Sí, tú puedes

Reading: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Listening to: "For the Movies" by Buckcherry

Outside: April breathes deeply, whooshing away the winter 

Travel veterans flank Indiana, limbering up for his first flight
Easter Sunday, March 31st 2024

After the passing of my dear friend in February 2022, my entire world went gray. The colours of my life's palette mixed up, all those rich purples and reds and blues and yellows swirled together into mud. Dark, murky, numb. I couldn't consume novels like I had before  - and I say consume deliberately. I used to eat them up. But the words ran together, the same sentence didn't go in. Over and over again. Instead, my train journeys to work saw me staring listlessly out the window, the way I'd observe other passengers doing that used to baffle me. Why stare out the window? What was out there? Well, it turns out - the world on a treadmill, rolling past, the same trees, over and over again. Nothing.

My favourite songs, the ones that always made my heart beat a little faster, no longer had the same effect, and I was distracted every day by those little moments that cut through, the ones that sliced: Before and After. (That book he borrowed and returned, the joke we had about Tom Waites. Before, Before, Before.) All those moments in between those Before and After ones - the ones were I held the book I was reading when he died, fanned through the pages again, rubbing salt into the wound - were me in a soundless room, where I made meals for my children without really paying attention, slicing carrots and boiling water for pasta. Placing heavy plates on a dinner table, serving food I couldn't taste. I was stuck. 

I guess it was fitting that we hadn't flown for a while. Would I have been able to board the plane? What other terrible things could happen? 

But we did it. Finally, after five years, we boarded a plane again, for a cheap holiday to Spain. My toddler son was brave through take-off, leaning into encouraging words from his big sister, who knows much about flying. Bolstered him with pro-tips throughout. Glued to the window, he and Lena watched the ground disappear. We enjoyed an uneventful flight, nice and short, and landed in Almeria just as the sun was setting.

And in the morning - colour!

If you look close - there are parrots in the tree

From our balcony, resort guests strolled around the pool below, staff in starched white and bow ties and aprons served drinks. A vast array of deck chairs shined in the sun, which reflected even further out across the expanse of the Mediterranean Sea, endless, criss-crossed with shards of sun and one or two slow, lonely boats in the distance. 

From the speakers in the restaurant, music full and fresh, as rich as the food as they served - anything you can want and more. 

The restaurant staff were as warm as the Spanish sun, always generous, muy simpáticos. By the end of the week, they all seemed like friends. One of them showed me a picture of his own toddler son on his phone, and I said, "¡Qué guapo!" (how handsome), and he laughed and pointed to himself. "¡Y tú!" I said. (And you!)

That connection. I felt that. 

Maybe I just needed some Spain to help feel my life again. Even just a little bit. I don't know where it came from, but I heard a voice in the middle of the night on our last night there, say to me, "Sí, tú puedes." Yes, you can.

For any of you grieving, remember there is always hope. There's always help. 

Remember to allow yourself to enjoy your life. It's okay to do this. Let yourself do this.

Sí, tú puedes.

In the moment -
 the world's beauty
waits patiently
for when you're ready
to see it again.

Happy Saturday, everybody.

What does the fox say?

Reading: Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

Listening to: Relaxing Jazz Music / Coffee Shop Ambiance

Outside: 2 o'clock sun rises a little higher, holding over us a little bit longer, as the days lengthen, amen

Maybe it's the snowdrops pushing their way through the slate flowerbeds, their tiny leaves so rugged and so delicate, tenacious even in the cold, but the end of January always gives me hope that Winter Can Be Gotten Through. They are springtime yearnings, these little shoots, wanting and waiting.

I take it one half-frozen day at a time, each school day a new hill to climb, a kind of structured panic involving a gallon of coffee, trendy school-bottles of water, unzipped book bags, fleeting time, and the same run of morning cartoons that roll on in the background, offering the same comforting noises - Grizzy and the Lemmings's cheerful-if-frantic intro tune; the gruff voice of the aged grandfather in Monster Loving Maniacs. Oh yes, I know them all, and my children eat it all up happily, along with their spoonfuls of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut.

