In motion

The photographer is coming to shoot photos inside my condo. I spent the entire weekend cleaning out the dust and ghosts of the past 3 years, and then some. The clumps of history bound together in bags and bundles were unraveled and launched down the trash chute unceremoniously. Polished patches of floor are visible for the first time in a year. Clothes are washed and folded. Bed sheets are smoothed. It's a shame I only get this organized when I'm about to bail. Wonder what it is about staying still that makes me get sloppy and sad. I crave a stable place but when I find it I feel smothered.

I reached out to Barb, the realtor, last week. I had known she would be the one I would call, and was working up the mental strength to do it after spring break. But in that moment I was thinking this is so hard, that I had better do it while my blood was pumping with caffeine, because I might easily talk myself out of it if I waited.

Just like that, I let go and let my soul take over. My soul was lingering in that mountain paradise where I spent the previous week. My body was back in my home town where life is predictable and still. It was obvious who should win out.

My soul is happy today, knowing I'm headed for higher ground with my dear heart Zoe in tow. I'm even starting to think about the lucky duck who gets to live in my condo next. I think I imparted some good energy inside those walls.

I'm the White Rabbit

My anxiety is triggered by stress, which is triggered by feeling a time crunch, which is pretty much how I feel all the time. Every morning I watch my daughter grow a little more into a woman. Every time I try to squeeze in a chore before I have to run for the 8:37 train. Every time I buy a garment thinking I'll have to hurry up and lose a little weight before I wear it. Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping.

And as my dear coach would say, what would I be without those thoughts? I'd be living in the moment, fully aware; keenly aware of how dissatisfied I am living from train to train. The solution could be as simple as resigning from this job. I'm more than ready to do that. I rehearsed the entire meeting in a dream the other day. I already know what to say, I'm just waiting for the right day. It will be here in a matter of weeks. It doesn't have to be wrapped in any other reason except the main one, that I no longer feel like I'm a good fit. I finally have options. For years I had to follow the course, just to survive. Now I have some money saved, a home, a car. A plan. Friends. Options. Boulder is waiting with open arms. My baby girl is practically a small adult with friends and goals of her own. We just have to pack our bags and go. Baby steps, in order to reach the land of giant steps.

The first steps are already happening. I need to make some conscious decisions now. Get the bills paid, set up the realtor, pack some boxes, sell some things, write some letters, call the movers, get the cat tranquilizers, refill my human tranquilizers, do yoga every day, pray for the realization of my dream...to live a peaceful life in harmony with nature. I can do this.

By the end of June I will be on my way to my new mountain home, spreading my unique energy and cultivating a new life. I will have everyone's blessing, even if unspoken. Ann pointed out how I'm still so stuck on the idea that I'll disappoint those around me. She said "how far does it go with you?" As in, how much do you allow yourself to believe that negative story? I told her "you don't wanna know." 

Today I made coffee. In the past I have relished giving someone else that job. I convinced myself at some point that it tastes better when someone else makes it. That's still true. But I didn't see anyone else who was willing to do that for me today. I waited for the water to boil, and I glanced at the Easter basket on the counter. I remembered Zoe saying, "it's too bad the Easter bunny didn't come to this house too." I'm not trying too hard to keep the myth alive. She saw the Easter baskets in our luggage when we left a week before Easter. She knew I was the one who put out the candy. But she lets herself believe it because-what a joyful thought that this sweet creature magnanimously shows up every year with treats just for her. I thought about what I'd tell her if she put me on the spot and asked if the Easter bunny really exists. I would've said that it's a story we tell little kids to see the joy it brings them. When we're older we accept a new role, as the giver of joy. We get our own special kind of joy out of it then. We just have to work a little harder for it, because we can!

