Work

I do not know how Krista and I became friends.

I write that sentence with a great deal of trepidation  because I cannot imagine life without this hilarious, level-headed, supportive woman. But I cannot understand how we came to be friends. I can't remember meeting her for the first time, and most of our early friendship (actually, everything right up until we became roommates) only stands out in my memory as distinct moments. Driving home from dogsledding in Ely. Some night I passed in her room when she was a resident assistant. Having her in a few theology classes.

When Krista and I met one another she was, well, a Christian. A listen to Jars of Clay, go to lots of hands-in-the-air-Jesus retreats, want to be a youth minister Christian. She was also effortlessly outgoing, funny, and very, very kind. I was a bookish academic. A radical feminist with a Dorothy Day streak and a desire to upend patriarchy and hierarchy, get ordained as a female priest, be a nun, and live out my days on a Catholic Worker farm, writing and praying and loving the Lord while simultaneously racing to get excommunicated for my "radical" approach to egalitarianism in the Church.

Over Christmas, when Krista and Carliene were here, we had a good, long laugh about the women we used to be. Not a mocking look-at-how-dumb-we-were laugh, but an oh-my-God-look-at-how-far-we've-come laugh. Krista told us that when people in Boston ask her what she was like in high school and she says she was way into Jesus they all look at her a little sideways and ask the same question. "What happened?"

She laughs and gives the same answer every time. "I met my friend Kelly."

It's a funny thing, knowing that you were apparently the first tug at the secure knot of someone's faith life and ultimately led to its undoing.

I don't regret it. Not for a second.

The Krista I know now, the woman who has lived among refugees in Kenya, who has helped victims of torture find healthcare and solace and a future in the United States, who has personally gotten me through some of the hardest times in my life, is so much more interesting and loving and compassionate than the women who could quote the Catechism to me.

***

I can't stop thinking about grace. 

This is both an usual and unusual state of affairs for me. As a theology student, I was obsessed with the concepts of grace and redemption. All of my independent papers were on it in some capacity or another. I could twist any conversation around to Karl Rahner. I spent hours ruminating on Romans Chapter 3. I loved talking about grace. What it was, how we receive it, how it changes us. 

I have not, however, spent a whole hell of a lot of time since I chucked God by the wayside thinking about grace. It was too painful, too sad, too much to think that the moments in my life that I always though of as imbued with God's grace were, really, just coincidence. I stopped thinking about grace like I stopped thinking about prayer and justification and works vs. faith. 

Then over the past few weeks a few things happened that have made me pause, have made me think about grace again. I have, rather unexpectedly, made a new friend (given my shyness and general status as a curmudgeon  this in and of itself is a goddamn miracle) who is smarter than I am and pushes me to think harder, be more precise in my language and arguments. Some writers I admire started talking about grace in the way that always hit home with me. Grace that fills and fuels our daily lives, that bubbles up and gives us the strength and courage to keep on. 

***

A few weeks ago a friend in the corporate world asked my why I continue to work in nonprofit. 

I inadvertently led him into asking the question. I had mentioned an article that I read saying how most nonprofit workers who hold my job leave their nonprofit, if not the field, after eighteen months. They leave for a variety of reasons, mainly dissatisfaction with their organizations, their pay, their executive directors, etc. I mentioned that if I ever do decide to leave the world of nonprofit, it's unlikely to be any of these things. 

"What'll it be?" 

"Exhaustion." 

He then remarks that he doesn't know why I stay in the nonprofit world, particularly when my ambition and (let's face it) competitiveness would make me a natural fit for the corporate world. 

The work I do, not my job, but the real work I do on my own time is no easy thing. Working for women's access to healthcare, for reproductive rights, for justice for women and children who experience domestic abuse and sexual violence, is exhausting. It's crushing to realize that because of where I live and the profession I've chosen from myself, I still only make .76 to every dollar a man makes (even after adjustments accounting for education, experience, etc.) 

So this man's comment has stayed with me long after that conversation. It has been especially resonant this past week, during the 40th anniversary of Roe and as I'm reading statistics on child prostitution and rape and domestic violence, as I'm really fucking angry that we still haven't managed to renew VAWA. And as I've started to think to myself I can't do this anymore. I can't care this much, keep this level of passion going. I can't be this angry all the time. I can't keep fighting. After ten years, I don't know if I have it in me anymore. 

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I thought about the women Krista and I used to be. How blithely certain we both were of our faith, our work, and our place in the world. How much we've both grown and changed in knowing one another. And I thought quite a bit about my life as a Catholic, as a theologian, as a feminist. About grace and how maybe it isn't only the province of theologians and people of faith. 

