A Long December

I went swimming at the MLK rec center for the first time since quarantine this month. It occurred to me as I swam that one day in the next few years I’ll quit having these “first time I”ve done x since COVID” moments. Of course, some other event worth dating things from will come along soon enough, with the kids preparing to graduate.

The thing about the end of a chapter of your life as it nears is that it does force you to be present and appreciative. You’re always asking yourself “Is this the last time I’ll do this with the kids?” Is this the last time we have spaghetti together, the four of us? Is this our last Yule dinner with the godparents? Is this the last time we all four go to a movie? Is this the last time we visit the pet store for supplies as a unit? The last time we all eat holiday candy together? How many more days until my oldest turns 18? Until she graduates? Until she moves away? How much time will I have with my youngest until she follows her?

Attempting to swim full laps for the first time in almost three years was humbling. I couldn’t find my swim cap, which I must have lost in the move. The seal around my goggles had gone out from three years in the drawer. I spent an hour in the pool, made some laps, but half the time just the kickboard in the empty shallows where my kids once played. No children were there when I visited. I tried to get the teens to go swim with me, but they were busy with their own pursuits, as they so often have been this last year.

I bought a rec center pass on faith, knowing that the guilt of the cost will force me back to the pool at least twenty times in the next twelve months to justify the expense. While the worst of our financial woes are hopefully past - enough so that I quit the restaurant job in November - we’re still massively in debt from the COVID years, and my plans to get us out of the hole will take at least another 24 months, if not 36. All those plans hinge on me making more money, so I still have two jobs for now. There’s the job I love where I don’t make enough, and the job I hate, the one where I apply and interview for work that will carry me into the third quarter of my life without worry. Both are difficult in different ways.

This year will the third year the children go to Nashville without me for the Christian holiday. It gets easier each time, especially as this year I have started planning for what life will look like when they are adults. My proposal for the holidays once they are grown is that we should always make a vacation of the time, go somewhere altogether different if we can. Of course, this plan presupposes funds I do not have and will not have unless I push my career forward again. This goal for future holidays keeps me motivated at the second job, as my day job would never pay me enough to make the holiday vacation plans plausible.

If I have done my job as mother right enough - and I hope I have - I should have the girls with me at least one holiday a year, all of us together, never wondering about last times too much. I don’t care if it’s the winter holidays so much, just once a year I want us all together. I want this so that there will never be a thought about the last time we do a thing, only a series of first times - the first time after a graduation, the first time after a relationship starts or stops, the first time someone new is with us.

Here’s to 2024 and all the future first times. This year has to be better than the last.

Thanksgiving 1996, 2014, and 2023

Last year I did a big Thanksgiving round-up post. This year I decided to write about two Thanksgivings I haven’t before - 1996, when my economic life was at its lowest, and 2014, when I was last at peak earnings. There’s a bit about this year at the end. This is the longest blog post I’ve ever made, because it’s just for me, really.

Thanksgiving, 1996

The day before Thanksgiving in 1996, Tim (not his real name) and I have been sitting in his broken down 1975 Cadillac on the side of I-40 for over an hour when I can’t take it anymore. I get out of the car and wrap the gross old sock we’ve been using to protect our hands when we feed oil into the dying automotive beast around a stick I find on the ground, and ask Tim for his lighter. Tim stares at me in wide-eyed fear, and tries to argue with me, but I’ve had it and refuse to sit here in the cold on the side of an almost-mountain in White County any longer. I light the sock on fire and wave it over my head. This action prompts wealthier drivers to call for help, and after a brief ride with a state trooper and a couple of hours in a Waffle House, Tim’s brother and father rescue come to get us and we are driven deep into the mountains, back into land their family owns all along one road, where people usually only drive if invited.

Thanksgiving, 2014

For the first time in my life, I’m in a car allowed on to Sea Island. I’ve been to Saint Simon’s Island many times in my life, as my mother’s family is from Brunswick, but never to what I’ve always thought of as “the rich people island”, Sea Island, because cars are restricted to driving there by property ownership or reservation at the exclusive resort that is our destination. It’s low tide as we roll in, and I marvel at how small the channel is underneath the bridge between Saint Simon’s and Sea Island. There’s little more than a stream I could swim in a few minutes at low tide between the island open to everyone, and the one closed to all but the wealthy and their workers. My grandfather did tell me that Sea Island was once much more a proper island when he was young, but Sea Island has been creeping towards Saint Simon’s his whole life, which is drawing to a close now. My grandmother Alice, who took me to Saint Simon’s the most, has been dead for years now. It’s the first time I’ve been back to the area since her death, as my other visits have only been to my Grandfather’s, where his extended family owns property all along one rural road about twenty miles away. People drive down the road where my Grandfather lives all the time, but to get onto Sea Island, you have to be invited.

Thanksgiving, 1996

My college boyfriend Tim has never taken any girlfriend home before, because he has a deep unstated shame about his origins, something that he won’t come to terms with while we’re together. Tim and I have been dating for over a year now, and living together for almost six months. None of his background bothers me like it bothers him. I went to High School in a factory town in middle Tennessee with a lot of people at this particular extreme end of the American economic spectrum, and so what I see along his stretch of family road in Appalachia doesn’t phase me. I’m twenty, and all I can do with the first real love of my life is think about how physically and mentally sick I’ll feel if we break up. He’s a redhead, and the last year with him has been a mid-90’s haze of pot smoke and sex. We moved into our first apartment together in July, and he’s taking time off from finishing his BA to work full time at the local video rental store. I’m still enrolled in college this semester, but barely - the housing crunch in Murfreesboro is real, and the cost of MTSU is jumping by hundreds of dollars in fees each year. My parents weren’t prepared or willing, it turns out, to really help me with college, and I’ve felt like a total failure since we moved in together and Tim said he’d quit school so we could make our rent while I take classes, because school means I can only work about thirty hours per week, all at minimum wage jobs.

The loss of Tim’s car on the side of I-40 is just the next step on the ladder down of our current economic free-fall, and this visit back into the mountains is something horribly humbling for the young man I’m dating. He was supposed to be the one who went off to college to become the first white-collar worker in his family. Tim’s only thing to show so far for his early 20’s - he’s two years older than me - is his girlfriend, this exotically tall thing he picked up at MTSU, that, despite all logic anyone can apply, seems attached to him.

I’ll realize much later that I will be mismatched with Tim for three years, including a failed engagement, for a lot of reasons, but chief among them will be the following. First, I imprinted as a small girl on my father, and that imprint gave me a tragic attraction to Appalchain dick that will result in some of the most beautiful, hilarious, tragic, and wonderful moments of my life. Second, I have in my genes a predisposition to addiction, which while I understand from early on this means I must at all costs avoid booze and white colored drugs, I will not realize until much later that a person can be addicted to love and sex. Third, Tim and I smoke clouds of bad 90’s ditch weed that intensifies the love and sex feelings and this also keeps me from moving on, quite literally, as I tend to get glued in front of a television screen or lose myself in art while I’m high.

No one in the holler Tim grew up in can understand why I’m here, with this guy, who has always been seen as an odd duck at best and a soft college boy to boot. He’s shown up for Thanksgiving after dropping out of college with no car, no money, and a six foot tall woman. It’s a mystery how we’re going to get out of this to everyone, including us.

Thanksgiving, 2014

My in-laws have paid for a suite at the Sea Island resort this Thanksgiving, both as a surprise and a brag. When the husband and I get our bags up to our rooms, it’s far too large for just us and the kids - the suite is possibly the same size of the tiny warehouse loft we own in downtown Atlanta. The in-laws aren’t even sharing this giant space with us, they’re down the hall in their own little palace. As I get the kids settled in, I take ibuprofen, because I cracked a tooth down to the root when I was down here on the coast just a week ago helping my Grandpa clean out his house. My mother-in-law heard my husband talk about how much I loved the area on that visit, and what a shame it was that we couldn't all go for a vacation. So she booked this Thanksgiving vacation for us, and I try not to think about how much it must have cost as the pain from a dental problem I can’t afford to fix flares in my jaw.

The husband and I are at an economic crossroads this Thanksgiving. I have recently admitted that I need to take a full time government contract with the CDC to keep my Digital Asset Management consulting business afloat, and while the terms are generous, the job will limit my potential for previously higher earnings. I’ve had to lay off my two employees the previous month, as no new contracts have been signed for the last six months. Basically, the CDC will become my day job in December of 2014, and that’s almost as painful as the tooth, because I swore after UPS I’d never work in a cubical again and I know I’m about to have to do just that.

I’ll realize much later that the in-laws are paying for this trip on borrowed dreams, that what I’ve started to suspect about the Nashville WASPs is true. Yes, once they had the kind of wealth that could support this sort of holiday, but the out of control spending habits the mother-in-law has had her whole life (like booking the largest suites on Sea Island at the last minute for Thanksgiving), have lead the husband’s mother to completely out-spend her generational wealth. The security I think is waiting for my children when they become adults is little more than an illusion propped up by moments of extravagance like this one. In 2014, I don’t know the economic reality yet - but like my broken tooth, the truth is just underneath the surface of a well dressed exterior.

After we get settled in the suite as big as our house, I let my Grandmother’s brother, a man who lives on Saint Simons, know that I’m in town for the holiday. His family, my mother’s cousins, are surprised to find that I’m at the resort. It’s a mystery to all of my mother’s family how I got here, including me.

Thanksgiving, 1996

I can remember, even now, twenty-seven years later, the exact layout of the tiny house in the mountains where I spent almost two weeks with Tim while we figured out how to get back to our life in our college town. Luckily Tim’s family had internet service, so I could email my professors that I was having a family emergency and would not be back on time.

