saw it, because the woods are thick with a million green secrets. That was AWESOME, the kids shouted. I worriedly imagine freaky heartbeat-monsters descending from above to devour us in ravenous gulps; they tumble through the endless blackberry-choked paths and press eager fingers into muddy animal prints. They dive comfortably into the mystery of the trees, fearless and happy and curious about it all.

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Motivation has never come come easy for me, but here’s what’s helping me lately:

This shirt:

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to buy a loose-fit workout tank. If you’re like me and you tend to get all self-conscious about your midsection in those tight racerback shirts, these things are game-changers. I bought a black one at Old Navy and I plan to go back and stock up on every single other color they have.

This MP3 player:

I got Sony’s updated MP3-playing Walkman as a Klout perk and I figured it would be like every other Klout perk I’ve ever received: a nice mailbox distraction from the usual flotsam of bills and junk flyers, but nothing I would have bought on my own. As it turns out, I can’t stop raving about it. It’s all in one piece, and it stays put — no more fiddling with cords or adjusting earbuds during a run. The downside is that it doesn’t play nice with iTunes on my Mac, so I have to manually drag individual songs to it instead of importing playlists. Aside from that small headache, though, I absolutely love how it eliminates gear-related distractions during a workout.

These songs:

“Daybreak” by OVERWERK. Heard it on this (gorgeous, watch it fullscreen) GoPro video, love love love it.

“Monday Morning” by Melanie Fiona. I can listen to this over and over. (The AV quality on this video totally sucks, sorry about that. This version sounds a little better.)

“I Get Around” by Dragonette. Makes me feel snarly and badass.

“Don’t Leave Me (ne Me Quitte Pas)” by Regina Spektor. Boppy and happy. I probably sound SUPER awesome when I try and sing along with the French part.

“All Alone” by Fun. Best Fun song. According to me.

“Must Be the Moon” by !!! She said “love is love but a fuck is what it is.” Ah, this song is great.

Okay, your turn, if you feel like playing: what are your current workout must-haves?

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But I can’t rely on someone else to help me over the parental small-talk molehill I’ve turned into a mental mountain and baseball’s coming up and this is just the start of years of kid activities and you guys, I’m just so goddamned bad at talking with people and I don’t know why I’m like this but I am and it’s not normally a big deal but sometimes it is. Like when you’re sitting on a bench with a group of other parents and everyone is chatting except you, and it makes you start to dread going to your kid’s soccer practice as though it were a twice-weekly root canal and it’s ridiculous and it sucks.

Here is the bench. Here are the adults talking amongst themselves in a friendly manner. Not pictured: me, silent and awkward and occasionally snapping photos of Riley or sticking my nose in a book but mostly just feeling incredibly self-conscious and wishing the earth would open up and swallow me whole.

Ah, I’m so tired of being shy. I’m lonely and I have no social life and I hate feeling this way during activities that should be perfectly normal and I hate the self-defeating brainloop it causes and I hate the creeping certainty that everyone thinks I’m a standoffish asshole when the reality is that I’m pathetically eager to connect, I just can’t get past the first step.

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***

“Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom?”
“What, Dylan.”
“Eggplant comes from putting chickens in the ground, right?”
*distractedly* “Mmm-hmmm.”
*beat*
“Wait. Wait, no, that’s — uh, no. Eggplant is a vegetable.”
“But you SAID.”

***

“Mom? If a bull fought a moose who would win?”
“Um, well –”
“I THINK MOOSE.”
“Okay, you’re probably –”
“But maybe a bull.”
“Sure.”
“Mom? If a whale fought a shark who would win?”
“Oh, maybe the –
“I THINK SHARK.”

***

“Mom, is it tomorrow?”
“No, it’s today.”
“Oh, you mean it’s yesterday.”
“No! I mean, well, okay, so today is –”
“Soon it will be next week.”