I realized that this work I do, all of these causes that make me mad as hell, frustrated, crazy, all of the hours I spend researching depressing statistics, writing grants and appeals and letters to the editor, all of my downtime that I spend trying to educate people about contraceptives and wage gaps and the number of times a woman will return to an abusive relationship and why, all of this work is my love letter to a God in whom I do not, and cannot believe. 

(For the record, I recognize the cognitive dissonance that comes with an atheist ex-Catholic feminist saying her work for reproductive rights is a love letter to God.)

I am not a person of faith. At this point, it would literally take divine intervention to make me Christian again. But not being a Christian does not mean that I've stopped yearning for and and being tormented by the desire for faith. In the absence of that faith, the best I seem able to offer is the work that I'm doing here and now.  It's rather like saying "Hello, God, I know you're not there. But I love the idea of you so much that I'm going to devote my life to trying to make this hopelessly fucked up world a better, more just, sustainable place." 

Martin Luther must be rolling over in his grave. 

Sleepwalker

I would pay someone, hourly, to crawl into bed with me at night.

This is one of the first thoughts that pops into my head this morning at 6:06, which is about an hour and a half before my alarm is supposed to go off. I've been insomniac for a few months now, with one or two good nights of sleep to keep me from going completely mad. But with the exception of when I was staying with my folks in Wisconsin, I've barely had a full, consistent eight hours of sleep a night since . . . early November? 

Sleep issues are my leitmotif. I've been an insomniac since childhood, and a sleepwalker for much of my life. I have frequent, intense nightmares from which I wake screaming. 

Sorry upstairs neighbors. Also, I know we live in Minnesota and consequently do not ask about the private lives of our neighbors but, really? Screaming in the middle of the night doesn't deserve a "Hey, are you all right?"

Over the years, I've learned the things that trigger sleeplessness or walking, but the older I get the more I feel like I'm trying to exercise control over a part of my life that makes very little sense. I know that stress triggers sleepwalking, but despite running fifteen miles a week, having an active spiritual life, and being surrounded by people who loved me, I still had a sleepwalking incident in graduate school that starred me as the Grand Empress of Prussia and a fleet of attacking trebuchets. I know that going to sleep requires a ritual and that having the computer on in the bedroom, checking your cell phone before bed, and using your bedroom for anything except sleep or sex interferes with your ability to fall asleep. But despite having banished all these things from my bedroom, I still can't sleep. 

Last week I wrote about the lack of physical affection in my life and how that takes a number of forms. There are a couple that trouble me more than others namely the lack of hugs, (seriously, North Country) and sleeping alone. 

A few weeks ago I attended a wedding with the gang from Minneapolis. The Sunday after the wedding we were all hanging out in the living room of the cabin where we were staying, lounging in our pajamas, reading, talking about comic books and Battlestar Galactica vs Firefly. As people slowly absorbed caffeine  we started talking about how everyone slept the night before and room temperatures. Then the conversation took a funny turn and suddenly every partnered woman in the room (which was all but two of us) started talking about how her boyfriend had a core temperature that rivaled Mount Vesuvius on Volcano Day.  

I wear wool socks and gloves to sleep. There are seven blankets on my bed. Most nights, I crawl into bed with a heating pad. This is my general state of affairs from October until May. During the summer, I still keep my quilt on my bed. As a result, I couldn't see the downside of having a personal space heater crawl into bed with me. Then the women present (and a few of the men this time) started talking about how their bedtime compatriots like to fall asleep cuddling and suddenly I was on board. Snuggle up on the couch and watch TNG or read with your partner? Absolutely. Yes. Where can I sign up? Try and spoon me while I'm making my nightly pleas to Morpheus for a quick drop into dream? I'll submit, but I'll also hate you, quietly. Mainly because I'm restless when I'm attempting to fall asleep and if you want to cuddle I will feel (inevitably) that I have to stay in one position all night and then I really won't sleep. 

I am really good at a lot of things. Baking cakes. Impressing funders. Raising money. Consistently reading over forty books a year. Quoting The Great Gatsby. Salvaging recipes that should be all but lost. Intellectual bare-knuckle boxing.To name a few. But I am unequivocally terrible at vulnerability in my real life. Before I continue, I acknowledge a certain amount of vulnerability inherent in, well, blogging. However, the things I write about here are things I have trouble discussing in real life unless I've recently taken OTC cough syrup or am with one of my college friends. 