I spent my time during our involuntary economic confinement alternately getting to know the women in Tim’s family and using their dial-up line to get on with a nanny company in New England, where wealthy people would pay me to live with them and look after their children. Tim’s mom was especially impressed with my ability to get people to call me long-distance so that I might work for them; this was not something anyone in her orbit had ever done before. I have always known how to get new jobs though - it’s just something I’m good at doing. That I was going to go work in child care as a domestic also impressed the other women, as it showed I knew how to do mom stuff. I was gaining their respect during our stay just by not freaking out and making plans for paying bills somehow.

We were still trapped on a deeply rural road with no car though, and it was terrifying, so I tried not to think about the situation too much. The house was deep enough in the mountains and so surrounded by trees that it was hard to see the sky. Views from windows showed only forest, as did any walk I might be ok to take by myself. When I complained to Tim after a few days that I just needed to see some sky, he called an old friend.

About a week after Thanksgiving we met Tim’s old friend - and local weed dealer - who hiked us up to the top of a nearby mountain where the top had been clear-cut for a communications tower. Tim and I smoked up for the first time since we had been stranded on the side of I-40, and I was so happy to be in real sunlight that once I got high I tried to take off my top just to let the sun hit my skin. It was cold enough that we could see our breath, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to soak up as much natural light as possible. This embarrassed Tim, who convinced me to just hold my hoodie up to under my bra and let my pale stomach and lower back soak up the rays. Tim’s friend clearly thought I was off my rocker, and I guess by that point in our adventure I was.

Thanksgiving, 2014

I can remember, even now, nine years later, the exact way my daughters looked as we waited for our turn at the Thanksgiving meal on Sea Island. They were eight and six years old, and wearing colorful knit Hanna Anderson dresses with rhinestone clips in their hair. They giggled and laughed that whole trip, delighted by the luxury of it all. My youngest danced on the beach in a pink dress, laughing and playing in the sand with other children. My oldest and I ran our hands over the skull of a sea turtle in the children’s nature center inside the resort. It’s illegal, of course, to own any part of a sea turtle, so I had never seen the skull of one before myself. It’s illegal to have these things unless you are Sea Island, and you can call someone at the DNR and get an exception.

We visit with my Great-uncle and his family, the man who kept my Grandmother financially afloat the last decade of her life, at his house on Saint Simons. My mother’s cousins are interested in me, and my family, and how I came to be here at this time and place. The last time I was here was for my Grandmother’s funeral. Everything is explained by my in-law’s money, but I confide to a younger second cousin how being on Sea Island feels a little like being on that science fiction train where Captain America eats a baby. He laughs, but no one over 30 gets the joke. They’re all impressed that I’m going to work for the CDC soon, as it’s a job they can understand. It’s always been tough to explain digital asset management, but that I can land a good federal job shows I know how to network. For the first time, I gain their respect.

The next morning I woke up in extreme pain. The broken tooth had been bothering me, off and on, since the trip started, but it was in full flare now. The mother in law gave me some of her Hydocodone, and I spent the morning doped out while everyone else went on a lovely nature sight-seeing trip. I missed out on seeing a bald eagle, the first in my lifetime in the marshes of Glynn, fly right in front of the private boat. I had wanted to be with my children and husband as the beauty of this place I have always loved was laid out before them, but I was laid out in bed in a pain generated by decades of dental health mismanagement. I was now in one of the wealthiest places in the world, and I couldn’t move because I couldn’t afford to fix the health problems I had gathered while getting here.

I spent the rest of our trip breaking the pain pills the mother in law gave me in half and alternating with ibuprofen to dull the pain enough that I could function but not taking so much that I’m bedridden.

Thanksgiving, 1996

After Tim works with his brother cleaning a few septic tanks, and after the greater Tim family realizes that if they don’t help us out they’re stuck with us, we manage to get a used Ford Fiesta and drive out of the mountains two weeks after we went in. Tim is ridiculously happy, but I’m nihilistic for the first time in my life. I’ve realized I have to leave Tennessee altogether the next week to fly around New England to interview for nanny jobs to have any prospects at all. I’ve finally understood that I’m going to have to drop out of college and work full time for at least a year in order to feed and shelter myself. I’ve experienced real poverty several times over the last six months, culminating in being stuck on a mountain sleeping on the couch of people who couldn’t really afford for me to be there.

In the next year, 1997, I will be a nanny on the Philadelphia Main Line for ninety days. Then I’ll stay with my Great Aunt Beth near the Texas-Mexico border helping out in her tax office for another ninety days. Then I’ll move back to Murfreesboro, and back in with Tim because he has asked me to marry him. Thanksgiving 1997 breaks us apart entirely, as my family does everything they can to break us up before we can get married, because they are terrified for reasons I can’t understand at the time of me tying my life to this stoner who has started showing real signs of mental health problems that I won’t know for another two years are schizophrenia.

I have my first broken tooth that November in 1997, and when my Grandfather found out during Thanksgiving dinner that I planned to have the tooth pulled rather than fixed, he drove to our rental house after dinner and screamed at us. After Grandpa leaves, Tim sits down on the edge of our shared bed and says “I don’t think I can take your family.” We are supposed to pick out wedding announcements the next week, and his parents are supposed to meet mine at Christmas. It takes us another couple of weeks to admit our first adult relationship is over, and to admit it’s time to let go. Our parents never meet.

Tim takes the car and I take the apartment, selling off our shared life piece by piece and I proceed to exist in a space you might call “housing insecure” until I can move back into the college dorms for fall semester 1998. It’s a blow to my pride to be 22 and surrounded by freshmen, but at least I have my own bed again. As I slowly pull my life back together and the twentieth century moves towards its close, Thanksgiving becomes something I start celebrating on my own, and will remain a mostly solitary holiday until I marry in 2004.

Thanksgiving 2014

As the husband and I drive our beaten Toyota off the island and back to Atlanta, I look out over the marshes and wonder when I’ll see them again. My Grandmother, who struggled both with her finances and depression her whole life, died a few years before this Thanksgiving. I just helped my Grandfather clean out his house back in the hammocks for good, so he could move into a house close to the VA hospital in Augusta. He will spend the rest of his life next door to my mother in Augusta, so she can drive him back and forth to his ever more frequent end of life healthcare appointments. Grandpa will miss the marshes, and his boat, but it’s too dangerous those last two years of his life for him to keep his legs under him on the tides.

I will get back to the islands a few more times. In 2016 I’ll go for my Great-uncle’s funeral, where, as requested, AC/DC was played inside the Brunswick Episcopal church.Then there will be a children’s school field trip in 2017, and a camping trip to Cumberland with the girls in 2018. Most recently there was the disaster of a conference in 2022 on Jekyll. Each time I go back to the Golden Isles after Thanksgiving 2014 will be a little bit more painful, and more of a reminder that maybe I shouldn’t go at all. I lose my wallet at a gas station on the way to my Great-uncle’s funeral, and my Great Aunt Beth has to cover me, even though we do have a good time. The school field trip is just after a hurricane, and full of sudden plan changes, though we do have a good time. The camping trip is over-ambitious for just one adult with two kids, especially since I’m still recovering from a broken elbow, and we end up leaving a day early, though we do have a good time. The professional conference in 2022 is between a chemical fire at the port and another hurricane, and I don’t have a good time.

The last thing I do in Brunswick, when I’m there for the last time in November 2022, is stop to pee in the parking lot of my Grandmother’s old condo. I needed to pee and I just…pulled in and let go in the bushes. I look at her old condo on the edge of the marsh one more time, trying to soak in the place and the memories, and wishing like hell I had been able to understand her better when I was younger. I didn’t get her entirely until I was forty, and by the time I was forty, she was gone. Sometimes, you just have to let things go.

Thanksgiving 2023

This year my oldest and I are celebrating Thanksgiving together in Atlanta. The youngest is with the husband and the in-laws in Nashville. With so many changes coming soon, like the oldest going off to college next year far away, I’m not sure there will ever be a Thanksgiving with all four of us again. I have to wonder how many I’ll have in Atlanta again. I should know by now looking back over the Thanksgivings that I have had, that there’s no telling where I’ll end up.

I want to pull my children tight against me and tell them that the years they’re about to live between eighteen and thirty will be some of the brightest and most intense, but that even when their lives mostly even out, things can and will still be strange and beautiful. The years I’ve had Thanksgiving with both of them have been some of the best.

My friends Jeff and Zach had invited us to their Thanksgiving in Chattanooga, this year, and I entertained the idea for a while because I do think I would have fun at their house. But even though Jeff and Zach live in fully urbanized Chattanooga, I can’t make myself go into the mountains again for Thanksgiving. At least, I can’t make myself go into the mountains for Thanksgiving with an older car and so little money in the bank. Maybe I’ll go back one day when I know I can really take care of myself, when there’s no danger of being stranded or having a broken tooth, when I’m more ready for what surprise may come my way.

This Thanksgiving I sat across from my almost adult daughter, and tried to fix her face in my memory as much as I could. My youngest and the husband are off having an adventure in Nashville, a place I don’t go anymore. I’m very careful about holiday travel these days. Just like in 1996 and 2014, I should be preparing for another job, but I can't make myself do the real work to make a new job happen. I want to hold on to what I have. My almost adult daughter smiles at me, and I know that what I want and what will happen are two very different things.

The Third Job

October brought beautiful weather and, as always, so many wonderful neighborhood fairs, concerts, and happenings to the city that the population probably doubled every weekend. I went to almost none of these as I was busy working the two jobs and trying to keep up with the teenagers, so it shouldn’t have been a real surprise when I hit my breaking point by the end.