***

“Mom? When I was a baby was I in your tummy?”
“Yup, you sure were.”
“Did you put me there?”
“Ah, um. Well, you grew there. Like a seed.”
“So you didn’t roll me up into a ball and squish me in there?”
“…. no.”
“Mom? When I’m in kindergarten Riley will be younger than me right?”
“No, he’ll –”
“Oh I mean older than me.”
“Right.”
“Do you like cows?”
“Cows? Well –”
“My favorite favorite favorite ice cream is chocolate, did you know that?”
“Yes, I –”
“So where did the seed come from?”

***

“Hey Mom? I never seen a leprechaun, never.”
“Right.”
“But Mom? Mom? I do know how to make a rainbow.”
“Yes.”
“You take a fish tube …”

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It took us a year, but we finally made a trip of it this weekend — and as it turns out, Wildlife Safari isn’t depressing at all. It’s actually pretty goddamned great: filled with contented-looking beasts, beautifully located in a pocket of Eden-like greenery among southern Oregon’s gorgeous rolling hills, and at $60 for the four of us, not a bad deal considering we spent at least a couple of satisfying hours there.

We stayed the night in Roseburg just to make the visit last longer, and found a place on the Umpqua to play during Saturday’s summery weather.

Everything about this weekend — the pretty drive, the fun of exploring a new town, the delight on the kids’ faces when they saw the animals, even the tumble and chaos of sharing a hotel room — was perfect. The sort of memories I wish I could flatten between the pages of a book, run my finger over them years from now and remember everything exactly as it was.

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Also soothing, maybe particularly after the sort of week that just happened, is looking around at all the other parents sitting in their own folding chairs. I don’t know, it reminds me of the sort of warm rush I’d get when I used to pick my boys up from daycare and I’d watch the other parents doing the same thing, how there was this big palpable whomp of pure love happening. Every game and practice, we adults huddle on the side of the action, alternately shivering and sweating in the capricious spring weather that thinks nothing of chasing an icy blast of rain-spattered wind with a beam of jeans-boiling sunshine, and you can practically see the heart-shaped dotted lines connecting parents’ eyes with their boy on the field. Even as the hour drags on and everyone secretly daydreams a bit about the forty billion things they’d rather be doing, we sit there and joyously yell mostly nonsensical supportive things (”Nice footwork!”) and break out into scattered, energetic applause. Like we’re watching a series of surprising and utterly delightful magic tricks.

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In comparison, Riley rides with his butt glued to the seat, his entire body held rigid. He does not quite give off an air of grim concentration, but it’s close — he enjoys riding, but he never loses himself in the sheer joy of it like Dylan does. You can see the effort it takes him to steel up his nerves before the first little jump at the track, as though he’s flinching his way into it. “Oh crap, here it comes again,” Riley’s brain seems to be saying. Meanwhile, Dylan’s brain is clearly replaying every Red Bull video he’s ever begged to watch on YouTube.

Riley is more cautious where Dylan tends to barrel forward with total abandonment. But Dylan is enormously shy, so much so that he can’t respond if a stranger says hello to him. Riley chatters to anyone who’ll listen, to the point where he sometimes reminds me of that character on Kids in the Hall: “Onions is all I eat!”

Dylan likes jigsaw puzzles, while Riley’s never lost his Lego obsession. Riley would sit saucer-eyed in front of the television all day if you’d let him, Dylan gets bored and wanders away after fifteen minutes or so. Riley loves to draw, Dylan has exactly zero use for crayons and pens.

I sometimes worry about how Dylan will do in kindergarten next fall. His ridiculously short attention span, his utter disinterest in making friends … what will it be like for him to sit in a classroom for hours at a time? Then again, I sometimes worry about sensitive, inflexible Riley, and whether he’ll be bullied or picked on.

I remember when I first learned we were having another boy, and how I felt a helpless pang of sorrow over the fact that I would never have a daughter. Part of me thought, stupidly, But I DID this already! I wanted a *different* experience!

How foolish, right? And yet five years later, I’m still somehow amazed on a daily basis that two boys raised in the same house who are only two and a half years apart can be so wildly, magnificently different from each other.

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Now, I’m gonna be honest here: “free life coaching session” sounded a lot like “free root canal” to me. As in, I’m sure it’s technically good for you but that’s what they say about kale and that stuff tastes like total bullshit so no thanks, okay?

