It was my first semester of college, and I turned in a paper late. See, the beleaguered writing professor had chosen my semester as the one to take a stand. She had a reputation as a softy, and she’d gotten tired of all the essays being turned it on the last day of class.

I didn’t understand the idea of a syllabus and keeping track of when things were due. So. I turned my 2nd paper late. And there was no appeal. I lost a full letter grade.

I suppose that B was well worth it, because I never forgot how important those deadlines were. I made it a habit to turn papers in a week early, get feedback and improve the paper so that I got the best grade possible.

Some people do things at the last minute. It’s a source of inspiration.

I hate the last minute. I like to be prepared and over-prepared. That’s good, right?

Maybe. There is a saying going around:

Begin before you are ready.

I can look back at my very first semester of college now, and have mercy on the girl who didn’t quite get it. I can laugh at the penalty of getting a B. At the time, thought I felt a huge failure.

Perhaps I wasn’t ready for college yet. Or perhaps I was, and doing it imperfectly was part of the experience. I would have chosen differently had I known better, but I was there to learn.

Lots of things in life are begun before we are ready. Birth is the most obvious example. Absolutely no baby is ready to handle life on the outside at first. We don’t think of that though. It just must be done.

Falling in love, learning a new skill, parenthood– these are all things we are thrust into. Ready or not here we come.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

I am attracted to the idea of loosening my grip on my feet. And terrified.

I remember in 2003 when I started writing my soon-to-be published book The Russian American School of Tomorrow. I didn’t know it would be a book. I didn’t know it would take more than ten years. I’m proud of it now, no matter what happens. And I never would have predicted it.

Back in 1999 when I met Chris, taking a chance meeting a new guy at the local pizza place, I didn’t know that we’d end up married and have all these adventures.

I wasn’t ready for any of this. None of it would have happened if I hadn’t taken the first step. It is a dangerous business. I don’t think I’m ready for it, but here I go.

So we went to the thrift store to help Veronica get a costume. Next week is her 100th day of kindergarten and she is supposed to dress like a 100-year-old woman.

We had picked a few things and I was having her try them on. The woman next to us was watching so I told her about our adventure. She chatted about things and was friendly.

Then she said “I was supposed to have a baby. ”

She went on to say she just had a miscarriage two days ago I gave her sympathy I told her that one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage.

Then she told me she had had three miscarriages and she was 19.

Whoa.

I tried to be encouraging I told her there was still time.

“The last two weeks have been really hard.”
The next thing she says is her mother kicked her out of the house because her brother told her mother that she would not let her brother play video games.

Also her friend had just died.

And her husband is in jail for something he didn’t do.

She’s not sure what she’s going to do.

What am I supposed to do with this information?

Some part of it is not true. Some part may be true.

Some part of her is playing me.

So. I told her to hang in there. Tomorrow is another day.

I suppose all women are like me. Or maybe I’m making excuses for all the lotions and potions I hoard in my bathroom. This Christmas I got even more–which my husband says is a sign I’m impossible to buy gifts for. I love them though!

Deep in the dark corner, I rediscovered a particularly exotic bottle.

My husband’s business involves a lot of German suppliers. They are all quite charming, and his business associates sent presents when Veronica was born. Blankets, clothes, books; so many sweet and thoughtful gifts. I am still humbled as I remember it.

The bottle said “pflegeolbad- mutter und kind.” Inside was highly aromatic oil–licorice. How foreign! Americans wouldn’t have a licorice-flavored baby. And I couldn’t deal with it when she was a baby. But now that I’ve found it again I find it sort of earthy and interesting.

mutter and kind– well, I’m the mother in that line up, and maybe I wouldn’t mind smelling like aniseed. I can cipher out that olbad means bath oil.

But I have no idea what pflege means. Should you put the oil in the bathwater? Use it before or after the bath?

Maybe pflege means scented.

