Monday, August 19, 2013

birthday eve

I ordered myself a new dress today. ohhhh yes I did. To add to the ever growing pile of clothes I keep ordering that don’t fit me that I stuff into the back of my closet, still in their mailing envelopes, that I promptly forget about while I go hard at a bag of crunchy cheetos?

No.

Not this time, suckers. I ordered this dress to WEAR. Definitely not when it arrives. Maybe not in a few weeks…but definitely next summer and I am definitely going to feel awesome in it, and I definitely can’t wait. I’m amped. I’m ready. I cannot wait for Wednesday!

So why wait, right? It’s a ‘clean slate’ thing. I’m prepping. I’m going to do it right this time. I’m all in. And god, I am SO excited…..

Tomorrow is it. The 39th anniversary of my first full trip around the sun…my 40th birthday. It sounds so awful when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Well, don’t panic. I’m going for another round of Botox next week. It’s all good. (not kidding.) But The ‘tox can only do so much. It’s my insides that need a revamp….It’s my heart and soul and attitude and brain that need rewiring and mojo. And I know that. I can’t put a bandaid on a gaping wound and expect it to heal properly.



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2003. 

I turned 30 in “my room” in my mom’s apartment just south of South Pasadena, California. I have “my room” in quotes because I guess it had ceased belonging to me when I moved to New York a year and a half earlier. That strange trip lasted all of 12 months and I returned home in February of my 30th year to find the room that had been mine completely amassed with boxes and piles and stacks of things that weren’t mine.
I’ve since learned that hoarding is an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder & emerges when one starts to feel a loss of control of their own life. My mom had filled her room to the brim with things and moved into “my” room with more things. All the things. So I settled in, as best as I could, thankful to have a place to come home to and my mom back in my arms again. She was the other half of my soul and always will be. She was diagnosed with Stage 3c Ovarian Cancer 3 months after I moved back home.

So that’s how my 30s started. With my best friend, the love of my life, and the most important person in my whole world in the fight of her life, and not winning. I got to sit in the waiting room at the hospital while she underwent an 8 hour surgery to remove a tumor the size of a grapefruit. I got to hold her hand while she sat in the chemo chair getting IV bags of poison pumped into her fragile, sick body. I accompanied her to countless appointments, kissed her bald head, tried my hardest to put on a brave face and keep the violent heartbreak and rage I was suffering at bay.

I got married when I was 33. She walked me down the aisle and she died while I held her hand almost exactly one month later. That was and will forever be the worst day of my life. I promptly lost all grounding. I was floating around with no anchor. The world expected me to be a glowing, elated newlywed so I wore a mask to please them and pretended to be ok but inside I was dying. I’m still dying. And I will never feel that anyone has understood the immense pain of that heartbreak. And for that I am eternally bitter because the day my mom died, she took the old me with her. I feel like everyone (myself included) keeps expecting the old me to come back one day, happy and carefree, but she ain’t coming back. I’m angry that my husband never got to be married to the old me, because, while I’m not claiming she was perfect, she was certainly more emotionally balanced. The whole of her emotional reserves not depleted to the point that no patience was left for anything else and in the void, apathy towards every single thing. I’m outraged that my son didn’t get to have her for a mother, because she was fun, and she was happy, and she was patient. And that is what he deserves. Instead, he’s been left with a shell of a mother who has been putting on a show. He is too amazing for that. And I am trying. I’m trying so hard. I just don’t know who this person is. It’s a strange thing to try and explain.

So then my awesome 30s have also contained a move across the country where I have no friends or family, an extremely ill fitting and unfulfilling job, a bout with Post Partum Depression and Anxiety which brought me to my knees and from which I have still not been able to fully recover, a crash in the housing market which wiped out the entirety of any equity we had hoped to build in our first investment and basically put us underwater for good, 2 years of near poverty level living due to the price of daycare costing more than a fucking mortgage (this is a literal statement.)…..

Those blessings I promised I would count?

My 30s gave me Ben. 

If there were adequate words to explain my love for him, how grateful and thankful and humbled I am by him, the only way I could explain it is kind of to say if it were possible, which it’s not, but if it were possible, the joy and fulfillment and awe he has brought into my life could effortlessly eclipse every hardship and heartbreak this decade has brought me. Effortlessly and entirely. He is just that good.

Unfortunately, we don’t get the chance to go tit for tat in life like that and the things that scarred me and hurt me and broke me are still there and the absolute elation of having such a perfect little being gifted to me is unfathomably awesome, but it is also not relative.

That brings us to today. Birthday Eve. Is it any wonder why I am more than ready to turn the page and close the door on this chapter of my life?

