On adulting

Sunny is completing her first trip around the sun. Everyone said her first birthday would mainly be a celebration of keeping a child alive for a year and it very much is. That and an ode to the fact that Nick and I are still speaking to each other most days.

On the one hand, I’m so excited to celebrate her. She’s grown so big, she’s nearly walking, she’s getting engaged in books, she has friends. And then on the other, I’m so excited for me.

Gasp!

When these tiny kernels of human beings arrive, they are pulpy mewling beings that rely on you for everything. It feels like you’re inside a shell and there’s no thinking beyond the shell—you’re just in it, doing the needful to keep a small being alive. It’s been a bit since it felt that extreme but I’m still astonished that Sunny can drink water on her own, she can hold her own bottle and she eats her yogurt with great aplomb.

Finally, I’m seeming to find it within my grasp to think a little bit further out than the fifty foot  radius of our house, on what adventures I can dive into myself. What better person can I become that Sunny can see, and that I can see? Who can I be that I can be proud of? Podcaster, author and contemporary oracle, Rich Roll talks about the feeling of being dismantled as a great opportunity. And much of the last year of being a new mother, I felt dismantled.

Step one of this new year keeps coming back to this, the topic of my current writing project: adulting.

I’ve started out on a series of essays about it—this adulting, a word that my AP English teacher no doubt would have cringed over, and an act I often find impossible to do, or at least do gracefully.

So along with visions of a surf trip to Puerto Rico and a long-distance paddle and a family trip somewhere exotic, I have dreams of this year simply registering my car on time (an example Merriam Webster actually uses to exemplify adulting and one I wrote a whole essay draft on), of being able to knowingly switch out a bit and wield a drill, of writing thank you notes less than a year from the date of receipt.

A good friend and fellow writer Susie Seligson once quoted such a concept in an exchange from A Raisin in the Sun:

“I want to fly! I want to touch the sun!" "Finish your eggs first.”

And it’s true. Let’s make space for the grand … and let’s eat our eggs first.

Is Email Life? And Other Things I'll Tell my Kids

When my kids are old enough, and definitely after they exist, I'm going to tell them: "Life is email. Life is email, and making new passwords because you've forgotten your old ones. Life is also wailing about all the things you have to do and not doing any of them until it's almost too late. So ya, where was I? Life is email, making passwords and kvetching balanced with procrastination." Then I'll remember after a couple seconds to add, "And contesting parking tickets. And meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. Meetings where people are told to do stuff and then at the next meeting, no one's done it. Meetings where everyone's late and if someone goes to look for someone whose late, the late person arrives and now the seeker is late. Meetings where you'll rush to fill the silence or else you'll think you might drown in it."

I'll tell them "If you're not doing any of these things, you've nailed it. You've made it." I hope it means they've become a traveling mime or a professional surfer. I hope it means they pay an assistant very well to take care of all their emails and forgotten passwords, to do lists and dishes, so they can wax their boards and practice miming what it's like to tight-rope walk over Niagara. Maybe my kids will bring back the megaphone and just blast all their messages through the streets over the air. They'll say, "Forget email. I'm just going to blast this message across a one mile radius and call it good." 

I won't really tell them that life is meetings and email, but I will warn them that it can easily become that if they're not careful. I'll also repeat what E. B. White told us is important in his mouse tale Stuart Little: A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy.