A break-up letter.

When I first started reading blogs, the notion of “mommy blogging” didn’t exist. It was back in the day–Leslie Harpold, Sarah Hatter. Dooce was not yet DOOCE! Maggie not yet so mighty. And the “titans” of blogging interacted with their readers because they weren’t yet too famous to care.

Leslie Harpold in particular ran the most astonishing blog I’ve ever read. It was called the Harpold 500, and she solicited photographs from people to use as inspiration for these stories she would write–500 word essays about whatever came to her. So often reading her site, my breath would catch in my throat, the walls of my dorm room would disappear, and I’d be transported to this place outside of space and time.

A sample of Leslie’s work:

Possible Scenarios for Heaven by Leslie Harpold

A record arm that you can pick up and put down in favorite parts of your life to play over, like dropping the needle in the middle of your favorite song back in 1980, when you knew exactly which part of the groove was where the guitar solo to “Train in Vain” ended. Moving it there meant you could dance around your room for just one more minute before shoving off, face first, into the snow on a school day.

Pick the arm up in heaven, and it’s the moment right before Billy Mullen kisses you, standing in the Putt Putt parking lot, just before the street lights come on. Leave it playing through the part where you race home, feet barely touching the ground for the nine blocks you run until you collapse on the landing, face flushed. Lift it off again before you hear your mom say “Young lady…” After savoring it a moment, which might be three hundred heaven years, drop it again that one day you stood in front of the mirror naked and went “you know, I think my boobs are pretty good,” and actually believed it. Just replaying the greatest moments again and again, and always being pleasantly surprised how quickly they add up, how many you have to choose from, not having had the luxury of seeing them like an endless play list when you wandered around on this mortal coil.

You get to drive down the most beautiful road ever as fast or slow as you like in a car with enough leg and head room, a great stereo, and the companion of your choice. Your companion enjoys riding shotgun as much as you love driving. Someone brushes your hair every single day and never says, “My arms are tired.”

The novel you wished would never end doesn’t and peonies bloom year round. You are encouraged to watch movies from an oversized bathtub.

Get up around sunrise, because sunrise is always five minutes after you wake up in heaven, and seeing a different and more magnificent one each day, simultaneously thinking “Wow, earth was beautiful” and also “This is pretty great too.” Spend the whole day reunited with pets and being really good at all the stuff you never got around to learning but always wanted to try like snow boarding and making quilts.

The feeling you get when you wake up in the middle of the night laughing thinking about the silliest thing you saw that day.

Swimming in the nicest pool ever, (100% pee free!) slightly heated, incredibly refreshing and no one ever bumping into you. To keep you aware of how lovely it is, periodically you get out of the pool for a big cookout where the watermelon they serve after the hot dogs is fresh and sweet, and there’s no penalty for getting back in the pool too soon. Also spitting watermelon seeds would be considered a beautiful gesture, not something “nice young ladies like you do not do.”

Perpetually maintaining a combination of these three feelings: hearing the first five bars of your favorite song in an unexpected place, the feeling you have when you wake up from a power nap, drink a glass of water and blink twice while taking your deepest breath; combined with that super fleeting moment your lips stop touching someone else’s. Right when you realize you’ve been kissed.

It is totally okay to write yourself notes and draw pictures on your arms and legs, as long as they are beautiful. P.S. You also get perfect penmanship.

Prada looking pants that feel like flannel pajama bottoms. You are always a size six.

Fresh blackberries with breakfast every day. Diet coke on tap. Gymnastics are second nature to your body, you flip and tumble with alacrity. When people look at you, they see you and they smile from the heart. At night you sleep on the softest pillow ever, and both sides of the pillowcase are cool.

What is is always good enough.

I’ve always been a lover of books, but it was through these pioneers of blogging that I fell in love with words, and eventually went on to dabble in them in search of my own voice. My first stabs at blogging were dark, honest. They chronicled pieces of my soul that I dared not share with anyone else, and while it was some of the realest, best work I’ve done in my life, it also wasn’t exactly what people wanted to read.

I have created and destroyed any number of blogs over the years, each time looking for the recipe to greatness and falling short. Ashley, Etc. is the closest I’ve ever come to internet “fame” (and please read that with a grain of salt as I know that I am far, FAR from famous) and while being featured on BlogHer and having a lot of people read my words was sort of exhilarating –they like me; they REALLY like me–I also hated it in a way. I hated it because the words  weren’t true to my story, to what I want to write. I’ve alluded to it before, but I hate writing about parenting. In the words of Chopin, I am not a mother woman. I love my daughter, but I very rarely love being a mother, and I certainly don’t love talking about it all the time. I became a mom, and I felt inadequate in my role as housewife and dame of domesticity, so I thought, yeah–I can write. Let’s monetize this shit. And I set about turning my blog into a “mommy blog” and “creating a brand” because writing a blog with a targeted audience is a much faster road to relevancy than writing novels. My idea sort of worked, except it could never fully pan out because I have issues hiding my disdain for my own stupid creation. I can’t push it past the brink and truly make any money off of it because I hate it.

I started a wordpress site the other day. Just a plain wordpress.com site. I Googled “random word generator” and I randomly generated a name for it that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And then I sat down, and I wrote a piece of fiction. When I hit publish, I had no idea who would read it, or if anyone would even find it. And it was freeing and intoxicating and exhilarating  It was all of the good adjectives. And for a second, I felt that rush I used to feel. The one that says, “Hey, words. OMG words. I want to devote my life to words.”

I do.

I want to devote my life to words.

I just need them to be words that have a purpose for me, words that don’t take themselves too seriously, words that aren’t something any schmuck could throw together and slap on a parenting website to generate some pageviews. I started out wanting to be a Leslie, or a Sarah, or a Heather, and then I saw that “success” was out there for the taking if only I made myself more palatable, forced myself into a mold. There is success out there; it’s just not my definition of success.

Leslie Harpold died shortly after I found her blog. Her family let her domain expire, and her words–her breathtaking, stunning, soul-altering words–disappeared from the internet forever. Someday I’m going to die, too, and when I do, there’s a good chance that it might be without recognition. I might not have a published book or have made it onto the Huffington Post. I might not have a blog that gets more than a handful of readers every month. I might not have ever made a dime from my writing. But if I have created something I feel proud of, if I’ve lived my truth and devoted my energy to creating things that feel like a truer representation of me, well…

I can’t ask for much more than that.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this domain, if anything. I kind of hate it and think it sounds like something a 12-year-old valley girl came up with. In all likelihood I’m just going to get rid of it, but I just got charged for another month, so it will still be here for a little while. At any rate, thank you for your love and support, and for finding value in the things you read here. I’m excited to continue the friendships I’ve built here in a way that feels much more authentic and fulfilling.

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I’ll be back.

I’m taking a bit of a hiatus and working on some other projects. I’ll be back, just need a little break. Wanted to let you guys know.

A work in progress

One of my favorite writers recently wrote a post about how she and her husband maintain a successful relationship. They’ve been together for 10 years, and she’s a much better writer than me, so she probably already did this subject complete justice and we can go ahead and close the book on it, but it got me thinking about my own relationship and I wanted to add my two cents into the mix. Zach and I are coming up on our second marriage anniversary, and it’s crazy to me because well, I just never thought I’d get here–you know, “here” meaning happily married and not divorced after 72 hours a la Britney Spears. I mean, I always wanted to get here at some point, but I wasn’t really sure I ever would.

My relationship history has been tumultuous at best. My therapist described my quest to find a healthy relationship as me “trying to build a plane when I’ve never seen one,” and a more accurate description of my personal endeavors into romance has never existed. I tried, and tried, and tried, and tried, and tried, and tried again to fit so many square pegs into a round hole. And I always made it my fault when it didn’t work. I could always find a reason why I wasn’t good enough, why I should be better.

