Shedding

Found today. This is a Recipe to Unwrap Your Life. I like that very concept…

1. Do something you've been avoiding, without thinking twice.
2. This might mean that you need to mail the letter or send the proposal. It will put things in motion.
3. This might mean you need to make the call or send the resume. Go for broke.
4. This might mean that you need to tackle the hand wash cold.
5. This might mean you need to make a meal from whatever you have on hand in the kitchen, without restraint or apology.
6. This might mean a dog walk or a litter box cleaning.
7. This might mean forgetting what he said, she said, you said and everything that has been said before now.
8. No one can tell you a thing. There is no "how to do."
9. There is only do.
10. Play as if your life depends on it. Without you, there's no music.

See? Shedding. There’s something going around these days. I have a number of things I feel that I need to address.

That was from http://mommazen.blogspot.com/

and then one I referenced in my last post is www.damomma.com.

I love love love my parents in law. I know that's incredibly rare, but it's very true of me. They are wonderful people. No one is perfect, of course, but I love love love them.

They are very supportive of Patrick's work, and they are amazing with my daughters. They understand the girls so well as the very unique personalities they are, and relate to each of them just as she needs. The bond between Patrick's Dad and Amelia is particularly tender and wonderful to me. It's a poetic connection, and I will try to do it tribute properly someday. There's a short story in there somewhere, and I would hope to be able to capture the way they look at each other, right smack in the eye.

They came down for Patrick's fancy museum on Saturday night, and took us out to dinner. Amelia was sitting beside her Grampa and said, "Grampa, what's your job?"

"Well, I'm retired now. My job is to be your Grampa. But I used to work for Polaroid, which no longer exists."

"What's Polaroid?" Amelia asked him.

"They made cameras," he said over the noise of the crowd.

"Camels?" answered Amelia. "Oh. I thought they made themselves."

Oh, we howled. He was still giggling when we said goodnight ten minutes later. I am so happy to have played a part in raising a daughter that could make this good man laugh like that.

I often hear people complain about their parents-in-law, but I adore mine. I hit the jackpot when I became a Browne.

Write Me Well

I am catching up on my DVR, and watching last week's SNL with Taylor Lautner. I don't think I have ever used this phrase before, but he's actually kind of bad-ass. He did this whole fighting werewolf routine, and it was impressive. I actually read two and a half Twilight Books, and I'm rereading the second one. Several people I like enjoyed them, and so I'm reading these books to know them better. (And because they are entertaining.) Do you ever do that? Read books to know people better? It's one of my favorite ways to know people. In fact, I can tell the people in my life who know me best by the ones who have read Anne of Green Gables and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Harry Potter and Little Women. And, as a matter of fact, this blog. Hmm. I didn't see that coming. I think I need to be better at that - giving that back, I mean. I think that I need to read my friends. I don't even know if that makes sense. But a neat experiment might be to ask people to send to me their top three formative books...the ones that are imprinted and defining. I will try to read them, and reflect back what I find. That's would be a neat way to do a character study. If that's already been done by someone more clever, feel free to let me know. I'll blame it on the second Fauxmopolitan.

And while we're on the subject, I'm beginning to know that people are reading this. It's kind of exciting, and a little bit scary, and I've found that I'm deciding to divulge more, to lean more toward an open journal than a blog. I'm not sure how much further I'd be willing to go on that path than where I am now, but it's an interesting line to be walking.

Kind of an amazing world, isn't it? Where you can get a glimpse into someone's real mind with the click of a button?

My favorite line in Shakespeare in Love is when Viola says, in her farewell to Will, "Write me well." What a delicious phrase. I don't know if I will ever be able to write someone else well - my mother or my grandmother or my great-grandmother, all with the most fabulous stories to tell. I have fabulous stories - their stories - to tell, and I hope beyond hope that I will figure out how and when to tell them. In the meantime, though, I am trying to write me well...me, my flawed, dramatic, passionate, seeking, gratingly irritating self.

It's a start. It's something. It's a way to connect to people. Maybe not ever in the life-altering, inspirational way, but in the way of knowing that somewhere, there is someone like you. Someone who might not think the same way, but at least thinks, same as you. I have a favorite blog written my a brilliant woman, a mom of three, who I have met in person, and who definitely tells the truth of who she is, and how she wants to be in the world. She's an awesome mother. Flawed and passionate and sarcastic and just so freaking honored to be mothering daughters. I admire her so much, and while she might know who I am, it's merely in passing. And yet I feel like I sit down for coffee with her weekly, hear the stories of her magnificent daughters and her energetic pursuit of happiness, and connect. And it's a click away.