Lena and Indiana chill after school
January 25, 2024

Now that Indiana has begun school, he returns home in the afternoon with a different walk, a new kind of gaze on the world. Learned, listening. A playground veteran. An Armageddon-like Here To Save The Day stride.  He considers things, questions and interprets carefully. As a three-year-old, he still trips over his own shoes (don't we all?), but there's a new toughness about him. He cries less, listens to reason more, dusts himself off, and offers his own solutions to problems. Emotions are still there, as they should be, but they're less like a fifteen-foot wave-wall crashing into the living room when his building blocks collapse (or in the backyard, when it's time to get off the swing because I've got to make dinner), and more like a shallow eddying current, softly buffeting and then letting go. Gentle. And, even more importantly, he sits down. He actually sits still. I am amazed. 

So amazed that I caught a picture of my two children not biting each other and screaming, but sitting, nay, snuggling on the couch, one day after school, glowing like a Rembrandt painting over the blue-tinted light of Lena's tablet. Cue the heart-breakingly beautiful violins: a Hallmark moment on the TV screen of Your Life. One of those moments you actually feel. You live inside it.  This here was one of the exact reasons we chose to have a second child, hoping one day this would be possible. And, ladies and gentlemen, here we are. Yes, he's probably just worn out after an afternoon of fun and learning, but it's a good kind of tired. 

Recently, we'd put on an old YouTube playlist, starting with a song we'd listened to a lot in 2020/1: "What Does the Fox Say?" by Ylvis. And like that, our Pandemic Playlist started up again, the soundtrack of the longest goddamn winter of my life, but with an entirely different backdrop - no scribbled home-learning papers scattered like confetti on every available surface; no broccoli boiling over on the stove, forgotten by an overwhelmed and overtired mom; no rumpled baby bouncy-chair in the corner; no lady-bug-shaped Tummy Time mat on the floor. And this time, two children were laughing at it, rather than just one (and a baby's blissful coos). I'd enjoyed this music video way back then - yes, even through the stress and exhaustion, the song's hilarity pierced my sadness, a magical chord struck - but this time I actually, really listened to it. 

And it's a great song!

The kids love it! And it got Lena asking, "What sound does a fox make?"

We all looked at each other, unsure. 

"I don't actually know," I said, and Indiana shook his head. 

"Don't know," he said.

And I guess the video's silliness and its Techno dance-in-the-woods got us thinking, and we couldn't figure it out, and that's okay.  In this moment of my kids being 10 and 3, their laughter unlocked yet another piece of my heart, and I wished for them to keep that curiosity, to always wonder what a fox says. 

And so I'll close with this: I hope my kids push forth like each snowdrop, awake and reaching and unafraid while its floral cousins sleep. Keep looking for wonders, my tenacious two, keep finding what you need. Rise and shine in that hesitant sun. Sooner or later, sunlight always comes back. 

I hope we all keep wondering about the world, and who knows - maybe, if we're lucky, we'll even figure it out. 

Happy Saturday, everyone.

The tightrope of adolescence

 Reading: The Devil in Connecticut by Gerald Brittle

Listening to: "Hallelujah" by Alexandra Burke

Outside: Winter closes in with the night

A dear friend wrote to me recently, that my daughter, Lena, "walks the tightrope of adolescence," and as Christmas nears, I bolster myself for what that means. 

Lena, age 9, October 2023

At this time 10 years ago, I was waddling slow. I was still working full time, scraping the heels of my winter boots on the ground as I went from home to office to taxi and home again. I had no idea then, in the fullness of my pregnancy, how much my daughter would change my life. 

Lena, age 2, October 2016

She's gone from wrapping her tiny newborn hand around my finger, to letting go of my hand across the street, to shying way from a peck on the forehead, to questioning my every directive. We're at a stalemate over homework, her sighs heard from all over the house. Doesn't matter what room you're in. But then there's more - she towers over her little toddler brother, who drives her crazy, who drives her creativity, who brings out the best in her, who offers her a special smile every time she says "Night, night." 

Lena shows Indiana how to play Dobble, Summer 2023

Her 10th birthday approaches, and with that, her 10th Christmas. I can handle her birthday - the double digits, the foil balloons, the ever-changing request for presents. I will be staying up late the night before, breathing life into those balloons until I'm blue in the face. (The parallel of deep breathing of hard labour and the deep breathing to swell birthday balloons is not lost on me. Oh, no, it is not.) I will be arranging and re-arranging for hours, because I want everything to be just so. That I can handle. I'll be tired, wracked with perfection, but yes, I can make our tiny house a temple to Lena's disappearing youth. 

It's Christmas I can't handle. 

Image source: https://www.facebook.com/AintNothingLikeAMother

I am clinging to our usual style of Christmas, our busy-to-the-point-of-panic evening: on Christmas Eve, we listen for silence from our kids' rooms, and then we stealthily set out our children's presents, all carefully wrapped and painstakingly tagged, pretending to be the Man Himself. We'll drink the milk and take a chomp from the cookies, leaving a dutiful, recycled "Thank You" note from Mr. C. Lena, along with her little brother, will be enchanted and delighted, and will question nothing. 

But will that happen this year? Will it? 

What will happen when I have to face that question, when she looks at me with those searing blue eyes, staring right into my soul, and ask me, "Mommy, is Santa real?"

What will I say? 

I can only hearken back to what happened when I approached my mom about it. It wasn't pretty. It went something like this:

Me: "Mommy, is Santa real?"

Mom: "Santa? No, honey. No. That was me the whole time."

Me: Pause. Brain cogs turning. Stomach churning. "What about the Easter Bunny?"

Mom:  Raucous laughter

I can only put this down to the fact that I was the last in the long line of four. My mom was tired. She had already been through it three times; with me, there was no energy left for ceremony. No long talk. No gentle, comforting sounds, no letting me down easy. Emotional support, nil. I can swallow it down, now, because I can see the pains she took to create such a magical Christmas tableaux every year. Every year. And pretty much, I have to say, all on her own. (I'm sure my dad cared; his long work hours kept him from co-Santa-ing; and of course it was all of his work money which would have funded Santa's efforts in the first place.) My mom vetted our Christmas lists, budgeted, purchased, hid the loot, wrapped, bagged and tagged. She handled my questioning as best as she knew at the time. Short and to the point.

And what if I break her heart?

Will I hate myself for this myth I have perpetuated for her entire life? I don't know what I will say when she asks me, point-blank. I really don't. I balked at her asking about a toy's country of manufacture a few years ago, blindsided by a six-year-old. "Mommy, this is made in China. How can it be made in China if Santa's elves made it?" An innocent question. I don't even remember how I replied.  I blustered through something and changed the subject. That was just the beginning. 

Many parents are steadfast in their lack of Santa. Never introduced him; they don't want to lie to their children. And I can see that. I can definitely understand that. I know of parents who believe in honesty, transparency; they want their children to know that Christmas is not a free-for-all, that parents pay for it, that parents make it happen. They do not hide behind stories, or myth, or tradition.

I guess, the journey takes its own path; each child experiences Christmas in a different way, and that way is down to how the parents or carers would like to present it. 

I guess, to me, it's magic. I uphold the magic, rather than reveal - just yet - the mechanics behind it. 

I become Santa, in this story: I navigate the path, sprinkling it with candy canes along the way, hoping for the best. Call me reckless, but there it is. In my story, the child simply grows from learning about the spirit of giving in the form of a tangible person - a person equipped with reindeer and a magical ability to drop down the chimney of every home in a single night - to the spirit of giving in their hearts. They grow into that concept. Like growing into a larger pair of shoes. Uncomfortable at first, maybe, but eventually, they wear those puppies into the ground. And those puppies take them places. Wonderful places. The child learns the meaning of having plenty in a time of little, when our Northern Hemisphere is cold and brittle and unforgiving. The child learns that comfort can be had in the smallest of things - a wrapped parcel, given from the heart. The child learns the warmth that giving brings. The child learns the ceremony of giving, the beauty of it, the goodness of it. The magic of it. 