In years past the weekend of the local Halloween Parade was a huge event for our household. I’d take the kids all dressed up, and we’d have friends in from outside the city, back when we lived in Little Five Points. For over a dozen years we attended faithfully until we got gentrified out of walking distance and the kids felt they were too big to attend. This year, as my former neighbors cheered friends of mine walking in the parade, I was riding my bike down the Beltline on the way to the restaurant job, so I could start the final seven hours of my sixty-five-hour workweek. As I pedaled I suddenly I had to choose between running over tourists that decided to stop and block the entire path under the North Highland bridge or go off the side into the loose gravel. I wasn’t going so fast that I couldn’t feel the wreck about to happen, but I was going fast enough that I couldn’t stop the fall. As the gravel slid out from under me, I had one of those moments where time slows down, and I was aware that everyone around me was watching me lose control. I knew the injuries were coming despite my helmet and leather boots. I hit the gravel at a roll, sprawling out my whole body as witnesses rushed over.

After the fall I spit out dirt, reclaimed my now scratched glasses, said I was okay, and rode the final mile into work bleeding. There I limped to the back of the restaurant and picked small gravel out of one of my knees, cleaned the wound on my numb right hand where the palm was split a good inch, slapped on the biggest band-aids from the first aid kit and just…worked my shift. There wasn’t anything else to do. The wrist was sprained badly enough that I wore a brace for a week from CVS, but I was going to be damned if I spent an entire week’s second job wages on stitches, so now I have a scar on my right palm.

Just to underscore that what I’m doing has to stop – I can’t keep working sixty-five hours per week at these wages, both monetarily and bodily – a few things happened at my day job and in my personal life that were both frustrating a ridiculous. By the time the bandages came off my split palm a week ago, I broke and caved. The City of Atlanta was never going to put Cop City on the ballot, my socially concious day job was never going to pay me enough to get out of the debts of COVID, and I need to admit I’m beating myself up literally at this point trying to make those unrealistic things happen. Time to face reality. I picked up the phone and made the text I should have made two years ago. I let Henrik know I was ready to get back into Digital Asset Management in the private sector.

I didn’t stop blogging for a decade *just* because I was busy raising my babies. I also didn’t blog during that time because I was also professionally peaking. Ten years ago, in 2014, I had my biggest year, where I published a textbook and worked everywhere from Honolulu to Berlin. There are a lot of reasons why I left all that behind and shrunk my work area from worldwide covered by flights to a five-mile radius I cover on bike. Henrik, a good friend, was happy to hear from me. He laid it out straight, as he always does, something I’ve always valued in colleagues. The good news is that absolutely nothing has changed in the last eight years since I was on the job market. The bad news is that absolutely nothing has changed in the last eight years since I’ve been on the job market.

So, I took a deep breath, and started a third job this week – pulling myself back together professionally. I typed STOP COP CITY in as a candidate on my ballot in an uncontested race, knocked the dust off my resume, and did what I always do to get myself together. I started working even more.

I'm pre-emptively claiming fifty

I couldn’t write in September – the two jobs made everything just too busy. I was so tired I messed up at both places of employment, but not so bad as to get reprimanded or anything. It became clear to me by the end of the month though that I couldn’t keep going at top speed both places, so I found a solution. I had racked up over one hundred and fifty hours of paid time off – vacation days for vacations I’ll never be able afford – at the day job. I’m now taking a paid day or two off every other week at the professional gig so I can catch up on my sleep and rest my body so I can work the second job. I’m essentially financing the restaurant hostess position with time from the job I got with my master’s degree. That’s just how the twenty-first century works, I guess.

There have been some real bright spots in the fall so far though. I walked with the Krewe of the Grateful Gluttons under a monarch butterfly lantern underneath the big international puppet tour of Amal the first weekend in October. My aunt came with me, and it was a perfect evening. My oldest daughter received an early acceptance letter to university next year out-of-state, along with some financial aid. Not enough financial aid to really make the offer a lock, but scholarship award season doesn’t start until after Christmas, so I have real hope for her going out of state like she wants.

A good friend of ours did a photo shoot of the oldest child in Piedmont Park for her senior portraits. We had the ones done for free by Lifetouch, but that company wanted too much money for prints, and over $400 for the digital download package. I gave half that amount to a friend photographer and got much better-quality shots for half the price. It’s hard not to post all the pictures online, but the kids started asking me not to share pics without their permission once they entered High School, and I try hard to respect their boundaries. It’s super difficult, but I would rather them know I respect their decisions than violate their boundaries.

I turned 47 at the start of October. When I turned 26, I started telling people I was 30, just to get used to the idea, and so I’ve started telling people now that I’m 50, at least at the restaurant. Saying that I’m fifty also firmly anchors me in the realm of the unfuckable as far as most of the wait staff is concerned, which is a great bonus to me as almost all of them are young enough to be my biological children. Well, actually all of them if you consider the idea of teen pregnancy. I’m actually older than all but one other person who works at the second job. That’s something that will happen more and more wherever I go, I suppose, except in my professional life. I have the kind of profession where people work until they die.

Before the pandemic, I was set to retire at sixty. The idea of retirement is gone now, and though I’ve mostly accepted that I won’t own a house again, and that I’ll likely be working longer than sixty, the idea of working until I die, is something that I have found the hardest to swallow. I can’t get the concept down my throat, no matter how much I try. I keep telling myself that it will be okay – this is always who I’ve been - that the rhythm of work keeps me in line, really. Even if I did retire, I’d just work on parade krewe stuff and the activism that I squeeze in at the edges of everything. Swallowing the idea that I have to keep working for money shouldn’t be that hard, especially since my professional job is a community support position for something I believe in anyway. But this is hard, I suppose, because everything gets just a little harder when as you start to really age. I keep saying I’m fifty, I suppose, to prepare myself for the real thing, because I can already feel at forty-seven the fraying around the edges of my physical form that I know will start to unravel in the next decade.

I’m glad I have the paid time off banked to rest my knees and sleep now and then, because afternoon naps in the autumn are amazing. The city is beautiful this time of year, and the shots of my High School senior in Piedmont Park at golden hour are stunning. I can just glimpse the adult form of my oldest child peaking around the edges of her seventeen-year-old form, and I don’t regret for a minute the time I had to work to pay for the images. Every drop of sweat and ache of my joints has been worth this. As I type, my youngest is playing piano with her teacher in the room next door, and that makes all the work worth it as well, to be able to hear music made by the children I so desperately wanted two decades ago. They’re preparing to leave me, but I’m glad, even if I have to work until my last minutes, that I did all this.

I wish I had more time and energy to write about everything we do and see together more. As many posts as I’ve made on this blog and pitas and LiveJournal, none of it seems enough.

The Continuing Catch-Up

We made the August rent, despite my expensive detour in a Lyft home from Knoxville, because my yearly bonus came through. While my team at work had made our calendar year performance goals, our being granted this bonus was by no means guaranteed, as everyone, everywhere, seems broke these days. Nonetheless the extra paycheck came in just in the nick of time, and I did not have to go into further debt to keep our family housed.

The debt instead this month came from a broken clothes dryer and then a broken car. The 2008 Toyota that had been on life support for a year gave up the ghost early in the month when I discovered nearly 5k in repairs were needed during the yearly checkup. The car needed new bearings, and both the sway bar and front struts replaced. Fifteen years of duty on rough Atlanta roads and nearly two hundred thousand miles driving around the Southeast had done their damage. Despite all the professional care, we had nearly driven the wheels off the thing.

I was ready to resume the carless life I had previous to 2004, but the husband’s parents came through and gifted us a 2015 economy car they had in their garage. I didn’t really care about the car, as my professional job and part time job are both easily reachable by bike, and the kids walk home from school already. Still, since we’ve had the replacement car I have to admit it is handy. There are social things the youngest needs a car to get to, and having a car makes the logistics of our four person household easier to manage.

I thought the night job at the restaurant would make rent this month manageable, even with the $200 increase we’re covering as we start our second year in the townhome. The second job has me working as a hostess at a restaurant on the Beltline, and while my co-workers are great the crowds are often rowdy, especially when the heat index rises. In the four weeks since I’ve had the position, I’ve been yelled at, called a bitch, and netted two negative reviews online that mention me specifically. I’ve also been complimented just as often (if not online), and have made friends among my co-workers and some of the regulars. Viva Atlanta.

But the second job was no match for those surprise expenses. I need to find about 2k more per month in the budget, and the restaurant work netted me only about two-thirds that amount. Then the husband landed a promotion at his job, one that should, we hope, bring in just about 2k more per month. It’s just that his pay raise won’t show up until one more month passes. So we will have one more month of late rent before we hopefully stabilize again. I’ll keep working my second job through the winter holidays, just to be sure. I’m exhausted from being unable to afford the unknown.

Due to now working over sixty hours per week, I had little time to help gather signatures for the Cop City vote initiative, though I did what tiny bits around the edges I could. I’m hopeful about the vote getting on the ballot in November, the first direct voter initiative the city has ever held. The crushing heat was not helpful to organized activity outside of any kind, yet still we managed to gather the number of signatures needed.

The kids went back to school this month, the last first day of school where I have them both in the house. Everything we do this year is the last thing we do as a unit of four people who live together, and it makes me sad even as I celebrate the triumph. The oldest is signed up for free college credits from the local state university in the afternoon. The youngest is celebrated in her after school pursuits. We’re moving along, slowly towards the end of the summer this way. A newer car and more income should have me celebrating, but the last three years has me too cautious to party. For the first time in two decades I won’t be at DragonCon this year, despite our eternal passes. Instead, I’ve taken paid time off from my day job and will be working my night job, giving myself forty hours of more restful time at home. I’ve muted friends at the big party on my social media feeds. Have fun without me, folks, I’m focusing on my own recovery.