Sleep, when it comes, is the one place where I not only can be but have to be vulnerable. I'm not a pretty sleeper. It's a fight that I have almost every night, and when I finally do drop off it's, well, gruesome. I have a hard time breathing so apparently I either snore or sleep with my mouth open. I drool on everything. I talk and walk in my sleep. My pajamas are the most utilitarian, uninviting things in the world (I mean, wool socks.) I have bad or embarrassing dreams and they're audible. 

Perversely enough, it's these weird, kind of gross realities of who I am that make me long to sleep next to someone, to find someone with whom I can truly let down my guard and be my sleepy, insomniac, sleepwalker self. 

Touchy

Once, when a friend of mine was an hour late for brunch, the first words out of her mouth were: "I'm so sorry! I know you are (insert Meyers-Briggs Personality type here.)" She couldn't see me because I was at the stove attempting to resuscitate a dried-out quiche, but I rolled my eyes so hard I was afraid they would stick.

"I saw that." She said from behind my back.

We laughed and sat down for a cup of coffee.

I've never put much stock in personality tests. At best, I think they confirm what most of us already know about ourselves. At worst, I think they become excuses for our bad behaviors. This particular friend and many of my graduate school friends, now that I think about it, love personality tests. I mean, will discuss their results for hours, talk about the ways to best manage different personality types, how our group is strongly skewed toward the "Woos." I usually interject some smartass comment about what do personality tests say about people who think personality tests are a load of bullshit?

"That you are strongly cognitive and evidence based. Also, you're kind of a bitch."

As I said, confirming what we already know about ourselves.

***

I'm really squicked out by strangers touching me. 

There are a lot of reasons for it, some having to do with being an obsessive-compulsive, some are leftover hang-ups from a Catholic upbringing, some are bad relationship remnants. Whatever the reason, I really, really, really dislike when strangers touch me. Handshakes are fine, but please don't fly into my Soviet Airspace otherwise.

However, when I'm among people I love and trust? All bets are off. There's no such thing as too much touching, sitting too closely on the couch, getting hugged too often. If I walk past one of my friends, I will pat them on the back. I will hug them when I show up to a party, when I leave, and probably twice in-between. I sleep best when I'm in bed with someone else and can reach out and put a hand on their arm to reassure myself that they're there. 

In the greatest karmic tragedy of my life, I've had breathing-while-sleeping issues since I was five and am apparently the worst possible bedtime companion. 

Back to the point, touch. My tendency to be innocently physically affectionate with friends has led to some, um, miscommunications. I've never been particularly good at navigating that weird close friendship vs relationship line, and I think a part of the confusion stems from the fact that I will practically sit on your lap on the couch. My personality-profile type friends tell me that this is because touch is my "love language" and has some profound insight into my metaphysical self and how I fall in love and where I've made mistakes in the past and better understanding my love language will enable me not to make those same mistakes in the future. 

Personally, I think it says less about my metaphysical self (I mean, honestly) and more about the fact that I was raised in a shame-based religious tradition with a bunch of repressed Irish Catholics. 

I suppose the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 

***

I cannot say this with enough emphasis. Adult friendships are strange. 

It's entirely possible that I say this because at the moment, my friendships are hopelessly cocked up by the fact that many of my close friends live elsewhere. When I'm getting ready to go on a date, I can no longer run down the hall to borrow a straightening iron or run over to see Krista to have her talk me down off the oh-my-god-I'm-going-to-throw-up-all-over-this-guy's-shoes first date panic.

If you haven't had that feeling you should probably just quit reading this blog.

My friendships now are strange because they're based primarily on email, chat, or Facebook. There's a part of me that loves these methods of communcation. I've always been far more comfortable writing my ideas down before I say them aloud. It gives me a chance to consider my word usage, how the other person will respond, and my arguments. And, let's be honest. Anyone who has had the misfortune to allow me an opening to talk about Enceladus or sea turtles in a conversation can attest to the inarticulate mess that I become when things about which I am passionate come up. So the text-based friendships are a way for me to be a slightly more articulate mess about the subjects that make me jump-up-and-down-in-my-chair excited. 

While I love textual methods of communication, I worry that I'm losing my ability to carry on a conversation with people who don't know Kelly shorthand. I am so intrinsically awkward on the phone that I still horrify my friend Andy. I'm actually concerned that when I try to have a normal conversation with someone who doesn't already know me, and who hasn't already known me for years, I'm going to shut down completely. I'll just sit there and stare, silently or ask for a pen and paper and scratch out the conversation like I'm deaf/mute. As I've blogged about before, when I meet people for the first time I'm already trying hard not to shut down entirely. Now I'm conducting the majority of my relationships through the internet, this has to end well. 

Oh Christ. That is literally the saddest sentence I've ever written. 

