Uncategorized

Having a plan for the year might be important, and having one for my life is probably crucial. However, sometimes I wander.

Find me…

on Substack for my most frequent rambling

on Instagram for intermittent photos of books, Max the cat, and my still adorable but not as amenable to photos teenagers

on Bluesky for whatever it is I’ll do there when I figure it out

I wanted to crash into July like a tidal wave, keyboard blazing and goals falling like dominos. Instead, I’ve done laundry and made dinner, closed my rings but missed my step goal, read too late and played too many games of solitaire. I don’t know why I can’t manage to piece together all of the pieces of my life into a puzzle that makes sense. Instead, it’s like the one on my dining room table: worked on in spurts and interfered with by a curious cat.

I’m not giving up, of course, because giving up on life is ridiculous when you’re not even fifty. I just sometimes wish I had a crystal ball to show me some options, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, the kind I used to read with my fingers firmly trapped between pages when I wasn’t exactly sure which adventure seemed like the right one. At this point in my life, the choices seem smaller, but bigger, all at the same time. I want so badly for the puzzle pieces to make sense, not just for my own life but for the lives of our kids, even though their lives are filled with their own potential adventures, not mine.

This in-between-ness isn’t for the faint of heart, which my friends with older teens already told me. But my in-between-ness is weighing on my heart right now, too. I want to write, but I’m scared to write, not because of the writing but of what comes after the writing. The promoting and wondering and wishing I would have made different choices along this twisty way of mine.

July hasn’t been a tidal wave, but I’m still going to do my best to ride it out to a better place than it began.

Talking about the weather in Michigan is a cliche. It changes all the time and gets stickier than people think but also changes all the time. I never even look at my weather apps anymore, because it’s always just enough off to annoy me.

Today, however, I’m wearing jeans and a sweater. J Crew Factory describes it as a beach sweater, which basically means it’s not warm enough to wear during the winter, and it’s a little too loosely woven to wear without some sort of camisole, but it’s still a sweater. Yesterday, I was not wearing anywhere close to this many clothes, and I don’t mean that in a euphemistic way.

I’m still struggling to find my footing this summer. I have so much free time, and I’m not using it correctly. I realize there’s no correct or incorrect way to use time when you’re on a summer break from work, but believe me when I say I’m not using my time correctly. My short story isn’t finished, and my running endurance isn’t improving, and I haven’t done any home improvements.

I’ve done laundry and cooked dinner and those kind of basic domestic tasks; I’m not feeling depressed or incapable of forward motion. I just need a little more motivation and maybe a little direction.

Jeans aren’t helping.

I used to consider myself a runner. I charted routes and crafted playlists and followed training plans, though never quickly and never longer than a half marathon. Speedwork stressed me out, and finding hills wasn’t a thing in Royal Oak. Now I live somewhere with plenty of hills and I basically use my treadmill and spend more of my “run” walking than anything.

I still make playlists. Ryan and Abbey make better playlists, but I still do my best to find songs that make me happy, songs that make it easier to move my body when sunlight won’t crack through the basement windows for hours.

This morning, I didn’t have a run planned — and this is not a vignette about how my body just felt like running so I did that instead of walking. My body doesn’t do that much anymore, and I only say that because saying “never” seems extreme. I chose sleep over a 4:30 a.m. wakeup time, and then I felt guilty when I walked in the house after taking the kids to school. I had time for a 45 minute walk, approximately. I’m not going to lie, though, the plan involved a more…leisurely walk than you might imagine. I didn’t exactly have time for a strenuous workout that would lead to having to take my second shower in two hours. No one has time for that.

The first five minutes were easy. I did my trio of little daily games (Wordle, the Mini crossword, Connections). I let my playlist begin. (I know I could just walk without doing any of those things. I didn’t choose to do that, and with the mornings staying darker and darker, I will use the treadmill almost exclusively. We don’t have sidewalks!)

As I increased the incline, my playlist picked up. Arctic Monkeys. Foo Fighters. Lady Gaga. Rihanna. I put down my phone and added additional incline and speed (a very small amount of additional speed). I felt a glimmer of the endorphins I used to get from running, which I didn’t think I’d ever feel without working up a major sweat. That glimmer got me through an extra half mile, and it maybe changed my mood for most of the day.

I miss the real “runner’s high” I used to experience when I ran more, and there are days I want to say screw my knees and my old-lady lungs and my excuses, just in hope of finding those endorphins again. Today, though, that glimmer helped.

