My Pink-Cheek Power Hour

It's 83 degrees in the middle of September, and I got to spend a power hour in the garden in the middle of the afternoon. (This is very, very good, because I'm on what I call garden probation; my 100 square foot community garden plot is monitored for appearance standards and the insufferable presence of weeds in its pathways - both of which have been less than desirable on the past couple of garden monitor visits. If my plot isn't picture-perfect prepared for winter, it will be taken from me. Yep, probation.) That power hour in the autumn sun planting purple brussels sprouts (whose winter produce promises leaves of deep purple or sea green with violet red tips and veins) and pulling out kale trees gave me rather pink cheeks. When I caught my reflection in the mirror, all I could think about was how lucky I am to have the weekday privilege of an occasional hour in the garden.

I've tried really hard (embarrassingly hard, since I've mostly failed) to gain a 9-5 type job that would make this kind of power hour quite impossible. Let me confirm that I absolutely love my job, but since it lacks the financial growth opportunity I need for long-term stability and security, over the past year and half I've spent hours and hours applying for jobs, responding to interview assignments and going to interviews. And failing to get the jobs. It's quite humbling. I'm never before encountered such overarching failure. Most of my adult work life has been born of the good fortune of excellent timing or spunk of creativity and resourcefulness, or both. Now I get to do good work for families and their young children, not because I knew anything about it when I started but because I let myself learn from the work along the way. So in a way, that was made possible by failing here and there along the way. But never on the scale of outright inability to advance like my intentional job search has been.
Now, I might be kidding myself to think I could stand a work-life that required me to learn a system and a standard that I didn't get to help create. I need the pink-cheek element of accomplishment and action I get in my garden just as equally in my work. That rosy flush of work well done or gone all wrong is a workplace privilege I'm proud to say I have in spades.

In my garden I grow plants for food and medicine. I also fail there. I don't get every zucchini at the right size, snails get some strawberries, my blueberries have failed to thrive, I let the nasturtiums take over my beet bed this year. Without my garden and it's edible gifts I'd be sorely missing many of the most joyful interludes of my life, including harvests and fruitful labor. Without a flexible work afternoon I'd be missing some of the prime pink cheek hours I'm fortunate to have. On days like today, I feel good about letting go of what I don't have to let in the enrichment of what I do.

So that's the power. Pink cheeks. I'm not failing myself in these moments, I'm living the dream with my pink-cheek power, every garden hour.

Hug a Caregiver Today

I have hope that when disease, age or very bad luck comes for me my daughters will have the flexibility, patience and strength of memories to reroute for me. And I must hope that they have until well after my 60th birthday to grow these virtues.

Over the past few weeks, my dad hasn't been able to fasten his own seat belt getting into my car even once. Today he managed to unfasten it three times as the vehicle was in motion, in an attempt to get out of the car in his frustration and anger.
I'm thankful my car has auto lock and I could control that as my heart fell to my stomach and I steered us out of traffic each time. There's nothing easy about an angry incoherent man throwing a punch at the windshield when you're in the driver's seat. It's downright alarming.

My 65 year old dad and I have spent long days together this summer, coming and going from my childhood home in a routine of coffee, walks, art class, gadding about town and driving. Until today, driving has been a soothing, reorganizing activity. He has been a happy passenger, even when we're hitting that awful afternoon traffic slowdown on the Burnside Bridge. I know my dad doesn't always know who I am on these days, but that's okay with me. Until today I haven't triggered an upset in his world the size of a mountain and speed of a hailstorm, which is to say it hit large and hard and changed the landscape we've been able to tender.

I'm lucky. I choose this weather with my dad. When I think about all the people without daughters or loved ones to stand by these times, I think about the people who show up for this work. They give long hours to unpredictable, sometimes volatile people, and usually with poor pay. They have few clues or any shared history from the lives of their dementia patients, which is often something that makes it work for me. Yes, I'm lucky. I can lean in to the legacy of our lives for compassion, patience and care.

7 Ways I Might Have Known I Was Dating a Predator

Sitting in my vehicle just before 8 a.m. the other day, I saw a man walk across the street to his car with his shoes in hand. Cool shoes, hipster half-boots, and wearing an oxford shirt mostly buttoned but not all. He was young, tousled and handsome and walking barefoot to his Lexus wagon with the look of exiting a place not his own. It reminded me immediately of a man I dated for a brief two months a few years ago who once watched me sit to put on the heels I had been wearing the night before and say he always thought it was sexy when women left with their shoes in their hands. He was very sexy to me, I craved him and his attention, but contrary moments like that should have been my clues to his arrogance. In our parting conversation he disdainfully told me the unwanted handmade birthday gift in his hand was the most thoughtful gift anyone had ever given him. A compliment of dichotomy.

