For the last two years, almost every Thursday night, I get together with the same two families. We rotate houses each week, meaning every 3^rd week, the gang comes to our place. The other weeks, we go to one of their houses.

And we are a motherfucking gang. Six adults and 9 kids between us, aged: 14, 10, 5, 5, 5, 3, 2, 18 months and 6 months.

My friend Kristi suggested this. I would never be that smart. When she suggested it, I thought “Well that kinda sounds like alotta work” but answered “Yeah totally” because I’ve grown to not trust my judgment when it comes to things like this. I’ve found that life hands you some pretty interesting shit if you say “yes” as often as you can, even if your gut is all “No thanks I’m fine right here in Land That I Know.”

I’ve also learned that something “sounding like a lot of work” is a crap reason to avoid it.

And so, we eat together on Thursday nights.

We eat together through death and grief and illness big and small. Through depression and joy and arguments and just another boring old Thursday night. We eat together in the dead heat of summer and the rainy chill of winter and we eat through tantrums and squeals of delight.

The kids blend into one another, a giant ball of love and limbs that kind of rolls through the house in an air of noise, the tiniest ones following behind devotedly.

I’ll hold the baby. Mac will hold the baby. Somebody will hold the baby and somebody will cut the kids’ meat and somebody will deal with the finger that maybe just got smashed in the door. Also, they should stop doing that.

We kiss, hold, hug, redirect and discipline as if all the kids were ours. They are, I suppose, all ours.

When screams come from a bedroom we look around and ask “Which kid is that?”

If an adult’s back there, we have another cracker. We know our friend’s got it.

We know our friend’s got it.

We sit together through crying kids who haven’t eaten enough for dessert. We sit through BS times in marriage. We sit through alcoholic family members and no money and a little money and vacations and rounds of strep throat and on Halloween maybe we dress up together. We sit together through pregnancies, the expected and unexpected kind, and we sit together through newborn periods and husbands working out of town and questionable mental health.

Each week when I ask “What can I bring?” or read “My house tomorrow, 5:45pm,” I know soon I’ll be at a table with friends who are just friends because we are friends. If that makes sense to you, you are a fucking blessed human.

We pass baby clothes around and it’s less painful because I know I’ll get to see another baby in those pajamas, on a Thursday night, as if he were mine. We all live within a mile from each other. Sometimes we walk to each other’s houses.

Sometimes we stop for a couple weeks, but we pick back up. Right where we left off. Just exactly where we left off. We keep picking up where we left off like a little crew that won’t give up and when the world is crashing and pummeling around me, when 10,000 things are happening that make me feel thrown around at sea, the chair at that table with my friends becomes a 10,000 pound anchor.

A built-in support system. A group of humans who already know because they’re already there. They’re always there. Sick? Soup. Depression? Company. New baby? Both. Out of town? Plants watered.

We know our friend’s got it.

I watch the three girls who’ve known each other since birth, in each other’s clothes, now they’re in a tattling stage. We tell them as they come, one by one, that they can work it out with each other. We laugh. They’re getting big. Ava and Rocket sit with us now at the adult table (none of us have a table big enough for 14 people). We talk and talk and talk. We get interrupted again and again and again. We get up, we clean up, we get annoyed, we discuss revisionist history, and a maybe a trip snowboarding this weekend. They all come out of the room without clothes. Somebody just poured water in her plate. Arlo is snatching toys. The three-year-old is on time-out. The baby’s nursing.

Everything is just as it should be, this Thursday night.

In times like this, when mosques are being fire bombed and Muslims spat upon and planned parenthood shot up and San Bernardino shot up and all the schools shot up and all the life bombed and Donald Trump white supremacist hate-conjuring as if the Japanese Internment never happened and old friends are dying and getting sick and newer ones too, and, and.

Each Thursday I sit at a table with my friends and our whirling-dervish mayhem, good food and love become a tiny shelter in an insane unjust bullshit world. It’s all falling apart, out there, it seems, but tonight we share something we made or they made for me, taking in the love of humans still in my arms, now in my arms. Our kids. Our bellies. Lives move on and on and yet stay right here at our table.

We don’t have to talk about it. We just pick up where we left off.

