Grumplestiltskin Gets Over Herself

I've started about 16 posts today and scrapped them. They were all whiny. I didn't get any sleep last night. I don't get Twitter. I wish I could spend the holidays on a deserted island to avoid family politics. I ate a cupcake and a cheeseburger for lunch and now my pants are uncomfortable. I ran out of coffee. I need to paint my toenails. Nobody understands me. I hate bad grammar and spelling. My cell phone won't charge. I was so creative before Google was invented. I am so tired of those people who draw a Hitler mustache on whomever is in office and stand outside the grocery store and bother me. (Learn some history and stop calling everyone a fascist!!!) Wah. Wah. Wah. Me. Me. ME.

So I took a break. Shut everything down and walked away into real life for a few hours. Took some time to be irritated by people other than myself, and this is what I've come up with:

Things can get pretty bad out there, I can't afford to let things get pretty bad "in here". I wrote a whole Manifesto about my new economy and now it's time to enforce it. I will not give in. I will not get discouraged.

This is what I have to give liberally and without regret today:

I pray daily for all those who are hurting, that they might find peace and comfort. If you're hurting, that means YOU.

Although being a keen observer of people often has its downside of noticing a great many irritating things, it also affords me the pleasure of noticing the wonderful, quiet things people do to make this place better. I appreciate YOU for all the good things you do that you may believe go unnoticed.

I spend a good bit of my time feeling like I'm getting away with something because my life is so blessed. I recognize not everyone's life is like that. I hurt for those who struggle. If you're struggling right now, I hurt for YOU and would do whatever I could to help.

I am a good listener. I will listen to YOU.

I will celebrate with you, cry with you, laugh with YOU. Even if I don't know you, I will.

Even if I disagree with you, even if I don't like you, I love YOU. I really do. I love the things that make us all different, and one of my super powers is being able to find a common reality with just about anyone. (My other super power is to always put my hand in something sticky when I'm out in public, but that's far less useful.)

If you come to me with a problem, I will not talk to you about doors opening and closing, silver linings, fish in the sea or any of those other meaningless things. I may try to make you laugh, though. I will definitely let you cry.

You're important or you wouldn't be here on this planet. If you can't think of anyone else that you are important to, YOU are important to me. You're important to me because you are a living, breathing being with your very own thoughts and emotions and struggles and triumphs. You may look different from me, act different from me, believe different things than I do, speak differently, love differently. You may even hate me. I still love you because you're a person. And as crabby as I sometimes get, I just can't figure out how not to love people.


P.S. Even YOU, Hitler Mustache people. You care enough about what you believe in to stand outside the grocery store and the post office rain or shine and have people make fun of you. That takes courage and some intestinal fortitude. I appreciate that quality and love it, even if I don't agree with you AT ALL and think you shouldn't try to explain your position to my 4-year-old.

Believe It or Not, It's Just ME!

Today's my birthday. It's very hard for me to simply state that because I always want to say it like this: TODAY'S MY BIRTHDAY! I love my birthday. I've only had 2 birthdays that I can remember that I didn't love to pieces. Not a bad record when this is number 37.

I have chosen this as my birthday theme song this year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1Z7u6c0mQ&feature=related

Undeniably adult now. No one is mistaking me for the nanny when I'm out with the kids. No one checks my ID for anything - except that one guy at 7-11 who checks it every time I buy gas but that's a whole other thing. College was more than a decade ago, I'm coming up on my 20th high school reunion. I've been around long enough now to see the high fashion of Junior High come back in vogue as "retro". People of a certain age look uncomfortable and a little sad when I reference pop culture in conversation. And I'm OK with that. We live in a culture that values youth and beauty above substance; where growing older (or at least looking like you are) is to be avoided at all costs, and where actual good health takes a backseat to an unrealistic ideal. It's hard to resist the gravitational pull of popular opinion sometimes, even with the best of intentions. The hair dyes are purchased, the creams, the outfits, the depilatories,  the "special" undergarments. But over the last couple of years, along with those attempts at staving off the inevitable, what I really was purchasing was a whole boatload of guilt and self-loathing.

Flower pot hat.

