Begin Again

It’s that time again!  Later this week, we will ring in a new year.  For some, it’s an opportunity to reflect on the year prior.  For others, it’s a time to set goals for the year ahead.  For still others, it’s simply an opportunity to get plastered and behave badly into the wee hours of the morn.  (As if one needs a special occasion for that…)

For me this particular year, the transition feels more significant than it has in the past.  2014 was a doozy for me.  I hate to use that damn cliche rollercoaster metaphor, but that’s all I’ve got.  The ups were great.  The downs left my head spinning and my stomach in knots.

I am so very ready for a new year, a new beginning.

As we count down, here’s a list of random things I’ve learned in 2014:

• Divorce sucks.  It’s the emotional equivalent of being put feet-first through a meat grinder.  Yet if you remember that stuff is just stuff, money comes and goes, and heartache can’t be alleviated by a court of law, you just might emerge from the nightmare stronger and wiser.  Grateful for what was.  Hopeful about what is yet to come.
• Opposites attract.  But long-term, common ground is a must.  Simple.  True.
• Honest conversation is also a must.  If you can’t speak your heart to someone, don’t give your heart to them.
• Some people actually enjoy being miserable.  The more you try to cheer them up, the more you tick them off.  Let them wallow.  Just don’t get sucked into their abyss.
• Parenthood is for life.  I did the happy dance when The Boy graduated high school, turned 18, and got a college scholarship.  Then he chose an entirely different path, and I realized that I will always feel a bit like I did on his first day of kindergarten: a little hopeful, a little worried, a little wistful, and a whole lotta proud.
• Yoda was right: do or do not; there is no try.
• 40 is the new 30.  So is 41.
• Needing glasses isn’t half bad.  They can be a fun fashion accessory.  Like shoes!  (But, you know, for your face.  So…yeah.)
• You’re never too old to do new things and improve your life.
• Online dating is a form of torture.  We should use it to wipe out terrorism.
• Wine and cheese with friends is good.  Wine and cheese alone at 11 p.m. while listening to Dido and looking through old photographs is a recipe for disaster.
• There’s no therapy quite like working up a good sweat out in nature.  Except maybe actual therapy with a counselor who knows what they’re doing.  I’m grateful for both.
• Speaking of gratitude, it works.  Count your blessings and watch them multiply.  Seriously.
• Helping others is a great way out of a self-pity party.
• Sassy boots and red lipstick also don’t hurt.
• Animals are way more zen than most people.  Want to know how to be a better person?  Watch a dog.
• Or watch my friend Veronica.  I swear she’s a dog in a human body (and I mean that as the ultimate compliment).  Always loving, always enthusiastic, always giving.  You know what she’s doing this week?  Donating a kidney to her cousin.  For reals.  I want to be her when I grow up.
• Good friends can get you through anything.  And I am blessed with really, really good friends, old and new.
• Some people, though?  Some people are just assholes.  You can work really hard to find the redeeming qualities in everyone, but some people are simply as deep as a puddle, as introspective as pond scum, and as mean as a snake.  You know what you do with these people?  Stay far, far away from them.
• Or turn them into a despicable character in a novel and then use the plot to torment them.  I mean, I would never do such a thing.  But you could. 
• Never let the assholes define your world view.  They’re in the minority.  Truly.
• Never lose your sense of humor.
• Magic happens all the time.  Expect it.

With gratitude for all who helped me through a difficult 2014, and with wishes for lots of good things and new adventures - for all of us - in 2015!

www.kcwilder50ways.com

Happy

The Boy is home from college.  This is as it should be, since the semester has ended and the holidays are upon us.

What isn’t as it should be?

He’s not going back.

He informed me of his decision just a few weeks ago.  “I’m not sure what my path is,” he told me, “but I’m sure this isn’t it.”

This isn’t it?

This path I’d worked my tail off for eighteen years to afford him - he was just going to meander off it after one semester?  Abandon my hopes and dreams for him?  Turn me into some statistic about how single mothers fail their kids?

Because it was all about me, right?

I told him I felt he was making a mistake, that he ought to just tough it out through the spring semester and see if he felt differently.  But I also silently owned up to the fact that this was opening old wounds for me, and I was going to have to work to keep from imposing my issues on him.

See, I never finished college.  The full story is one for a book.  The Reader’s Digest version is this: I was unhappy at one school, and when I found myself in a downward spiral of Girl, Interrupted proportions, I decided transferring to another school would be the answer to my problems.  Then I decided to defer my enrollment and work for a while.  One year became two, two became three.  I found myself married and pregnant and divorced (more or less in that order).  I chipped away at my degree over the years, but as a single mom working full time and attending night school, I had more than a few moments where I wanted to travel through time and throttle my eighteen-year-old self.

Which, I suppose, is why I wanted to throttle my kid when he dropped his bombshell.  I mean, didn’t he get it?  I thought of all the years I’d have given anything to go back to the days of having a dorm room and a work-study job and enviably few responsibilities.  Didn’t he understand how good he had it?  Couldn’t he learn from my mistakes?

Of course he couldn’t.  None of us ever does.

A few of my friends suggested that I tell The Boy he had to stay at school.  That coming home wasn’t an option.

Ha!

Have you met my kid?