I caught up with more friends from older posts

As July crawls to a close it’s become obvious that the AC in our rental townhouse just can’t keep up. Setting the thermostat all the way down to 70F (21.1 C) will take the basement down to about 72F, but the main floor will sit at about 74F and upstairs is now usually somewhere between 76F to 86F on the worst days at the worst times. Yes we have fans, and yes I’ll buy a window AC once next month’s rent is paid. Until then our options are to be outside of the house or not on the top floor when it gets really bad. Just to be spiteful, the clothes dryer also started to chew holes in some of my good work dresses and make horrible squeaking noises.

After I got the second job and before I started working weekends, Devon said I should visit my college friends in East Tennessee and sent me a Greyhound bus ticket. Devon didn’t know how bad Greyhound travel now can be, and I was happy to have a rare chance to see people I haven’t seen since before the pandemic, so I was willing to take the chance. There is a newly rebuilt Greyhound bus terminal at the Garnett MARTA station, and I let the revamped exterior fool me. While I spent most of a day waiting for the bus to Knoxville that was four hours late, I saw three different people get removed from the bus station by security for different problems, all loudly. When the bus did show, it wasn’t the remodeled “Flixbus” promised by social media advertising, but an old Greyhound with cracked seating and a hostile driver who, at one point in our trip, pulled the bus over by the side of a road to get up and yell at passengers for talking. There was no talking allowed on the bus, because our driver - who clearly was suffering from some sort of Greyhound driver specific PTSD - was on a hair trigger the whole time.

I hadn’t attempted a Greyhound bus trip in 25 years, so I didn’t know how far things had fallen apart for regional bus travel. There’s no Greyhound terminal in Chattanooga anymore, just a strange building surrounded by weedy lots on the edge of that city with no bathroom facilities for travelers. The only bathroom stop was in Athens, where a cinder block building in the parking lot of an Exxon had single toilets for each sex and no air conditioning, and smelled about how you would expect. Devon, on picking me up, was shocked to learn that Greyhound had no Knoxville terminal anymore either, the bus unloading in a random parking lot in a bad part of town where cops waited to greet the bus just in case violence should be waiting as we disembarked. I jumped in Devon’s car and we were off. I was grateful for the pickup and trip, but never again will I ride Greyhound - I don’t know how much worse regional bus travel can get, and I’m not anxious to find out.

I did get to see Devon and their family in their lovely house on a piece of land in Appalachia owned by her husband’s family for generations. The air smelled amazing, and Devon’s children and husband were gracious to the giant stranger who came to sleep on their couch. Elle drove down from deeper in the mountains to see me as well, who once went by another name in my blogs before transitioning about twelve years ago. Likewise I was able to visit with my friend Laura, who was once called Ford, and who survived breast cancer diagnosed just before the world changed for good. I hadn’t seen Elle or Ford in five years, and Devon in four, despite talking to all these friends fairly regularly by text or mail or phone. It was good to hug them in person. It was good to see how we’ve all changed. We all knew this time it was the last visit for a few years, where before the pandemic we would see each other about every eighteen months or so. This was the last time for a long time. So I tried hard to make it count.

I took a Lyft back, and what had possibly been a free trip will take me three or four restaurant shifts to pay back. The trip was worth the cost - everyone is so changed, we’re all so dramatically different. Laura who was Ford was the one I had been the most worried to see, but who looked in some ways the least changed. We all may be hanging on by our fingertips, but we are hanging on to our lives as hard as we can.

Appalachia blazed at me in wildflowers and green beauty while I was there. I was again reminded how nice it must be to feel at home in the mountains, but I never have. Knoxville is about as small a city as I’d ever want to inhabit, but is a proper city with architecture and good museums and street art and sidewalks full of people. I like Knoxville, but it’s not for me, it’s for Laura and Elle and Devon.

There’s probably dozens of slight changes in my life during my twenties that would have meant Knoxville was my city, that I would have learned to love the place on a deeper level and adopt it as my own. But none of those things happened, and I think I was destined for Boston once I met Dan in the summer of 1993 when we were volunteers with the National Park Service. Once I understood what Boston was, I was going to find my way there. When you’ve loved a truly great city like that, there’s no going back to much smaller, and of course I always knew I’d live in Atlanta since I was very small myself.

I wish Atlanta loved me back like my friends from college. Laura and Elle and Devon love me, and I love them, like true friends do. But Atlanta has decided that it is a Manhattan kind of city now, and librarians haven’t been able to afford to raise children in Manhattan for more than forty years. I came to Atlanta when it was still possible to live downtown and be a civil servant and have kids. The city has outgrown me, just as my Atlanta-born children are outgrowing me. So my season here is getting late.

There are other cities out there, ones like Knoxville but not in the mountains. There are cities where I can fit that are still affordable. I will spend the next three years finding my next place, unless Atlanta changes its mind about a great many things. The mountains were cooler and beautiful, but they’re not for me, even if they’re filled with people who I love. I need to find a path to my own autumn in a place with a lot of red bricks, books, and hopefully a proper riverfront. Until then - until my summer children are ready to leave the nest - I’ll be here in Atlanta, covered in sweat.

After a cool June, July has been pretty hot

Ten years to the day I turned in my resignation at the Mega Corp that made my career in Digital Asset Management – ten years to the day from when I scored a quarter million-dollar contract as CEO of my own company – I’ll be starting a second job as a hostess at night at a local restaurant. This isn’t where I thought the last decade would take me, but this is life. I haven’t written since June because I was digesting the reality of the next three years to come, deciding how I would tease out the end of my forties. Before you read the rest of this post, just know: I’ve got this. It’s all going to be okay, and even if it’s not okay, I’m making the best choices I can to get to where I want to be as I approach the third quarter of my life.

I stayed up too late at the beginning of summer watching the longest-ever Atlanta City Council meeting as Cop City funding was debated. After staying up to watch the meeting it was as if I had missed a rung on a ladder I had been climbing. I couldn’t get my sleep schedule right, and the debate tumbled and tore through my mind. This can’t be Atlanta. This is Atlanta. Who we want to be, who we think we are, and the truth of lived experience can be very different things. I wasn’t in the best place mentally as I grappled with the fact that selling the Lake Claire house wasn’t enough to save our finances on a monthly basis AND that my taxes were going to fund a military style police training camp where once in childhood I thought ghosts haunted the woods. I felt like the city was sliding out from under my feet, where once I knew how to stay upright when MARTA buses lurched along Ponce and how to get anything I needed from this place that I have loved.

My sisters were worried. The second week of the month Abby came up from Augusta for dinner, and Sara surprised me by flying in from Portland to visit. The third or fourth time I started talking about the city hall Cop City meeting, Sara grabbed my shoulder. “You have to stop talking about this.” She said. I realized my sister was right. I was acting like a crazy person. The two of us spent the first night she was in town out on Wylie Street, where I helped her scrape down old wheat paste posters off the wall against the train yard so she could properly place her tag on the Beltline for the first time in five years. We talked about how much things have changed and haven’t changed. We gave each other the support we could, and then she left for an art show in Asheville before she had to fly back west.

The third week of June I barely remember, other than that I worked to make up time I took off with my sisters and got my sleep schedule back on track.

The fourth week, Kati came to visit from Maine, another concerned friend. The last time we had spent any extended time together was nine years ago, when I had just published a textbook and Kati was finishing her PhD in Honolulu. I had seen her since then – we met up for dinner in London once and just missed each other in Germany a few months after that. Kati and I had the best vacation, riding eBikes around the city and just talking. We stopped at the MLK tomb on Juneteenth and talked about Cop City, about Kati’s upcoming social justice conference at the HBCUs in town.

I took her to Peachtree Center and Kati bought us sandwiches from Beni’s and we ate them at the loft inside the Marriott Marquis, one of my favorite places in the city. We sat and laughed where Jeff and I used to sit and laugh at DragonCon, and I took her through the habitrails a little. It was so, so good to see my friend, and to know I wasn’t the only one feeling like these fights that we have about the things that really matter – Cop City, the heat, the daily grind of *I have to do something to make it better* - weren’t really crazy. I just can’t let myself be eaten alive by the history happening around me. I’m not the only one struggling with the way I think things should be and the way things are. By the time I dropped Kati off for her conference at a seriously sketchy hotel near a shelter for the unhoused, I was feeling wholly myself again, and I hugged my friend, and I had a good mood for another week.

Then it was time to pay the rent.

I realized then, the fourth week of June that I owned nothing of real value.

There was no way we were going to make July rent. I had spent money to support my oldest in her college program. I had gone out to eat with my sisters and my friend, and even those expenses were modest, they were money we didn’t have. I thought about selling the antique oak blind cabinet we own only to find that the market is flooded with antique furniture right now because everyone else is selling. I’ve never bought expensive jewelry or fashion label clothes anyone would buy secondhand. We own one 2008 Toyota. I sold off my graphic novel collection a year ago. There’s nothing left to sell, and I even went and priced out my wedding band, platinum with small diamonds. Everyone is selling their diamonds, so the band was worth, in the last week of June 2023, just $100. The market for everything is flooded because everyone is desperate.

I asked the landlord for a grace week as the first was over the July holiday weekend. The oldest daughter came back from her month away, and for Independence Day all four of us went to watch fireworks from the North Avenue bridge. It threatened to rain most of the night, and the air was hot and thick, but people were still out having fun. The youngest – she’s fifteen – and I had an argument about her cell phone. We left the fireworks early, the angry teen walking far ahead of me as it started to rain on all of us. I let it all get to me and yelled at the teen once we were home after she acted out again. Then the husband and I argued later as a proper summer storm let loose outside, and that was how July started, with all of us feeling like we did the wrong thing on a holiday night that should have been enjoyed as the start of the last full year we’ll ever have all living together. Next year the oldest will leave for college for real, and nights where the four of us are together are on a timer now, ticking down to the end of an era.