Of course, the other downfall to friendships conducting at a distance is what I've already set you up to think about. 

Physical intimacy has dropped to almost nothing. 

And to be clear here, I am emphatically not talking about sex. That's a whole different blog entry that I will never post. What I'm talking about is, quite simply, the lack of physical closeness I have to people here in the North Country. I really didn't think that anyone could be more repressed than my aforementioned  Irish-Catholic family, but damn, Scandinavians have them beat. I don't hug my friends here. Partially, I think, because most of them are friends from work and hugging your coworkers is objectively weird. But even taking that into consideration, the people I know here are just not physically affectionate in the way I'm used to being physically affectionate.

I didn't realize how much this was impacting me until I went in and had a massage a few months ago. I have a love/hate relationship with massages. I mean, they feel wonderful, but I have the aforementioned squick factor when it comes to having someone I don't know touch me. In graduate school I solved this by what my shrink calls exposure therapy and just kept going to the same massage therapist until I got used to her. Up here, it came down to necessity. I had been sleeping oddly--really twisted up and pinching a number of nerves until my back was a mass of knotted, uncomfortable muscles--and I needed to do something. I mentioned my squickiness to the massage therapist and said that it usually makes me really ticklish, and if I started squirming it was unintentional, and I would say if something was painful or uncomfortable. 

About ten minutes into a fifty minute massage, something happened that has literally never happened to me before. 

I started sobbing. 

And by sobbing, I don't mean mean getting a little teary. I mean, full-on-I'm-watching-Atonement-after-having-not-slept-for-four-days sobbing. With those terrible, racking inhales and a runny nose and general gruesomeness. 

Have I mentioned I'm not one of those girls who looks cute when she cries? Do they even exist? I call patriarchal mythos.

To my massage therapist's credit, she didn't seem terribly phased. She paused, asked if I was all right, gave me a tissue and continued.

I'm not great at admitting when I was wrong, and it took me months to acknowledge that while I still don't buy into the meta-personality bullshit, my Meyers-Briggs loving friend may have a point. When we're not being loved and cared for in the ways we want--no, need--to be loved and cared for, it feels an awful lot like not being loved at all.

Black Hole

I'm in my early twenties, sitting in my Literary Criticism class with one of my favorite professors. I've spent the first part of the class discussing Kate Millet's Sexual Politics. I'm pretty fired up, as I always am when we're discussing gender, sex, politics, and writing. Somehow the conversation takes a turn toward the movie The Notebook, which another student recently recommended (idiotically) to our feminist firecracker of a professor. When we start discussing the movie, the professor gets really wound up and eventually shouts, SHOUTS at us:

"Come on you guys! This is like dumping laudanum on your ice cream!"

The class dissolves into silence and then raucous laughter. Everyone picks up their pens and scribbles the quote down in the margins of their texts. We collect ourselves and resume the thread of the conversation.

I've never forgotten that professor's description of romantic comedies, partly because it's hilarious and partly because it's so apt.

***

"So, what does Mr. Right look like?" 

My therapist and I have been talking at length about loneliness and isolation before she asks the question. I, still incapable of not being a smartass, answer:

"Ryan Gosling." 

We sit quietly for a minute and she rolls her eyes at me, which is my cue to stop being flippant. 

"Smart. Preferably a little smarter than I am or smarter in a different way so I don't get lazy. Well-read." I pause. "Articulate and equally ambitious. Funny and interested in science-fiction and board games and going for walks after dinner."

We talk a little more about what I expect out of my romantic partners and whether or not I'll be able to find someone in a city as small as the one I'm living in currently (short answer, no.) We finish our session and I put in my headphones and turn up my coat collar for the walk home. 

As I'm walking I think about what I held back in that session. After all, it wouldn't be me unless I refused to disclose some tiny part of what I was thinking. In this case it was that I want the proverbial laudanum my ice cream.

Not all of me and not all the time. Most of the time, I want exactly what I told my therapist I want: an intellectually stimulating, emotionally and sexually satisfying man in my life. Who likes jazz. And science-fiction. But there's this tiny part of me, a part that often goes unacknowledged, who wants to be carried away. 

Let's be honest, that Kelly is kind of a dope. Inclined to pop-sentimentality and gooey love songs, romance novels and daydreaming, she's a real drag to be around. She starts nattering on about surprise trips to Paris with her hypothetical boyfriend. She sighs, audibly, during parts of Pride and Prejudice she's seen/read so many times she can recite them from memory. 

Thankfully, that Kelly doesn't have a whole lot of resiliency. She can usually be dealt with by putting on a Bessie Smith album. 

