Let’s Go on a Meetup Yoga Hike!

After my brief foray into online dating this Summer, I decided that meetups were a better way for me to go. Most meetups have the advantage that they are random groups of couples and single folks, friends, and strangers, all with some interest in common. I went on a couple of meetup bike rides, and a meetup hike with dinner after. I met some cool people. They met me. 

Since I am allergic to anything with Singles in the title, I have not joined any singles meetups yet. There is a singles meetup dance on December 29th. I am trying to get up the courage to think about considering possibly perhaps going. Maybe. Or not. It could be that I drive there, sit a while in my car, and then drive home. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, once you join one meetup group, the Meetup app seems to think you want to be bombarded with emails about every single group and activity within a hundred mile radius. Thus it was that while I was preparing to go in to one of my patients yesterday, a message popped up on my phone: New Meetup Group: Yoga Hikes. I was a bit distracted, thinking about my dying patient and all, but still I had to grapple with this concept for a minute. Yoga hikes? How can you do yoga if you are hiking? Conversely, how could you hike if you were also, simultaneously as it were, doing yoga? Do you hike to the yoga? Yoga, then hike, then more yoga? I am also kind of allergic to yoga, but I know enough about it to understand that the concept has a lot to do with staying in the one place and centering yourself. And hiking? It’s all about striding around and going somewhere. I quickly gave up trying to understand this strange marriage of hobbies, and went in to see my patient.

The yoga thing: I tried it. Everyone was banging on endlessly about how it changed their lives. So I went to a few different classes. I tried hot yoga. I tried cool yoga. I tried really really gentle zen yoga where most people fell asleep. I tried really annoying yoga where a 25-year-old instructor ruined my shivassanas with her 25-year-old life advice. I kept thinking how I really didn’t like yoga. But who doesn’t like yoga? It’s like saying you don’t like the Dalai Lama. So I kept trying. Because people kept telling me it was just that I hadn’t done enough of it. I didn’t like it in the beginning, they would assure me, usually with more than a hint of smugness, but I finally got it. And now? It’s changed my life!

Finally, I decided that I really like my life the way it is. I feel perfectly grounded and centered, and it’s completely okay if I don’t like yoga. I don’t much like being told where to put all the different parts of my body, or for how long. Nor do I like being told to inhale through my nose then open my mouth and exhale slowly making a HA sound. I don’t want to make a HA sound. And I really hate downward dog. I like the Dalai Lama though, so we’re good there.

I also like hiking, so after work I had to check out the yoga hiking meetup thing. Turns out you hike somewhere and then, just when you’re having a really great time swinging your arms and chatting with your meetup buddies, marching along and taking in the view, you have to stop at a flat place, unroll your yoga mat and start...doing yoga. Imma skip that meetup.

I do have a pretty bad yoga confession, now that you’ve got me started. I’m all about live and let live. If other people want to do yoga, go right ahead. But there’s something about seeing people walking round town in their LuLu Lemon yoga pants with their yoga mats slung over their shoulder that just sort of irks me. Usually when I see them I’m driving off to visit my first patient. I’ve just spent an hour setting up my day and making sure nobody died overnight. I’m on my second coffee and playing music, and I’m feeling pretty good. And then I have to stop at every pedestrian crosswalk in Fairfax to let the yoga folks cross. I know they’re about to spend 75 minutes on the clean wood floor at Yoga Mountain clearing their energy and aligning their chakras. And I really want to just let them. But sometimes, I also want to rev my engine while they’re in the crosswalk, see if they drop their yoga mats.

It’s the same at my gym. If I walk in and there’s a dance class going on, that’s cool. The music is usually some sappy Hawaiian thing, and I long ago gave up trying to follow dance instructions (I am really bad at this, see yoga complaints above), but I’m happy to stick in my earbuds to drown out the crooning and get on the treadmill. But if there’s a yoga class going on, I immediately feel annoyed. I have to pass through the class to get to the spa and changing rooms, so I can’t avoid hearing at least thirty seconds of yoga instructions before I shut the changing room door on them. 

It’s not so much what they say. I think it’s hugely important to connect with your inner stillness and feel yourself root into the earth. It’s the tone of voice. Yoga instructors generally seem to think that their instructions won’t sink in unless intoned in a cloying, fake-spiritual sort of voice. It’s the kind of voice I have to shut a door on and go get in the hot tub. I almost always connect with my inner stillness in the hot tub.