My heart broke the day my mom told me Santa wasn't real, but over time, I learned that really, in this one singular thing, my mom was wrong. Santa is real. I'm 40 years old and I still believe in Santa; I never stopped. When I was 34, right before my mom passed away, she gave me a collectable ceramic horse figurine, its snow-white mane and tail bright against its dark-blue body dotted with a snow-topped forest of pines, framing Santa's sleigh racing across its midsection. "His name is Midnight," she'd said, "He belongs to you now. You always loved Santa so much." 

Was it her way of making amends, decades later? I don't know. Maybe. All I know is, Midnight is now in a special glass cabinet I look at every day. Midnight is hope, magic, love, joy. Midnight is a light in the darkness. 

My Christmas mornings are still full of magic - even though it was my hands and my husband's hands who wrapped our children's presents and placed them under that tree the night before, by morning, some alchemy in the moonlight had rendered them unfamiliar; the wrapping paper glittered at different angles, the boxes all moved, re-stacked; it wasn't our work at all. It was Santa's. Somehow, in my crazy heart, it always was. 

My daughter is about to enjoy her 10th Christmas a la Santa. She believes, and I hope she never stops. 

Whatever happens, one thing's for sure: on this tightrope of adolescence, Babygirl, I'm here to keep you balanced, and keep you from looking down - I've been on this tightrope a while, and I might be standing at the other end, but I'm always right there with you. Baby steps, darling. We're in this together.

Lena and me, Halloween 2023

Happy Friday, everyone.

To my second-born

Reading: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Listening to: "Suit and Jacket" by Judah & the Lion

Outside: Summer drizzle dances on the dandelions

Mudpie!
May 3, 2023

Dear Indiana, 

The world spun slower the year you were born - in fact, for many, it came to a stop. We stopped going outside, in every way "outside" could signify: work, school, fun. Outside was a threat. You, who floated blissfully in the water of my womb, grew just the same. For you, the world never stopped spinning. 

You, who will get a side-glance, a raised eyebrow, a tiny smile, when you grow up and you're standing at the counter at the bank to deposit your first work pay, or to open a mortgage account. "A Pandemic Baby," they will say, speaking of a history that is printing dark and wet in the world's Modern Civilization textbooks right now. You'll get that comment when you hand in any form you fill in, everywhere you go. Everywhere.

For you, I was already a mom. Your sister made me one. She made me a person I had never been before; she made me new. She gave me the confidence, almost seven years prior, through trial and error, in bathing a baby, feeding a baby, swaddling a baby, singing to a baby. She taught me all those things, and you experienced the results of that tuition. We can thank her for that. At least we had that going for us.

For you, I was hurried. Overwhelmed. A baby does that - as, too, you may find someday. Oh yes, a baby does that! It doesn't matter if it's your first or your fifth - a baby keeps you on your toes! Morning slides into night, with a long span in between consisting of bottles, diapers, laundry and naps. 

But lo! I was already on my toes: I was not the same mom I would have been had there been no such thing as Coronavirus. I would have been steadier on my feet, less panicked, less breathless, my hands resting here and there longer, my soap-cracked hands not so busy bleaching groceries and washing door handles and clearing and labelling a quarantine shelf in the back room. I was preparing and overseeing Lena's home-school-work, uploading photo evidence of learning, processing a new way of life. I was setting timers on the microwave, stove, and phone, and surprised every time each one went off, unsure which thing (Lena's gym-class equivalent? The bottles in the sterilizer? The baby?) the alarm was for.  I was answering phone calls from Lena's teachers, checking up on "how things were going." (What was I supposed to say? That I felt unhinged? Vulnerable? Incompetent? That I didn't even know what day it was?) I was answering phone calls from the doctors, a six-week baby check that took place over the phone. I was telling them all the truth. "Yes, he's doing fine. He is ship-shape." I was worried, exhausted, opening the fridge door and forgetting what I was looking for. I was shaking a rattle at you and telling Lena how to spell "circumstance," and forgetting what was in the fridge. I was needed too much.  I was burning dinner. 

Indiana, 2 months old
December 23, 2020

You are no longer the tiny baby we welcomed into a scary, uncertain world. You left that baby behind sometime last year, and I have already mourned the last time I held you for a nap. You are simply too big, you complain you're too uncomfortable, to lay across my lap. (But oh! Oh, honey, you are always welcome. Always welcome.) We said goodbye to your bottles, your crib, your bibs, and diaper rash, and teething, said hello to big-boy-underwear, and your school uniforms are in your closet, ready to go.  

And the world's changed. Groceries no longer terrify me. We go outside to school and work and play. And I've changed - dinner no longer burns, there are no more alarms, and I'm no longer rushed. I feel even in the world, balanced; the cares are still there, but fewer. They're lighter; I carry less.

Indiana in the sunshine
May 20, 2023

As you run across my back-yard view, showing me your mud pies and climbing into the swing yourself and asking politely (!) for a push, I am hoping I am making it all up to you. I hope you will remember how I build building-block castles with you, and how you knock them down. I hope you remember blowing bubbles in the bath, how you insist I'm not feeling very well but magic water well help me (it does!). How we sing "Bonny Portmore" together every night at bedtime.

Now you're almost three. Three years old.

As you laugh and nap and scoop ice cream and dig big sand holes at the Filey Beach and grab for bubbles along with your sister, who ushers you through your summer carefully and almost mother-like, I hope you know I will miss you when you start school, and that these days, these days-just-you-and-me, are numbered. It will be crippling, this missing-you, and it will be altogether different from the missing-you of Lena's first day at nursery. It will be the knowledge that you are the last one, that are no more coming after. 

Those baby-steps will be turned into flashes of leather-shod feet, so big and so small, so sure of themselves, running down our front walk, bright backpack bouncing with intensity. Into the wide world you will go, for the first time, without me. 

Everywhere you go, son, 

I'll always be here. 

Loving you.

Always amazed by you.

Being even in life's uncertainty,

And

atoning for lost time. 

An expectant me 
and the Indiana that will be
August 23, 2020

Happy Sunday, everyone.

Chicken Soup

 Reading: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

Listening to: The sounds of dinner cooking

Outside: Blue-gray skies threaten rain

The other day, my two-year-old son's grandfather informed me that my little boy does, in fact, like chicken soup. "He loves chicken soup," he said, and I was quietly and profoundly surprised. I don't know why I was surprised. Was it because I'm pretty much the only soup-eater in the house? Or because my daughter turns green when she sees a bowl of it? 

Sure enough, I gave him a bowl of Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup yesterday for lunch, and he devoured it. He was in his own little world of bliss.

Lena and Indiana, snack time - 
Summer 2022

And that was astounding to see. It really was. To see that pleasure on his face. This toddler whose mood swings are vast and furious and unpredictable, slurping away contently, tapping his little foot in the air.

For almost ten years, my life has been an endless round of laundry and Mom's Cafe - I am no longer the carefree girl who used to skip rope on Field Day and win; or the early-teenager who lost herself in Shel Silverstein's poetry; or the twenty-something woman who worked three jobs and studied university English classes. I am 40 now, and my life couldn't be more different: CBeebies and Play-Doh videos dominate the TV, replacing Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Used bundles of children's clothing pile into my Ebay shopping basket, replacing the Clark's shoes I used to buy. My fridge door and my mind has become a jumbled, highlighted schedule, with so many things to keep track of. My Writing Cave, decorated so carefully, has been a nursery for two years. (My creative process is now relegated to the confines of my bedroom.) 