I have this ridiculous secret 3-in-the-morning fear of 2012. I'm actually angry that they made that movie and showed the trailer with the Harry Potter movie. I know it's totally unreasonable, and yet I sort of believe it in the way I believe in the DaVinci Code or National Treasure. (What? Could totally happen, dude.) Anyway, I have been told by smart people that to call it the end of the world might just be a form of ascending. We are shedding old ways and old patterns of believing and making room for new, more open-minded ways of relating to each other. It could be like a Renaissance.

Okay. Okay fine. That was DEFINITELY the second Fauxmopolitan talking. Peace out, friends. Merry merry ho ho ho.

...And a Partridge in a Pear Tree

Bit of randomness for today...

I am very proud that in the midst of the madness of my household right now, I'm still clinging closely to Christmas. I have felt very in the spirit since the start, and have accomplished my goal (so far) of making this one very magical and festive for the girls. We've had some great family events together, and despite the packing boxes, our halls are still as decked as can be. Watched a bunch of great sappy Hallmark movies, and seen some epic Christmas light displays. I love tacky Christmas light displays. Good thing I married Patrick, sensible and classy, because a weaker man would have ended up with a twelve-foot lit-up snowglobe and at least nine sparkling reindeer on the front lawn.

My play is coming along nicely. I'm still afraid it isn't funny. I can do teen romance, I can certainly do teen drama, but the humor is evading me still. I'm very much hoping that my former students, my inspiration, who are going to do the read-through for me will help to infuse some of that.

Christmas shopping is almost done - the girls are done completely, and everything is even wrapped! We normally do that on Christmas Eve while watching It's a Wonderful Life. I actually thought it was something that Patrick enjoyed, but turns out...he doesn't, actually. So now it's all done and Christmas Eve will just be the two of us, George Bailey, and the eggnog.

And speaking of George Bailey, I watched a bit of that movie last Saturday night, and I still think it's the most wonderful film that has ever been made. It's a perfect story, and I couldn't love it more. They are doing the show again at my theater next year, and it looks like I will get to share the role of Mary again (provided I lose 30 pounds, which I totally will...and this is my decree, not the theater's, lest you think that they made that a condition. I just want to tell the story truly, and a matronly-mama-shaped Mary ain't gonna fly.) Anyhooo...one thing I love so much about being in that play is the fact that Michael, who plays George, takes it so incredibly seriously. He'll joke off stage, and just be a regular guy, but when he gets out there, each and every single night for 21 performances, he IS George, and he gets all of the rest of us to rise to the occasion. He honors the story and the chance to tell it to 400 people a night, and I so respect that about him. His total honesty in all of it, but particularly in the "we've got to stick together" speech kills me every time. It's such a privlege to get to tell that story, to inhabit the world of Bedford Falls every few years. It'll be well worth ten months of ass-busting to have that chance again.

My mom is leaving for Chicago tomorrow to be with her sister for her surgery. I'm glad she's going to be there for my aunt, but I do not like my mom not being home at Christmastime. She's due back on the 22nd.

The girls have their school concert on Thursday night, and out of three solos awarded to kids in the whole school, my girls each got one. I think my head is going to explode from pride, no lie. They are talented and confident and I'm crazy about them.

I packed my basement for 5 hours yesterday, and didn't cry once. Things are coming along.

On Thursday I have to teach sixth grade boys how to do counted cross-stitch. Send me patience and herbal tea, 'cause I'm not allowed to drink vodka in school.

Moving Out

Packing boxes are all over my house right now, ones I’ve pulled from school, or gotten from the friend of a friend. Sharpies, labels, the tape-gun, wrapping paper, and not the Christmas kind.

I’m very present in the fact that this piece of my life is coming to an end. It’s been a long phase, the marriage/motherhood/rising professional phase. A lot has happened to me in this little house, in every part of it, in a home that has felt completely, totally my own since the beginning. I had a little piece of Earth, just like Francie’s grandmother demanded. (And by “my own,” I mean ours, Patrick’s and mine. But he has to write his own blog about what this yellow house has meant to him.)

I can trace every “self” I have been through the places I’ve lived. Pieces of me have carried over, but I am my home and my home is me. Mr. Plumbeam and the Big Orange Splot. Do you know that story? It’s wonderful.

