Into the Deep Middle Ages

Yesterday I turned 45.

Just when I felt I was getting used to the Forties, I am heading towards 50.

I loved 44. I am a double digit girl and always have been. Double digits bring me luck and they run through my life like a magical current. I was born in '66, graduated from college in '88, and until a few days ago I was 44. (And yes, I loved 11-11-11, and it was a very good day).

It was a good year. A lucky year. A year of fruition after lots of years of slow, quiet and important growth. I ran a marathon, got two of my best magazine articles ever published (and the ones I am proudest of), hiked the Grand Canyon Rim 2 Rim 2 Rim, got a new job that is cool and different and doing some good for kids and schools, and am making the most money I ever have, when I wondered if I would ever make real money again.

I am growing, I am learning, I am lurching a little.

I am tired, I am excited, and I love my life.

A strange astrologist trained in an arcane system of Indian astrology told me in a small garden tea hut last January that my life would start getting better and more productive in the spring. Or at least new things would start happening. And that is true. He predicted a super productive five years (as long as I wore a moonstone on my wrist to balance my energies, which I am not doing).

I am still here and glad to be alive for one more year on this sweet earth.

For my birthday we went to Yosemite, the four of us, and spent two nights in a little tent cabin in Curry Village, with a heater and a single light bulb. We worried we would freeze, but ended up hot. The boys threw snow balls of dirty left over snow and prayed for a blizzard, and the Valley smelled like fall. On Saturday Benji said he felt like the next day would be Christmas. We hiked up to Vernal Falls and then Nevada Falls and my boys were so amazing they became celebrities on the trail. We ate dinner at the Ahwahnee, in the grandest dining room I have ever seen-one that bears an uncanny resemblance to Hogwarts.

Yosemite is one of my favorite places in the world, and after a weekend of hiking and climbing and soaking in that beauty my bucket is full and I am ready to forge on and do my best in the world. I will post a picture here, I promise.

This year I hope I will start my newspaper--for real!--fix my bike at the bike kitchen and do a triathlon, take guitar lessons and become really good at guitar, and go somewhere amazing I have never been before with my husband and boys. I hope Jonathan and I will start some amazing and bold venture together--something creative and different that will grow and do good and make us a good living.

To all who make my life rich, and sweet, Thank You. I am grateful.

Signing off for now, from the Middle Ages.

Follow Your Jealousy

Joseph Campbell tells us to follow our bliss. I believe in that--but sometimes I also believe you should follow your jealousy. If someone is doing something that makes you crazy with jealousy, with longing, that makes you agitated and restless and like you need to go running or DO SOMETHING!@#$#@! then maybe, just maybe, you should be doing more of that yourself.

I like my life. I do. I am grateful for so much.

But occasionally pricks of other realities come poking through and I have a glimpse of roads not taken, things not done, passions not pursued, lives not lived. An alternate Hilary universe.

This week it happened twice, and it was most uncomfortable.

First, my brother and his family went to Naples, Italy, where we lived when we were young. After a lifetime living in a villa on the Bay of Naples, our godparents (I claim them as mine, but really they are only godparents to my two siblings) will most likely leave their home (and our fantasy escape) forever and move to New Zealand. All three of us are filled with memories of Naples so deep and evocative that you can see that Italian influence laced through all three of our lives in different ways. Me, I live in a home that looks Italian on a hillside looking out on another hillside full of twinkling lights like a Neapolitan cliffside. The neighborhood is even slightly chaotic and dilapidated, like the Naples I knew as a child. At night, the smells are similar to a Neapolitan evening, and the herbs and plants and lizards that grow here are like the Italian city that seduced me for good when I was young, and left me searching for them ever since.

I am so happy for my brother, that he took his family to our beloved place. That his girls danced and explored and played hide and seek and pretended to be Roman statues just as we did. I love knowing that the taste of Neapolitan pizza and Italian gelato and Pompeian adventures is now stuck in their heads, too. When I saw his girls playing where we had played I was so happy it is hard to convey. I want that for my boys, too. I want them to eat zucchini pasta on Capri and to climb the Phoenecian steps. I want them to skip and run over Roman ruins and to see vespas with handsome men, beautiful women clinging to their waists, screaming up cobbled streets. I want them to look at Vesuvius looming over the Bay and to know what a real Neapolitan pizza tastes like.

Then, last night, Jonathan invited over a BBC correspondent and his new wife. They had moved here from Thailand, where he was a correspondent, and she was some sort of diplomat. They were wonderful, smart, worldly, curious and well-traveled. I guess they are what I was once--and what I thought I would be. And they still delighted me. I felt the jealousy surge--wasn't my life supposed to be like this? Full of tales of Thailand and Libya and celebrity and adventure?

I lived that life for awhile. Then stopped.

And here I am.

I can still go to Italy, and I will take my boys. I hope they will fall in love with Italy the way my brother's girls have. But the life of a foreign correspondent is dead to me--an option that has been truly shut down and put to sleep. I may travel again, and live abroad, but my former profession is dying and I would not put myself in danger with kids.

I love my choices. I love my screenwriter husband, my Hollywood life, my boys. I love California, the national parks, the sound of Spanish in this my unlikely, but adopted home of Los Angeles. I love our charter school and the life we have created here.

Still, for one week, as I approach my 45th birthday (eek!) I felt the surge of not-quite-regret, but of some slivers of dreams lost, choices made, options closed. Not forever. I can break them down and try to pick out the parts I want. But I guess it is a part of middle age that you come to terms with where you are, you do not lie, or fool yourself with promises of what can be. You look with cold hard eyes at what you have. Then you thank the world for all the things you have (and I have so much!) and figure out the essence of those things you wish you had, the source of those pricks of jealousy.