Our kids are the ages of the ones who died in Newtown. We don’t have to talk about it. We will, for a moment. For a moment somebody will say something, but probably not much else, as we sit down and serve ourselves and smile at the 2-year-old who just removed her clothes for the 10^th time tonight.

What beauty. What luck.

People, I never tell you what to do, but I’m telling you this: Get yourself a crew. Find them. Show up. Cook some food. A lot. Pick up where you fucking left off.

Every time. Just pick up where you left off and know they’ve got it.

Know your friend’s got it. None of us were made to withstand the weight alone.

Mac kissing the head of a baby who isn’t ours but is kind of ours.

****

Two spots left in my January writing workshop.

February is half-full.
Join us now!

WRITE THE MOTHERFUCKING WORDS.

(Also, hang out with me (well, via video). I’m way less batshit than I appear in my writing. LIES I AM WORSE.)

I’ll never feel “just right” as a mother. That’s what I’ve learned. No matter what I do, a piece of me will wonder about the other side, the other choice. I’ll crave it a little, yearn for it a little, lie down at night and wish for it, a little.

I’ll wake up in the morning and go on with my day anyway.

I’ll wake up and get dressed and go to my office and write. It will feel right. I will feel refreshed to be out of the house and alone, invigorated to be doing the work in my gut, trying, bringing our finances to a more comfortable level.

“When I grow up I want to be a writer like you, mama.”

Ha. George thinks I’m a writer. Of course she also has a fake friend named “Carrot” (who’s also a giant), but her declaration makes me smile all the same.

I get home from work and Mac has taken the kids to swimming lessons. I bring home Mexican food but we miss each other. I eat alone and leave again to work with women alcoholics.

When I get home, Arlo is already asleep.

My breasts and arms crave him. I’m a little irritated at Mac for putting him to bed, which is insane, and I know it. It’s not him it’s me. It’s the sadness, my choices and non-choices, the guilt and stab at my heart. The not right. The just not quite right.

“But I have to nurse him!”

“I’m sure he’ll wake up for a little nursing, Janelle.” Mac is right.

I lie beside my babe and pull him close and he nurses instinctually, eyes closed, wide open mouth like a little bird. We settle down near each other as we have since he was a newborn, in the same bed, and I kiss and smell him over and over again like a starving person who just found food.

I physically crave my baby.

I physically ache for him.

I imagine this is the ache that drags bereaved mothers to the brink of insanity. Hair-pulling batshit total delusion insanity. Because if that craving could not be satisfied…my God. I think of my friend Kim.

Three days a week, from 9am until 4pm. That’s how long I’m gone. It’s not long. I used to work more. Some moms work 50, 60 hours a week.

Some evenings I’m gone too, but I’ll be gone a lot more than 3 days a week if I start drinking again.

I know these things, all of them, and yet at the close of the day I think of my first baby turning 14 in a few months and last summer, when I was home all the time with them and we went to the library every day with new tiny creation Arlo and how Ava mentioned it as the best summer and how this summer we’ve only gone once. To the library, that is. We swam on Sunday together as a family and Ava played with her siblings. I wonder how much longer she’ll do that.

When I think about it like that I curse every moment I’m gone and want back. BACK HOME. Back with them.

Yesterday though I met with a filmmaker who’s working with me to write my first screenplay and when she and I are talking I feel an energy vibrating through us and I think there’s no way I would survive without finding out what the words will say.

Now, and in 20 years.

I can’t quit silent.

From the outside it looks sometimes like women are secure and clear in their choices or non-choices. For better or worse, it appears black and white.

I want my kids to see an independent mother.

I want my kids to see a mother at home.

I want my kids to see a professional mother.

I hate staying at home.

 I hate working.  

I work because I have no choice.

I stay home because I have no choice.

For me, it’s all gray. (Maybe it’s gray for all of us, deep down.) I work because I have to and mostly want to, but I also know if we seriously down-sized I wouldn’t “have to” anymore. But I don’t want that either. I’m never “sure.” I’m never not regretting, sometimes. I’m never just right.

Maybe you’re the same.

I see you.

And here’s what I want to tell you: Maybe not just right can actually be “just right” and life can roll on okay with us over here flailing a little back and forth, acutely aware of how little we know, and how much we’ll never be clear how to be, exactly. And what’s “best,” always.

Maybe this is it. The clarity and the best.

