How to Get Unstuck

This is a piece I wrote for a fundraising event for Little Orange Fish, a local mental health nonprofit. The theme of the event was Feelings Are Real. I wrote this to convey the experience of trying to help someone with OCD, where the feelings are real, but the stimulus is all in your mind.

Emma was born at just under 6 pounds. “A wee girl,” the midwife said, placing her in my arms. The mystery of her smallness had overshadowed my pregnancy. By the time she was four, we had a clinical diagnosis and, at 17, thanks to a gene study at HudsonAlpha, an explanation. The study also confirmed something that we already knew about my husband’s heart.

Exiting Memorial Parkway

At the beginning of his hospital stay, I had a sense of urgency that things at home needed to be put right because as soon as he was out there would be no time to attend to anything. Our lives would be falling apart in the rearview mirror as we embarked on the road to recovery, maybe even in another city. I would need to leave behind a manual for all of it.

Tidying the playhouse

Still Life with a Bouquet and Skull, Adriaen Van Utrecth, 1642

Hey, happy new year. I’m back. I am banal and topical.

I have spent the past two weeks reading Marie Kondo, reading about Marie Kondo, and tidying up.

She tells you to start by visualizing why you want to tidy.

Ugh! I hate this part. What brings you here? I dunno, so I can breathe, move on, do other things. Light, space, air. Clean desk.

Breathe differently

Yesterday there were 11,603 emails in my gmail inbox, 5,081 of them unread, of which 72 are from Brooks Brothers, who have been sending me increasingly hysterical, now twice-daily, notifications about their sale. Usually it is more trouble to delete an email than to skim past it, but clearly this has to change. It is a kind of passive digital hoarding. Yesterday, the younger daughter kept me company and offered opinions as I emptied out dresser drawers and purged clothes. I let her have my Beached at Bellevue’s t-shirt from our friends’ party at a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant in the fun 90s. And now I am diving into the wreck, with you and my old cat to keep me company, to declutter my inbox.

Handle with care

It’s a certain kind of woman in her 90s who thinks a package being delivered to her house might be a bomb, and then opens it anyway.

And this is why I was sending her cookies and peppermint bark, because throughout my life she has been one of those important people I am fortunate to know.

The package was kind of battered by the time it arrived. The address was faint. She had been outspoken online and thought maybe this was retaliation.

Keep calm and win Christmas: 10 last-minute gift ideas

Originally published in 2012.

The best laid plans can go astray in the run-up to Christmas and you may find yourself having to buy a last-minute gift, as I did yesterday.

In the weeks leading up to holiday I have felt that I have been engaged in a kind of stress challenge, a triathlon for moms that measures thoughtfulness, organization and endurance.

Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour” recently had guests Allison Pearson, author of I Don’t Know How She Does It, and journalist Deborah Orr on to debate the extent to which an Asda supermarket commercial was celebrating reality or perpetuating gender stereotypes and whether or not Christmas is a mother’s realm, her undoing, or her finest hour.

It hits a nerve, right?

In an anthropological aside, an American ad would never end with giving the mom a glass of wine. Instead mom gets external validation, male approval or female envy, a sticky kiss from her son or Santa winking from the rooftop or the husband’s arm around her shoulders.

So, here, in an effort to help you in this final push before the big day, or as on online note to self as I train for next year, are some last-minute gift ideas:

Someday

I started this post in headphones one morning because the older daughter was having a bout of perseverative vocalization, and it gets into your head, all the phrases she has collected, the classmates’ Dr. Who voices from eight years ago, bird sounds, the sounds from wherever, it’s there like all of the conversations of Earth that travel through  space.

Also, my desk is in the hall and her father’s baseball podcasts can be hard to tune out. I normally use headphones if I am doing work with sound files that would disturb others, but people are not creating noise to communicate with me right now, they are in their own worlds, and I am in mine.

Who are these people?

Before I was born and before my parents had moved into the building where I grew up, they lived in a few other apartments in our neighborhood. They described these apartments and their idiosyncrasies with fondness, but also to shock a person with what people might put up with in order to “make it” in New York City: an oven door that when opened blocked the front door, a plywood partition that was all that separated them from their neighbors in the landlord’s eagerness to increase the number of units on the floor. The neighbors on the other side were a lesbian couple who argued and had affairs, providing more detail into the intimate lives of others than my mother had been party to in her North Carolina sorority house.

The Mandarin Counting Song or How to Be a Better Parent

Write it down

“You can go out with a guy without having to break into a zoo,” Loquatia tells Capricia at dinner the other night.

Was Capricia proposing some kind of monkey or large cat abduction to secure the heart of a classmate? Family mealtimes are full of these kinds of pronouncements, which at the time make perfect sense only you are laughing so hard you forget what they said, or you write it down and forget what they meant.

You’re a cab

Make me a sandwich. You’re a sandwich.

Call me a cab. You’re a cab.

You’re the parent of an 8th, 9th or 10th grader? You’re a cab, too.