As well as being a failed yoga practitioner, it may not surprise you to hear I am a failed meditator. This is the subject of another blog post, but I just want to mention a great video I found on the Internet that did help me meditate for a bit, even if I was constantly giggling during the experience. It’s called F*ck That: An Honest Meditation, and it’s by a guy called Jason Headley. Gradually let the horseshit of the external world fade from your awareness, he intones, in exactly that fake spiritual voice I was mentioning. My kind of guy. Maybe if he was on the yoga hike, I might give it a whirl.

Single Mom of Teen Cooks Tasty Dinner

We are decorating our Christmas tree. There’s me, contributing by sitting at the table typing this. There’s my daughter, contributing by showing her friend her Instagram picture of my terrible ornament placement two nights ago [see previous blog post]. And there’s her friend, who just sampled our candy canes, confirming that when candy canes are three years old they have zero crunch left, but are completely chewy. Who knew? People who put the same candy canes on their tree three years running, I guess.

Decorating the Christmas tree, as I may have mentioned, is a skill best left to the teens. Apparently, once you pass 50 you are no longer to be trusted with a holiday ornament. So they are on duty, and I’m...well...off-duty. Happily typing this. 

There is a phenomenon that occurs when your teen’s friend arrives. Where you might have had reasonable or semi-reasonable answers to their questions before the friend’s arrival, once the friend arrives, your answers are suddenly completely wrong and unhelpful. But the friend’s answers? Even if they are the same ones you were giving, they are correct. This is not a discovery by me, it has been noted by parents throughout the ages. You have to just roll with it.

Naomi brought with her an impressively huge handwritten spreadsheet of every detail about every college she wants to apply to. The three of us gaze at it, spread out on our shag rug. Jessie and I are in awe. We tried to do a spreadsheet for her college applications, but gave up after two colleges. Tedious! I ask Naomi what college she would most like to attend, you know, in a perfect world? Mom, says Jessie sternly, that’s not helpful.

Why is that not helpful? Actually, I’m not even trying to be helpful. I’m just interested. Naomi mentions a couple of colleges and I go back to the kitchen table, where I have a chance of being less unhelpful. Plus the spreadsheet is making me dizzy.

So I’m there writing Christmas cards while the girls make our tree look fabulous with the artful hanging of the decorations. It is the first time I have written Christmas cards in three years. I bravely tried a few the first year after the divorce, but writing “love Sara & Jessie” just did me in, and I couldn’t write ‘The Tolchins’ on the envelope because there are only two of us now and somehow a mom and her daughter don’t seem like a family, so I just gave up. Last year I couldn’t even contemplate trying. Actually,  if memory serves, I just wanted Christmas to go away. This year, I was enthusiastic about buying cards and find to my surprise I can write “Love Sara & Jessie” just fine. Progress.

I cook dinner for the teens. It’s weird, but it seems every time Naomi comes over, I have cooked a meal. This may not seem weird to people who cook dinner every night, but as I do not belong to that club, it’s pretty remarkable that the three last times Naomi came to our house there was a tasty nutritious homecooked meal on the table. I’m not the only one surprised by this phenomenon. As I keep producing more dishes (this is a kale/apple/feta salad, this is a butter lettuce/avocado salad, oh, and here are the roasted carrots and garlic bread from the oven) my daughter exclaims mom! You cooked a meal!

I fear a lot has been made in previous blog posts about my impoverished cooking skills. I just don’t want you to think I was exaggerating. When Jessie’s not home, I generally dine on a cheese sandwich. Occasionally I forget to eat dinner altogether. Anyway, Naomi’s happy. She still remembers the day I met her on our road on my way to work. She was coming to visit Jessie, but Jessie wasn’t home. Never mind, I told her,  if you’re hungry, there’s a crockpot meal cooked, just let yourself in and help yourself. She did exactly that. When I got home later, I found a note beside the crockpot: Just what I needed! Thanks Sara, delicious! Naomi probably thought I cook tasty crockpot meals every other day. That was the first one. There have been no others. One can live in hope.

Now, however, she’s under no illusions. Although she insists that every time she comes to my house I’ve cooked, Jessie strives to impress upon her what a series of weird coincidences that is. I can see that Naomi is unsure, so I weigh in. Really, I almost never cook. You’ve just been lucky. She looks a bit confused, but finally accepts the general weirdness of the situation. We finish dinner and pile the dishes in the sink. Who will wash them? I will leave you to guess at that one. It may take three days, but finally I will cave. Because I am a bad parent with no boundaries. And because I will have run out of dishes.