***

I feel like I'm letting the home team down lately. 

After a lot of hard work, my career feels like it's finally going in the direction I want. I have incredible friends. My OCD is slowly coming under control. I've discovered in the past few months that I'm a pretty tough person. I have all of these things heading in exactly the direction I want them to be heading. I'm really proud of the challenges I've faced, the risks I've taken, the things I've achieved.  By all accounts I should be happy. 

No, it's not that I'm unhappy. I'm . . . wistful, maybe. A little too inclined to go back and read old love letters and think about what old boyfriends are doing now. A little too teary at weddings. Feeling a touch too much like I want to watch Bridget Jones's Diary. 

It's the wistfulness that I find troubling, the fact that I feel like something is missing from my life because ohmygodhowfuckingclichedcanyouget? I might as well put on a pair of yoga pants and eat an entire pint of ice cream. Covered in laudanum. 

It's my hangup, of course. But from the conversations I've had, it seems like it's the hangup a lot of smart, successful, single women have. It's as though we've all acknowledged that we're bright, capable, for-the-most-part together ladies and that's what we project to our families, friends, coworkers, whomever. And that's great, because that's who we are. Yet at the same time, we all seem to have made the decision that the bright, capable, for-the-most-part together ladies are the only aspects of ourselves we're allowed to show the world. Ever. We've bought into the bullshit that in order to be successful and respected we can't expose these small parts of ourselves that need to be loved and cared for to other people. Because the second you say "Yes, I'd like to be dating someone" or "Yes, living alone can be really lonely" what you're really saying, or what people perceive you as saying is "Oh my God. I need a boyfriend six weeks ago and I'm going to settle for the first guy who comes along because I'm lonely and desperate for companionship." 

Suddenly, instead of being the woman who's single by choice or inclination you're the friend who's single because she's a huge swirling vortex of neediness. A relationship black hole and any guy who gets too close is going to experience emotional and mental spaghettification. 

This, of course, isn't the reality. Or rather, it's not the reality of who all of us are as people. It's the reality that's been put forth in those laudanum-on-your-ice cream movies. And while none  few of the women I know who admit to occasionally feeling lonely or isolated or who just want to be dating someone are actually at emotional black hole, I think we all fear being perceived as it.

 As a side note, I wonder if men feel the same way, or if this is just the gift that entertainment has given women.

Back to my point. It's this emotional clusterfuck that has me feeling like I'm letting down the feminist side of things. The part of me that wants to be swept up, swept away, the part of me that was raised on princess movies and who still reads romance novels is slowly becoming more resilient, less inclined to be silenced by a blues record. That Kelly is not a bad person. Sure, she's a little dopey, a little dreamy, but she's also a hell of a lot more sincere and less jaded and less angry. There's nothing anti-feminist about wanting to fall in love in that breath-taking, heart-stopping, annoying way in which I like to fall in love. Just like there's nothing inherently feminist in listening to Graveyard Blues.

Pass the ice cream. 

Wild & Young

"I don't know, Kel." My father and I are having our one serious conversation a year that isn't about work or John Axford's ERA.

It's a few days before Christmas, the one time of year where my father and I can have serious conversations without fighting. Every year we go out Christmas shopping for my mom together. It's one of my favorite holiday traditions, partly because my father loves Christmas. Something about the season makes it so that this trip, this one time out of the year, we can actually talk to one another. We've been shopping for his Christmas presents for Mom together ever since I was a little girl, and I've never told him, but it's the best Christmas gift I get.

This year we're talking about relationships and marriage. I tell him one of the best things about growing up with them as parents has been that my brothers and I have felt very little pressure to grow up in the conventional settle-down-have-kids-and-buy-a-house kind of way. Their attitude made it possible for me to go to school out of state, live in China, settle down here in Minnesota, get a graduate degree, move around often, and live a life of my own choosing.

He;s thoughtful "I met your mother at 24." He pauses and says to himself "I think she saved my life."

My father, particularly in his early years, is an enigma. I've heard bits and pieces of his early life, a little about how he met Mom, and snippets of stories about aunts and uncles here and there. I know that he was laid off from his job in his early twenties and lived on a beach in Belize for a few months. He would go down to the Kentucky Derby as a road trip with his friends every a year for many years. He was wild and young and making what appear to him retrospectively to be bad decisions and somehow my mother fell into his life.

She was no angel herself. A disco queen with an affinity for shoes, nail polish, and big hair she made her own youthful, rash decisions. But somehow the pair of them clicked and settled down and built a life together. I would have thought that after over thirty years of marriage, they would know all there is to know about one another. I've wondered a few times whether or not they've ever grown tired of one another's jokes and stories over the course of their marriage, if they've ever longed for the thrill that comes when you meet someone new. A few years ago Mom said something to me I've never forgotten.