Maybe I can be grateful for my life, my choices my words my home my breath my kids and husband and trust that this is enough.

I think this is it. I think I can relax in the gray and be here now, in my office writing to you.

And home in a couple hours, wondering what the fuck happened to the kids’ room.

And sitting down to play the sorting house with Arlo because 9am to 4pm is an awful long time when I walk in the door and he comes toddling so fast his tiny legs blur like the side of me that will walk out again tomorrow.

You know, because I called Ava yesterday while she was visiting her grandparents and asked how she was keeping herself entertained. She responded “looking at feminist posts on Instagram.” And I thought well that’s pretty rad since there are a few thousand other things a 13-year-old could be looking at with her smartphone and Rocket read his fortune the other day in the Chinese restaurant by himself without even a lick of fear and George, well she wants to be a writer now and Carrot is doing just fine,

and Arlo will wake up for a little nursing.

He’ll find me again, even with his eyes closed, in the gray of evening when we can’t see a thing.

Somehow still here, just right.

I’m supposed to be at an ashram in the Sierra Nevada foothills, meditating and doing yoga with a bunch of blissed-out white people, but I’m not. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

The place was fucking beautiful. Green grass, ponds, flowers, stone walkways. Giant weeping willows, hammocks, sprawling oaks. The cabins were just rustic enough to seem earthy as opposed to “run-down.” I pulled up and felt a sense of relief just to be out of my house. Here we go. Nature, meditation, yoga. I SHALL BE FIXED.

Fixed from a dark mental place. I was not doing very well. A couple weeks before I stood at the GET SPIRITUAL NOW gate (It doesn’t actually say that. I just made that up.), I realized I was moving from “dealing with tough circumstances” to “not dealing with anything” due to an internal sense of hopelessness and the related apathy. I saw myself crushed under the weight of my own self-pity, of my childlike tantrums that my life didn’t look as it should, that I wasn’t getting “what I deserved,” that it wasn’t “fair.” I had become identified with asshole circumstances of my life and I couldn’t wrestle myself free. I knew I had ceased functioning but couldn’t figure out how to get past the paralysis of my feelings.

So, like any white middle-class northern California woman in despair, I bought a Groupon for a “Beginner’s Yoga and Meditation Retreat” at an ashram in Grass Valley. They kept referring to us as “The Groupon People,” which hopefully sets the stage for what I’m about to tell you.

Allow me to say it bluntly: If I see one more blissed-out Caucasian bouncing around barefoot in white flowing pants and a small smile of “Damn it feels good to be more enlightened than you” plastered on their vegan-fed faces, I may die.

I’m not talking about the people attending the retreat. I’m talking about the people running it. The ones who were apparently on “a spiritual path.” The volunteers (dressed in yellow and white) who were studying under the head “Swami,” who wore all orange.

One woman had actual flowers IN HER MOTHERFUCKING HAIR, and literally pranced. As in, gently hopped instead of walked. She was the skinny prancing flower lady.

I thought “maybe she’ll get strangled in her Tibetan prayer flags.”

This is why I’ll never be a swami.

A bunch of the volunteers were running around barefoot. My friend and I found this baffling because we were supposed to take our shoes off inside the buildings, presumably out of respect and cleanliness, so if they’re barefoot outside and walk inside, aren’t they still bringing the dirt into the room?

But one looks much more spiritually connected while barefoot, and that’s what’s important here, folks.

All the signs said “Blessed self” at the beginning. So it would say “Blessed self, please don’t put your tampons in the toilet.” Or something like that. I found that hilarious. “Blessed self.”

But if they actually believed we were all “blessed selves,” if their respect for us ran so deeply, as fellow manifestations of the Divine Creator, what’s with the air of smug superiority?

Check it out, blissed ones: I don’t care how many chants or “asanas” you do each day, you’re still an asshole and therefore missing the whole damn point.

Statues of Hindu gods and goddesses lined the back of every room, but since none of us knew what any of it meant, it felt like a stomach-turning display of cultural appropriation. The statues had “meaning” and “depth” only because they were from “over there,” from far away. It was the eastern mystery and “otherness” that made them compelling and “deep.” To illustrate this point, I can only imagine people’s responses if there was a bunch of Judeo-Christian images and statues surrounding us. All the yuppies be like “What? Jesus? Fuck that shit. I grew up on that. Give me some nice deep sublime Hindu stuff!”

