InnerTeub

I suppose I could write about the New Year, given that it’s the last day of the Old Year, but ugh, I don’t know. I’m not really a good enough writer to make my own personal hopes and dreams that entertaining, so I suppose all I can say is this: I found 2010 and 2011 to challenging years, and 2012 came at me as a lovely respite from that. My brother once theorized that life is made up of three main components: family, career and social, and at no point would all three things be 100% satisfying. I’ve been watching these three elements ebb and flow for me for the past few years, and while I agree that not all three are 100% satisfying, for right now, I’m doing ok. The things that matter are where they need to be.  In 2012, I feel settled and happy. I’m right where I should be and I’m with the person I should be with. That’s a lovely thing, and at the risk of being greedy, I wish for more of the same in 2013.

(Perhaps I could also wish for the ability to not end a sentence with a preposition? Nah)

Anyway. What I *really* want to talk about is Justin Cronin’s The Passage and follow up novel The Twelve. Good LORD, these two books. I have never, not once, worked so hard for a book to be satisfying, which is ridiculous; my main feeling about books is that if you don’t enjoy them you should just give up, because hello: this is an optional exercise, there’s no teacher giving you a grade, you decide what to do with your free time, etc., but MAN, I couldn’t stop with this story – I wanted to KNOW, I had to UNDERSTAND – but damn if the act of getting there didn’t feel like work.

Is that praise? I can’t tell. It must be;  I read the damn things, and I keep thinking about the story, and I tell other people to read them.

Somewhat related but not really: I saw the final Twilight movie with La Stepdaughter a few weeks ago, and, ok, ok, yes: I got teary. But hear me out! I had not cared to see the movie; the second half of the final book was my least favorite part of the whole series, so I was not particularly interested in seeing an entire movie devoted to it, but Sammy wanted to go and when a 15 year old wants to voluntarily spend time with you? You go. And you guys, it was great. It was so great. Way back in 2008, Samantha begrudgingly lent me the Twilight book to read (seriously: begrudgingly: she LOVED that book. She re-read it at every opportunity. I think I only was able to pry it out of her hands because New Moon had come out), and oh. I loved it. Yes, yes, I KNOW, but for as much effort as The Passage was to read, Twilight was the exact opposite. It effortlessly entertained me, and I loved it. I loved reading it, I loved talking to Sammy about it, I loved getting to read the subsequent books. I loved watching my stepdaughter fall head over heels in love with a story; she was consumed by it, she wanted to read it all the time, not pausing for dinner or car rides or conversation. Do you know how wonderful it is to scold a child: “Put your book down and come to dinner!”? As a lifelong reader and book nerd, I could not possibly have had higher hopes for Samantha, that she love to read and love a story as much I do and have.

And the Twilight series went on for YEARS, you guys. So many years of sharing books and seeing the movies and watching her grow up into an amazing almost 16 year old, a smart as hell woman whose reviews on Goodreads are delightful and who has serious opinions about the latest Tana French novel and who constantly asks me for a good book to read. So when the credits for Breaking Dawn Part 2 came across, and they gave a montage of all the actors for all five movies, yes, fine: I teared up. Those characters have been a part of my life since 2008, a period of time when I became a stepmother and a wife and a member of our great little family and I found myself thinking back to how much things have changed and how much fun we’ve had and how lucky I am to have gotten to share this story with her.

I’ve been made fun of more times than I can count for how fiercely I have loved the Twilight series, but oh, you guys. How could I not love it? An 11 year old girl fell in love with a story and I fell in love with her, and here we are, years later, and man. I am so damn lucky.

Ok, yeah, I know, but: I still need new running shoes, a photo by LizScott on Flickr.

Given the photographic evidence, this might not be immediately apparent, but I swear: I totally need new running shoes.

A friend of mine had a baby via IVF using donor sperm, as she and her spouse couldn’t get pregnant together. Happens all the time. 

They are moving to Atlanta and are required to go through a legal adoption process, as the  donor sperm (apparently) means the baby is only technically the mom’s, as it was her egg, and not her spouse’s sperm. This requires, among other things, social worker visits to their home to determine if it is a “fit” home (btw, that cost is $700), along with all other fees associated with legal adoption, which I last heard estimated at about $10,000. 

We should be outraged, right, because that is ridiculous. Married couples have babies using donor eggs and sperm all the time, and the parentage is never legally called into question. Unless, of course, it’s two married women (which in this case it is), and then, well. Adoption for you. Please leave your $10k and understanding of “separate but equal” at the door.

Right after I got engaged, a career mentor of mine casually mentioned: “Marriage can survive 1.5 careers, but not 2”

He wasn’t trying to be a dick. He wasn’t suggesting that getting married was going to kill my career. He was just saying “Marriage is hard, and it’s harder when both people are hyper focused on their career.”