I thought of how I'd give myself the same advice about the transition I'm making in my life. I came back to my home town after the course of my life changed 6 years ago. I knew it was temporary. I had to reset, rebuild myself, revisit my ghosts, make peace with all of it. The ghosts are all disappearing, one by one. Even the divorce, once the biggest shame and disappointment of my life, is small in comparison to the things I've achieved since then. All thanks to my decision to revisit my childhood home. I did what I had to do. Now I'm on the black diamond run of my life. I rose up to this point because I earned it, and the reward is in the ride. Falls and all, I'm in this for the sheer thrill. I wasn't meant to sit still at the bottom of the mountain, I was given this powerful body for a reason, to make and do, talk, see, wish, push and pull. There's another mountain beyond this one, and another lake, and another friend, and another sensation, and another love. I'm in motion, stopping is not an option.

Oh man.

I woke up in Boulder yesterday. Today I woke up in my own bed. Still can't believe that I triumphed over my short attention span to make that 16 hour trip in one day. That's something out of a presidential campaign itinerary. Glad I don't have to drive for a living. I was getting awfully goofy at the end.

Colorado. Rocky Mountain High. And today, Illinois. Flatland Hangover. Totally having a morning after guilt trip. I can't believe I got so swept up, again. You and your bluebird skies, shimmering blanket of powdery snow, beautiful people, healthy food, charismatic artsy social scene. When I'm there I'm so preoccupied with being accepted by your culture. I completely lose myself, in a good way. I think about growing my hair long, wearing Lululemon clothes, drinking artisan cocktails. It's a fun costume to wear. But so exhausting. This time I went so far as to rent two tons of ski gear to prove I can play the part. I was even reminded that some people just go to the ski lodge to hang out. But no, I jumped right on it. All I needed was an example and I followed it the best I could. Ann even complimented my skiing skills. I was copying her after all. Not that she realizes that.

I'm just trying to figure out why I do this to myself. Is there any part of me that is naturally drawn to the Boulder lifestyle? Can we be totally honest? Check this out: I paid $3 for a bunch of cilantro at Whole Foods in Boulder. When faced with the same price in Chicago I responded by saying hell no, and I biked over to the Cermak Mexican Market where I bought 3 bunches for $.10 apiece. It's the principle of it. But there's no Mexican market in Boulder, at least not that I could see. There's a lot of privelege in Boulder, and not much room for someone like me who is scraping by as a single working mom. I've been fighting this sentiment. It sounds like I'm giving up. I can't have gone through all this therapy and sacrifice just to decide it's better to stay put. But when I think of all I'd be giving up in this homogenous town with its yoga moms and biker dads, each one more meticulously groomed than the next...it sounds like eye candy and no substance. Now that's not true, Ann has found many people with substantial interests. And good looks. So it happens. But then there's me. I work full time so social opportunities are few and far between now, let alone in a faraway town where I'd be the sole caregiver for my daughter.

Then there's my daughter. Her closest friends live in the lap of luxury in Boulder. They don't flaunt it, thankfully. She can't help but want what they have. The truth is that we will barely have enough money to afford a roof over our heads, and the constant reminder of our lack of wealth is very real. I looked at a studio that cost about the same as my 2 bed/2 bath. Wake up call. No laundry, no walls. One room with a kitchen, bath, and a closet. I remember when I moved in with my ex and I thought I was done with that lifestyle forever. I can't possibly go back, not with a 9 year old as my roommate.

Time to be honest, dummy.

The irony

The aggressive throat clearer at work is at it again. For about 12 weeks, she has been hacking, barking, gasping, sighing, croaking and generally eating away at everyone's patience. Today it was as if she drank a bunch of milk to increase her phlegm production, smoked crack, and had a new business plan to flesh out for all of us to hear in great detail...and then aggressively and continuously cleared her throat for the entire day at intervals of 5 seconds to 5 minutes apart. The fact that I named my blog "Clearing my throat" has come back to haunt me. It was my other aggressive throat clearing coworker who first uttered the phrase, sparking my imagination to create a place where I could "clear" out the garbage, and try to get at the heart of the matter.

The real pressing matter...AHEM...AHEMMMM!!!!...is that I need to make a plan. I'm painfully aware of my ugly history every day when I walk into my office. I'm not embarrassed by it anymore. Not like when I first announced I was getting divorced. I do feel that I've outgrown the environment. I'm afraid to make a move because I've become so accustomed to hiding out. But I sometimes daydream about looking back at this self from a new vantage point, and maybe even patting that old self on the back for doing the brave thing by leaping into the abyss.