I tidy up each morning's toddler toys, trains and trucks and blocks and dolls scattered like used artillery shells across the living room, only to tidy them again in the afternoon, again in the evening. I wash load after load after load of school uniforms, of winter gloves, towels and bedding. I am the unsung hero, the servant in the shadows, the angel of the house, invisible, making things bright and clean and neat again. 

It's a hell of a lot of work.

I guess, until the time comes that I am no longer spinning all of these plates in the air - my children, impossibly grown, taller than me and sipping their own coffees, fired up about studies or work or romance - I guess, until then, I must remember to Live In The Moment. To find my own chicken soup. 

Maybe it won't be the big things that I remember from this time in my life. Maybe loss has struck too hard, and those closest to me are fewer, and maybe my children are squabbling over the TV remote again. Maybe I'll burn dinner again. Probably. 

But maybe I'll remember, in all the chaos, between another load of laundry and the weight and heft of carrying my son all the way home from the grocery store because he doesn't want to walk but he doesn't want to go in the push-chair - maybe, just maybe, I'll remember how he made us laugh at the dinner table that evening; maybe I'll remember how my nine-year-old daughter helped me find a fork, or offered me a glittering stone, or loaned me her prized penguin stuffed animal as a Snuggle Buddy at bedtime. Or that sunset that splashed against the sky just right, like red waves on a red sea, stopping me in my tracks. Maybe I'll remember those tiny moments, so perfect in the imperfect lives we live. Those little chicken soups. 

I guess this is just to say, be sure to enjoy your chicken soup, whatever that is for you: a quiz show or a ski slope or towels fresh out of the dryer. The way your dog smiles at you when you get home. Take those little moments, the ones you think you'll forget, and enjoy the hell out of them. Drink deep.

Happy Friday, everyone.

The importance of good neighbours

 Reading: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
Listening to: "Harvest Moon" by Neil Young
Outside: Sun splashes on the morning's leftover puddles

Hello again, Dedicated Reader, and welcome to my Thursday afternoon blog post. 

My house is empty of children, because they are racing the wind at the seaside, and indulging in pizza and hotdogs and ice creams at Filey, and they fill their grandparents' days, making memories that will last a lifetime. They are making the most of the end of the summer, and I look forward to seeing them all again over the weekend, when I can hear about all the things they were up to since I saw them last.

Lena becomes a unicorn.

So I potter around, missing them, missing me, missing them-as-an-extension-of-me, even missing that frenetic schedule that sometimes wrings you dry - up early, breakfasts, play, lunch, nap, snack, play, dinner, CBeebies toddler shows babbling throughout - and I wander around this silent shell of a house: too quiet, too still, the only evidence of my children being their empty rooms and empty shoes and Lena's faded muddy bare-footprint by the front door. The big unicorn floatie bumps around restlessly in its pool-corral in the back yard, waiting for its friends to return. My house is like a TV on mute.

So I've filled my days with all the things I normally don't. Anything to stay busy. British citizenship application? Yep. Lena's back-to-school preparations? Yep. Front yard refresh? Yep. Roto-Tilling the weeds away without a Roto-Tiller, shoveling clods of earth and roots and dandelions and errant rocks into the ever-growing pile back behind the garage. The smell of soft, fresh dirt as it dries in the sun. The hot work, the muscle-busting work, a kind of work I can understand. And it's hard. It's really, really hard. It's the kind of work where you are about three seconds away from crying because the edging strip won't go down into the soil right, when the pins won't hammer it down right. It's sweaty and repetitive, full of knocks and hammered knuckles and lemon-sized bruises, but you get there in the end - you get there - and it feels good to finally sit down in the grass at the end of the day, every bone aching, watching the evening's shadows stretch along the dirt-beds. Another achievement unlocked.