I have found this be true. When Mike and I both had high intensity jobs, it was hard. We struggled. Picking up my stepdaughter from summer camp at 3:30pm was an everyday conversation of “Whose job is least important today? Who can take the hit and leave early?” Continually deciding who was going to be the person to do 80% at their job in order to take care of stuff at home isn’t fun, and led to a lot of extra stress, a lot of feeling like we were failing both at work AND at home. Letting everyone down, all the time.

That’s where the 1.5 careers comes in. It’s not about not having two people who don’t work full time, or that one person’s job is any less important (financially or lifestyle wise), but more about an understanding that one person will go “all in” on their career, provided the other person can step up on the home front. It’s about expectation setting, and flexibility. I can work late when I need to, I can take that meeting in Milwaukee next Tuesday, I can be 100% at work when I’m actually at work because I know my husband has the time and flexibility in his job to make sure I’m not dropping things on the back end. I couldn’t do the job I do now, and feel comfortable that I can continue to make the living I do if I wasn’t working as part of team.

It’s working for us right now, but you know, nothing lasts forever. We check in with each other a lot; “Are you still happy? Are you bored? Is this what you want to be doing?” The answers to those questions might change, and we’ll change to accommodate. I see so much conversation about the idea of  “having it all”, but those always seem to look at a woman in a vacuum, with not a lot of discussion about the way the family is structured around it. Can women (or anyone) have it all? Sure, why not. You can have anything you want. But you can’t have everything you want, not at least all at the same time. Life, as I understand it , is a lot of give and take. I want my marriage and my family. 1.5 careers is working for us as we move forward.

(Interestingly, when we were discussing this on twitter, one woman mentioned that her being a stay at home parent IS their “1” career, and her husband’s work was the  .5. This makes total sense to me – she has four young kids, and the raising of four very young children requires her husband to have an extremely flexible job. As they grow older, she anticipates a shift in the dynamic, where she slips to the .5 and and he can rededicate to work, making his job the “1”. I love this example because it just seems to smart, and so real.)

I think living in DC for 12 years skewed me a bit with regards to elections. Election season in DC always seemed to be an intellectual exercise, where people weigh the pros and cons of a particular party winning and losing based on how it will impact their job and THEN their sensibilities, because, let’s face it, if you work in DC? Your job in some way revolves around which party is in charge, and if it doesn’t, then you are the only one of your friends and neighbors who can say so, so you play the game with them anyway.

This comes along with the added element of the fact that if you live in DC proper, it doesn’t matter anyway. DC never goes for the Republican party. The announce the mayor of DC after the democratic primary, for crying out loud. And that whole ‘Taxation Without Representation  isn’t just a clever licence plate tagline – it’s true: Congress holds the budget for DC programs, and we have no representation in Congress (unless you count a delegate that has no voting power, which I do not.) Any thought process or passion revolving around Senate and House races is probably because you work for a Congressman or Senator. Not because their ideals and values matter to you deeply (which is not to say that they don’t, it’s just to say how much they matter to you doesn’t matter because you’re not voting based on that; you’re not voting for them at all.)

All I am saying is: politics, when you live in DC, is an intellectual process, with much of the passion stripped out of it based on our proximity to the process itself (I asked a friend of mine who he wanted to win the election and he answered me by doing electoral college math based on various scenarios) and our lack of overall representation anyway. 

So you can imagine my surprise when I landed myself in suburban Colorado, a mere 20 miles from the Focus on Family headquarters, deep in Red country but in the heart of a swing state. There is no regard to process here, it is all passion. It’s a different experience for me; in DC it seems that you are heavily impacted by the process of electing officials, whereas out here in the middle of the country, you are impacted by the actual officials that are elected. Instead of (hypothetically) sitting in DC watching laws and policies get enacted that I disagree with and wondering how the rest of the country could get it so wrong, now I actually am the rest of the country. 

This is not to say I couldn’t get all riled up about politics before, but that now I can get riled up and I can DO something about it, and then I can chose to feel elated or crushed based on the outcome. It’s a different game.

Moose is feeling undecided about how to vote tomorrow. I know, I know, how can you be undecided? It’s crazy right? But on the one hand, he’s got a candidate that will make him share his dog biscuits, and on the other, you have one that wants to cut off his balls.

Choices.

It’s Friday. I’m zonked from October, you guys, for real, so today you get tidbits from me, and you will like them.

Mike just landed in New Jersey to go camp out with the military over there and … do military stuff, I guess, in support of hurricane recovery efforts. Here’s why the military is cool: the orders came down to his reserve office that they needed a Marine in New York and the needed a Marine in New Jersey, and Mike was originally scheduled for New York, but when he told them “Hey, my daughter is in New Jersey, can I go there?” and boom yes, yes he could. Thank you, USMC, for letting my husband surprise his daughter while she is still living sans power or other normal functional life things. That was cool.