"Your father," she said, looking up from her knitting, "is a very different person than the man I fell in love with."

I'm a little nervous about where this conversation is going. My mother is known for weird, slightly embarrassing non sequiturs, for instance, leaning over in the middle of Mass to ask when you last moved your bowels.

She continues, "It's like getting to fall in love with him all over again."

***

I'm driving back from Minneapolis, feeling more than a little wistful. I've spent the past three days in the company of the people I love tremendously, the people I refer to as my Minnesota family. It's always hard to leave them behind, but today on my friend Nick's birthday, a few days after he and Victoria announced their engagement, it's really difficult. I'm a weird mix of happy and sad, and I can't quite identify why I'm feeling the way I am. It's a good distance from Minneapolis to the North Country, and during the winter, night comes on quickly. By the time I start getting into town, the winter light is fading rapidly.

And it happens.

There have, for me, always been songs that are right for whatever period of my life. In high school, it was any song by the band Thursday. In college "Nobody Knows Me," by the Weepies. Graduate school was, hands down, the song "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show. Whenever those songs came on the radio, I had to listen to them all the way to the end. For whatever reason, whether teenage angst or good memories associated with them, the songs were (and still are) just right for that time in my life.

Anyway, I'm coming down the hill into my adoptive city when the song for this part of my life comes on the radio. And I realize why I have this funny wistful feeling. Regardless of what happens in the next few years, I think that this is going to be the part of my life that I always look back on with a certain fondness. Realistically, the last couple years have been challenging. God knows I've blogged enough about those challenges. But this is also the first time I can remember by life being wholly and completely my own. While I have obvious responsibilities (bills, family, work) those responsibilities are relatively minimal. I've spent the past year and a half without having to do homework or look after children or worry about whether or not my boyfriend is going to be pissed about the dishes in the sink.

I say this with utter sincerity (all the while feeling a bit hokey.) I feel like right now anything is possible. I could write a best-selling memoir and become a famous writer. Go back to school and become a noted astrophysicist. Close a million dollar gift. Make a difference in the lives of women and children. And those aspirations are good ones, they're ones I feel like I can be proud of, but even they don't encompass the whole of what I've trying to talk about.

I feel like I finally understand the gift of youth. That the dance parties we have in Victoria and Nick's basement, the long nights spent debating politics and religion over many glasses of wine, the cigars smoked while talking about art and love and life, these are all things that are possible in this way only right now, only because we're young. Of course they'll happen later in life too. One cannot surround oneself with interesting, intelligent, engaged people and expect them to become less so just because they get married, buy houses, have children. But whether it's the new year or number of engagements that have happened recently or confronting the mortality of someone I love, these recent months feel blessed in a way I neither anticipated nor recognized until now. It's as though something clicked in the past year or so and I've finally given myself permission to commit all of those youthful indiscretions I feel like I've missed.

***

Since their children have moved out of the house, Mom and Daddy have taken some amazing trips. Somewhere around their 25th wedding anniversary, my father bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and my parents have taken to taking cross-country motorcycle trips to listen to blues, eat BBQ, and generally act like young adults. They called me once at 2 am after a Springsteen concert, waking me up with the screaming and noise of motorcycles in the background. They are as lovey-dovey as a pair teenagers, which is simultaneously sweet and gross. 

I wonder what my parents would have thought of one another if Daddy hadn't lived like a drifter for a few months, if Mom had gone out a little less. It would be reductionist to say that they wouldn't have fallen in love and I wouldn't have been born and wocca wocca wocca. But I can't help but wonder if my mother would have asserted so firmly that she has continued falling in love with my father throughout the years if he hadn't started out a much different person than the man he's become. 

The gift my parents have started giving me as I've gotten older is more profound than they'll ever realize. The stories of their youthful indiscretions, of the mistakes they made, of the chances they took are a revelation. These stories are, whether they realize it or not, reinforcing that while my own story, my own youthful indiscretions may not lead to finding my one true love or settling anywhere close to their home, they're worth experiencing regardless. 

And they're teaching me that even when you get older, even when you've been in a committed relationship for 30+ years, have raised children, struggled through adulthood, and do all of the things that I dread, perhaps you still don't have to give up those memories of when you were wild and young.

Food

I'm munching on some dried apples, trying to take the edge off of my appetite while my andouille sausage and spinach stuffed squash bakes away in the oven. I'm making do, making up an recipe with the discrete objects I still have in the freezer/on the kitchen counter from before I went on vacation a week ago. Except the dried apples. Those are my answer to kettle chips, the junk food Kryptonite to my Superman.