And here are my good neighbors, offering kind words, a rake, fresh tomatoes for a snack. They come from next door and from across the street, offering encouraging sounds, bringing the tons of slate I've requested, dropping it into a car-sized pile in another neighbor's driveway (to which that neighbor said, "If you can't help your neighbours out, there's something wrong.") And then, sending their kid and his friend over the next day to help with the shovelling, wheel-barrowing, dumping, and flattening out of the slate rocks. I am floored by my neighbors - I am grateful of their hands out, ready to help, hands filled with tomatoes and rakes and shovels and Cokes.

Audrey's home-grown tomatoes

There's plenty of bad in this world. Too much.  There are bad neighbors who can make your life a living hell (believe me, I know.) But I am super, super lucky to have the neighbors I have - they are a testament to the kindness in this world. If you're reading this, guys and gals, thank you!

And it was only a few days ago that I got to show my best friend and her mom around on their first-ever visit to the UK - and, there she was, my favorite neighbor, her kindness stretching back 22 years, when she first stood in my doorway on college move-in day, at Room 509 at Woody Shales dorm and declared, with happy certainty, "I like Polly Pocket."

Haley and me at York Rail Station

Gurl, so do I. 

Ever since then, she has been my keenest listener, my finder of lost things. She observes, relates, jokes. She has been my classmate, dormmate, colleague, therapist. And here we are, more than two decades later, connected by Facebook posts and random Messenger chats chronicling the weird and wonderful things in our lives. We live in different countries, different time zones (she's in Indiana, I'm in Yorkshire), but for a couple priceless days we got to share meals, and walk side-by-side, breathing the same air, and that is a beautiful thing. Love you long time, BFF.

I hope you have a good neighbor, Dedicated Reader. If you don't, go out there and find one. And, of course, by all means - be one.

Happy Thursday, everybody.

Un-American

 Reading: The Coincidence Makers by Yoav Blum

Listening to: "Don't Kill My Vibe" by Sigrid

Outside: Gusts of chilly-hot air, summer's turbulence from the ground to the ground-up clouds

"Travel and education make the familiar unfamiliar." 

                                    - Ball State University English professor, circa 2003

I was the good kid. A summer-pool-shimmery, high-energy, chlorine-scented child with wispy dirty-blond hair who wanted to read as much as I wanted to make mud pies. I wanted to do good, and be good. I wanted to make my parents proud. I was taught to stand up at my little desk, put my hand over my heart, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance in my elementary school classroom every morning, alongside my friends and classmates. 

I was taught to believe that America was the best country in the world. You've heard it all: it's the Land of Opportunity. It's the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. If you disliked baseball or apple pie, you were labelled "Un-American," and that was a pejorative term. 

It wasn't until I moved to England in September of 2006, at the age of 23, that things became skewed.

 When 4th of July rolled around, I was shocked beyond words when one of the customers of the local convenience store I worked in growled at me, "We let you win." He said this with gloating contempt, and I was chilled right to my core. How dare someone say that about Americans, about our glorious triumph on that hallowed day in 1776? How dare someone spit on the American flag like that? I was hurt. I was angry. I was furious.

Over the years, and there have been almost 16 of them, I have learned to chill the fuck out. Along with my estimated 200,000 fellow American ex-Pats living in the UK, I have learned that, no, America is not the greatest country in the world. It is merely obsessed with itself. 

It is the jealous, narcissistic ex-husband who won't leave well enough alone. 

For instance, Americans abroad are hounded and threatened with fines and time in federal prison if we don't continue to file our taxes, if we don't show them how much money we have in every single named bank account, trust or retirement account kept in foreign banks. America is one of the very, very few developed countries in the world that still requires its citizens abroad to do this. Uncle Sam is staring at us all the time, looming over us, creepy as hell. 

America insists its highest baseball tournament must be called the "World Series" when there is no other country involved. It puts itself at the center of it all. It thinks of no others, considers no others. It is everything but united. It is damaging.