Pretty much since conception, he’s upended my every plan.  My pregnancy (which I’d intended to spend quilting cute things for his nursery) was miserable, thanks to Hyperemesis Gravidarum - you know, the brutal 24-hour-a-day variety of “morning sickness” that everyone now cares about because Kate Middleton suffered it.  And those dreams I had of singing lullabies to a sweet, cooing infant or writing for hours while he napped?  Not a chance.  My baby was colicky for a full six months, which basically meant that he never slept more than two hours at a stretch, and when he was awake he was often screaming inconsolably.  I kept waiting for his little head to spin around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist.  And though the colic ultimately passed, his defiance of norms became his defining trait throughout childhood and into adolescence.  ‘Strong-willed’ would be the kind term.

The funny thing, though?  Things have a way of working out for The Boy.  I’ve learned - time and time again - not to sweat his quirks.  He can be frustrating as hell, but he’s also smart and funny and has a better sense of self than anyone I’ve ever met.  And while there may have been times when I wished I’d made better choices when I was eighteen, this much I cannot ignore: the path I took brought this awesome kid into my life, and being his mom has given me more joy than I can quantify.  There’s a lesson in that.

As it turns out, The Boy has a fairly concrete plan for his schooling: spring semester at community college, then transferring to an in-state school for the fall.  He’s done the work to make the shift.  He seems happy.  Truly happy.

And I can’t think of anything I would rather have my son be.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

The Boy and I meet.  And yes, childbirth is exhausting and makes for bad hair.

My little buddy.  I think he’s humoring me.  Do you know how much I love to play in sand?

He hated that buzz cut.  I was not allowed to do that to him ever again.

We’ve got sweet dance moves.  Probably thanks to all those times we watched Napoleon Dynamite.

I am permitted only one selfie per road trip.  Even though he does stuff like shoving a cheeseburger into his face at the last second.

Conscious Uncoupling

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin recently made headlines when they announced the end of their marriage, perhaps less because of the split and more because of their use of the term "Conscious Uncoupling."  While some explored the concept earnestly, it was widely derided - this is, after all, a couple who named their first child Apple, and Ms. Goop is the poster child for all things flighty and New Age-y.

But it gave me pause.  We as a society love cliches and catch phrases when they're the equivalent of a battle cry toward success.  What repels us about the idea of trying to find civility in failure?

Back in the Stone Age, as I completed my senior year of high school, I was thrilled to be selected to deliver an honor essay at graduation.  Thrilled, but if I'm honest, not surprised.  The honor essay competition consisted of taking a quote provided by the powers that be and weaving words around it to a predictable, graduation-ceremony-appropriate end.  The quote, from Andre Gide, was standard commencement fare: "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."  I was good with words, better at leaping through hoops.  I took that quote, spun it in the direction my teachers and school administrators expected, and then spit the trite piece out from the podium at graduation.  I'm sure my classmates and their families alike fought to remain conscious as I went on.  And on.

The funny thing was, I knew what a farce the whole exercise was.  "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."  Well, duh!  Who the hell were these fools afraid to lose sight of the shore?  Who, at seventeen or eighteen - perhaps particularly at our provincial high school - wasn't utterly ecstatic at the prospect of discovering new oceans?  I, for one, was beyond ready.

Except, as it turned out, I wasn't.

I left my provincial high school certain I was destined for great things, and I went on to fail spectacularly.  I had a scholarship to an enviable college, and I let an eating disorder and depression take it from me.  I gained admission to another impressive school, and I let important paperwork slip, rendering enrollment impossible.  I married, had a child, and divorced, more or less in that order.  I made a career of a job I'd intended to hold temporarily.  I found and dated every emotional train wreck within a considerable radius.  I felt myself shrinking under the weight of the chip on my shoulder.  I was a master of self-sabotage, yet I wondered why my life wasn't improving.

And then, about a decade or so ago, a shift began to happen.  A friend introduced me to the work of Dr. Susan Gregg, whose approach to life I initially found insufferably optimistic.  Yet it's funny the way the human mind and heart work: once a door is opened, it can't be closed.  Considering the possibility of the world as Dr. Gregg saw it led to considering other possibilities.  Slowly, my very paradigm of life shifted.  I gave thanks for the short-lived marriage that gave me an amazing child to love and learn from.  I felt grateful for the career that sustained me as I began doing more of the creative work I loved.  I stopped dating the train wrecks and gave marriage with a reasonably decent human a shot.

And you know what?  I continued to fail.  I still fail.  All the damn time, to be perfectly blunt - it's part of this pesky business of being human.  But at least I now have a sense of humor about it.  I accept it as part of the journey, and I do my best to turn negatives into positives.

That was my gut reaction to the news of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's "Conscious Uncoupling" - they were doing their best to turn a negative into a positive.  This pair of people so accustomed to success had failed at something important, but they weren't going to let the failure define them or their family.  There would be no knock-down, dragged-out battles to feed tabloid headlines.  They would protect their children and work through the failure of their marriage with civility and love.

Funny?  No.

Admirable.

I may not have had much use for the Andre Gide quote assigned to me at graduation, but this quote from Erich Fromm rings true:

"The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity."

Insecurity has been a companion for more of my life than I'd have liked.  But it's a companion I've learned to tolerate well.

Even as I edge the bastard off onto the sidelines.

www.kcwilder50ways.com