My 40s are going to bring me serenity & peace & happiness & calm & adventure & health & vitality & inspiration.  For no reason more than the simple fact that I. AM. READY.



Thursday, August 15, 2013

a clean slate

You know how they say the older you get, the less you give a shit what other people think? Like how Grandma has no qualms telling her waitress she’s got a really pretty face but could sure stand to drop about 130 lbs? Or how Grandpa just farts right in the middle of the grocery store? Well, I’ll try and keep my farts to myself and if there’s one ultimate truth I will uphold it is that I have no right whatsoever to tell anyone they need to put down the twinkies, but I’m turning 40 on Tuesday and you know what? I’m sick of blowing smoke. I’m sick of pretending on the internet like life is fucking fabulous all the time and I've got an unwavering positive attitude and a golden unicorn who shits rainbows & lives in a cotton candy house in my backyard.

I used to write a blog called In My Life I Love You More. I started it when my son was about 3 months old and wrote about things like how happy I was to be his mother and how I couldn't imagine my life without him. Puppies. Rainbows. I wrote letters to him every time he turned another month older and tried my best to perfect my photography skills so I could capture all of life’s beautiful moments….and then post them on the internet, fingers crossed for comments of praise and applause & to become the most popular blogger on the interwebs. Duh. I aim high, folks.

Well guess what? When my son was 11 months old, I had a bit of an epiphany... completely distracted, totally frazzled and in a state of I-don’t-know-the-hell-what, I crashed into a Lexus, started sobbing and couldn't get a grip for about 5 solid hours. It was that afternoon that I finally called my doctor. I was diagnosed with PPD and PPA and promptly put on medication with strict instructions to find a therapist. I had spent over a year (because, while undiagnosed, I know I was suffering from Anti-natal Depression as well) putting on a show, playing the part and acting “as if”, waiting to finally BE. I thought I could do it all on my own. I couldn't ask for help because FUCK YOU, that’s why. Is that harsh? Sorry. Just be glad I’m not farting in the middle of the grocery store.

The bottom line is, while everything I wrote about how much I love my son and how he is the whole of my heart and everything I live for was and is 100% the truth, that blog started to feel contrived. I was being followed by people I felt guilty for saying the “F” word around, I was writing apologetically and censoring myself... “I can’t say that. What if my family reads this?”. Well, that’s no way to write. And writing, for me, is the best form of therapy I know. It’s my emotional brain vomit. I have to get it out to feel better. But getting it out there was not an option anymore because the small handful of readers I had there were expecting puppies! And rainbows! And all I wanted to do was scream the F word and cry for a little bit until I felt better.

I've always thought of myself as a person who tells it like it is. I really, really appreciated Britney’s complete post-partum mental meltdown on Matt Lauer. Does anybody remember that? (Also, if you need a last name to figure out Britney who, maybe you should read another blog. I’m not sayin’....I’m just sayin’.) Like, it was REAL, finally. Her hair was a wreck, her nails were chewed off, she was a little fat and obviously really needed to be medicated and she just started bawling. The pressure, man. Well, that’s sort of how I feel right now….and coincidentally (or not…) my hair is currently also a wreck, I’m a little fat ( a little?) and thankfully, am extremely medicated….So what I’m saying right now is Brit, I feel ya, sister. And you got your shit together! ::::fist bump::: I mean, if Britney can do it, so can I.

:::::::::roundoff back handspring! High five!:::::::::::

So that’s what this next decade of my life is about. That’s what this blog is about.

Fuck this birthday horseshit. The fuss & fanfare and all the bull. I’m so over it. It was a habit of 39 years to make a big deal, have grand expectations and feel deflated and resentful when those expectations were not realized which – obviously – they never, ever were. That’s the thing with expectations, right? They are basically the root of disappointment. I started on that cycle this year too and somewhere around 3 weeks ago I woke up and said to myself “Rach, cut the crap. All you really want for your birthday is clean sheets, new pajamas and a good night’s sleep” and you know what? Once that occurred to me, the monkey on my back wearing the polka dot birthday hat, throwing confetti and blowing a kazoo skulked away with his tail between his legs. He was an asshole anyway.

SO here we are. On the cusp of 40. My 30s were basically one gigantic clusterfuck. (We’ll talk more about that tomorrow. ) But the next 10 years will not be.

I lost control; I’m getting it back.

I stopped living and just existed; I’m not satisfied with that anymore.

Because of my depression, I gained a frightening (to me) amount of weight; that’s coming off.

I will often be happy and excited and motivated and enthusiastic. I will often be angry and hungry and disappointed and deflated. I will always be real. And I will do it all right here. If you’d like to join me, I’d love to have you.


It’s a new year, it’s a new decade. It’s a clean slate. I just love clean slates.