I met Zach 3 weeks after I’d kicked some jerk I was sort of dating to the curb, and I’d just finally–FINALLY –gotten rid of a lingering drama with an ex. I had a clean slate, I felt very much at peace about embracing my singleness, and I’d decided before I even knew who Zach was that my relationships were going to be different from there on out. The only trouble was, I still didn’t know exactly what that looked like.

I knew from the beginning that Zach was going to be an important person in my life. Don’t ask me how I knew; I just did. I felt it. It felt different, and I didn’t want to screw it up, so I did what any normal person might do and I panicked. I bought books because I’m a dork, and that’s what dorks do. To this day, I have an unread copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to a Healthy Relationship sitting on our bookshelf, and a book that I did actually read called He’s Scared, She’s Scared, which, shut up. Don’t laugh. YOU’RE scared. So is your face. And so is your mom. Burn!

All of this to say that I really, really wanted this relationship to work. And it did–once I sat back and stopped trying to force it–but it took a really long time for me to be able to let go of the reins and just let it happen. I had to learn how to trust Zach and myself, and (hardest lesson of all) I had to learn how to allow myself to be loved. That seems like it would be the easy part, but it’s not. It’s actually really hard to believe that you’re deserving of the love you want, especially when you don’t have a lot of positive relationship role models in your life and have had a wealth of bad experiences in the romance department. For a while it felt like I loved Zach with bent arms and clenched fists, always bouncing around and trying to be one step ahead of whatever blow I assumed he was going to throw my way. But the blows never came. When we were mad, we fought, and then we healed. When we had chances to walk away, we didn’t. When we had the opportunity to choose something else, we chose each other instead. And I relaxed because slowly–painfully slowly–I realized we were fighting FOR each other, instead of against each other.

My relationship with Zach is the happiest, healthiest relationship I’ve ever been in, but that didn’t happen by accident. We push and pull, squeeze, stretch, compromise, grow. We give each other the freedom to be individuals and the space to make mistakes, but we always know where home is, and we always know that our willingness to return there is a matter of choice. That’s the conclusion my “wealth of knowledge” about marriage has led me to: that choosing your spouse is the most significant part of making your relationship work. You have to do it every day, even when it’s hard, even when you don’t feel like it. You have to say, I could be anywhere and I could be with anyone, but I choose this life, this commitment, this family.

It’s a choice.

What leads you to continue making that choice will vary from person to person and relationship to relationship. For me, it’s being with someone that I really just genuinely enjoy. Zach and I like spending time together. We have our separate interests, but we spend the majority of our time together willingly and easily. We laugh a lot. All the time. We share our days. We fight respectfully (most of the time), and we always own up to our mistakes and apologize. And we’re honest with each other–maybe even more honest than we need to be at times, but it works for us.

Relationships are a blank canvas, and you fill that space in your own way. No two relationships will look alike or function by the same set of rules. The important thing is to find someone who shares your vision, who has integrity, who loves you enough to work with you and even to fight with you, and who you trust completely.

It’s also very, very important for them to love eating spicy Buffalo wings and watching bad horror movies with you on Friday nights, and to understand that the Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch in the freezer is MINE SO BACK OFF PLEASE.

What are some of your tips for making it work?

Weigh-In & Thoughts on Week 2

Current weight: –

I reserve the right not to weigh myself this week because it’s that time of the month. I am a notorious water weight gainer during that time, and if I step on a scale and see a gain, I’m going to go name a pan of brownies “Feelings” and eat them.

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I exercise an inordinate amount of care when it comes to feeding my daughter. I’m not the paranoid type who refuses to feed her anything that doesn’t come certified organic and with a written history of where it came from, but I am the thoughtful, concerned type. When she’s hungry, even when she just wants a snack, I make it my mission to give her the most nutritious variety of foods possible. I always make sure she has fruits and vegetables on her plate. I avoid processed foods as much as possible, and even if Zach and I are eating fast food, I usually try to find something healthy from home for her to eat. That doesn’t mean she’s never had a chicken nugget or a French fry, but I practice a standard of quality within my daughter’s diet that I don’t practice often enough within my own. I see her as growing and developing, in need of healthful foods, and pure enough that I don’t want to fill her with junk.