I recall that the Project Management Institute claims that 67% of communication is non-verbal. Not words. So maybe it doesn’t matter what it means. It’s fun to think about what it might mean. Probably if I asked babelfish it would be something boring.

I haven’t always thought that way. I do so love words. I think I raise the median on that 67%, because my verbal communication is more like 90% verbal. I have belabored over emails and memos to find words to express the shade of meaning and tone I want.

And again and again it has been missed.

Only a few years ago I learned that it wasn’t a fault in my prose. It’s just the nature of communication.

I heard a podcast this last week about an American guy who fell in love with a French poem. It was cute and simple, and he decided to translate it.

But translate what?

The words? The meaning?

The tone?

The meter?

All of those things were what made the poem so enchanting. He ended up making more than a hundred translations, just to try different aspects of what that poem meant.

And who is to say which English version is most true to the original? Or whether that was ever even the point?

I ran into a friend taking a walk with his baby the other day. She was all snuggled in a carrier on his chest while he and I had a fascinating in-depth conversation about parent concerns. She was cute as a button, half-lidded eyes. He hoped she would sleep, but she never quite tipped over into dreamland.

At the end of our talk he said “She never lets me talk for more than 5 minutes without squawking.”

Well! I can feel very honored. I am the rare individual who gives Baby peace.

So I should feel proud? Probably not. More likely it had nothing to do with me. Maybe she happened to have the right amount of sun hitting her skin, or just the right amount of sleepy so stay quiet.

Did it have anything to do with me? It couldn’t have had anything to do with what I was saying, because she didn’t understand language yet.

Her frame of mind and willingness to listen is most likely a happy coincidence of circumstance.

Or maybe it had everything to do with me.

There is no way for me to know. I can’t translate the human mind.

I suppose all women are like me. Or maybe I’m making excuses for all the lotions and potions I hoard in my bathroom. This Christmas I got even more–which my husband says is a sign I’m impossible to buy gifts for. I love them though!

Deep in the dark corner, I rediscovered a particularly exotic bottle.

My husband’s business involves a lot of German suppliers. They are all quite charming, and his business associates sent presents when Veronica was born. Blankets, clothes, books; so many sweet and thoughtful gifts. I am still humbled as I remember it.

The bottle said “pflegeolbad- mutter und kind.” Inside was highly aromatic oil–licorice. How foreign! Americans wouldn’t have a licorice-flavored baby. And I couldn’t deal with it when she was a baby. But now that I’ve found it again I find it sort of earthy and interesting.

mutter and kind– well, I’m the mother in that line up, and maybe I wouldn’t mind smelling like aniseed. I can cipher out that olbad means bath oil.

But I have no idea what pflege means. Should you put the oil in the bathwater? Use it before or after the bath?

Maybe pflege means scented.

I recall that the Project Management Institute claims that 67% of communication is non-verbal. Not words. So maybe it doesn’t matter what it means. It’s fun to think about what it might mean. Probably if I asked babelfish it would be something boring.

I haven’t always thought that way. I do so love words. I think I raise the median on that 67%, because my verbal communication is more like 90% verbal. I have belabored over emails and memos to find words to express the shade of meaning and tone I want.

And again and again it has been missed.

Only a few years ago I learned that it wasn’t a fault in my prose. It’s just the nature of communication.

I heard a podcast this last week about an American guy who fell in love with a French poem. It was cute and simple, and he decided to translate it.

But translate what?

The words? The meaning?

The tone?

The meter?

All of those things were what made the poem so enchanting. He ended up making more than a hundred translations, just to try different aspects of what that poem meant.

And who is to say which English version is most true to the original? Or whether that was ever even the point?

I ran into a friend taking a walk with his baby the other day. She was all snuggled in a carrier on his chest while he and I had a fascinating in-depth conversation about parent concerns. She was cute as a button, half-lidded eyes. He hoped she would sleep, but she never quite tipped over into dreamland.

At the end of our talk he said “She never lets me talk for more than 5 minutes without squawking.”

Well! I can feel very honored. I am the rare individual who gives Baby peace.