I borrowed 1k from an old friend for a week to make rent on the 7th. He’s a solid almost family kind of friend that I helped in the past when he was in a similar spot a decade ago and I was flush. I paid him back this week, the second week of July, and we had lunch yesterday where we talked about how things are now. This is life after the pandemic. For the first time he is dating a woman in a similar position as me, someone who owns nothing of value, someone starting over from zero. This is new to him, and I think he just wanted to validate with me, the formerly successful, that yes, this happens, yes, we start over sometimes mid-life. It sucks, but it happens, and you get a second job and just keep moving forward.

I probably should have gotten a second job sooner, but I needed the time between the house sale and now to recover from the old second job of constant repairs and maintenance of the Lake Claire debacle. I needed to just work 40 hours per week for a few months while I healed up, emotionally, from the experience of investing all my time and money in a property that was lost. I needed to do physical therapy in March and join a parade Krewe in April and help my kids in May and ride bikes with my sisters and Kati in June and gather signatures for the Cop City Vote in the first weeks of July. And now that I’ve done those things – now that I’m as recovered from the end of the pandemic as I can be – now it’s second job time.

This is the plan I will work until the end of my forties: for the next three years I will have a second job at night after my day job, just like many other adult professionals responding to inflation and our new shared reality. I’m going to accept Atlanta for the city it is now, knowing we’ve all changed, knowing that we’re all recovering, knowing that things were once different in ways both good and bad. My new second job will be working with some people who are great and some who aren’t, but we’ll all be working in the city at a location some people would give anything just to visit for one night. When you step into the door at the restaurant, I’ll make sure you have one of the best dinners you could possibly have, because when I ate at restaurants in New York and Chicago and London and Berlin I had the best dinners too. When I go back to my day job in the morning I’ll be doing everything I can to make Atlanta an easier place to live in my own way, because even though my day job pays shit I believe in the city. We’re all working too much, and we’re all tired and it’s going to be ok, it’s going to be just fine, because there’s always times when you get to eat at the table and there’s always times when you serve. This is just the next three years, and if the last decade has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t know what will happen in three years after that. Summer is almost over.

There Are Reasons Some Dorms Aren't Full

The morning before I drove my oldest daughter to her first stay in a college dorm - she won a partial scholarship to a state sponsored program for High School students - I was trying to alleviate some anxiety in the house by stressing positive things.

“The books for the program are provided for free, isn’t that nice?” I said as we packed.

“All textbooks are free if you’re not a pussy about it.” Replied the oldest daughter, not even looking up from her task.

I nearly exploded in parental pride, right there on the spot. The kid already knows how to pirate college textbooks and she’s not yet 18. This did considerably lift my mood for the day, which would hold more frustrations after a long May of frustrations.

The oldest daughter had been recruited to attend programs at elite universities this summer, but of course we couldn’t afford those. We ended up at a state sponsored program in its first ever year. This summer on campus experience is a bid to offer lower income students the same sort of opportunities well off families can afford, as well as a chance for a state uni with lower enrollment to fill a new dorm for the summer. The registration for the thing was a red tape long haul, which I won’t go over again, but just know that when we pulled up to the fancy new dorm that had been advertised, this turned out to not be the housing provided. I don’t blame the state uni employees who put the program together for the many stumbling blocks in the execution of student registration and enrollment. It’s the first year of the thing, and we’re getting what we paid for. Every kid in the program had to fight to be there just as hard as the program employees probably had to fight to pull such a thing off.

So we had to assemble the bedroom ourselves a bit, the furniture in the provided dorm rooms all being in one corner as it was unprepared for guests, but it was newly cleaned. No signs or banners welcomed the kids to campus, but they did each get a water bottle, a cinch sack, and some pens. I helped the oldest daughter set up her first dorm room ever, and took her out for a last off campus lunch for a month, and then was left to drive home by myself, dealing with my own conflicted relationship with academia.

One of the things I did in the decade I took off from blogging was author a textbook myself. It won some awards, and the second edition is still being used in a few graduate courses. Springer publishing sends me a check for 2k every other year, and I get about $200 annually in royalties from the second edition, which was self published on Amazon, because the respected academic press offered to pay me in “Springer Bucks” for the update. I actually have a peer reviewed article that will be published later this year, for the customary zero compensation. So from a strictly “how much have you published and how much are you cited” view of academia, I’m relatively successful. Of course, me being a late Gen-Xer, I have a pretty complicated relationship to higher education on the whole.

Two decades ago I had close to two dozen friends and friendly acquaintances who worked for universities, and today I have two. I watched over the years as an entire generation of academics were sidelined into adjuncts until they got so sick of living on pennies they quit. Those of us who weren’t made into adjuncts - academic librarians and archivists - had our positions eliminated or downsized. Sure, a few here and there made it through the killer filter of the early 2000’s, but none of those I know or know of my own age were able to stay in academia and have kids. I know there are women and men out there around my age who got to work for colleges or universities and raise children. I just don’t know any of them personally.

I defaulted on my student loans. That’s a longer story, but I refuse to feel bad about not paying back the education that failed to pull me out of the ranks of the working poor. Anyone who wants me to feel bad about defaulting on my student loans can feel free to take payment for said loans in Springer Bucks.

Dropping my kid off at a cut-rate university program for the poors was a hail mary pass at padding her college applications with scholarship bait. I’ve had the talk with her about university not being strictly necessary for a productive career, but she wants to study Psychology, and no one wants a therapist without a degree, so into the machine that chewed up and spit out so many Gen X nerds she goes. Our family is hoping the oldest daughter can achieve escape velocity from the lands where abortions are illegal, and the summer college program is more fuel for her to move in that direction.

We are flooded with mailers from universities, of course, and I think GSU right here in Atlanta is a great school. Due to our economic circumstances, she may end up in higher ed here yet, but I am hoping against good sense that a school where more sane laws govern young women’s bodies will offer to take her in despite our lack of cash.

Everything is a knife edge for kids as they finish high school. I just hope universities don’t end up wounding either of my daughters as badly as they did so many I have known. That I got away with only the financial scar of a loan default I suppose was a fair price to pay considering I have my degrees and the doors they did manage to open. There wasn’t any real cash behind any of those doors, but there was some work, and some health insurance, and I got away in time to have my children.

Steal all the textbooks by downloading them, Gen Z. Don’t be a pussy about it. The universities and loan officers certainly won’t flinch or blink while they steal from you.

Frustration, destruction and creation

It was a week of frustration in general at my house on multiple fronts. A plumbing repair sent us a week without a bathtub. The iPhone update broke the older model phones I had for the kids, leaving one without cell reception at all. We’ve spent hours trying to make the phones that worked last week work again, and will likely just have to pay for new devices as replacements. Then there was the endless red tape of dealing with the college board for everything my older kid needs to try and continue her education. I also had the routine American phone tree tangle for routine health care things. Between the iPhones dying, the higher ed red tape, and health care, I probably have spent at least twenty hours on the phone, and sent somewhere north of two dozen emails to variations of customer service in the last week. When multiple facets of your life just refuse to operate as you’ve been told they should, it’s not a great day-to-day experience. Clearly, my only antidote for the overkill of consumer denial was to do something deeply odd with craft supplies. I made a point to myself to spend as much time making art with other people this week as I did dealing with customer service. I clocked around twenty-five hours of communal creation time. I will clock more this week as part of my grieving process over Cop City.

When I saw the drone footage of how many trees had been removed from the old prison farm woods - what everyone now properly calls Weelaunee forest - I felt sick and immediately angry. This is my generation’s Stone Mountain, a tragedy cut into a natural space, a ruin of nature that will never stop being the source of arguments and protests and violence. Just like the annual fights over the maintenance and symbolism of Stone Mountain, the protests and potential for bloodshed will always haunt Cop City. If you think people in Georgia will forget what happened on that spot, ask the protestors down in Columbus about The School of the Americas.

The protests will never stop. There will always be incredible security costs associated with these ventures that only the wealthy want and push ahead against the wishes of voters. The hubris and money behind these misbegotten ideas last a few generations until the inevitable weight of history bending toward justice eventually forces some positive change. This week it was announced Fort Gordon near the city I was born will be renamed Fort Eisenhower in the next year or so. I have hope that I’ll live to see maintenance on the Stone Mountain carving stop, and whatever they build in Weelaunee repurposed to something that will actually benefit the city. Given how long it’s taken to get the name Fort Eisenhower though, it might be my grandkids that see the change. When people ask me why I bother to protest, or write about protesting, it’s because I know at some point when I’m old a kid will ask me what I did to stop the nonsense that happened in my lifetime.

I’ll say. I signed petitions, and I voted, and I showed up to some meetings. We knew it wouldn’t work because we weren’t wealthy, but it was the only thing we could do at the time so we did. The best change I could effect was just to show up on the right side, but by the time I was born physical protests were no longer effective. We had to wait, and wave signs ineffectually, and teach our kids things could be better, eventually. To keep ourselves sane we made art, and found friends we could laugh and cry with, and pushed forward. When I look back over my two decades of blogs, some of the stuff I’m proudest of were the protests.

That the protests I’ve attended for my entire adult life have made NO material difference to any government plan cooked up by billionaires makes no difference to me. For the last decade, when I do go out to community actions it’s for no reason other than my own satisfaction - to say I tried - and to physically push out against the despair. So basically, it’s the same reason I vote, or make art, or do anything. You either believe in a better city, a better state, and a better society, or you don’t. I’m sure the men with money who do the terrible things I protest and vote against tell themselves the same thing. The difference is that eventually I will be right, and though we may both be long dead before the damage is undone, I will die knowing I pissed on their graves.

Lockdowns Lower Grades

The only thing that upset me about the mass shooting this week was my entire lack of reaction outside of annoyance at the disruption of the school schedule. We can all get shot at any time. I wish this wasn’t the case, but I feel most angry that my kids probably have lower grades as a result.