(Here’s why the military is not cool, although it seems silly to bitch, because it’s not like you don’t understand the degree of pain in the assery you’re signing up for, but still, things that are less cool: they have nowhere to house him so he was told to bring a sleeping bag, he has no return ticket or idea when he’ll be back, and he found out he was leaving just after early voting had closed in CO and left before early voting opened, so there was a period there where we were fairly certain he would not get to vote. [I tweeted that out and then was told by my county that they’d send him an absentee ballot via email even though we’re past the deadline so HIGH FIVE Eileen in Douglas County – that was awesome])

***

Unsolicited work tip: if you find yourself needing to work late into the evening and want to do so on your couch perhaps with a beverage in hand, but cannot really do that because of the shape of your couch not lending itself to end tables, may I suggest the following life hack?

Stemless wine glass, slipper. Boom.

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Unsolicited work travel tip: if you find yourself in a rapid succession of different hotel rooms in different cities, may I suggest the following:

Take a picture of your room number before going to hotel fitness center first thing in the morning. Seriously, you guys, you have no idea how embarrassing it is to try to unlock room 506 in your post workout sweaty shame when room 506 is where you were YESTERDAY not TODAY, TODAY you are in 1024 and now the person in 506 thinks you’re going to kill them AND you still have no idea where your room actually is.

Electronic breadcrumbs, my friends. Live it.

Quiet over here because it’s been BUSY over here, which is always, always a good thing.  Speaking of Good Things:

–  Good Thing the First:  I have a nephew. He is cute, and appears to like me best, but that could be because I’m the only extended family member he’s met. Whatever. Getting to see my nephew at one hour old is one of the exact reasons we moved closer to family, although I wouldn’t have defined our decision making process in exactly those words. But I want to be friends with my brother and sister-in-law, know my nephew, to babysit when needed and living nearby is the best way to facilitate that. It’s a Good Thing. (Also a good thing: my nephew has a Tumblr. And his own Facebook page. I guarantee that the second kid in this family will barely get a mention on the first kid’s status update.)

I promise we’re not about to steal the baby. I do not know why Mike is wearing gloves.

– Good Thing The Second: A coworker of mine has a rule that she will only work weekends if it makes her money or makes her happy, and along those lines, I worked all weekend, and it made me happy. Now, of course, there’s things I’d rather do than powerpoint my way through a sunny Saturday, but I like my job and I’m proud of my work, and the stuff I did this weekend allowed for Good Work Things to happen, and I was happy to do it. Liking your job? Good Thing.

(Also enjoying that while I did have to work this weekend, I was also able to make time to enjoy Colorado fall, which we can list as Good Thing The Second and Half.

Hiking with Mike and the Pup in between PowerPoint Ninja’ing

– Good Thing The Third: Along the same lines, I’m starting a lot of work travel next week, and while that generally is super obnoxious and a pain to coordinate, I like the stuff I do on the road AND it’s enabling me to have dinner one of my FAVORITE imaginary Internet friends, so I’m pretty excited to get that process going, despite the various travel shenanigans that have me going from Denver to  Portland to Orange County to Denver to Raleigh all in a 72 hour window. (You guys, try flying direct from Orange County to Raleigh. Not possible. I actually have to fly BACK to Denver, sit through a three hour layover and THEN fly to Raleigh, and I tell you, I get that layovers happen, and if my layover was in, say, Dallas, I’d be all “Oh well, layovers happen, whatever” but because I have to go BACK to Denver where I STARTED all this travel I’m sitting here looking at my itinerary all “WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE” and am grumpy about it. BUT! Getting to see people you like and do stuff you love: Good Thing.

–  Good Thing the Fourth: I’m back at the gym and OH it is humbling and MAN I am out of shape but it’s so nice to be back among my people. Most of my gym people are dudes; I go the 5:30am Crossfit class, and since  my small town is mostly working dads and stay at home moms,  the morning Crossfit crew tends to be guys getting it in before work, whereas the middle of the day Crossfitters are mostly women going while their kids are at school(and don’t be making soccer mom jokes, those women could kick your butt), but anyway: my gym people are mostly guys, and it’s been interesting to see them react to both pregnancy and miscarriage. I would have thought both would be awkward, but it’s not: these guys are dads and have been through elements of all this, and they’re also my friends; I’m getting a combo of concern and “take your time getting back to it” with a healthy dose of “come on now, stop slacking! You can run faster than that/lift more than that/try harder than that.” The perfect balance between concern and smart assery. Being back with my workyouty people: Good Thing.

(If you’re interested in reading more about miscarriage AND HEY MAN WHO ISN’T, Kim wrote a nice post today about post D&C working out, and while I know that seems like a hard sell for a good time, her experience is matching mine so I enjoyed reading it.)

Anyway, that’s where I’m at. Trying SLOWLY to get back into running shape (Mike to me: “Hey, so… you should run again. You um, see happier when you’re running” which I think is a very polite way of saying “Woman, you have been SUPER STRESSED AND IT’S FREAKING ME OUT”) and have started an informal running club with some of my RAGNAR people, a development which is scary (oy, out of shape!) but also awesome, because running partners are some of the Best Things Ever (hey! Good Thing the Fifth!) But overall, life is good, in some ways better than it’s been in what seems to be a very long time.  Good Things Indeed.