But Erin was so nice and reassuring in our initial email conversations, I quickly found myself warming to the idea. Even when she said it would involve a couple phone calls, which freaked me out because GAH PHONE CALLS. (I know: a blogger with a self-declared phone phobia. How original.)

Anyway, here’s the deal — I’m going to tell you a little about my experience working with Erin, and I’m going to share the special discounted price she’s offering you guys. I want to be up front that this is technically what you’d call a sponsored post, but it’s really unlike anything I’ve ever done before.

The session we chose to do together is her Ready, Set, Grow! program. She describes it as “for those who want to take a close look at where they are and begin to make a plan for their future,” and it’s essentially a two-hour session that’s intended to help you prioritize your values, assess your current situation, and start building a roadmap.

That’s a crap-ton to get into two hours, right? It actually encompassed a lot more than that on my end. She started by sending over a couple documents for me to fill out, and I dithered over these FOREVER. It’s tough work to be honest about what motivates you, what’s holding you back, and what values are most important to you. It’s even tougher to share this information over the phone — but Erin was incredibly kind, gentle, and astoundingly capable of translating my occasional (frequent?) inarticulate-ness.

We had two different calls, each lasting about an hour. After our first call, I wrote to her,

Did you ever read Stephen King’s Firestarter? In the book the main character has the ability to influence people’s minds (it’s his daughter who can set fires), but when he does so there are these occasional unintended consequences where the victim ends up fixating on certain subjects which sends them into self-destructive feedback loops. He calls it an “ricochet,” I think. Anyway, it’s awful because people end up doing things like sticking their hands down dish disposals because they can’t stop thinking about holes, but my point here is that I thought of the ricochet — uh, in a POSITIVE way — when I kept thinking of certain things we discussed and your gentle suggestions.

Hm. That was a terrible comparison. My point here is that ideas have been bouncing around in my head in a good way, and I thank you for that.

Okay, so what I actually MEANT by that — jesus, I’m a dork — is that many of the things she said to me really made a lasting impact. Erin isn’t about telling you what to do, her skill lies in helping you figure things out for yourself. For instance, in one of our discussions she asked all the right questions to lead me from “I feel invisible, everything I do is impermanent, I worry that I have no impact on anything” to the realization that deep down, what I long for isn’t really recognition or even being praised, it’s feeling ACKNOWLEDGED.

Erin put it like this, “I see you and you see me.” It sounds so simple, and yet that’s exactly it. I want to connect. I want to be heard. I want to know that the things I write mean something to someone. How do I get that? By writing things that mean something to me. By digging deeper to gut out my most real voice, the one I want you to hear. Prioritizing the jobs that allow me to do that. Carving out the space to write here more often, where I can always speak from the heart and I never have to write about Justin Bieber if I don’t want to.

So that was one thing, but we talked about lots of things. About how to improve my work/family balance during these last months while Dylan’s at home with me, ways to get back on the wagon with regards to health and fitness, and some next-step actions for my writing career.

What I would tell you about working with Erin is that there is incredible value in having someone help you completely focus on yourself. I mean, when’s the last time you really did that for more than a distracted minute or two? I feel like we’re so inundated these days with Pinterest-esque life lists and advice for prettifying every superficial aspect of our existence — and in comparison, what Erin offers is a chance to roll up your sleeves, toss out the design blog bullshit, and delve into figuring out what’s really going to make you more fulfilled. Plus, she’s warm, funny, and extremely easy to talk to.

Some of the things we talked about have already made a difference in the choices I’ve made since. Accepting a super-intimidating invitation for the sake of focusing on my value of adventure and getting outside my comfort zone, for instance.

Erin charges $149 for her Ready, Set, Grow! program, and at that price I honestly think it’s a steal. However, for the first five of you that sign up between now and April 15th, Erin’s offering the service at $99. You can contact her at erin@magnoliaworkshop.com to take her up on the special price.

I truly recommend checking out what she does, and I’m enormously grateful that she reached out to me. If you have any questions at all, hit me up in the comments — or if you’d like to email me privately, you can do so at sundry@gmail.com.

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