This week, less than two miles from the High School my children attend, a man with a gun shot a bunch of people in a medical waiting room. It wasn’t the first time this school year that gun violence meant the school was on lockdown, and so for me, sitting another mile away from the event, I was just annoyed more than anything. I was actually surprised when a relative called to check if we were ok, because I didn’t know the shooting had made the national news and was confused as to why it would.

I want to be clear that my lack of reaction to the violence was not because I live in downtown Atlanta. Gun violence, and violence in general, has happened all around me for the last three decades. Around the turn of the century, a man in middle Tennessee crawled out of ceiling tiles at a fast food restaurant and killed all the young people while they were counting out the registers. This happened right before I left Tennessee for good, and cemented my feeling that if someone with a gun wanted to kill me, there was nothing I could do about it. The man who killed those restaurant workers was never caught.

If you’re around violence enough - and we are, as Americans, all the time - you just kind of get used to it. The first few times my children’s schools went on lockdown, I worried. After I really thought it through though, I quit panicking, because I feel like my children’s schools are secure from *outside* threats. This is of course naive, given what happened in Nashville a few months ago and Uvalde not quite a year ago. Still, ever since those people my own age were killed closing up a fast food restaurant for less than a thousand dollars, I haven’t been able to be scared by potential gun violence.

Sometimes when I’m in a crowd - any crowd, any time - the thought that a crazy person could start spraying bullets randomly creeps into the back of my head. But I love crowds. I love concerts and parades and DragonCon. So do I stay inside and deny myself the basic human joy that comes from participating in society, or do I shove the fact that I live in a very violent society to the back of my mind and get on with life? I think every American knows the answer to this question, even as they pull their kids out of public life and into homeschooling in record numbers.

As the search for the missing shooter Wednesday went on, less than two miles from the High School, less than three miles from our town home, around four miles from the husband’s office, we just got on with our lives. The violence did disrupt the kids' education though. My older daughter needed to talk to her Biology professor, but that period of the day was canceled. My younger daughter was supposed to attend a math study group in advance of the state milestone testing after school, but that study group was canceled. No one at the High School was directly hurt by bullets, but we can safely assume both my kids had their grades impacted by the lockdown as a direct result.

When the shooter was caught north of the city in Cobb county, I hope people realized that living downtown wasn’t any more inherently dangerous than living outside the city, where the man was caught. I doubt that idea got through to anti-urban die-hards though. I bet though, just like most Americans, that every time conservative rural or suburban residents are in a crowd they know how easy it would be for someone to start spraying bullets. Gun violence can happen anywhere, at any time. Your young adult closing a fast food restaurant, your attendance at a country music concert, your doctor’s office waiting room. Anywhere, anytime.

I hate that it lowers test scores when this happens, because I can't do anything about the violence. I've marched. I've signed petitions. I've voted. Now I just have to wait for the kids - and I hope it's the millennials, that we don't have to wait for Gen Z - to actually make the change happen. I hope my grandkids aren't going through lockdowns like this. Those lockdowns really do lower your grades.

Spring Review 2023

I've kept a hexagon fish tank off Craigslist since about 2012. I called our group of Tetras we were given by a friend "the cartel", and the aquatic creatures were unkillable and prolific enough over the years that annually I had to give away the extra fish, plants, and snails that propagated. Then something changed during the pandemic, and the fish quit breeding. I tried everything in 2021 and 2022 for them - blood worms, fry hides, pH checks, a new filter and pump.

By the time we moved into the rental townhouse, we were down to just three tetras, and I was resigned to providing a quality hospice aquarium for the remainders. Then in early March I saw the first baby tetra in three years. Now there are two babies. I don't know what changed. Maybe everything.

In a few months, my first peer reviewed article in ten years will be published. It's my first professional publication in six years. The piece on how digital licensing counts affect library funding will be in an obscure journal, and my two co-authors are at a different workplace than mine. I kept trying to give away the lead author spot, as I have done with other group articles in the past. The co-authors kept giving it back. The article went through a couple of different professional publication reviews before finding a home. Not sure exactly what changed to make the work publishable, except persistence on the side of the co-authors to find the study a place in print.

Next weekend, I'll start working with a local parade Krewe to build my first lantern in six years. This will be my first big lantern build in eight years. The oldest daughter is building a lantern as well, her first in the same amount of time. We always meant to do this again, but there were all the things over the last six years that stopped us.

I don't know why the fish are making babies once more. I don't know what makes one publication take an article over another. I don't know why it took me so long to push myself forward on parade krewe work. I only know good things are happening.

I'm typing this as I listen to a high school choir perform "Call of the Flowers", which is lovely. In the row of seats before me, my youngest daughter sits, waiting for her turn to take the stage. All around me are the children I’ve watched grow at a distance the same time as mine. I don't feel like I know as many of the kids as I should. In a few years they'll all be in very different places, because everything will have changed again. It's their Spring concert, and I'm in a completely different seasonal cycle, sweating through the end of my own personal heat wave.

I feel like my long season of summer storms is almost done. I started a counter on my phone before Christmas to my 50th birthday, and I check it every few weeks, watching the numbers roll inexorably toward the third quarter of my life, the autumn. I can't wait for the end of the high temperatures, the next big real Change, not disaster, but something I know is coming but can't feel the shape of or name of yet.

I know everything will be different in three years, and not just because all the children around me will have graduated. These kids will have become the same kind of seeds on the wind I was when I started blogging in my own Spring. I'll have found my own new adventure by that time as well.

My youngest daughter and all the other performers are now wrapping up the show with Sunday by Sondheim. The seniors on stage have roses. One of the parents behind me is crying. We are all on the edge of marvelous changes, all the time. The aquarium that I thought was on life support was just on pause. I suppose I was, too.

All the other versions of me

It's April 20th, and I'm sitting on a picnic blanket in the Piedmont Park field nearest 10th and Monroe. The weather is gorgeous, with a bright blue cloudless sky over the green field with a slight wind. There are lots of other people here, but it isn't crowded because it's a Thursday. A few hours ago I took my first commercial capsule of a mushroom blend from a state on the west coast where it is legal to sell such things to people like me, people who were on FDA approved SSRIs for a long time before those drugs stopped working.

I suppose the point of the "micro" in microdosing is that I can't really tell that I took anything. I can only hope that the blend of Lion's Mane and other dried fungi, when taken on the daily in tiny measured capsules, will help with the crying, which is still daily as it has been for months, and the overwhelming weight of things, which has been with me since I was first diagnosed with depression around age ten. I've turned to the capsules imported from another US state after realizing I'll never feel OK spending the 3k for the three legal-in-Georgia ketamine therapy sessions I was prescribed over the winter. My insurance won't cover the legal ketamine therapy. My pocket money can cover the capsules from the west coast. I could, of course, obtain illegal ketamine or illegal mushrooms anywhere for a fraction of the cost of trying the legal stuff. I'm too scared to do any of that though, so here we are. As with everything else in life, I get to be the version of me that I can afford.

I had today off not to start taking the microdose capsules, but to have the routine colonoscopy scheduled for middle aged women. To prepare for the procedure, I was prescribed tablets that, when taken with nearly 2 gallons of water, would clear my system for the scope. Unfortunately, my insurance wouldn't cover the tablets, and the pharmacy asked for $300 for the prep, or I could have an older liquid prep for free.

I took the liquid prep. When I started exorcist vomiting the night before, it was too late to do anything about the fact that my system was emptying the wrong way. So when I showed up at 6:30am after a horrible night to the surgical center asking what could be done, the answer was nothing. Now I have to pay for a canceled procedure, and I'll still have to pay $300 for the prescribed tablets anyway when we reschedule.

There's a version of me that paid the $300 for the right prescription two days ago and had her colonoscopy like doctors wanted. That person isn't worried about debt. Maybe that person also got another credit card and paid for the 3k in ketamine therapy, and is happier on the daily even though they can't make rent. I envy this version of me in some ways, because the anxiety of debt doesn't bother them as much. I thought I could muscle through the liquid prep because my insurance said I could. I also I don't think I need to pay 3k for ketamine therapy, because my insurance also insists that prescription is a luxury as well. Insurance thinks everything is a luxury, and that wanting what the doctors want is weak as fuck, and I should toughen up or pay out.

There's a version of me that walked away from the colonoscopy recommendation entirely based on the price tag. That person probably bought ketamine or mushrooms on the down low and found a sketchy trip sitter. Maybe that person is happier too, even though they might get really sick or brain damaged. Insurance will be relieved when this version of me dies younger, because being old is expensive and painful, and insurance doesn't understand why I would want that anyway.

I've chosen to be the version of me that tries to do medicine the reccomended and legal way, at least, as much as I can. It's not easy for most people to be the version of themselves they can afford. At least sitting outside in the sunshine is still free, and I am surrounded by hundreds of other versions of people who have all decided that we'll at least try to be happy in nice weather at the park. That's the best any of us can do.

The Cat Came Back

The orange cat returned himself to us the Thursday evening before Easter, two and a half weeks after he went missing. We had the windows and back deck door open all that day as the air conditioner was broken, and maybe the smell of our sweat and the sound of our voices led the cat home. Or perhaps it was just that he was suddenly free from whatever garage or crawl space he had been trapped inside, as Walnut came back to us two and a half pounds lighter than he left, dehydrated and dirty, but without a single flea or injury. We all were so happy to have him back, even if he did cry all night the first two nights he was home. The orange tom still fought when I and the oldest daughter shoved him into a carrier for a vet visit the next day - it had been this type of visit that had prompted his disappearance, after all - but the doctor only drew some blood and had a vet tech help me shove a deworming pill down his throat. Because the cat’s system had been so stressed, the vet decided to wait on vaccines until he gains at least a pound back and his labs came back clean. So Walnut’s attempt to avoid the vet by running away in March has only netted him double vet visits in April.