Long ago, I was the little girl on K Street with the doll table and chair set as my “office” desk. I hung contact paper onto the fiberglass insulation of the basement apartment. My cat used to sit by my feet while I wrote my little stories in notebooks, and then he’d get stuck in the wall and we’d have to lure him out with cheese. Government cheese, provided to my mother on welfare. Bread, peanut butter, macaroni and cheese. Rice-a-roni, made of white rice, tuna and a can of cream of mushroom soup. These are poor people’s foods, and they comfort me even now. Rainbows and unicorns in my Lisa Frank coloring books and sticker pages. Knowing that I was swimming upstream, and working for something. My mom was working for me to get something, be something more than the ones before me had had the chance to be. I shared a room, and bunk beds, with my brother, and I learned about resilience and strength in the things my mother never said.

Then I was the girl on Hadassah Way. A house that my mom and her new husband bought from her parents, a house I had lived in with all of them when my mom had gotten divorced. Then, I was the girl with my own room, finally. I sat and journaled beside a crabapple tree on a window seat fashioned out of a radiator and afghans knitted by my grandmother. Hideous 1970’s Lawrence Welk colored afghans, sometimes made of accidental patterns of yarn from whatever was leftover after knitting the bedding for each of the four bedrooms. (I have one of those afghans now, and it is one of my most treasured possessions. I had Katie give birth under it in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.) The amazing house that my Greatest Generation grandparents were able to afford after living their own childhoods and early marriage in such poverty. They made a jump up on the social scale, and I was in a yellow bedroom by the sea because of it. In that house, I had a canopy bed that had belonged to my aunt. A hand me down, but still…my own. I had a record player, also left behind from my aunt along with a pile of Broadway records and Fleetwood Mac. Sacrifices were made to keep me there, in a place of normalcy and safety. I can recognize and appreciate that now. I appreciated it then, I think, but I was, in the way of all adolescents, just ready for more, very quickly. I was bursting to get out and BE, to learn and explore and taste every thing that life could offer me. And I had the soundtrack to go with it. That’s who I became on Hadassah Way. I plotted and planned and projected, and manifested my whole entire future.

And then there was college – Crabtree and Rolling Green and all of those other dorms and waiting places in between. It’s a Wonderful Life poster and Lisa’s paintings and a rose-colored quilt. I know that’s why I want to paint my office in the new house that same rose color. I want to bring a little bit of that girl along with me in my new house. I liked her. She figured out the concept of Moments in the Woods. Learned to see the moments, appreciate them, and mark them down in purple pen. I’m glad she has remained with me still. (I think I have recently felt embarrassed by that part of me – overly romantic and Hallmark-movie-of-the-week-ish. I am getting over that. I am letting my freak flag fly, finally. Oh, that’s been freeing.) I learned to live with others in those experiences, valuable lessons, and forged the friendships that have been my life’s foundation.

Then it was back home to the yellow bedroom by the sea, which I felt the need to strip of the marigold-colored wallpaper and add a little wildflower border to my white wall. I needed to live at home, for financial reasons, but also because I was needed there, though I still feel that I was not able to fully fulfill my mission to my family in that time. I shut out a lot, and I sometimes wonder if I was supposed to be more supportive, or if I was supposed to focus on my own journey and doing my part to bring the line along, so to speak. I had made it to college. I was getting ready to marry the Good Boy. I wondered, then, if my grandmother had lain awake in this same house years before, hoping that everything she was sacrificing would ultimately allow for someone, one of us, one of her progeny, to get where I was going. To take that next step up. I used that time, in that room, to end my life as Me, alone, and get ready to permanently share my life with someone. I was very present in that transition, too. Scared the shit out of me, but I was IN it.

Our apartment on North Street, and our brief time in that Duxbury mansion, tromping my pregnant self up three flights of stairs. Building a marriage, having a child, and getting ready to own my piece of the Earth, a piece with a porch swing and a back deck and trees trees trees. I know the outline of every one of those trees against the night sky. I know my stone wall and my yellow bedroom and the girls’ peach bedroom with directives painted on the wall by my own hands….explore, learn, play, dream, celebrate, learn, wonder, laugh…I hope that there have been nights when they have had a hard time sleeping, and they have read them round in a circle by the light of their nightlights, and repeated them a like a mantra. Burned them onto their little spirits. I have been entrusted with the souls of two Little Women, and I have tried to be a good teacher. I became a mother and a wife here. Here on Westwood Road.