Meanwhile, there’s a dude with a pile of flutes telling me to chant something in Sanskrit to “wake up.” Weird thing is we didn’t ask him for help, or even indicate we were in the market for energy advice. His pretentiousness dripped from him like agave syrup in June.

I tried to kill him with my eyeballs.

He spoke to us like we were absolute morons, pathetic little creatures come to lap at the bowl of his insight. And I suppose it was kind of true, actually.

Pretentious dicks are bad enough, but pretentious dicks WITH FLUTES? I just can’t. I mean I literally cannot. Make me a white-girl “I can’t even” meme because ladies and gentleman, I can’t even.

The main teacher dude, another white guy with serene expressions, Swami something (they all changed their names to something more spiritually appropriate, like “Padma” and “Kala.” I felt like saying “You know your name is Kelly or Nathan. KNOCK IT OFF.”), anyway he lost me on day one when he refused to answer the question of a socially awkward teenager dragged there by his mother.

Deep Swami Guy said he wore orange as a symbol of him “burning up the karma.” The kid asked “What does that mean?”

Pretty relevant, I’d say.

But Swami Dude didn’t answer his question. He laughed and said “Well that’s a big question. There are whole classes just on that concept.” And with an air of “sucks to be you, small human” he moved on.

NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE. If you can’t explain something in a few simple sentences, YOU DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. If you can’t put into layman’s terms your vast spiritual truths, you don’t understand them. Period. Game over.

And sorry dude, you don’t get to dismiss Super Annoying Teenage Gamer Kid in the front row because his questions aren’t feeding your ego appropriately. Of course he’s super awkward and annoying, but you’re supposed to be seeing his buddha nature, aren’t ya?

And the lectures on “prana” and how we should eat and “transform compassion” in all this esoteric bullshit nonsense. So much theory. So much in-the-clouds bullshit. Big concepts and big words and “deep philosophical truths” and “profound spiritual insights” are used for one purpose: To mask the fact that we have no idea what the fuck is actually happening.

In other words, Swami dude, you’re just as captured in the ego structure as I am. You’re convincing yourself you’re “deep” and “spiritual” because you’ve learned a bunch of scriptures and chant and live in an ashram and shit, but real teachers aren’t pretentious, and they don’t spout deep thoughts all the time. They’re on the ground, right here with me and you and all the other Groupon humans, and when they talk you know they’re speaking truth because it is you in the deepest part of you, not just some fancy idea that sounds good but has no practical application.

We feel more human in the presence of these teachers. Not less.

Oh, but how these earnest, lovely imposters helped me.

God damn it they gave me everything I needed.

In the late afternoon of day 2, after sitting through 2 more hours of esoteric posturing, I packed up my shit and left. I drove to a hotel in Sacramento, ordered some Thai food and went to bed at 8:22pm, alone. I slept TWELVE SOLID HOURS. Twelve, people.

I walked out of that place because I realized two things: 1.) I need some privacy and sleep; and 2.) Nothing will “fix” me.

There is no escape from reality. There is no silver bullet and there is no “fix.” No ashram, no teacher, no guru, no wilderness and no words. No change in my life circumstances.

My problem is not my life. My problem is that I’m battling my life, refusing to accept it as it is. Some things have happened recently that have deeply hurt and tweaked my family. I cannot change the past. My husband is working out of town and I’m struggling with the weight of these kids, work, and my powerlessness to change any of it right now.

But I refused to accept these things.

Instead, I was kicking and screaming and thrashing against it. Fighting it. But I can’t win this fight. Life is. Reality is. I can work with it or die from insanity trying to beat it. I was on the path to the latter.

It isn’t about loving it. It isn’t about even liking it. Accepting reality is about freedom, a little serenity, and effectiveness.

One of my greatest teachers told me: “If you’re in the living room and you want to be in the kitchen, first you have to realize you’re in the fucking living room. Otherwise you’ll never know to get up and walk into the kitchen.”

You see, simple? I have to accept the truth of my life as it is RIGHT NOW before I’ll understand how to effectively move in new directions. I was stuck and dying and wasting time knee-deep in futility. It looked like resentment, anger, self-pity and fear.

