Category — Uncategorized

And just like that, I have high schoolers.

The twins had their moving on ceremony from middle school this week. They’re enrolled in high school classes for the fall. And in between is a bittersweet summer where they know that they just said goodbye to one stage of life and have no clue what the next one will be like.

It’s my last buffer before college.

If I think about it too much, I start to cry, so I’m trying not to think about it too much.

When the twins were very little, they did this preemie thing when they felt stressed. Instead of looking at the object or person directly, they turned their head and looked at it out of the corner of their eye. They did this until about age five, and I find myself doing that now with their future. I can’t look at it head on in my mind. I need to turn my head and look at it out of the corner of my eye because it’s too emotional to take in.

I want them to grow up. I want them to experience college. I want them to get jobs and homes and relationships and (if they want) children. But I also want them to live here. Like in my home so we can talk every night. But I get that’s not what they’ll want down the road. Roots and wings and all that stuff.

So this is it. I get four more years, the last onion layer peeled away before college. I can’t wait to see how these next years unfold, even if I cry through the whole thing.

So I read this quote last week because it was at the top of the Skimm, not because I follow boxing. Andy Ruiz, Jr, won a heavyweight title. He’s the first person of Mexican descent to do that. And he said after he won: “This is what I have been dreaming about. This is what I have been working hard for, and I can’t believe I just made my dreams come true.”

I just made my dream come true.

I couldn’t stop thinking about his words because I was thinking about the role I played in making my dream come true, which was parenthood. I wanted to be a mother, and while I grew them (somewhat) to term (sort of), I didn’t make them. I mean, the doctor and his staff made them in the sense that they wouldn’t exist without their intervention, and science accomplished the rest. I may have played a very active role in raising them, but I played a pretty passive role in making them come true.

I need to think like that because if the opposite is true — if I actively made them — then I also actively lost all of their siblings. But I don’t think I really got a say in either case. I didn’t make them happen, and I didn’t make the other babies not happen. That was just my body acting independently from my will.

His words made me think about how powerful it is when you make your own dreams come true. When you know that it was your investment of time or energy or talent that led you to a moment. Or maybe it’s the size of the wish; when you didn’t really know whether or not you would be able to achieve it, and then suddenly the moment is here and you know and you acknowledge the very real otherwise.

Because that’s just it. The missing part of the story. I mean, I was happy for him, but I thought about all the other silent people behind his words. Yes, he made his dream come true, but what about all the people we don’t hear from because they didn’t get that moment? It’s so odd to think that there are all these silent people, other potential heavyweight champions, and we don’t know their names or their thoughts because we only hold up the person who is celebrating.

Behind everyone who achieves their dreams are a long line of people who didn’t get to tell us their thoughts. I guess I want to hear their thoughts because there is a lot to learn from the journey vs. focusing on that singular moment, that destination.

I’m not sure why his words affected me so much.

It’s so funny how we can talk about having breakfast for dinner, but we never talk about lunch for dinner or dinner for breakfast.

In Israel, you have salad for breakfast. Salad is something very specific: it’s a dish with chopped up tomatoes and cucumbers with lemon juice and olive oil and salt and pepper. And hummus and pita. But those are all things that I would only eat for lunch here. Or dinner.

CNN did a piece unpacking breakfast around the world. It’s kind of funny because we usually bring breakfast with us when we travel. I don’t like to eat in the morning, and we need to get going, so I bring a granola bar with me. But in Italy, we ate pizza every morning for breakfast (usually squares of potato pizza). In Norway, I ate a grated potato pancake every morning before I set out.

What is your favourite breakfast when you’re not at home?

Apparently, just in case you’re interested, it is totally normal to be sad on your birthday.

The best birthday still contains one inevitable sorrow: it reminds you of the separation between past and future, the one-way nature of time, that there is no going back to the you of last year.

As someone who is often sad on her birthday, and this year felt very sad on her birthday, I liked hearing that other people thought about how “one day all our birthdays will run out.”

I don’t think it would help to ignore my birthday and celebrate a different day. It’s marking the day in general; realizing I’ll never be able to say I’m 44 again. Milestones remind me that time has passed.

When I started this blog, I was 32 and I thought that was old. 45 felt impossibly far away. And now it’s here.

Come sit with me if you’re also sad around birthdays.

Another post about Normal People that is not about Normal People. There was a post on Longreads in which a woman wrote about posting on social media after her mother died. Her mother died at 4 am. By 8:30 am, she had posted her news. She writes,

Now she was gone, and it seemed appropriate, even convenient, to let people know through these broad, digital strokes … Relatively speaking, I took to social media quite soon after Mom breathed her last, and when I consider this, it feels — at least immediately — both crass and bizarre.

Is it crass? Is it bizarre? Isn’t it where we’re going to go to mourn if it’s also where we go to celebrate? Those who don’t spend a lot of time online, it would be bizarre. For people who spend a considerable amount of time online, it makes sense.

It ties into a part in Normal People. There is a death, and a character goes on the Facebook wall of the person who died. They write,

Lots of people from school had left comments on his wall, saying they missed him. What were these people doing … writing on the Facebook wall of a dead person? What did these messages, these advertisements of loss, actually mean to anyone? What was the appropriate etiquette when they appeared on the timeline: to “like” them supportively? To scroll past is search of something better? … Thinking about it now, she can’t understand why it bothered her. None of those people had done anything wrong. They were just grieving. Of course it didn’t make sense to write on his Facebook wall, but nothing else made sense either. If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.

Is there really any right way to mourn? And just because you mourn one way for one person, do you have to keep mourning that way for others?

I’ve never gone on someone’s Facebook page after death and written them a message (that I can remember), though I have read other people’s messages. I once spent a whole night, scrolling back through messages that people left an old friend after he was gone. It made me feel connected to something. Less alone with that grief that had nowhere to go. Isn’t that a small good thing?