I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of myself that way. When I was little, I ate what tasted good. If we had soda in the fridge, I drank it. If we went out to eat, I figured why eat a salad when I can order cheese-smothered enchiladas with sour cream sauce, beans, rice, and as many delicious, crispy chips as my stomach can hold? I didn’t have a grasp on what was healthy for me and what wasn’t. It took me years, lots of experimenting, and many, many books to understand which foods are best for me and why. And, unfortunately, during those years of trial and error, I learned to eat for taste, for indulgence, for convenience.

It’s strange to me when I compare Sonia’s diet to my own. I go the extra mile for her. I will chop and steam fresh vegetables as a side dish for her lunch. I will stand there for 10 minutes cutting grapes and blueberries in half for her snacks. I will spend weekends prepping fresh foods for her to eat during the week. I don’t do things like that for myself. Somehow I always see myself as not worth the effort; I’ll always “do it tomorrow.” Except tomorrow never comes. I struggled a lot to get back on track last week after my weekend of pigging out because I’m still not completely in the “lifestyle change” mindset. I’m still looking at food the wrong way.

My goal for this week is to treat myself as well as I treat my daughter; to look at meals not as a chore or an opportunity to pig out, but as an opportunity to refuel and energize my body, and to try to pack as much nutrition as possible into each eating choice I make.

This would all be so much easier if I was a baby and had someone else doing the work for me.

Can’t Buy Me Love

My instructions to my husband regarding Valentine’s Day were simple:

“At some point I want chocolate. It doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day; I just want chocolate. Oh, and if you spend $100 on flowers, I’m going to kill you.”

We were standing in the floral section of our local supermarket, and I was fingering the petals of a single cream rose sticking up out of a $90 arrangement. From afar, I looked like any other woman admiring the flowers, dreaming of the grand gestures my husband might make to prove his love for me come February 14th. But, up close, I was inspecting the petal for gold dust, or a diamond inlay, or whatever the hell it was that might make a few roses worth $90.

I’m what you might call The Anti-Cupid. Every year Valentine’s Day rolls around, and every year I am baffled by the pink streamers and boxes of candy decorating the aisles of WalMart in January, entranced by the hideous jewelry on chain store commercials, and riveted by the hoards of people scrambling to make reservations at almost any restaurant that will take one. 1-800-FLOWERS comes on TV with a $300 bouquet and a teddy bear, imploring us to “give her a gift she’ll never forget,” and I sit there on my couch thinking, “Yeah, spend $300 on some flowers that will be dead by Sunday and another stuffed bear to add to the bookshelf.”

I don’t understand spending as much on flowers as we spend on groceries. I also don’t understand supposedly “romantic” dinners that take place in over-crowded, over-priced restaurants with a 30-minute delay on orders because they’re so backed up with customers. I don’t understand Kay’s Open Hearts collection–mostly because it makes me think of open heart surgery–or those hideous wanna-be charm bracelets, and don’t even get me started on Zales and their “chocolate diamonds.” That sounds like something that came out of my diaper genie.

I just don’t get what’s romantic or remotely thoughtful about any of it. Thoughtful is when I didn’t get enough sleep and my husband surprises me with a caffeinated beverage. $90 flowers? Those aren’t thoughtful. They’re actually kind of thoughtLESS. We could have used that $90 to put food on the table, or buy something for the house, or buy something for our daughter, who will still be alive in 5 days, unlike those roses.

It occurs to me that my attitude towards “romance” probably has a lot to do with my socioeconomic status. I am someone for whom $90 is a lot of money, so the idea of treating it like disposable income is ludicrous to me. And it’s not that my husband has never bought me flowers or made any sort of grand romantic gestures towards me because he has. He’s even done them on Valentine’s Day (the horror!). But, we’re simple people. We’re realistic in our wants, and subtle in our expressions of love and affection. And, well, who says romance has to cost a lot?