I've recently had a traumatic dating experience with miscalculated intentions; predictably it has impacted the way I will and want to meet men. I haven't expected to write about it without confronting my own contributions to what was ultimately a trauma for me. Several weeks removed, I can more clearly see how I might have known I was dating someone that now strikes me as a sexual predator. Much like the fellow I knew above, he was someone who had my attention by virtue of his smarts, sass and straight up sex appeal.

He got my attention, and then he let me make all the moves.
By virtue of busy schedules and brief as well as impromptu connections, I unwittingly initiated all the thrills of getting together. He simply kept saying yes.

Emotional intelligence is his curb appeal modus operandi.
He has it. However, he avoided being sexually explicit in his probing honesty and admissions. Saying "I'm a lot" proved to be highly insufficient introduction to his sexual proclivities. But a potential romantic partner being vocal, communicative and inquisitive about shared interests is an easy invitation to be smitten in the wilds of online dating.

In broad daylight "Why am I not fucking you right now?"sounded good.
Too good. I liked it. Rarely if ever since I was 17 has a man I've simply kissed turned on my body at the mere thought of him. When you crave someone that much, anything sounds like a compliment in his company.

He invited me to a sex club for a date and seemed to relish my subsequent curiosity when I said I had questions instead of saying no or yes.
Personally, I know I'm more likely to enjoy that kind of destination when I've already breached intimate boundaries. But I've met a lot of people out there in the land of online dating as well as acquainted with or been hounded by plenty more, and nothing surprises me about the stunted ideas of seeking connections. I had good questions. He confirmed all my suspicions. Timing never landed us at the sex club. But I know he frequents all three in town; I can usually admire a man who is willing to share his lifestyle interests with me.

It wasn't groceries in his paper shopping bag when I suggested we go on a picnic, and we met at my house.
It wasn't the original plan to meet at my house, but it did happen. I'm going to chalk that up to an incident of timing and strong appetite for living on the edge. My rule about not inviting men to my home if I haven't been to theirs is pretty solid, well-founded and smart. Yet it also falters with the spirit of impulsiveness, the safety of daylight and the intrigue of a fantastic connection. But letting someone into your home is a (deserved) signal of trust and consent by my estimation of dating middle aged men. In my experience, men like sex when they can get it. They don't always recognize that women like sex when they want it. His bag was equipped with sex toys and mezcal. He came with an agenda under cover of accepting a picnic invitation. Was I surprised? No. Was I game? Yes, though......

He equated being in my home as a measure of my permission and safety. 
"This is your home. You're safe here." If that's not the most revealing predatory statement for a guest in your home to make to you when you're struggling to balance discomfort with pleasure and surprise in their company, what is?

He had a safe word.........that he didn't reveal until I needed it.
He had a safe word! That I didn't know. Whereas he had the concept in place, there was absolutely no conversation or agreement to enter an intimacy that would warrant a safe word. Cerebrally, I was caught in the conundrum and momentum of dichotomous confusion and pleasure when I needed such a word - and I had to beg for it.
Ironically, I had spent the better part of the prior 8 months deflecting the advances of another man who desired an intimate relationship with me based on his rules and kink. He was annoyingly persistent about trying to convince me it would be worth my time and stubbornly disinterested in accepting my deflection, but in comparison he was marvelously and respectfully communicative about the breadth of his desires without actually advancing them upon me on the rare occasions he might have.

On the one hand, I went with my eyes open into the embrace of a predatory man whose success in his profession as a fighter is training to get what he wants. It was part of the intrigue, until he opened season on my 'training' without me knowing the regimen and rules. On the other hand, he mistook my curiosity and miscalculated my interest as an invitation to skip the niceties. Resultingly, my intrigue and curiosity dissipated instantly. Then came the interval of three days when I struggled to focus on the tasks before me. I lacked appetite, lost all interest in connecting with him, barely noticed he wasn't making any effort to communicate with me. The mystique, excitement and respect evaporated in his presence and then morphed into post traumatic stress. It took me three days to recognize the symptoms, six days to forgive myself my smitten weakness, more than six weeks to find an angle of communication about it. He gave me a lot to think about. I have no doubt he's unaware of the weight of his actions and ways. I believe I'm one in a succession of many others. He will go on in his search for someone who fulfills his greatest need - to know that women like him - and to use it as a cue for secret scripted intimacies.