Making friends with ghosts

For years I longed to be alone. I was in a loveless marriage, feeling like my life had been reduced to slavery. Punching the clock, trying to fulfill everyone else's needs, losing sight of my own. Till I couldn't do it anymore. I missed who I had once been, before I was defined by all the detritus of adulthood. When I got my wish, as these things always go, I missed all the clutter that padded and protected me from the rocky road of solitude. My journey became dark and treacherous when I was finally alone. I'm still struggling with how to navigate this unfamiliar path.

Today I woke to the usual cries from my needy cat. I scolded myself in my mind for spoiling her, and for rewarding her demands with almost constant affection. It was still dark outside, and I debated taking some ibuprofen. Headaches had plagued me all week, and trying to fight it seemed futile, but I swallowed the pills with the foul-tasting water from the faucet. I pulled my hair back, threw on a fleece shirt, and walked out the back stairs to grab a coffee to further medicate myself. It was so gray and dreary, quiet, still...and without thinking, I exited the store with my warm drink and walked toward the clouds, in the direction of the rising sun, which I scarcely believed was somehow rising behind that colorless curtain.

My walk took me past my old therapist's office. Past the blackened snow piles at the fire station. Down the street where I used to catch crickets to feed my lizards. Like a nostalgic scene in a movie, my mind's eye obscured the generic beige town homes, and in their place I could envision the untamed grassy plot that used to surround the old greenhouses where flowers and onions were grown for a hundred years as the town took root.

Past Mayren's beautiful bungalow...I was fairly sure I saw Mayren jogging up the stairs in a long night shirt, stopping abruptly as if she recognized me. I walked up Milburn, then back down Evergreen, admiring the holiday decorations that lingered in the fog. I wondered why that foreclosed house was empty, and why the fog was so much thicker in that backyard.

I said hello to a woman, same age as my mom, who was pulling the leash of her stubborn husky who wanted to sniff around the electrical pole some more. I realized I was the only person walking without a dog this morning. Maybe I need a dog, I thought. I made my way to the playground where I spent countless afternoons as a kid. I thought about the day we packed up the Feigns' cats in the Burley trailer and walked them to this park, how our kids laughed and rolled around in the grass in their pajamas in the setting sun, the day before our family trip to Colorado. I plucked a needle from a pine that sparkled with water droplets, and ground it between my fingers so I could smell the winters of my childhood. The last bit of thawing snow crunched under my feet. The grass poked up bright green through the slushy ice. It had been preserved like a salad bar garnish since the warm spell before Christmas. I left the park and passed the church where a year ago I attended a group therapy session for families of addicts. How open my eyes had been that day.

The snow that had been piled next to sidewalks and driveways was shrinking, twisting, growing black sooty stubble. I sought out the formations that looked like black and white renderings of the hoodoos I saw in southern Utah. I saw one that was a perfect little arch. Just big enough for a cicada to walk through. I bent down to get a better look, and I uttered a little "huh," like I would if I was about to point it out to my companion.

And just then, I didn't feel alone. This little nature walk was all for me. The surprises were my own, not for anyone else to notice. My imagination, swollen with sweet lingering memories, was doing cartwheels, soaring high over the earth, dancing freely, singing answers to my questions, holding both my hands and swinging me like a child over the cracks in the sidewalk.

Full moon + solstice = a new beginning

I need to say a few things about waking up alone on a Sunday morning. 1) this hasn't happened nearly as much as it should have in the past 5 years. 2) it's a very special kind of quiet that lets me feel my body aches and hunger and clarity and especially comfort. 3) why was I afraid of this? I haven't even gotten around to having a warm drink to complement my warm blanket. This can only get better. I have my cats, who are bopping around like they're happy to see me, tossing toys back and forth, murmuring little grunts as they play, stopping to check out the view.