Because of the sudden vet expense, for the first time ever I had to borrow some money from the oldest child to fix the AC, a point of shame for me. I was able to pay her back in just a few days, at least. The money to cover everything eventually came from a state tax refund, our first in years as the husband is no longer self-employed. Our financial problems that started during COVID and culminated with losing the Lake Claire house are slowly abating, but like my grief are doing so in waves, a tide that is rolling away from us even as the water pushes back and forth on our fiscal shores. I hope I never have to ask the kids to cover anything, even for just a few days, ever again.

I missed writing last week again after one of those emotional waves crashed over my head from the shame of short funds. The weight of memories and anger and financial depression worked against the progress I felt like I’ve made recently. I want to write about all the practical skills I picked up during COVID, how I taught myself basic masonry and expanded my foraging abilities and refined red clay right out of the ground and more, and attempt to write about these things in a positive way, but I don’t have the right words or framing yet to do so. Trying to force the thoughts and memories into type doesn’t work yet no matter how many times I want to approach the positive stories I could tell about the last three years. I don’t know how long it will be until I’m really ready to write about our COVID years. Everyone sane says you can’t will yourself into emotional recovery from loss, but of course I’m irritated that I’m not the exception, that I’m not some sort of grief prodigy. I always think I’m supposed to be better at everything, and of course that’s part of the problem.

So I’m going to try to continue to write about the good things, even if I have to reach back in time to do so, but this week I don’t have to go backwards too far at all. The youngest started her orthodontia this week and I’ve had to feed her soup and scrambled eggs and soft things as the pain of positive movement began in her mouth. I helped the oldest child with a problem in her workplace, and felt good about that, proud of her completion of her first year of employment and her modest savings account. I had my first new prescription for lenses in nearly four years come to me this week as well, and I made the jump into bifocals for the first time in oversize frames.

My new glasses are the kind of frames the grungy 1990’s teen me would have been appalled by, real Pokerface 1979 throwbacks in style. The frames are rose gold in color, a dramatic departure from anything I’ve ever had before. I normally stay away from both gold and pink, and this style shift in my daily wear wasn’t planned, but I was determined to push out of my normal habits and try something new. Friends have complimented me and it’s a big swing, fashion wise. I have to believe that if I don’t like the frames in six months or a year I will be able to buy another pair. I have confidence in my own ability to keep changing. I know that even though the waves keep hitting me, the tide of grief is going out. Eventually I will be able to clearly see what the destruction of the high water has left on my shoreline and handle the clean bones.

There are beaches full of beautiful sea glass, smooth fragments of green and blue and brown worn down and now used for beads and decorations. People forget sometimes that all that reflective beauty is there because once we dumped all our trash in the water, and that the sea glass was once broken beer bottles. You couldn’t walk on some of those beaches when I was a kid barefoot, because you’d cut yourself on the sharp refuse and get bad infections. Now older women collect the smoothed out pieces. I look like an older woman in my new giant glasses. I am an older woman, but not old enough yet that the recently broken things in my memories don’t still cut me when I try to handle them.

I’ll get to the place where I can talk about the last few years without hurting. It’s just going to take more time.

It was Dickens' daughter Mary who wrote that quote about cats.

The orange cat is still missing. Our youngest daughter, fighting off the head cold the house has been passing around last week, attempted to pick up and cuddle our remaining cat for comfort, and was rewarded not with the big loud purrs of her sweet gone tom, but the claws and hissing of a black cat that only loves on her own terms.

Solace the black cat came to us the week my Grandfather died six years ago. The tiny black kitten had been dumped in the brown lot behind our Dekalb avenue loft by some asshole. People were always dumping things in that lot, especially the wealthy man from the north side who owned the property, despite the fact that the land was ringed by very expensive Inman Park homes on three sides and our sketchy condos on the fourth. My daughters and their nanny at the time – Alena, a recent college grad who picked them up from school and kept them safe until the husband and I could get home – saw the kitten with a can stuck on its head one afternoon. Once the can was removed from the lost kitten’s head, the small black creature decided it needed to live with us. When I got home from work that evening and settled into my blue recliner, the kids opened the door to show me the kitten outside, and said kitten ran in the door in an instant and right up my legs and onto my shoulder. I had just heard about Grandpa’s passing, and had the final argument with my mother over the phone that solidified our permanent estrangement. I admitted to the kids that the kitten could stay until we found it a new home as it purred in my ear and insisted that I could be loved, that I was loved, and that it didn’t matter that my Grandfather was dead and my mom never liked me anyway.

I still really did try to give the kitten away, even sending her away to another person, who brought her back the next day, complaining that the baby cat cried all night. I sighed and gave up then, posting my bike for sale to cover the vet costs, and that’s how Solace the cat came to live with us.

She was our older child’s kitten in many ways at first, but Solace also came to think of me as her person. My daughters could play too roughly with the kitten at times, making her dance until I told them to stop, or dressing the new pet in hats she didn’t care for. It was up to me as the adult to rescue the kitten from these situations, and so Solace became used to sleeping with me at night. She still does. Solace’s favorite thing in the whole world is just to lie on me or the husband at night, or during the day, or whenever we can be induced to lie on the bed. The best thing that ever happened, from Solace the cat’s perspective, was the quarantine period, because suddenly someone was available to sit on at all times. The more often we are in bed, the happier Solace the cat.

Despite her love of our company in bed or occasionally on the sofa, Solace does not like to be picked up. She is determined to cuddle on her own terms only after the excessive cuddles of the children in her first year with us. If my daughters lie on my bed or the floor, Solace may try to groom their hair or sit on a teen’s noggin until she squawks. Walnut, the orange tom who we acquired eighteen months after Solace from the old Decatur Cat House, was the cat who adored being carried around like a baby over the shoulder, the cat who could be cuddled and who would often demand to be picked up with loud yowls. Now that he is gone on his own adventure, we are left with just one cat to love the four of us, and she only does so on her terms.

The only times Solace the cat has been out of doors are when some asshole dumped her, that one night I tried to give her away, the times we’ve moved and the times she’s been to the vet. As far as Solace is concerned, the house’s front door leads only to bad things, and she actively runs from any door that leads outside. It’s not worth the risk to her of losing her warm and comfortable home. I wish Walnut had felt that way. People keep telling me stories about cats that have been returned to them or have turned back up after months away. I hope Walnut turns into one of those stories. Both of our cats, I suppose, have been good at teaching our daughters that you can never really make something love you the way you want. It just sucks that the loss of love is baked into that lesson.

I had to lie down last week.

The weather shifted today in Atlanta, starting somewhere around 40F and going all the way up to 80F, a swing so sudden that it was upsetting, causing headaches and sneezing. I had the familiar nausea of change that happened too fast, and then found myself outside the house at the end of a day of work blinking at the clear blue sky and warmth where a cold overcast wind had cut through me just twelve hours before. I felt like I had been thrown into a new environment suddenly, like I went to work and came out into a different city. In some ways I had; the governor signed a genocidal sort of thing against trans kids, the prosecutors in downtown courtrooms insisted going to a concert made some other kids domestic terrorists, and everything suddenly seemed dangerous in ways it hadn’t before.

I’m having problems adjusting to the new reality reflected by the laws and cases happening around me, and along with the ongoing external turmoil, my own grief for life before the quarantine comes in waves. I had gotten back into the habit of blogging weekly for six months, and then the third anniversary of the quarantine shut down came, along with a rain of bad news both personal and political. I couldn’t write last week. I could barely move after work some days. I had to stand with my back against a wall, as per therapist instructions, and try to breathe and stretch and exercise my way out of the inner tempest. I walked as much as I could, tearing up the backs of my heels as I have yet to regrow the calluses lost over the 1,095 days since the world turned upside down. I still cry too easily. The calluses will only grow back with time.

The income tax refund came in this week, so I took the youngest to sign up for much-needed braces, a victory in parenting. We’re all slowly catching up on health care we’ve been missing, first because of quarantine, and then because of the finances. The oldest was able to pick out a second pair of prescription glasses, a backup pair that will make us all less anxious. I’ll be going to the optometrist myself for my first pair of bifocals on Friday, and I scheduled some preventative health care for next month. I tried to take both cats into the vet, but our five-year-old orange tom caught wind a day early, and took off, the first runner he’s ever done. We have posters up, and he’s chipped, so we’re hopeful he’ll come back.

The youngest is bereft, crying that this is the worst week of her life, as she was told she has at least two years of orthodontia ahead of her and her cat went missing. I often wonder about the perspective the teens in the house have had about what we’ve all been through the last three years, but they’re a notoriously difficult to talk to demographic. I wonder what they’ll say to me in a decade’s time about 2020, the year of school at home, and 2021, the year we struggled to get back on track, and then 2022, the year we lost the house. I have joked - and in front of them sometimes - that I went through quarantine with two girls at the meanest ages, 6th and 8th grade. I can’t write about what it’s been like for the kids though, because I’m not them. I lived with them, but that’s not the same thing as having the same experience. I haven’t been a teen for thirty years, and their world is so different I admit I haven’t a clue as to their feeling on anything. I wasn’t a teen in a world where everything could shift so radically in a day or a week that what was safe and true when you woke up could be illegal or outlawed by the time you went to bed.

Of course the domestic terrorism and anti-trans movements here in Atlanta have been rolling towards us for a while. But it’s still a shock that these things just keep happening. I want to write more about my own work, but I can’t, because it’s not safe anymore to talk about any sort of activist work, or to even say public service work is activism. I debated last week the merits of deleting twenty years of personal blogging because who I am and what I do is ever more contentious. I have a library degree. That used to be something that guaranteed fairly secure, safe work.