In the age of $40,000 weddings and diamonds as a requirement, I find it sort of refreshing sometimes to just say no. No pressure, no over-expenditure, no useless teddy bears or heart-shaped antacids. In fact, my favorite thing about Valentine’s Day since I met Zach is that it reminds me how lucky we are to NOT feel obligated to give into the commercialization of February 14th. We enjoy each other every day, we show each other love and consideration regularly, and we don’t have unreasonable expectations for how our relationship should be. Romance, for us, happens when no one is looking, and I think that’s how it should be.

Today, whether you’re single or taken, love the flowers or think they’re a total waste, I hope you remember what’s really important: that tomorrow, all of the chocolate will be half off.

Weigh-in Numero Uno

Weight lost this week: 0.6 pounds

Weight left to lose: 52 pounds

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“See, what had happened was…“

I did really awesome last week. I ate tons of vegetables, and I stayed under my daily calorie limit almost every day. I snuck a weigh-in on Friday and I was already down a pound and a half. That meant I would probably lose almost 2 pounds my first week. How exciting!

Unfortunately, right after that came the weekend, and I ate the world. Seriously. And eating the world kind of undid my progress. A little bit. A lot. Fridays are usually “date nights” for Zach and me. We like to order some takeout, rent a movie, and spend some time together. It’s fine if I just do that on Friday, but unfortunately eating poorly begets more poor eating for me, so I kind of let Friday night spiral into a 3-day free-for-all.

My goal for this week is to have my normal Friday night indulgence, but not to let it bleed out and ruin the rest of my hard work. I want to exercise some control over the weekend and not treat it like a vacation. Wish me luck!

Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, and I have a perfectly grouchy post planned. In the meantime, you should check out what Emily had to say about the day because it’s hilarious.

Also, thank you for all of your kind words and support yesterday. You let me be completely self-indulgent and not a single one of you told me to put a sock in it already, and that means a lot. I’m still responding to your comments, but I just wanted you to know that you are the best!

Just a phase.

I’m going through a slump in my writing. I have plenty to say, but when I sit down nothing comes out. I can’t find the right words, or it doesn’t flow properly, or it doesn’t seem like anything that’s even worth reading. I know a few other bloggers who are going through the same thing. Is it just that time of year?

When we moved to Omaha, I had a lot of personal and professional goals. Omaha wouldn’t be like Texas. I’d make mom friends and participate in community events! I’d weasel my way into the local writing crowd and make connections with the Omaha World Herald’s Momaha group! And when we first got here, I genuinely pushed. I attended events, I joined the Momaha chats every Friday, I tried out the library, I tried to make contact with the Momaha editor.

But nothing changed.

I kind of feel like I’m butting my head up against a brick wall. I pitched an article to the editor of Momaha. She said nothing for over a week, and I figured she just wasn’t interested. Then, in the Momaha chat the following Friday, she said, “I still need to message you back! Make time for me on Monday .” So I did, and…nothing. So I waited a few days. I waited a week. I emailed her asking what it was she wanted to talk about. And she never answered. That was almost 2 weeks ago.

Now I feel like one of those losers in high school trailing after the popular kids hoping desperately for them to notice me. Meanwhile everyone I know is landing in the Huffington Post, and writing really wonderful blog posts that get 63.5 million comments, and I’m just sitting here kind of deflated and defeated and wondering if I should just throw in the towel on this entire operation. I shouldn’t, of course. I know that. It just seemed like things were going really well. It seemed like calling myself a real writer wasn’t so crazy after all. And then that little well of success dried up, and now my confidence is so shaken that I can’t even write a normal post.

I’m struggling this week because without the community of blogging, without any successes with my work, I feel very much like “just a mom,” like I have nothing to offer the world. And I sit here all day folding clothes, doing dishes, playing with blocks, and I resent my life because I’m just a mom. I’m just another chick with a blog. I’m just another Average Joe who’s foolish enough to think I have talent. Like those sad people we all laugh at in the American Idol audition rounds.

I’m in a funk.

I’m attempting to get a piece together for Listen to Your Mother. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish it in time because the words are not coming easily, but I hope I do. I hope I get a call back. I could really use a little bit of success right now.