The teens repair to the bedroom and I continue writing Christmas cards and try to imagine what it would be like if there were any dessert in our house. Eventually, my fertile imagination proves too strong for the realities of the situation and I walk around to the 7-11 for ice-cream and chocolate. On the walk home, I look in the lighted windows along my road and wonder how many households sat down to a nutritious home-cooked meal tonight. Probably all of them. It’s not really all that exotic outside of our house. When I get home I deliver the ice-cream to the teen bedroom (the chocolate did not quite make it home). Now Naomi thinks that as well as cooking dinner, I provide tasty desserts. Well, let the poor girl think that. Who knows, the next time she comes over, she might just hit the jackpot again. As long as it’s not for a few months

Mom Three, Teen Zero

I just spent the entire day with my daughter. We had planned it, lots of fun things, and it was a really great day. This may sound like I know how to spend an entire Saturday with my teen with no eye-rolling, expressions of disgust, or instantaneous brush fires. This is not entirely true. But as we are both not just still alive, but unharmed, I feel that I have some small amount of authority to speak to this subject. So I’m going to blog on it before anything changes.

Let me just say up front that my daughter is pretty damn great. Her dad and I used to joke nervously between ourselves when she was little about how awful the teen years would be, how we might just ship her off to some distant relative at 13 and drive out to pick her up on her 20th birthday. After four-and-a-half of those teen years, I can thankfully say none of our fears were borne out. She makes good decisions and picks great friends. At 15, she weathered the divorce of her parents with consummate grace. She’s an all-round expressively loving and responsible kid. I haven’t actually tried to give her away once. 

That said, I had no idea how dim I would become during the passage of her teen years. But just this morning, I was reminded of my extreme lameness as we embarked on our day together. She showed up around 8am, having seen her boyfriend off to the airport. My first glimpse of my general inadequacy centered on a discussion of how she had missed two dentist appointments recently. My sense was that she had known they were scheduled, but had double-booked and had to cancel at the last minute. Her sense was that “we totally forgot about them.” How I could have forgotten a dentist appointment I didn’t know was scheduled was difficult for me to understand. I tried for a minute. But already, I was implicated in the general imperfections of the situation. Just the fact that I hadn’t even known the appointments were scheduled turned out to be evidence of my lameness as a parent. And I hadn’t even got out of bed yet!

I got out of bed, determined to improve upon my parenting excellence before my second cup of coffee. My first cup of coffee had been consumed at 5am when I woke up. After that delicious hot beverage I fell asleep again for a wonderful extra hour. Nevertheless, when I relayed this information to my teen, she very kindly let me know that it is really dumb to consume coffee at 5am. I tried a spirited defense that it was decaf and I am a chronic insomniac. Her expression confirmed that this evidence was not permissible in court.

After an hour or two of home-based activities, we headed out to breakfast. As we got into my newly purchased car, and I rejoiced aloud at the driver-side door handle and windows that go up and down at the press of a button [see previous blog post], Jessie laughed and said “mom, you’re like one of those people who live at the poverty line and you give them a crappy car and they’re just so grateful because it’s better than walking everywhere.” Once again, she had me pegged. Except my crappy car is a 1999 Jaguar Xj8 and I happen to be in love with it. So ha! Take that, teen! One-zero to me.

Breakfast was at the Hummingbird in Fairfax: a New Orleans eatery complete with beignets, local color, and mardi-gras beads. We ordered our favorite dishes. As I embarked on my Fairfax Sunrise Breakfast, I must have been grinning more foolishly than usual, because Jessie asked me what was wrong. I looked out the window at our town, sparkling in the recent rain, clean and bright and full of good people, and around the Hummingbird, clean and bright and full of good people. “I’m just really happy,” I said. “Breakfast out with my girl, y’know?” She smiled back at me and nodded. Yeah, mom. Me too. 

Skip ahead a few hours. We picked out our Christmas tree and brought it home on top of the car. Takes a village to put up a Christmas tree, but not really in our house. It takes the two of us to get it straight in the holder, but after that I am off the hook, because apparently I lack the skills to decorate a tree properly. She strung the lights, and they looked really good. Then she put on a few ornaments. I started feeling bad that I wasn’t helping. I kind of like the tree with just lights. So uncluttered. But our ornaments have a lot of memories and history for us. Especially the ones she made in preschool with the bowtie pasta. So all helpful like, I hung an ornament.