I didn’t delete the twenty years of blogs - the wayback machine would hang me anyway, if someone wanted to make my personal life an issue by way of a professional attack. But the idea of the laws in Florida, the ones that mean librarians can be sued personally, along with all the pointless censorship, were in part what laid me out for a week.

I can live through this. I lived through the last three years. I want to talk to my kids, in a decade or two, about what they felt and thought about what’s happening in Atlanta, both inside and outside our home life. I want to know what they think about everything. I want them to talk to me with their straightened teeth about how they felt when (hopefully) the cat came home. I want to know what the girls are like in ten or twenty years when the calluses on my heels and emotions have grown back. And after the adults I have raised tell me their truth about growing up through the quarantine and fascist governorships, maybe we’ll sneak over the Chattahoochee and piss on Newt Gingrich’s grave together in the dark. These hateful old men can’t live forever, and my daughters are young and strong. At least, that’s what I tell myself every day now, with my back against the wall, as I focus on breathing.

That time I took a newborn to drag queen bingo and she ended up part of the show

I could write this week about how upset I am at the Tennessee anti-drag law, but instead, I’ll write about how I took a newborn to a drag show and she ended up being part of the show. It’s a fun family story.

A week after I gave birth to my youngest in a coverted warehouse loft off Dekalb Avenue near Little Five Points, her godparents asked the husband and I out to the monthly drag queen bingo game that supports PALS Atlanta. It was 2008, and these drag bingo benefits for charity were already a long time fixture in town. PALS Atlanta was started in part by a guy who used to work reception at Inman Animal Hospital, where my cats have been treated since I moved back to the south in 2002. PALS started as a charity specifically to take care of pets of those suffering from the first pandemic of my lifetime, HIV/AIDS, but later PALS moved on to take care of lots of animals for those who were ill.

A week after giving birth, I was desperate to get out of the house. I also looked like total shit, but I didn’t care. My sisters were both still in town, and willing to stay home with the toddler, so I put on the maternity pants that wouldn’t fall off, a nursing top, and a button up shirt, and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. The husband and I met The Godparents at the venue, which was set up like any big old bingo hall. Long communal tables allowed me to discretely deposit the newborn baby girl in a sling across my chest, where she happily curled against me unless one friend of The Godparents or another wanted to show her off. It was a perfect first outing – I could sit and play bingo, enjoy the show put on by expert Atlanta drag queens, and the baby equipment – carrier seat, diaper bag, etc. – were easily hidden under the table. The large bingo hall set-up meant that lots of people were always getting up and moving around, so trips to the bathroom were no big deal. The combo of nursing top, wrap, and button up shirt meant that I could feed the baby discretely whenever she wanted.

Discretely, that is, unless you saw me from a very specific vantage point.

A feature of Drag Queen bingo, wherever it might be held, is crowd work. The MC’s walk around the large room looking for opportunities for comedy, or just to get the crowd’s attention. About midway through the night, as I was getting close to bingo and thus intent on both my card and nursing the baby, I failed to notice the host walking up behind me – until I heard a SCREAM.

The host, Ms. Bubba D. Licious, had noticed the weird sling I was wearing and had walked up behind me and looked down. It bears mentioning here that breastfeeding in public had only been legal in Georgia for a few years at this point and was uncommon unless you were in an area with a lot of progressive moms. So what the hosting queen observed, when she looked down at me from over my shoulder, looked to her like I had THREE BOOBS, AND ONE OF THEM WAS MOVING.

To give her credit, after the initial scream, she recovered quickly. Of course, my face was bright red – this night of all nights I really did not want everyone looking at me. Still, the situation had to be explained on mic, as everyone had heard the sudden shriek.

We all laughed it off the best we could, there were a few jokes, the MC returned to the stage, and the game continued, but it was clear the queen had lost the crowd. When the next break happened, women kept coming over to me to tell me they supported public breastfeeding. Which was nice, but I really didn’t want to be noticed, it as just that I had accidentally caused Something Political to happen at a drag show. Did I mention breastfeeding in public had only been legal in Georgia for a couple of years at that point? The idea of feeding your newborn outside the house was still gaining acceptance, and I had just brought the debate into Drag Queen Bingo accidentally.

Bubba D. Licious realized she had lost the audience and came over to me during the break and apologized for screaming. I wasn’t put out. Then she asked if she could hold the baby for the next bit.

By happy accident, I had actually brought the perfect blanket for the occasion: a furry Winnie-the-Pooh job with a wide yellow satin border. I set the host up with the blanket so that Bubba's dress wouldn’t be hurt by the baby and the baby wouldn’t be hurt by the beaded and sequined fashion. As the lights went back to normal show levels for the next round of bingo, my youngest made her local theater debut in the arms of one of Atlanta’s best improv drag queens.

There are fewer greater introductions to Georgia society than being held in the arms of a local legend and being proclaimed one of the most beautiful and best-behaved babies in Atlanta. It’s a memory I really treasure, and a story The Godparents have told endlessly. Of course, one of them is always sure to mention that the real reason they wanted us at bingo that week was because he showed up at the venue the previous week unknowingly still with placenta on his shirt from helping deliver her. Not everybody believed it was placenta, so he had to show up next week with the mother and baby.

Drag has been part of my children’s lives from the start. I really can’t imagine Atlanta without drag. That Nashville, where I saw my first proper drag show in the Spring of 1995, now considers drag some sort of corrupting experience is bizarre. The south has always had some of the best drag in the nation. I tried to watch a show in Boston in 2001 – it was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. I heard the shows got better up there in the last decade. Boston drag certainly couldn’t get any worse than what I saw.

The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil wrote a story about Nashville once called “High Heel Neil”, one of the first works he published after his book on Savannah. The title refers to Neil Cargile, a wealthy and respected Nashvillian, who once had to make an emergency landing on I-24 when I was in high school. Neil did so while wearing a dress, as was his habit – he wasn’t really a drag queen, the author explained, but a cross dresser. Still, I find it hard to believe that current governor of Nashville wouldn’t have at some point in the late 80’s or early 90’s, been at the same fancy restaurant or society event where Neil Cargile was present in less than masculine clothing. He was around, and he was part of upper class Nashville for a very long time. As was drag- that same era I was in High School was the Cowboys La Cage era of downtown, where a really excellent Reba impersonator was very popular.

Alas, Cowboys La Cage folded before I was eighteen, and I was never bold enough to sneak in. Until I reached the age where we could legally get into a bar, my boyfriend and I entertained ourselves instead by sneaking onto elevators in the L&C tower to jump up and down as they descended to induce brief moments of weightlessness, to see how many seconds we could make ourselves airborn. Without bingo or storytime or other public drag performances, we resulted to the petty teen crimes of trespassing and misuse of private property. This is what locking drag away from minors gets you – kids seeking their own dumb thrills and then growing up into the kind of moms who will bring their infants to drag shows to breastfeed in public after home births. I know that’s not the kind of future conservatives want for their children, so I suggest they unlock drag for minors and public appearances to prevent such shenanigans.

I'd rather be crazy OCD lady than crazy crying lady

I’ve had some good times with the kids lately, like the afternoon I took them to the Japanese convenience store on 14th so they could load up on foreign junk food, or the time I helped the youngest with her Girl Scout cookie distribution, or the time I introduced both of them to subs at Publix. I’m trying hard to commit all these good times to memory as our time as a family unit of four enters the final stretch.

This week I helped the oldest register for some college classes she can take in her final year of High School. Actual human wailing may have been heard as my oldest child encountered bureaucratic red tape for the first time, being forced by offices of higher education to repeatedly enter the same information again and again on digital forms all on the same website, all going to the same institution. Explaining that this frustrating endeavor 1) used to all be done on paper and that 2) was needlessly complicated because administrators still think of web forms as a 1:1 analog to those antique paper forms did nothing to lessen the prospective student’s suffering. Children born in this century find no comfort in the idea that it could all be worse, you could be working in pen and have to start all the way over when a mistake is made. I might as well have said I used to have to do my paperwork uphill in the snow both ways.

I may have felt a little smug when I explained to the suffering applicant that I had, for YEARS, done the same sort of applications for every summer program she had been in - and often times done it in duplicate, as both children attended camps and enrichment programs. A teenage snarl was the only reply.

It’s not all fun and games as the kids prepare to move out. The girls are going through puberty while I go through perimenopause. Given the hormonal upheaval we all live in at the house, plus all the grieving for the life we had before the pandemic, I’ve unhappily taken to crying at the drop of a hat starting around last December. This is deeply unpleasant, and while I’m good at keeping a lid on the disgusting trash water coming from my eyes and nose at work, tears fall in private and in social situations when I would rather it not happen at all. In an effort to get the crying to stop, or at least get it under control, I started physical therapy this month for crying.

Yep, the whitest thing I do (white lady crying over nothing), is being addressed by the second whitest thing I do (finding a therapy to try to feel different). This week was only the third session, but I can feel the progress happening slowly. This week the therapist had me back up against a wall and just…feel the wall behind me as a physical support. So I may be replacing my deeply inappropriate crying with weirdo wall groping in public spaces.

I’d rather be a weirdo wall toucher than a crier. I would find it more acceptable, in fact, to repeatedly touch doorknobs or have some other OCD “eccentricity”, anything but tears. I’m actually happy my kids are growing up. I’m happy I’ml almost menopausal. I’m even happy that I have to teach my kids how to deal with the stupid red tape of academic bureaucracy, even while I have my doubts about the usefulness of higher education. At least, my brain is happy, my body is forcing the water works open without consulting my brain. So when you see me, teaching my girls to drive, or getting some new certificate of achievement, please don’t mention it to me if there are tear tracks down my cheeks. Just extend some understanding while I do some breathing exercises while groping a wall.