So thank you, out-of-touch swami and swami wannabees with your flowing linen pants and serene smiles, for being just like me: Broken, kinda pathetic, judging too harshly, working like hell to get someplace new, oblivious to the fact that we’re already there, and everything we need is right here already.

(But please, stop being a dick. Nobody likes enlightened dicks.)

I’m headed back to the ashram of my insane family.

Tomorrow my husband leaves again.

I’ll miss him like crazy, and in a week be back to mind-numbing exhaustion, but I think I’ll start meditating again, and it appears I can sorta do yoga, and that’s some healthy shit. Healthy shit is good.

And goddamn that weeping willow taught me a few thousand things. And the king-sized bed with the clean white sheets, thank you. You just told me everything I needed to know.

Nice to be back where I can listen again. Nice to have a few minutes to write to you. Nice to be alive.

Om Shanti, motherfuckers.

Swami one, two, three and four.

So that 401K post got me thinking about my experience working in a law firm in Sacramento. It was an amazing job with uniquely interesting and good people doing seriously awesome work (natural resources conservation). I was proud when they hired me right out of college (as the receptionist), and I was proud to do other administrative work for them for almost 8 years.

However, since it was my first real job and they hired me at 23 years old, I did a bit of, um, “growing up” in that place.

Alright I was completely freaking clueless, though I thought I knew pretty much everything. I was like a walking law suit with a loud voice and questionable judgment.

But I knew it ALL.

I was 23. Duh. The Age of Omniscience.

Anyway I thought I’d share with you some of the most impressive lessons I learned at that firm, not in order of importance. So here we go.

The Office Survival Guide for people who probably shouldn’t be allowed in offices.

1. Be nice to the receptionist. Receptionists are people too.
2. You think the receptionist isn’t listening. The receptionist is listening. She knows pretty much everything about you and your mom and everybody else in the office, on account of everybody assuming she isn’t listening.
3. Do not wear black bras under white blouses to work.
4. Do not wear low-cut trousers and g-strings to work.
5. “You cannot just say everything you think to the attorneys you work for.” (Yes, that is a direct quote.)
6. Copy machines have top-loaders. (Wish I woulda known THAT little tidbit before I spent that summer internship in college making copies by hand, one by one. If I ever find the bastards who watched me do that all summer without telling me about the top-loader – I’ll kill ‘em.)
7. The “reply-all” email feature can ruin your life.
8. So can your potty mouth.
9. On a related note, there is no sarcasm font.
10. If you set up your cubicle in accordance with Feng Shui principles, you will not work more productively, but everybody will think it’s cool.
11. Burning popcorn in the microwave will make it stink for the duration. Nothing will fix it ever. Buy a new one.
12. The most annoying expressions in the world are: “At the end of the day;” “playing catch-up;” and “touch base.”
13. Oh, and “paradigm shift.”
14. You will cringe when you hear yourself saying these things but you will not be able to stop.
15. Talking on the phone while chewing is not okay under any circumstances.
16. There’s always somebody who knows more about whatever it is you think you know everything about. That person is in the room with you right now.
17. Emergency drills are scary, much scarier than the ones in grammar school.
18. {In the case of a real emergency, I would run full speed out of the building giving no thought or concern whatsoever to those around me.}
19. “Lower your voice” is uniformly solid advice.
20. Extreme pressure generally turns an ordinary project into an absolute disaster.
21. If you are wondering at all if you should say something, you shouldn’t.
22. The computer is not broken. You did something wrong. Re-start it. You’ll be fine.
23. If you think the project is going to take a week, tell your boss it’ll take four.
24. Even if you have no idea who or why a person is calling you, but they claim to be “returning your call,” assume they are correct and roll with it.
25. Some people walk around with paper on their heads and do other such silly things. You cannot do these things. People already think you’re weird.
26. Take notes as if your life depended on it, even if the note contains: “10/10/07: George told me about his trip to Madagascar, detailed incident with monkey.”
27. Don’t skip.
28. People frown on skipping in the workplace.
29. Also ballet moves. Total no-go.
30. You will become the woman who shows everybody pictures of her kids and talks about them too much. You will. Because you miss them.
31. Accept that you will never become completely professional. Aim instead for “professional enough to not get fired.”

It ain’t glamorous, but it works for some of us…

Happy Cubicle Day! (It’s not actually cubicle day. But it is in my head.)