Apparently not in the right place. I know this because moments later she posted a photo of our tree on Instagram with the caption: Decorating our tree and my mom puts this ornament here. I case anyone missed my ornament placing faux pas, there was a big red arrow pointing at it. But I was fine with that, because it meant I didn’t have to hang any more ornaments but could go back to futzing on my iPad. Ha! Two-zero to me!

Moments later, her friend arrived to scoop her up for the evening. Most of the ornaments were still in boxes on the sofa. I was reminded how most of the laundry had been on the sofa earlier, in little folded piles, as her laundry chore did not quite get carried through to the putting away of the laundry. When I called her on this, her watertight excuse was that she didn’t know where most of the stuff goes. Of course! So it should stay on the couch! Where mom likes to sit, but now she can’t because the laundry is there!

The laundry got put away. But now there were boxes of ornaments on the sofa, proving the age-old teen law that if there isn’t folded laundry on the couch, there will be boxes of Christmas decorations. Oh no wait, that’s not the law: it’s that if you are in the middle of something and your friend arrives, you should immediately stop what you are doing and leave, because friends arriving trump homework, chores, and decorating Christmas trees. An unintended consequence of this law may be that stuff gets left all over the place. But that is really beyond any teen’s power to address, because they are just obeying the law.

The good news is that the tree mostly just has lights on it still. And it probably will for a few days, until #1 daughter person has time to finish the task. When I came out to the living room before dawn this morning, the tree sparkled and winked cheerily at me with its lights and its barely discernible few ornaments. So ha! Take that teen! I may not be able to sit on my couch, but the score stands at three-zero!

That was the river. This is the sea.

I was listening to this song by The Waterboys the other day and it brought back a sharp memory of the night I left my marriage. It was a Monday evening, and I had walked out of my house with my daughter and a bag of clothes. After dropping her at her best friend’s, which was where she wanted to be, I drove east with the idea of staying in a hotel somewhere. There were numerous doorsteps I knew I could show up on, but I wanted anonymity.

I pulled over on the Miracle Mile in San Rafael and used my phone to book myself a room in the Embassy Suites, a suitably huge and faceless place where I knew I would meet only strangers. Then I drove out to China Camp state park. It was a warm September night, the moon and the stars were out, and this song came on as I pulled off by the side of the road overlooking the marshland and the East Bay’s lights. Now I can see you wavering as you try to decide, you’ve got a war in your head and it’s tearing you up inside...but that was the river, this is the sea...

I got out of the car and I stood looking up at the night sky - Hamlet’s brave o’erhanging firmament, fretted with golden fire. The phrase howling at the moon comes to mind. But instead of howling, I remember that I shouted something out loud to the stars. It would be impossible to describe how I felt at that moment, because it was not one emotion but a whole mess of them. Then I got back in the car and drove to Embassy Suites, where I walked across the giant empty atrium with my single bag, and the smiling receptionist said cheerily, hi there, how has your day been?

My room was enormous, a suite really. A suite for one. I put my bag in the corner of the bedroom, and my toothbrush in the glass in the bathroom and I looked out my third storey window to the parking lot below. I called two close friends, and then I lay down on the bed and wondered when I would ever feel normal again, and what that new normal would be like.

That was the river, and this is the sea...

The metaphor is an apt one. Marriage feels to me a little like a river, with its tug and flow and the familiar banks keeping the water in check. Sure, there are dangers lurking: the odd rapid, sometimes a series of them; periodic threat of river eels or snakes or something uneasily unpleasant just below the surface. But you move along with a river, in the one direction, with a general purpose and the sense of a beginning a middle and an end.

When you leave, you cast yourself into the ocean. It’s vast and uncharted, unfamiliar, fraught with the fear of going under. Everything you knew is back there on the shore. There are waves and storms and frightening creatures of the deep and you have no sense of direction as you flounder around. In the beginning, you are consumed with the effort not to drown.

Leaving a long marriage is a kind of death. You lose so much, and you go through the same phases of grief as when someone dies: shock, pain, guilt, and on and on. And yet, in my experience, there is a prevalent sense in our society that if you chose to leave your marriage, and especially if you are clearly happier since you left, you must be doing just fine. 