I keep seeing things about glimmers as an opposite of triggers, and I’m intrigued. I’m not sure if they’re made up or an actual phenomenon, but they interest me. I appreciate the idea of finding moments that can change my mood or my attitude for the better, moments of peace or beauty or joy or love that I didn’t expect to experience. I’m not sure it counts as a glimmer if I find it in a playlist I created for myself, though I do play them on shuffle, so the particular order of songs wasn’t by design.

I’m not sure than it matters.

I hope I can remember that feeling the next time I’m struggling to find a little figurative sunlight in my day. I hope I can find those endorphins again — even if it means I need the Foo Fighters or Rihanna or Alex Turner to help me do it.

It turned 11:00 before I washed my face tonight, which means it’s later than that now. I’ll regret the minutes that creep towards midnight (and possibly past) in the morning, but it seems lately that if I don’t open the computer (or journal or scrap pieces of paper) to write when I think of it, the thoughts fade into nothingness by the morning. I wish I could be the type of person to go to bed at an hour that ensures a decent night’s sleep. I wish I didn’t dread my alarm ringing next to my bed or the way it feels to change in the darkness, starting my day with everyone sleeping around me.

Many days I do it anyway, the abandonment of a warm bed always a shock, even when I know the run is worth it. Some days aren’t even a run, just a quick walk after shushing the cat to silence with a belly rub and his breakfast.

Last nights don’t always look the same around here. Usually someone is in bed and most of us aren’t, though the combinations of people change. Normally we go to bed in age order from youngest to oldest. Sometimes the spaces between those bedtimes are whispers, and other times they’re gaps of time, when laughter gets stifling behind hands and closed doors.

Abbey and I were looking through old photos tonight, trying to find one of her and her best friend, their hair in the kinky curls of brushed out braids, their smiles perfectly imperfect in the way they were before braces and lip gloss. Her friend turned 16 today, a whirlwind time of almost-driving and homecoming dresses and sleepovers still filled with giggled, whispered conversations.

I’m not sure why I opened the computer, why I began this post. Maybe to record the laughter before it fades into the darkness of a Wednesday night, the ephemeral nature of conversations happening in the middle of the week, when we’re tired and maybe a little sillier than we need to be as the clock inches closer to 11:00.

I wonder, sometimes, if these moments are glimmers of parenting done right (connection) or parenting that misses the mark (too late, too loud, too much bending over phones and pressing post). Maybe we don’t know until later, until the moments stack on top of each other to make a week, a month, a life.

I found the photo we wanted. I found so many photos that reminded me of a day or a pair of pants or sunglasses worn in the early days of Covid when we still found it novel to be on zoom instead of in a classroom. How quickly those days slipped into the past. How deeply they’re embedded in our psyches, entrenched in ways that delineate before and after.

Tonight, however, it’s past eleven, and I need to go to sleep. I hope the laughter echoes in my dreams.

My alarm breaks through my morning sleep like a hammer. I snooze and cocoon back into my blankets until I drag my way to the treadmill – except on the mornings I don’t, which become more frequent with each week. My teenagers don’t wake up as easily as they did as children, but they have an excuse, biorhythms and science support their reluctant rising. My yawns match theirs as we trudge through the darkness, and maybe they don’t think about how the sun will rise earlier soon, but I do. 

I notice the changes in my skin first: drier, paler, duller. I make sure to wash my face each night, to moisturize each day, adding Vitamin C serum and other letters I buy from the drugstore, though I know in the back of my mind I’m getting a ghost of the help I could from a dermatologist. Soon, I’m avoiding my own eyes in the mirror; the shadows underneath resemble bruises. Articles tout the power of filler, of prescription-grade products, of a skilled facialist. One article calls out what the others whisper: if you don’t want your skin to age, it helps to be rich.

I’m not rich. 

The next best path, it seems, is sleep. Seven hours. Eight if you can get them. Nine if you want to luxuriate in it. My fingers tap out hours, counting backward from my alarm time, then counting forward from when we’re finally home each night, when the laundry has been shifted to the dryer, when the counters are wiped and the dishwasher started. The taps aren’t close to nine, nor eight, nor even seven. 

I know I could find my way to my pillow a little earlier. Those hours in the darkness, those missing taps, could be spent sleeping. Instead, I fill them with one more mindless scroll, a game of Sudoku, a few more pages, ten minutes of the next episode of a show I’m watching with Ryan. I hope these moments, stretching into too much time, allow my brain to quiet instead of just darkening the purple moons beneath my eyes. 

I drink more water, ignoring the numbers on the clock, waiting for the promise of brighter skin. 

I’m still waiting.