In the Westwood Road years, I have learned the value of connection. If my college word was Moment, these have been the Connection years. Stretching the boundaries of my relationships, all of them, just to see what they were made of. How much they could withstand, how they could all fit together. I have never stopped marveling at how close you could be with a person, and how varied those forms of closeness could be. I feel like now, I am working to study them, a few at a time. My friendships ebb and flow now, but I do believe that the friendships that matter will remain true in their cores. We are all busy people. We’ve all got a lot of living to do right now. Someday, not as far away from now as we think, my friends and I will have time to sit on my front porch, or some front porch somewhere. We’ll drink wine and watch the waves and mull it all over. We’ll have time for that again, like we did in college. Only…we’ll have more to talk about. Right now we’re busy living the lives we’ll be laughing about later.

In this new place that I go, I will see my girls through high school, and maybe beyond. I will evolve into the next phase of my marriage. I will let it all unfold as slowly as I can. I am not in any hurry right now. More than any other time in my whole life, I just want to take everything as it comes. I want to look forward to things in the short term – vacations, writing things, parties with my friends, celebrations with my powerful little family. Not much beyond that.

I feel that this is a chance for a new start for me. In this new Home, in this new phase of my life, I have several goals. One, to finally learn yoga. To be a kick-ass, focused mother to teenage girls. To be a great wife. And for me, writing. (Though I will work on being less wordy in my new house. Haaaa.) I want to learn, in my new home, to write my truth. I don’t always tell the truth, and that is something I have spent the past several years working to change. But it’s actually less about writing, and more about being the person I am willing to tell the truth about. I want to be the kind of person who lives a life she can tell about…mostly. (What fun would I be if you thought I had NO secrets? The secrets I will choose to make now will eventually be truth, and they will be…delicious.) But, seriously, when you think about writing that has touched your life, it’s has been writing that has had the ring of truth. You know it when you hear it. I am trying to ring true.

That will be my mantra for my new home, my new life. The years of Ringing True.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Fa La Freaking La, people. It is SO on. Christmastime! It's the most wonderful time of the year.

My eyes are bleary from tromping around the Natick mall tonight, but I totally accomplished my Mrs. Claus mission and got the exact Most Special Thing that Abby wanted, which is Ivy, the American Girl Doll, best friend of Julie, the first and only American Girl Doll that Nana got her for Christmas last year. Julie has been on every major family excursion, snuggled up beside her every night, spent her days on the bed with Cow-Cow, and visited Abby's third grade classroom any number of times. She was wrapped repeatedly in toilet paper for her mummy Halloween costume, had her hair done at the American Girl Doll store in New York City, and been dressed and undressed approximately 2,351 times. Julie is beloved, and needs her best friend.

I know they're expensive, but I know that this is the exactly perfect Most Special Thing that Abby wants, and she has proven that she recognizes and appreciates these dolls, and I am just so thankful that my ass-busting throughout this fall has yielded money that I can use to give my child exactly what she is dreaming of for Christmas.

I actually have a great deal more to say on that topic - on the whole idea of the ass-busting to gift-buying ratio, but that's a topic for another day.

Related, though, is the fact that coming up this weekend is going to be an Epic Gift Experience for my girls and my mom and me, a Christmastime in the Big City that will hopefully become the stuff of family lore for years to come. I can't write about it in advance, but I'll dish it all when we come back.

Life is pretty crazy right now. I'm trying to pack up my house, plan for our annual Christmas gathering, Mrs. Claus myself to the hilt, and write a play. But, you know...I feel so zen about it all. I'm not feeling even a little bit stressed. Should this be scaring me? I don't know. But it's not. And the lights are twinkling on my tree and LuLu and Gabriel, the elves that visit my daughters each morning, have already left their morning surprise (mini sticker books) and I came home tonight to see that Patrick had strung the lights on our pretty little front porch. So pretty and welcoming.

I sent out this survey this week and have been fascinated by how willing people have been to open their hearts and share their experiences with me. All different sorts of people from all different areas of my life, and I just appreciate them all so much. It's given me lots of inspiring stuff to use in my play, but more than that...it's reminded me again how connected we all are, how common the experience of loving someone, and what a gift it is to be trusted with parts of people's lives.

Okay. Sleepy now. Visions of sugarplums await.

Survey Says

I am writing a play about, among other things, awkward teenage experiences. I sent out a questionaire to my friends on Facebook to inquire into their connections to Shakespeare, and to ask incredibly nosy questions about their high school romantic experiences. I am deeply curious about all of them, and have absolutely loved the responses I had today. I'm still hoping for more, but my greatest discovery so far has been the absolute universality of Teenage Awkwardness. Despite the fact that I very carefully wrote my whole entire teenage life down on paper as it was happening, or immediately before it happened to insure that it WOULD happen, it was still far more awkward than romantic. More frustrating than gloriously joyful. But boy...when the joyful parts came, I was more than ready, and welcomed them with open arms...and awkwardly placed noses and intercepted notes and misunderstood comments. It was all part of the package.