As a mother of a daughter, I am ever-vigilant about teaching her to be proud of the person she is. To accept her uniqueness and celebrate it. She's 7 now, so it's not much of an issue for her. You wanna wear a hat that looks like a flower pot? Awesome. You wanna build a time machine that will transport you to colonial times at recess instead of letting the boys chase you? Go for it. You wanna wear a shirt with a picture of a monkey wearing glasses to school for picture day? Rock on. Right now my wee girl is in her own orbit. She's got this whole world that she inhabits that is all her own. She's friendly and outgoing, she gets along with people in a way that I find almost enviable, she's relatively unscathed by the politics of being a little girl in a society that's in a rush to grow them all up. But I know in a few short years, her orbit will start to feel that gravitational pull. She'll start to notice that she's different at a time when that's about the last thing anyone wants to be. And then what? I want to be able to say, without hypocrisy, "Just be yourself. Your self is fabulous."

These are our actual faces. Deal with it.

I quit wearing makeup on a regular basis when one time, in my 20s, I was especially late for work and didn't put any on. All day, people kept asking me if I was sick. It was so disturbing to me that when I didn't have my warpaint on, people thought there was something wrong with me. Thus began my campaign: "This is my actual face! Deal with it!"  Now that face has crows feet and little parentheses around my mouth. I'll be honest, sometimes those little footprints and punctuation startle me when I look in the mirror or see a recent picture of myself. But they are also a happy reminder of all the years I've thus far been able to laugh and smile and etch those little lines a little bit deeper. I've been OK with the makeup thing for years. But on this, my 37th birthday, I am chucking the hair dye: the makeup I've been applying to my steadily whitening hair. It wasn't fooling anyone, least of all me. I started to go gray when I was 22, I'm now reaching that point where there's a little more salt than pepper. I've spent years and thousands highlighting, low lighting, and desperately coating those amazingly resilient diamond strands. This is the year I say "Enough." This is the year I look in the mirror and see my ever-changing mane of crazy hair and say "You are part of me and I love you." It seems a small and silly thing, but it's a huge leap for me to banish the mental images of Barbara Bush from my mind when I brush. "This is my actual hair! Deal with it!"  I'm doing it for me, and I'm doing it for my daughter.

When she looks at me, I want my little girl to see a woman who has enjoyed her life, appreciated herself and loved her person. I want her to see a woman who didn't spend a lot of time, money and energy trying to deny and defy nature. These bodies we've been given can do some amazing things and I believe we should take care of them. But ultimately, they are disposable. They were made to wear out. When our jeans reach that pinnacle of just-right comfort and ease, we rejoice. We wear them every day we can get away with it. We are sad when they're in the laundry. Why don't we do that with our bodies? I'm not quite old enough yet for unsalvageable and unsightly holes. I'd like to think I'm at that "favorite jeans" phase of life. A little bit faded, worn in, comfortable and still highly functional.

It's a new year for me. Another year of being undeniably adult. I want it to be a year of being undeniably fabulous. I think there should be a secret meeting for all preteen girls to explain to them this wonderful secret: regardless of your structure, your clothes, your hair, your face, the hottest woman in the room is the most confident woman in the room. Embrace your hotness!

Dancing with Demons

We all have our own personal demons that haunt us from time to time. Sometimes they pop up and say hello when we least need them to. Or we think we've gone all Buffy on them and they're gone only to return with a different face and a new set of weapons. Or sometimes we conjure them ourselves in order to provide some demented sense of continuity in our lives or to give us some familiar company when no one else will do. 
I had a conversation with a friend last week to this effect. The whole thing devolved into a mutual confession of the specific demons we keep around and we were surprised to discover that we shared more than a few of them. 
I fear one of my most staunch demons has been fiercely guarding this blog for months. It's the one who sneaks up as soon as I log in to write and whispers in my ear. "What have you got to say? You think nobody's thought of that a thousand times before? Why would anyone want to read that?" Yup. It's one I know all too well and I'm sure many do. So this week I've decided that if he's going to hang out with me, I'm going to expose him publicly for what he is. I'll take him out and waltz him around for all to see, so that in doing so, he might lose some of his sway.
 I picture this particular demon as a man in beige. Terrifying in his talent for being completely nondescript. That uninteresting negative void who sucks the creativity out of the room just by showing up with his well-combed hair (is it brown? blond? I can't remember exactly) and his plasticine average looks. He's not even evil enough to be interesting. 
So, strike up the band, we're going to take to the floor, my demon and I. I have things to write and the dizzying demon dance just might rattle a few of them loose.