So I should feel proud? Probably not. More likely it had nothing to do with me. Maybe she happened to have the right amount of sun hitting her skin, or just the right amount of sleepy so stay quiet.

Did it have anything to do with me? It couldn’t have had anything to do with what I was saying, because she didn’t understand language yet.

Her frame of mind and willingness to listen is most likely a happy coincidence of circumstance.

Or maybe it had everything to do with me.

There is no way for me to know. I can’t translate the human mind.

One time my mom took my brothers and I with her on an errand. None of us were teenagers yet. She had to stop by a woman’s house, and of course she couldn’t leave us in the car. To my young eyes, the house might as well have belonged to Thurston Howell the third. A curving staircase wound down into the foyer, and on its own special pedestal was a small bronze figure of a woman in a ballet pose. She was naked.

We had been raised in very strict Christian schools and churches, and had never seen anything like this. Mom introduced us to the lady, and was talking about whatever grownup business they had. None of this was interesting. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the statue.

The woman noticed my brothers acting strange. They were silently blushing furiously and looking very hard at the walls. “Oh, you are embarrassed by the nude. Here, let’s go into the living room.” I was disappointed to leave her.

When I moved to my own apartment, without the censorship of parents and church, I was able to buy my own nude wall hanging. For years this reproduction hung on my wall:

She is lovely! And it says right there at the bottom “Picasso.” A billboard telling anyone that sees it this is FINE ART. She is naked and yet modest. I loved looking at this picture on my living room wall.

Somehow, when we last moved, she was put in the garage and I hadn’t seen that painting in quite a while.

Here is the reproduction that hangs on my wall now, frameless:

I’ve written about her before. She is in the room where I get dressed in the morning. She is also getting dressed, my beautiful doppelganger. Degas is a less ostentatious name than Picasso, but I no longer give a damn.

La Toilette is womanhood in action, practical beauty. She is getting ready to get going on her day. And no apologies, right now her boob has to be hanging out for that to happen.

When we cleaned out the garage I rediscovered my Picasso woman. At first I greeted her as an old friend. Oh! Yes! I have loved this painting on my wall!

Then I stopped and looked again.

She is tight and huddled. Yes, for those years she was my doppelganger too. I was stepping away from family and church, naked to all the world. Ready to experience and be exposed; yet still huddling protectively.

Poor nude Picasso.

Things are changed. She does not belong on my wall. I’m ready to open my heart and expose more to the world.

the first workday of not being at work.

it feels good. It feels great to be with my family.

i want to keep this feeling. Peace takes practice

She was too young last year when i got laid off, so I didn’t tell her. But I thought I’d tell her this time.

At first she wanted to start thinking of what sort of new job I could get. I told her “You do not need to help me find a new job. I will take care of that. It’s not your problem.”

Still, she thought for a bit. Since we were walking the dog, she thought I could get a job as a dog walker. Then she suggested policeman.

I told her it hurt my feelings a little bit that they told me they didn’t want me to come back to my job. So she invented a new kind of people, the Meanies, and declared that they were the Meanies, and they got distracted with fleshing out the details of what the Meanies were like.

But the next day, without me bringing it up again, she had more thoughts. After we got to gymnastics lessons.

And Chris said to me, “Congratulations. Six years of no dead baby.”

Yup, that is the basic measuring stick of parenting. Not a perfectly accurate one, but a decent rule of thumb.

We kept her alive.

For her party, she had 18 friends come to Jumping Jacks. Well, we invited everyone I could think of. If I hadn’t been so busy with the job, I might have made better efforts to reach out to more people. But we invited more than 30.

18 came. It was a great party.

In a coincidence, the job laid me off on friday. But that is not important.

Her friends were amazingly generous and adorable with their presents. Most of them made little cards for her, which makes me think we should work on her writing more.

She got two games:

Monopoly Junior and Catan Junior.

So we spent a LOT of time today playing Monopoly Junior and Catan Junior.