And you take them, and work towards them, to make them happen, before you die!

In the Land of the Zombies

The days are getting shorter, the mornings darker. Still, in a feeble attempt to keep my sanity I rise at 6:30 and try to run a couple of times a week before work. It keeps my nerves in check, and my breathing steady. I dread getting up, but it makes me happy.

When I started the day was bright, the sun up. I could see downtown when I crested my final hill. Now, I set out in the pitch black. I am running in the moment when the street lights have gone out, but the light has not yet come.

I run across the Hollywood Bowl parking lot, under the freeway underpass, and across into a sweet little neighborhood called the Hollywood Dell full of cute houses, lots of hills, and, early in the morning, coyotes, rabbits and sometimes deer.

But as the economy gets worse, and the mornings darker, I am seeing other wildlife. I am there when all the homeless people rise from behind their bushes and rocks and park benches. I am there when they come out of the woods and parks dressed in black, with their hoodies still pulled tight over their heads. They are half-awake, just like me, stumbling out of strange places to begin the day.

I do not scare easily. But the other morning, I suddenly felt I was in the land of zombies. All these people, who feel groggy and half-dead, and invisible to the world most of the time, were awake, with me. Alone on the streets.

Is this why zombie movies are so popular right now?

Because when you are awake when the rest of the world sleeps, this is the world you see?

Fiber Arts

Necklaces, bracelets, hats, ropes. My boys have been compulsively finger-knitting, competitively finger-knitting, for every spare moment. During quiet time, on the sidelines of their soccer games, early in the morning, in their rooms late at night. They have knit long enough tubes to go across the San Francisco Bay--or at least to stretch from upstairs, down the stairs, around the corner and across the living room. It is competitive, it is creative, it is fun!

This One's For You, Ruth!

Here is the new do!

And another view!


Ruth, I hear the man in your life does not love your hair as much as I do. Well, the men in my life don't love my new short, sassy do either. But I did it for me! I cut my hair as a metaphor for change and a sign that things are going to be different and I embrace that--with my hair!!!

This was in the salon, the day it was cut, blown out and cute. I felt good.

Since then my hair has flipped out--it does not know what to do with itself. I look wacky and weird and have strange lumps after I sleep. Still, I am happy. And I saw your hair, and I like yours, too.

Across the ocean, we are receiving similar hair messages--cut it short, swing it around, be a sassy, smart woman.

You look cute, sweet niece. Send me another picture of you and I will post it here, on my blog!

New hair for a new life! That's my motto!

Vacation! After Just Two Days!

We broke the news to the boys that I would be going back to work about three weeks ago. They were vaguely interested. They know I write stories sometimes, and am preoccupied. Perhaps they thought it would be like that. All out, then quiet again.

So on the second day, (a Friday) Theo said:

"Are you going to work again?"

"Yes," I said. "I am."

On the third day, (a Saturday) he asked again:

"Are you going to work today, too?"

"No," I said. "It's the weekend."

But I realized, for him, my work is a brief sprint, when I seem distracted and absent, and then, soon, it is over.

This will be different. I cannot even bear to tell him how different.

Not yet.

One day at a time.

Back to Work

Today was my first day at my new job: I am chief of staff for Tamar Galatzan, School Board Member. I am thrilled to be working for her. She is smart, a clear-thinker, wants to do good, and cares. She is also tall and strong, an Amazon like me. She is cool. You can read more about her on her web site.

The job came about through a series of coincidences so bizarre that though I never intended to go down this road, I swear I felt I was being sent a sign from God. I care deeply about the issues, the pay is good, Tamar is awesome, and this is a chance to learn about LAUSD from the inside out. Oh, the access! It is a journalist's dream! I am, officially, classified. On a completely classified floor, in fact. Security feels tighter than the Pentagon. I kid you not.

It is a chance to effect change, in a completely different way than as a journalist. But I will use many of the same skills, too--writing, investigating, asking questions, getting out in the field and finding out what is really going on, then fighting for that cause, through writing, attention, diligence, truth-telling.

My heart is a little twisted, and lurches here and there. I am excited about the job, thrilled in fact, but also emotional about leaving my boys for so much of the time. What will it be like? How will my heart handle it? I have been such a full time mother. Withdrawal symptoms will be severe. And though I wish it were not so, I happen to believe the greatest kids do have someone who loves them in an extraordinary way around most of the time.

I am also, for the moment, suspending my dream of starting my community paper. This caused me so much distress I took to bed for a week. But I have vowed to myself that I will keep forging ahead with my dream, and try to launch more slowly on line this fall, with no ads, build a reputation, and then be ready in the future to take it out in print. I have a logo, dear readers, and soon I will post it here. Remind me of this dream, devoted readers, fellow writers, all lovers of stories and news. Because beyond this immediate job, I feel starting this community paper is something I am meant to do in this life. I just need to help our family achieve a little financial stability in these tumultuous times. And to have a little money socked away for me to put up those initial investment costs without panicking. You know what I mean. I know you do. But I beg of you, hold me to my promise.

I will try to write still, yes I will, indeed writing here may be even more important than it has been. But perhaps this blog was a record of my time at home, my time with my boys, a journal of the quiet moments of motherhood that are not glorified by society, but are so beautiful they can make your heart ache. It was a record of both the joy and the loneliness of making the choice to be a stay at home mother in a society that does not value motherhood.

Or perhaps this blog will be a place to record what it is like to go BACK to work, after being off.

I am not sure yet.

I do not know.

But I will keep you posted.

Right here.

Promise.