When a death happens, people come around. They bring food. There’s a memorial, a way to come together and grieve and remember. There are no markers in our culture for divorce. One day you serve papers. One day you sign the marriage settlement agreement. One day the court-stamped paperwork shows up in your mailbox and your marriage is officially over. I picked mine up on the way to work one day, thirteen months after I left. I drove around seeing patients all day with that manila envelope on my passenger seat.

The night I walked out of my house, I lost my life partner and all our plans and hopes and dreams for the future. I lost my intact family, my house, my pets, most of my possessions, and my neighborhood community. I lost any sense of security. Over time, I also lost some friends. Couples, mostly. People I thought were close friends. The best I can understand it is that for some couples, hanging around with a newly single person is uncomfortable. And all that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what my daughter lost.

Did I choose to lose all those things? Nobody chooses the pain of divorce. They just choose the lesser of two kinds of pain.

Over time, a new Waterboys song became more relevant to me: I shed some light, I change my address, I haven’t felt this great since I first went West. I’ve got brilliant intentions, unthinkable plans, I’ve got sparks and electric shocks just exploding from my hands.

It’s a song called Learning to Fly, and it’s about a guy who is falling in love all over again. Okay, so I’m not a guy, and I’m not falling anywhere. But it was a new metaphor. I’ve always fancied flying and I thought maybe I had spent enough time in the water. And when Mike Scott would sing I’m gonna love you as hard as I can, and I’m never gonna stop, I would think how that might be true for me again some day, and in the meantime, why not lay a little love on myself?

Blogger error: Repost from August

Once again, Blogger spuriously reposted an old blog post of mine, this time from August. Please ignore this morning’s post on buying deerproof plants. Time to move to Wordpress!

Being Quiet

Here in the Bay Area, we are thirteen days into fire air. The Camp Fire, four hours north, has been burning since sunrise on November 8th. It has burned more than 150,000 acres and they don’t think it will be fully contained until November 30th. Now instead of getting out of bed every morning to push the button on my Mr. Coffee, the first thing I do when I wake is check purpleair.com to see how dangerous the air is in my town. Today, November 20th, the PM2.5 count is 176. Still red. Still dangerous to breathe.

PM2.5 are the fine particle air pollutants that our lungs are not built to filter. Fine particulates that are less than 2.5 microns in size travel deeply into the lungs and can cause long-term health problems. We Californians all know more about these particles now than we ever wanted to. San Francisco continues to be the most polluted city on earth, and it probably will be until that longed-for rain, forecast for tomorrow. Meanwhile, we don’t really know what we are breathing. Words like asbestos, lead, toxic waste hover on the periphery of my thinking. I don’t want to let them in. 

Writing about the fire is difficult, because whatever contaminants I am breathing in down here, and however my life has been impacted by having to stay indoors, wear a mask, and limit patient visits, it’s all so minimal compared to the suffering of those up north. The death toll rises daily, though the list of the missing is now getting shorter, after rocketing up to 1200 last weekend. I don’t even know how many people have been displaced. Fire refugees. A new tribe of humans.

So I want to write instead about the curious quiet that has settled over the Bay Area during these smoke-filled days. I drove into San Francisco last Saturday to meet a friend in from Ireland. The weekend before Thanksgiving, the Golden Gate Bridge should have been thronged with tourists. It was like a ghost bridge. Usually towering up proud and gorgeous out of the fog or the sunshine, it loomed out of the smoke like a grieving shadow of itself. 

People are staying indoors. When they go out, many are wearing masks. Many, but not enough. I see folks out with their toddlers and no masks. It breaks my heart because kids breathe so much faster than adults, and metabolize pollutants differently. Their developing brains...asbestos...lead...solvents...yeah. You get the gist.

So it’s one of the biggest holiday weeks in the US and the streets are weirdly empty. It has been a hot, dry, sunny November. A single day of rain so far. But the air is hazy, the sun shines dark gold, even red sometimes through the smoke. And the trees stand still in the breathless murk, hanging on grimly to their rustling dry leaves, waiting for rain.

But it’s the internal quiet that I have noticed. Usually restless and a little over-invested in being ‘productive,’ I find I have slowed down, physically and emotionally. Staying indoors has narrowed the focus. The mood is somber to begin with. We’re all waiting. We are all in mourning, in a kind of prolonged shock: and grief and disbelief make you slow. 