Veronica is INTO monopoly. and Catan is a beginning strategy game. Chris can begin to teach her how to defeat the world.

I prefer monopoly junior. There is a lot of Math that is perfect for a kindergardner.

But I could see the world-domination gleam fire up in Chris’s eyes when we broke out Catan Junior. Veronica would do well to learn that skill.

I stole the complete works of Shakespeare from my Jr. High library. It was huge sin, but I was resentfully certain I would not get caught. I might have checked it out but in all my years at the k-12 Christian school I’d never once been shown how to use the library and didn’t know how to borrow anything from it.

I was certain that they would never miss it. And I needed it.

My brother had come back home after his adventures in Jr. College and tossed some Shakespeare plays at me, little single play paperbacks.  I ripped through them and asked for more.

“Don’t you find them hard to read?” my big brother asked.

“Why? They sound just like the Bible.” The school did at least tutor me in King James’ English.

I reached a milestone yesterday: I finally got 500 LinkedIn connections. If you have 499 connections, LinkedIn says you have 499 connections. If you have 500 it says you have 500+ connections. I now look like I could have infinity LinkedIn connections!

It was a goal for me to reach 500. I really wanted to get there this summer. This summer I was looking for a job, so I spend a good amount of time on LinkedIn. Looking for a job is very uncomfortable. It felt as if my goal–getting a new position–was entirely the product of happenstance.

Except everywhere I looked, there was someone giving advice on how to do it the “right” way. Which was a lot of pressure.

So every day I would get up and try to look for a job. I began to get more and more single-minded and narrow in my focus. A JOB. I WANT A JOB. I NEED A JOB.

And every day I would not get a job.

I knew I was starting to get crazy. I was super unhappy. I didn’t want to be.

I knew I had to set myself up with an achievable victory, or a goal that I had more control over.

So. I decided to try to get 500 LinkedIn connections. I had 400 something connections. Surely I could fill that out and push it into the 500+ realm.

And still I couldn’t quite get there. So I was doubly foiled. Even the thing that I thought should be easy and achievable I was failing at.

Some of the job search advice talks about this. Our jobs can easily become our identity. I know I had put on my job–the one I’d lost–on like a fancy uniform and told the world what it was I did.

It was as if that uniform came off and so did my skin. I had no buffer. No wonder I was unhappy!

I didn’t have a space in my own mind to inhabit. What it seemed like I had a big clear spot for a vicious fearful inner voice to talk to me. A perfect acoustic amphitheater for my fears and insecurities.

I knew it was getting out of control. Here’s a job for self help and support groups!

One of my groups is reading a book called Loveability, which talks about self-love. Self-love is not something I would have pursued on my own. And yet…

In the isolation chamber of applying for jobs, nobody loves me. They don’t hate me, usually; they just don’t care very much. In the face of overarching indifference, I was left with the voices in my mind that were very mean and afraid.

If I wasn’t on my own side, it’s hard to persuade someone else to be.

So that’s what this self-love thing is trying to tell me. I get to be on my own side and keep a good opinion of myself. That I can move closer to compassion for myself and further away from being critical.

I haven’t finished the book yet. When I found this sentence, I saw myself:

How I felt about me was determined by how they felt about me.

I don’t want that to be true about me! And yet, especially during my job search, that is exactly how I felt. I must be worth nothing because that is how these hiring managers and HR people are treating me.

I know I am of value. How on earth did I let myself fall to these depths?

I have a job now. For three months I’ve been going to my office and doing work. Nobody is mean to me. I could tell myself, “Whew! I’m glad that’s over!”

I am glad it’s over. But it will happen again. I will find myself looking for a job again. Or there will likely find myself in a situation where I am valuing others’ opinions of me more highly than my own opinions of me.

Those 500 LinkedIn connections–when I don’t need a job anymore–feel sort of anticlimactic. These new lessons in self-love could seem that way too. Yet I know, I am going to need to build up my positive connections for when they are all I have. Especially with myself.