Like the obscenely slow uptake on the changing of horrific, went-on-way-too-long slavery laws of the 1860s, and the tragic, wasteful war that followed, in order to fight that change, America is moving slowly yet again. Actually, no, it is moving backwards. In the 50 years that followed Roe Vs. Wade, we are still arguing about women's rights. About gay rights. About gun laws. We are still fighting for equal, affordable healthcare for all.

 We are still screaming outside abortion clinics - which, in many or in perhaps all states, will now be closed - at women who have made the incredibly hard but necessary decision to remove a fetus from her womb while at the same time, we are still shedding tears over the children killed at Sandy Hook, Columbine and Uvalde and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more schools, shopping centers, workplaces, gas stations, and yet doing absolutely nothing to change gun policy. 

Safety laws have formed to make us buckle up when we get in the car, take off our shoes at airport security, and use the Jaws of Life to get the lids off medicine bottles. Gun laws still do not change. 

Slavery took generations before it was finally, finally made illegal. 

Women who have made a healthcare decision or an elective decision for abortion are now no longer given that freedom. 

Homosexuality is still, even after all these years, stigmatized - why? Why is the LGBTQ+ community still not recognized as actual people with full rights? Why is this still a thing to be argued about?

America is a country full of contradictions. 

The Land of the Free. Who is free? 

The young man who can't afford his asthma inhaler?

The woman who has no access to birth control? 

The gay couple who wishes to tie the knot but can't?

The homeless man who lost his job, his car, and his house, because he got cancer and his insurance wouldn't cover the extortionate cost of treatment?

The seven-year-old who crouches under her school desk, terrified as fuck, because she's participating in yet another pointless Active Shooter Drill? 

Are these people free? Are they really?

And here we go again - a woman has to put her needs aside for someone else. Has to obey what other people tell her to do. She is controlled. She is Britney Spears under an endless Conservatorship by her dad.

It should not be this way, and should never be this way.

I look at my American flag, doubting its glory. It is cloth shaped into stars and stripes, and meant to represent honor. Valor. Victory. It is meant to represent freedom. It's a symbol of fighting for what's right. 

This flag has become a symbol of darkness. Divisiveness, hatred. Discrimination. Hurt. When did the American flag start to represent stepping on people and destroying their lives? When did things go wrong? Why are basic human rights always so threatened in America? Why must life in America, for millions of people, be so much harder than it is in other developed countries? Or was it always that way? From the very first moment the first white settlers decided to take over the forests of Roanoke and Chesapeake and Manhattan?

When will America ever get its shit together? Come on, America, you can do this. All the other developed countries of the world are way ahead of you, and have been for a long time. It's time to flex those muscles you've bragged so much about and actually do something good for once.

So yeah, I was the good kid. I went along with what everybody said. I didn't rock the boat, I didn't rattle the bars of the cage I didn't realize I was in. I stood up and said the Pledge of Allegiance, lest I be taken to the side, hot and red-faced with embarrassment, and get taken to the Principal's office, where they'd call my parents and I'd get in Big Trouble. 

Now, going on 16 years outside of the United States,  I'm the bad kid.  I have seen free healthcare for all, I have seen more flexible working hours and more paid vacation time, I have seen affordable university education and more libraries, I have seen safer streets, schools, and shopping centers. I have seen equality between men and women, blacks and whites, gay and straight. I drop my daughter off at school in the mornings knowing I will see her again in the afternoon and I will get to ask her about her day. I look at her and know that she will have a choice about what to do for her body, that her healthcare decisions are entirely hers and hers alone. I am confident and proud of the fact that she, and my son, will someday be able to marry the person they love deeply, man or woman. I do not have to worry about their safety now or their legal rights later. I do not carry the crushing weight of that worry around with me like a stone like millions of Americans, tragically, do.

In my view, you can be right or you can be kind. And like I tell my children, if you have a choice between being right and being kind, always choose kind. Always, always choose kind. Even if that means breaking the rules.

Rosa Parks refused to move from that seat. 

Human rights are a thing, people, and we should do everything we can to uphold them.

Happy Saturday, everyone.