And I have to believe, only a predator exploits people that way.

Diagnosis

I started dating with intention about a year ago because of a spectacular one night stand.
Actually, I thought I started dating with intention because of a spectacular one night stand, along with the encouragement of a couple particular friends. One of them was a woman who was enjoying it herself, the other a man who, more than anything, really likes to nudge people toward possibilities, which I appreciate. As for the one night stand, that was a surprise on all counts. Wherever he may be now, we were both in the right place at the right time last January. His vitality and ambition and attitude were a contagious marvel to my maternal single-hood. I credit him for reminding me it was time to renew my appetite for those cravings of youth.

As the year progressed and I met an assortment of men with varying talents, urgencies, quirks, idiosyncracies, agendas and experiences, I quickly found I wasn't in it to uncover the men reinventing themselves, the men high on themselves, or the men with ambition that fueled confidence but relaxed into arrogance. But that's who found me, on repeat. One notable guy had a particularly difficult time responding to No. In fact, he's a guy whose essay could be titled The Man I'm Not Dating Just Broke Up With Me.....Again for all the consternated emails he sent, except that I'm not sure I can fault him his delusions based on the simple handicap of not wanting to believe I didn't want to date him. I'm also not sure I'm not at fault for responding to the guy when he texted erratically over the course of several months, because hey, it's nice to know someone likes you, even when he's a little (or a lot) crazy and overuses emojis.

It occurred to me this week that the real reason I started dating could be summed up as diagnosis. More specifically, that recurring alone-ness that presents itself in force when things like diagnosis come along. The two years prior had carried diagnoses in my immediate family ranging through dementia, anorexia, depression and tumor growth. Most of those things came with accessories of anger, grief, confusion and hardship. They all suck. They all require maintenance and attention and priority at inconvenient times. Friends are good, but friends have their own families and accessories and schedules that always upstage an ongoing emotional drain and drama. The ultimately relentless daily alone-ness was taxing. I was certainly seeking a companionship that could withstand me and conjoin the factor of increasing matriarchy with his own whip-smart, fun, equally human coexistence. Funny thing is, a lot of people that are or seem to be good company aren't on dating sites. They are the musicians taking a set break, bagging my groceries, the servers at the restaurants where dates take you, the bus driver serenading its riders. It's funny how dating re-frames everyone into a context of potential date (and when those good-company folks are on dating sites, they are so often already in professedly wonderful open relationships looking to expand their hearts, which doesn't happen to fit my interests). So I've curtailed all momentum on dating. I opened my profile this month to find I am now liked by 900 people....the majority of whom I will never know what they think they like about me.

Any idea what the apropos diagnosis is for that?

Last Night at the Hospital

Tonight on the cancer ward, two little girls reminded me of the power of truth in the process of grief for young children.
As I sat coloring with the 5 1/2 year old daughter of my cousin, her 3 year old sister suddenly looked up to us and stated "My Papa is going to die soon." It blossomed right into her big sister explaining that's why she was at the hospital, and the problem the size of a cupcake in her grandpa's brain, and how he would feel better when he dies, and it's okay because they will always love him in their hearts. She told me it makes her sad, but it makes her mom very sad and cry all the time. I told her it makes me sad and I cry too. I told her it makes me sad that my dad's brain is sick too, and when she asked if it would make him die, I said yes.
And then, that big sister asked me what would happen when her mom and dad die. I told her people would take care of her with the love from her mom and dad in their hearts. But she meant what would happen if they died and nobody else was there. In that moment, what I thought to say was that would be an emergency and she could call 911 for any emergency. "Oh yeah, she said.....can I also call you?"
I said "Sure. I can tell you my phone number. Would you like to call me right now? "
She 'called' me right up and said, "I just wanted to let you know we are in the hospital because my Papa isn't doing so well and he's going to die soon."
And it went from there. She alternated between a toy phone and a pretend phone all the while she colored and carried on a conversation blending the facts and some fiction ("we're just about to park now, we'll see you soon") and even asking if there was anything she could do for me.
Perhaps 15 minutes later, in the waiting room outside her poppa's door, a woman sitting with her husband in a hospital gown, overheard this big sister ask me how cancer gets in your brain. She proceeded to say hello and tell her she loved someone who was going to die very soon too. It was one of those times you have to trust that a complete stranger is going to say the right thing, a helpful thing, an explanation of something that even doctors can't always explain, because every moment makes an impression of truth. I am not certain, but I have a guess, that hearing she is not alone in this place of losing a love she has always known, was a gift for both the giver and the receiver.
If you've ever doubted the power of truth in the process of grief for kids, I wish you could have been there with me tonight.