I love food. 

My enthusiasm for food and cooking is reflected in my Christmas gifts from the past couple years. Many of them come from Sur la Table, a store I could spend an entire afternoon in happily. There are candy making spoons, tart pans, fancy cake pans, new pots, a marble pastry board, a Kitchenaid, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking (thanks, Mom!)

I love cooking. I love having other people cook for me. I love walking into someone's house in a sundress in late August with a lattice-top peach pie. I love showing my love and appreciation for someone by inviting them into my kitchen when I don my damask apron, crank up Ella Fitzgerald, and make onion soup and coq au vin to make you weep. 

I love eating what other people cook for me. Laughing out loud when I  find out that the impossibly tender and flavorful Dijon chicken and asparagus I'm eating was cooked in the microwave. Tasting a family recipe that someone learned to cook at the elbow of a loved one. Seeing a new cook execute a tricky recipe for the first time.

I love cooking with other cooks and listening to their stories. How the crepe pan belonged to someone's mother and they used to get crepes on Bastille Day. How a meal brought a couple together. How one cook blew up at another and dumped a pan full of olive oil into his soup. 

I love food. 

I fear food. 

I fear food in the way that only a girl who weighs over 110 pounds and has shopped at the Uptown H&M can fear food. 

I worry about the calories in the cream and sugar I add to my afternoon cup of tea. I can't eat a cookie without counting up the calories in my head. Sometimes I have popcorn for dinner because it's objectively awesome and sometimes I have popcorn for dinner because I had a rich or heavy lunch or a late afternoon candy bar. I rarely keep things like kettle chips or ice cream in the house. The least healthy thing you will find here is a bag of popcorn that needs to be popped on the stove (because then I have to decide if I really want it) and hot chocolate that I keep to curb my sweet tooth.  

In quite possibly the worst or best decision I've ever made, I now keep my scale in my kitchen. I weigh myself every single day. When I'm thinking about after-dinner ice cream, I have to walk right past the scale before I can get to the freezer. Possibly unbalanced? Yes. Best weight-maintenance decision I've ever had? Absofuckinglutely.

A few months ago I decided that I was going to start "writing dangerously." The decision was more or less concurrent with my decision to go into therapy and the realization that maybe never telling anyone what was going on in my head was a bad idea. As a result, many of these recent posts have been more confessional than I ever intended for this blog. It's been a complicated process. A) I'm naturally a taciturn person B) I'm worried that my writing is, as a result of dealing with all these feelings, going down the shitter. C) This process has been therapeutic in a way I'll never be able to describe. D) I don't know if I want my writing to be my therapy process.

I'm inclined to these kinds of false dichotomies in my thinking. I can write about my feelings or I can bee a good writer. I can eat this cookie and still have dinner and be a fatty for the rest of my life or I can skip two meals today because I had an afternoon cookie. I can be successful in all aspects of my life by projecting the supremely confident, funny, smart girl that I am 70% of the time or I can admit that I'm sometimes a shrieking void of insecurity and doubt and will die old and alone, without even the cliched cats because I'm allergic to everything fluffy and adorable.

My relationship with food is probably the best (and worst) illustration of this crazy schizophrenic thinking to which I've suddenly become inclined. I would have never noticed it if my shrink hadn't suggested that I track my panic attacks and see what the triggers were. With the exception of all the worries about my loved one's health and the attendant panic that's occurring there, every single panic attack I've had has occurred after I eat.

What. The Actual  Fuck. How did I get to a point in my life where doing something that I used to enjoy, something that is, I don't know, NECESSARY TO CONTINUE LIVING, became something that I've so pathologized that I cannot do it without feeling like I may be dying when I finish? Might this indicate that it may be time to take the scale out of the kitchen? On a bigger level, to quit with the nutty dichotomies in my thinking?

Absofuckinglutely. 

All of You

I am the black sheep of one side of my family.

I'm in my late twenties and unmarried. I don't have kids. I seem to be allergic to serious relationships. When I was talking to a family member about my recent whirl-wind trip to New Orleans I said that I had never been so grateful to be unattached, childless, and without a pet in my entire life.

She rolled her eyes. I gracefully changed the subject to her grandchildren.

In a similar conversation with my younger brother and father I said, a little flippantly, "I can barely even balance my own checkbook, what the hell would I want a boyfriend for?"

My family doesn't miss a beat. "To balance your checkbook."

"My hypothetical family," I reply, "is going to be a two bank account kind of a household."