We are also in fear. I repacked my Fire Bag - a backpack full of passports, cash, essential papers. We’ve been over our fire evacuation plan, trying to imagine the scenarios. If you can’t get through to me, call Uncle Steve, let him know you’re ok and I’ll do the same. But the truth of it is, people got burned alive in their cars trying to get out of Paradise. It doesn’t take an overactive imagination like mine to see my daughter’s Jeep burned out on our road.

I want to honor the fire victims, the displaced, the firemen, and all the people whose lives are forever changed. The news cycles move on to the next disaster. Paradise may rebuild, but it’s a graveyard right now. Humans are resilient and the wonderful stories of heroism and generosity coming out of disaster have not surprised me. It’s hard to know how to adequately honor them though. After donating, volunteering, and sending messages of support, it seems like being quiet is the appropriate response.

Single Mom of Teen Finds New Ways to be Annoying

Sometimes my daughter looks up at me from her phone when I have been speaking to her for a while. Her look clearly says oh, right, you’re here! And yet what you have been saying is outside of my sphere of interest, so you will have to repeat it.

For my part, I consider it part of my mom duties to find new ways to annoy her. This is especially true since I am a single mom, so when she can’t stand me, she has no backup slightly less annoying parent to turn to. Plus it’s ridiculously easy to exasperate her. I can sometimes do it just by existing.

The other day, for example, we were taking a road trip together. We love to drive and we love to drive together. I mentioned that I was feeling a sense of deja vu. I pronounced it, as the French do, deja vyew. Jessie looked at me witheringly. It’s deja voo, she corrected. Actually, I said, aware that I was about to be very annoying, I’m the person in the car who speaks French and I can thus verify that the correct pronunciation is vyew. She looked straight ahead. That’s not how anyone here says it, she answered firmly. And there it was: cemented in fact. I was wrong. But I was fine with that, because now I had a new way to annoy her. I said deja vyew a couple more times during our trip.

Sometimes my questions annoy her. Asking how her math test went, for example, is annoying because it reminds her she had a math test that she didn’t study that much for. Asking how she is: that’s bad. I can’t remember why. 

And I am apparently very frustrating in my preference for sad songs. We share a lot of our taste in music, which is a happy thing as we both play music incessantly. But my tolerance for sad sack music is way higher than hers. And apparently it’s weird to have a Spotify playlist for driving called ‘Upbeat’ and then populate it with a bunch of slow, miserable songs. Who knew?

Possibly the thing that annoys my daughter most about me is my inability to provide her with food. I know that might sound like a sort of basic mom task, but it’s a particularly difficult one for me to perform correctly. She doesn’t live with me all the time, but her schedule is random and decided on the fly. It’s hard for me to keep in my head what nights she will be here, principally because she only texts me her plans late in the day sometimes. I do go grocery shopping. Feels like I go several times a week, and each time the bill has three digits. But no matter how often I carry out this chore, the food just seems to run out. She doesn’t eat that much, so I wonder whether she has teen hordes over when I’m not home and they pick my fridge clean? Or random strangers come by while I’m at work and eat all our groceries? This could be. Her interpretation, however, is that I never have food in the house.

I’ll be honest: keeping the fridge full of tasty, nutritious, fresh food is not my strong suit. That said, she can open a full fridge, stare in for a moment and then say despairingly Mom, there’s nothing in our house to eat!

One sure-fire way to get a reaction is to answer her honestly when she asks how work was today. I’m a hospice nurse. She knows my work frequently involves bodily fluids. What she really wants to hear is my day was great, thanks sweetie! But sometimes I decide that our relationship will be deepened if I tell her how my day really was and not just what she wants to hear. So I might recount some details from a manual disimpaction that afternoon, or throw in the wound care I did for some gangrenous toes. She really loves that. She wanted to be a nurse herself, for about ten minutes in junior year. Then she heard what a manual disimpaction was and opted for journalism instead.

On balance, I have to say that life with Jessie is very harmonious. We see eye to eye on most things. We have the same sense of humor, so we frequently crack each other up. And I think she can forgive me most of my more egregious flaws, like how I don’t moisturize enough. I do try to avoid the more obvious parental missteps, like showing her new boyfriend unflattering pictures of her when she was a baby (it’s hard to find those, but there are a couple). I try not to nag her about college applications or cleaning her room. But given the stressors of the job, I think every parent needs a couple of deja vyews up their sleeve.