Thanks to their mama (my cousin) for her permission to share this story gift. I just wish I could have recorded the twenty minutes of precious, tender, honest love of it all for her.

Where and When Giving Works

Living on a close budget is a reality for most people I know, no matter the size of their income.
For most of my adult life my version of living on a close budget doesn't allocate any money to savings, no allowance for vacations, and almost always puts my daughters' expenses ahead of my own. Over the years I have occasionally squirreled some tax returns into savings that always ended up spent on medical costs - except for that one year I took the whole broken family to Disneyland for $1000, and I thought I'd have to be the one who could bust the cycle with a rejuvenating "play together, stay together" effort - and my weird car karma has also afforded some unexpected gains. (This is where a footnote would come in a research paper, because I've owned seven cars in the past thirteen years and all but one met their demise by no fault of my own). But ultimately, I just get by.
For the past year my budget has been exceptionally strained, and in the past several months the demands on it particularly weighty. My medical expenses pooled, my health insurance premium rose, my car needed to be replaced. For me those were pretty basic needs I needed to address with a longer term outlook. I had a whole summer of sticking very close to home with a disabled vehicle and a limited income during which I put a lot of time and energy in to job searches, applications and interviews believing I had no real option other than to refocus my professional energy in a direction that could be more securely financially compensated. I had to pull out of funding extra-curricular activities for my kids. It was soul-crushing and liberating at the same time. For several months I believed I was on the cusp of Huge Change and dreaded the fine details of how I was going to communicate that to my families and young students. But I also got a scope on the massive amount of transferable skill I had amassed on the job in 18 years with a public entity and 10 in a small non-profit, and that was heartening. None of it produced that new, more financially comfortable job and I ultimately decided to re-energize being myself. But that needed a new focal point too. I needed to find a way to give more of what I had to give, and hope that could launch me beyond surviving. I really needed new glasses, new contacts and to get out from under the stress of a broken car - which became no car - and that I could only afford to buy one that would keep me in the cycle of having to replace again in a year or two. (Yes, I thought about being car-free, but even in Portland I just couldn't see my car-free future).

Volunteering one's time with two jobs and two kids and one relatively meager income isn't that easy. I found that as I approached my 40's I needed a lot more rejuvenation time for myself. All the bustle and hustle to survive was more taxing, and adding a regular volunteer commitment to my schedule for my own pure joy just didn't happen. That grief became a stressor for me over the years too. My volunteering time is pretty limited to what I have to do, which is more like bartering. I get a substantial financial aid package for my daughter's high school tuition and in return contribute a substantial amount of time to the school. I really enjoy it, actually. The barter system works well for me. It's profit only goes so far, though, as it keeps you surviving and not always thriving.
Last fall I decided I just need to say yes more often, find more ways to give in manageable ways that I could risk to afford and enjoy. I started pulling books off my shelf for people, blending teas for specific needs, used my GAP rewards to buy clothes for kids in a refugee family, spent another $100 on the refugee family instead of ordering contacts, gave away my homemade garden preserves and herbal remedies, made herbal remedies for Standing Rock out of the donated dollars of customers, said yes to a cat bed my daughter wanted for our cats (it helped that it was half-price with an extra discount), said yes to the big tree my girls chose for the holiday and encouraged a community-giving project in my workplace, gave my experience to people who benefited from it in their new jobs.

You know what happened next? The more I exercised the habit of giving - even small - the more giving seemed to come around to me, and often when I really needed it. When I risked revealing a quiet skill I have to make and sell medicinal remedies and plant medicine to folks that I know, it ended up financing the purchase of new glasses and contacts and giving me the reassurance that I will find a way to afford my higher health care premiums. When my car finally died, people loaned me their vehicles. When my car search was stretching into compromise and stagnation, a great investment came to me. This weekend I started driving a car I risked financing on my tight budget, and for the first time since last June I can plan to drive out of town, when I need or want to. It's a liberation I have needed for many months.
In a way, I got a lot of the things I needed from the elusive job search, without suffering some of the consequence. A lot of the need got strongly salved. A lot of the need produced patience and consideration and human relationship. A lot of the support came from my work family past and present, people whose children I spent and spend time with. That's where giving works - where the heart is.