They roll their eyes. I gracefully change the subject to baseball.

Let's be honest. I've got some relationship hurdles to clear. I'm a recovering Catholic with all the attendant hangups that come with being a recovering repressed Catholic. I'm convinced that anyone who comes home with me that I haven't known for a billion years is secretly a serial killer. I talk about space constantly. My younger brother gave me a USS Enterprise Christmas ornament and I almost cried out of sheer happiness. I can be the worst frickin' culture snob. I sing constantly and completely out of key.

Charming, huh?

Additionally, I've never met a married couple and thought to myself "Yes! That is a totally stable and sane relationship. I WANT THAT RIGHT NOW AND FOREVER." I say this with all due respect to my parents and many of the lovely married couples I've met. Their relationships, while they may be stable or sane or perhaps both, are not what I have in mind for relationships I want to be committed to for the rest of my life.

In addition to the aforementioned problems (as if those weren't enough) I identified another, um, hurdle over the past couple weeks. While I was with my social worker friends last week, I brought up a question that appeared when I registered for online dating. The question was, essentially, "your partner has a minimum wage job and no ambition to ever have a higher paying/more prestigious/world-changing position. Would this bother you?" My answer, shockingly, was "Totally unacceptable."

Some of my friends have really run me through the wringer over this one, indicating that someone's work doesn't necessarily have to do with their ambition and they might be interesting and blah blah blah. All right, I'm not so shallow that I want my hypothetical boyfriend to make tons of money at a soul-crushing job just for the sake of money and power. But I want them to have work that they find interesting and meaningful and, quite frankly, that I can be proud of them for doing.

I asked the question to my social worker friends and praise be to the gods above, they agreed with me. That wasn't entirely unexpected, but it's nice to have independent verification that you aren't a vicious harpy because you expect your signif to be ambitious. My friend Carliene put it best. Women like us are running at top speed most of the time. If you can't have someone who can keep up, you might as well be speaking different languages.

I've spent my entire life as a skeptic of the "one true love" or "love at first sight" kinds of stories. Partially, I suspect, because my parents are utterly forthcoming about how they both kept dating other people after they met. Partially because I'm just a skeptic. I mean, one true loves and love a first sights make for great music and books (Ugh. The Night Circus. *pfffffffffffffft*) but in real life? And if those things aren't real, what's the point in mingling lifestyles and credit scores and DNA?

***

I'm the Grinch of weddings.

Don't get me wrong. I love wedding receptions, provided the music is danceable or I know most of the people in attendance. But that doesn't keep me from mulling over divorce rates while I'm sitting through a Roman Catholic wedding mass or watching the first couple dance to some terrible Tim McGraw song (honestly, people, Ella Fitzgerald has some beautiful love songs.) It sounds and is horrible, but I can't help but think about all of the weddings I've been to where the bride and groom are clearly not suited to one another and wasted their life savings on a huge, expensive, crazy party that they'll look back on and regret.

For the record, it's not every wedding that has me contemplating divorce attorney's rates and how much your credit score drops when you do divorce. It's just some and the thoughts come to mind completely unbidden.

You know what? I'm going to stop justifying this. Just don't invite me to your wedding.

***

A few years ago a friend of mine called to announce that she was engaged.

I started crying over the phone.

I was crying out of happiness.

I love this woman. I love her husband. I love them both so much it makes my heart hurt. Their wedding was one of the happiest, most joy and grace-filled experiences of my life. When my friends get together and we talk about the best wedding we've ever been to, we roundly agree on this one. It was incredible because of the people getting married and the obvious love that they have for one another. But it was equally incredible because of the generosity and love they showed for their friends and family and their friends and family showed for them.

For many years this was an atypical wedding for me. Many of the "celebrations" I attended included bridal freakouts, family drama on the dance floor, weird wedding party dynamics, etc ad nauseam. However, as my Minnesota family--the friends with whom I'm closest and love the most--are slowly getting engaged and planning their weddings, I'm discovering that those weddings, the dramatic, overblown, overly expensive affairs, are the exceptions. The other weddings, the ones that are full of love and respect and joy are becoming (thankfully) more common.

Oddly enough, the more of these weddings that I attend, the more convinced I become that love at first sight and one true love don't actually exist. Or perhaps they do, but they look a lot different than I always imagined. Instead of shared bank accounts and, I don't know, saving one another from huge-unconquerable-on-your-own problems, it's separate banks accounts and sixty hour work weeks and still taking a lot of meaning from your job. But also, curling up together in front of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and learning, day by day, that the one you love is not, in fact, going to kill you in your sleep.

At least, that's what I'm hoping it is.