The play deals with Romeo and Juliet, and as much as I admire the poetry of the play, I want to just slap the two of them upside the head. Really? Poison, Juliet? Married at 14 to a fickle boy you met like twenty minutes ago? Come ON. But still...one thing that chimes through is that teen love is without sense, without limit, and utterly without the belief that anyone can possibly understand the depth of feeling that pulses through your particularly hormone-laden veins. I had two boys that I "loved" in high school - one, unrequited, ill-advised, and really only created in my mind because he once danced with me to Frankie Valli singing "You're Just Too Good To Be True" under twinkling lights at the South Shore Music Circus. It was ridiculous, but I was Sixteen, and it was Time to Fall in Love. That was a disaster.

When I really truly fell in love, it was with the Boy Next Door, the one who had been waiting for me, who was right there all along, the one who...insert 80's romantic pop ballad song lyric here. But is was real and true and as deep a feeling as I've ever felt in my whole entire life. How lucky I was to have that, but how inevitable for a girl like me, born of showtunes and romantic novels, to have been blessed with such a relationship. Would I have taken poison for him? In retrospect, I certainly hope not. But had you asked me circa 1989 as he kissed me behind the lighting booth in the high school auditorium...hell, yes. And I would have offered my diary for the script of the teenage movie of the week that you could have made of the story.

So...while I am doing my best to try to make the script of this play as non-corny as possible, I will attempt to honor that other universal theme - that teen love is messy, awkward, embarrassing, laced with ridiculous moments and a particular delicious rosebud sweetness that never, ever comes again.

Below is the survey I posted, if you care to chime in.



My Dear Friends,

I am writing to ask a favor of you. I am currently working on a theatrical project for my high school, and I am seeking some very specific input. I am writing a play loosely based on the You’ve Got Mail/The Shop Around the Corner/In the Good Old Summertime formula of being in love with a pen-pal whom you actually despise in real life. It’s set in a modern high school, specifically in an AP English class working on an advanced study of Romeo and Juliet. I am looking for some perspective – both current and revisionist – about the experience of reading Romeo and Juliet in particular, but Shakespeare in general. I am asking you, if you are willing, to share your points of view. You can answer some or all of the following questions, or simply write back and say “No, thank you.” Either way, I hope that you will allow me to use some parts of your opinions in my play. I’ll totally give you all the credit.

The first few questions are about Shakespeare, but the last ones are about high school experiences in general, from the humiliating to elating. Again, you don’t have to answer all of them, but any little tidbits that you can offer will help to deepen the reality of the play. Oh, you can just reply here if you don’t mind sharing your answers, or cut and paste and reply to me privately in a message. Totally up to you!Thanks so much for participating!!

1. When you hear Romeo and Juliet, what are the first images that pop into your head, positive or negative?

2. Did you read Romeo and Juliet in high school? If so, what did you think of it? Has your opinion changed as you’ve gotten older? Did you relate to any parts of it? Did you really read it, or fake/Cliff-Notes read it?

3. If you read it in school, did you do any projects or writing activities in class that made an impression?

4. Have you ever seen a film or stage production of Romeo and Juliet? What did you think of it?

5. Did you ever use any aspects of Romeo and Juliet, or Shakespeare in general, to impress a guy/girl you liked? How?

6. If you are gay, did/does that have an impact on your experience of the play? How so?

7. Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play? If so, which one is it and why? If not, why do you think that Shakespeare did not connect to your life?

Here are the more personal questions:What is the craziest thing you ever did for someone that you had a crush on?

What was your first kiss like? Was it romantic? Tender? Awkward? Embarrassing?

Did you ever have a secret crush that you were afraid people would discover? Why did you keep it secret? Did you ever end up telling the person, or did you get caught in your feelings by anyone?

Describe a negative elementary school experience with a peer that stands out in your mind. Did you ever have a fight with a kid that made you absolutely vow to hate them for all eternity? Did you keep that vow, or forgive them later?

Anything else romantic or traumatic you would like to share? Names and circumstances will be changed to protect the innocent or guilty, but it might feel awfully good to purge the energy from that by seeing it enacted on the stage!! Thanks for your support, my friends.