How a Cup of Tea Became My Failed Exit Strategy

I am a single person with teenage children. If I die or have a catastrophe, it's likely to be my children who will take the communication helm for me, notify friends and such. Just last week my oldest was reveling in the awesomeness of my various (mostly long-time) coupled friends. Most of them have been supporters of fundraising for her trip to Ecuador last summer, moral supporters, hosts for visits, employers, even written her letters of support for her retreats. One of my oldest and best male friends wrote her a letter I was lucky enough to read, and it made me weep, reflecting on how her birth informed his eventual journey into fatherhood a decade later. I couldn't replace that introspective unconditional support if I tried.

I started dating intentionally about a year ago. It was partly for my daughters, because it's one way of building meaningful new friendship with people who are actively seeking new friends. Because my people are all coupled. I've spent my parenting and adult life outside that club, often sadly. Disappointingly, I haven't met a high caliber of people this way. No, I've met a lot of people who like sex, a lot of people I wouldn't introduce to or even tell my friends about. I've had fun with that, but not much I can tell my kids about, when they wonder - as they frequently inquire - if I have a boyfriend yet.

Yet. Like there's a deadline. Maybe there is, in their minds. It would probably relieve them considerably that I had someone else to worry about and crash my idiosyncrasies into. It's true that I started with a genuine interest in companionship, kept an open mind about that, but mostly faded out with skepticism. I'm not entirely surprised, yet it's disappointing to consider that in nearly a year of meeting strangers none have really made the qualifying friend grade. One, actually. He's a guy I'd want on my crisis team, so to speak. And there's arguably a second rather in the wings. He texts me every week or so (texting really changed the face of dating, I suspect), fueling an intelligent and hesitant, if not normal, undemanding friendship.

What I have discovered this past year reminds me that friends and women are still two different categories for many men, and we can have fundamentally different ideas about the importance and transparency of sharing friendships with our kids. If I communicate with someone with regularity and I know I'm not going to date them, my kids will eventually know. They are teenagers, they have a sixth sense about that stuff because having friends largely defines their worlds, and more importantly they have an undying need to know that I'm not just a mom. I want them to value knowing who I am, that I make friends too, that I'm worthy of friendship. And if I do make friends with a man with kids, eventually I'm going to to want to identify that he values knowing his kids know who he is, who he presents himself to be, worthy of friendship.

And that's how a cup of tea became my retrospective but backfiring exit strategy. Several months ago I met a man who challenged every ounce of my dating sensibility. I knew it right away when he said to me wonderingly, "You're such a catch, why are you even single." Don't get me started here - that's a terrible line or thing to say even if it happens to be sincere, and I cringe whenever a man pulls this out. I knew it again months later when I agreed to meet again and witnessed such an irrational, explosive outburst that I actually feared for his well-being more than my safety and invited him to come in for a cup of tea to calm the fuck down. That should have been the end of that, but there's something else I've discovered in the past year and it's how much I veer into caretaker mode when I don't have a romantic endgame in mind. So as I have weighed the risks of being a friend to this man (who calls and texts a lot), I have encountered things like phone calls that are terminated suddenly when his children arrive and announcements that he isn't ready to introduce his kids to female friends. Okay. But we are adulting here, and I renew my wonder, why is it that so many grown adults don't give more value to their kids knowing who they are, worthy of friendship.

When my old friend sent me the letter for my daughter (the one that made me weep), he was in transit on an airplane. He was adulting sincerely and effectively to support a teenager's growth. He may have written that letter for my daughter, but he also gave a phenomenal gift to me. He showed my girl that I was worthy of his friendship and embraced the platonic companionship we had nurtured over two decades. Especially because I am single, it's something I believe daughters really need to see in their mothers.

So I made that cup of tea to be a friend. And to protect myself from being the bitch that made a volatile man leave me on the street in the dark. It worked - too well. He calmed down, left with gratitude. There's no sign of how this man - that I am most definitely not dating - values that his teenage kids know he desires or even has friendship, let alone graceful interactions with women. It might be a lackluster reason not to be a friend, but it's starting to be a very important one that emerged from that cup of tea.