I changed my furniture layout yesterday. I was attempting to consolidate the clutter, make better use of the windows, open up the main room. Can't believe I didn't think of this sooner. I was so focused on filling up my free time with social activities that I didn't allow myself time to get into my own magical head space. Here I am, in that space, feeling like I went far away on a soul searching journey. And I'm at home! I missed the feeling of home. Once my brother visited me at my studio apartment in Ravenswood, the last really cool vintage place I lived. He said something about how I can always make a place feel homey (implying that it wouldn't be his choice to live in an old building with antique lighting and whatnot, but this was not so bad). It was one of the best complements I ever got.

Today I'm in my perch, 4 floors above the corner that is the historic center of my historic home town, in a fairly new and perfectly functional attached home. No complaints. I just watched a Canada Goose approach from a quarter mile away, and fly off to the North. It's been a mild winter to say the least, and the goose confirms all of our confusion.

On another house-cleaning note, I broke up with Michael. It was a no-brainer. Or an all-brainer. Yeah, all-brain decision. I woke up at his house for the last time a couple weeks ago on a Sunday. Woke up feeling stressed about brushing my teeth before offending him with my morning breath. Feeling obligated to relieve his sexual urges. Knowing his kids were texting with demands for rides and visits. My own daily needs were so far down the list I couldn't see them. And this had been going on for a year. 5 years, really, if you count all the false starts. But it had really come to a point where I didn't see a way to fix it. I simply didn't want to wake up with anyone else anymore. I wanted this very thing, to wake up and be concerned only with my self and my daughter. And my pets. Mine, not his poor ailing sleeps-all-day dog.

I met Michael within a month of my separation. It was an awful, anxiety-ridden, rainy April night when I desperately sent out my plea to the readers of the match service to come and save me. He was the only one who answered. He was recently separated too, and sort of homeless, since half the time his wife was home with the kids and he was squatting at a friend's condo. Talk about two drifting souls looking for something to hold on to. We had fun, forgetting our money troubles and broken hearts together. It was actually one of the most fun times of my life, in between the terrifying moments of realizing I was going to be on my own. We traveled, we danced, we laughed, we slept and ate and drank and talked and reminisced about our former married selves, we grieved together. That was such a gift. And the gifts kept coming. And then he had the chance to try falling in love with someone else. My heart broke again, not a total shatter but a big tear. But I realized it was for the best. I found someone else too, someone else who needed to grieve. It wasn't as fun. But it taught me some new things. And it had to end.

I hadn't had much time to embrace my new world of being officially divorced, and off the dating circuit, when Michael started coming around again. This time he was open about sharing his kids, and wanted more to do with Zoe. It was the same man but a totally different attitude. I tried to play it casual. But how could I ignore his attention? He knew how to get me to open up. And then I'd retreat. And that made him sad. So we got into a pattern of him seducing me and me falling all in, and then me taking my life back. And over and over as time permitted, on a bimonthly basis since that's when Zoe would be visiting her dad. They started to feel like conjugal visits. It hasn't felt right since we returned from Italy. I came home to the prospect of a dead end job. Our best friends had moved away. I had my family. But they deflected any mention of my companion. They met him once, at Brian's crawfish boil. He came in his own car, obviously tight on time, focused on having to go back home for his son's baseball game or wrestling match or something. They didn't seem to dislike him. But they definitely didn't try to pull him in to our family tradition. It wasn't until December of this year that my mom and I had a conversation about what it would be like to pack up and follow our friends to Colorado. She asked if Michael would move with us. In that way that mothers ask. It wasn't so much the actual words that carried meaning, as the disdain in the wrinkles that formed in her nose and eyebrows as she asked the question. I told her I felt like he was purely my companion, not my partner. It seemed to appease her. And weirdly, as I said it, it appeased me too. He wanted to be a partner, and he showed great potential. But partnership to me felt like a punishment. Like being grounded. I'd be relegated to a tiny house in Skokie, not just me but also my daughter who has had the privilege of growing up with her grandparents a few steps away. She'd have a smaller room, she'd have to share everything for the first time in her life, or confine herself to avoid conflict. And so would I. In this tiny house I couldn't imagine being confined to a corner of a bedroom, with barely enough room to tiptoe past the dog bed and zero room for clothes and personal tokens and space to do all the weird crafty things I like to do. No. This was not a once in a lifetime proposition. I was not coming into this relationship with a deficit. I was already set up in a spacious, clean, bright and cozy spot that was perfectly affordable. Could I finally just admit that to myself and go on with my life as I pleased?

I made a clean getaway.

Here I sit, on my comfy couch, under my comfy blanket. Free to be all the things that I am. Going all sorts of places. Revisiting all my favorite memories. Ready to soar like that goose. I'm already 4 stories high, I wonder how much higher I can go?

Note to Michael

Alone in her home, maybe for the first time in years, she laid on her stomach in the dark, typing into her mini laptop. She created a person on an Internet match site who went by the name Susan. She was a smart, creative, thoughtful woman, who was in search of a "single male for friendship or dating." She didn't know what kind of friends she would encounter in this anonymous world of selfies and lyrical autobiographies. But with the exception of a few desperate-sounding, couldn't write their way out of a paper bag types, the possibilities seemed promising. She thought she had known loneliness when she was single. And then, a new, more wrenching loneliness as a mother of a baby girl, her husband desperately holed up in the farthest corner of their home reeling with regret. But this rainy cool spring evening as she sat in the dark, too anxious to turn on lights as the sky faded to black, a stark new sensation of loneliness washed over her. Her revisions were labored, she didn't want to appear lost, like this was a desperate plea for validation. Of course it was.

Earlier that week she had filed a petition for separation. She chose a lawyer by Googling "Divorce lawyer Rogers Park." Mr. Stone gladly obliged her request to represent her. She met him on her day off in a nearby suburb. His office was filthy. Subway wrappers littered his desk and floor. Instead of fleeing, she took it in stride. After all, she was doing a deed that unearthed so many unpleasant, even nauseating feelings, that sitting in a dank basement office discussing the exorbitant cost of divorce-it felt perfectly in line with her mood to be surrounded by garbage. He didn't shake her hand. "I got a thing..." he said. Germaphobe? Warts? She didn't inquire further. He was young, but his beard was very long. And he wore a sad, wrinkled white shirt with odd strings hanging from his belt. A few minutes into their conversation it became clear that he was one of the Orthodox Jews she had grown used to seeing in the nearby neighborhood, often walking to and from services on Saturdays. He was a real estate lawyer. This didn't sway her from seeking his counsel for her divorce. Turning back was not an option. She made it this far, she would just see it through, this unchartered journey she was about to embark upon.

Fighting through a stinging headache, she typed, reread, edited, added, subtracted, reworded, and selected photos of a younger, brighter self. It was exactly like applying for a job, and carried the same anticipation and weight of filling out an application for a job whose requirements were only vaguely known.

This person was easy to create. She had a great job, a family, a respectable history of being a city dweller with some street cred. She knew the bike trails, the cool bars, after living in Chicago for 12 years she knew the city like an old friend. She was a chameleon who could adapt to her surroundings. She's studied all sorts of environments and people. All she needed to do was get noticed.

And just hours later, you noticed.

You asked to meet her at a restaurant in her neighborhood. You were late. And that was acceptable. She knew you had kids at home. You were determined to meet her though. She was thrilled. She drove with the radio blasting the theme from Footloose. She ordered a shot of whiskey to calm her nerves. When you arrived you flashed her a warm, but reserved smile. You sat at a table that was uncomfortably high for both of you. You talked about work, college, sports (it was a sports bar). You didn't like the service. It seemed like you were in a hurry to get through this part. And then you paid the bill and said your goodbyes in the parking lot. You gave her an extra long, silent look. She smiled awkwardly. And that was it.

She went home alone and thought, well, that wasn't so hard. And thought about the possibility of meeting others. This guy was a CEO, after all. He probably had lots of opportunities to meet other women. She would chalk it up to experience and move on.

She couldn't have predicted that only 6 weeks later, she would exit a plane in New York City under a full moon, and walk into a hotel lobby to find the same man in an ill-fitting, and nonetheless, handsome, tweed blazer.

For 3 days they enjoyed one another's uninterrupted company. Long walks, lazy breakfasts, views that she knew only from TV and movies. Her 35th year, her most difficult and painful year, ended in a sweltering haze of soothing infatuation.