Summer 2024... a new job... same view out my home window!

Posting about Summer seems to be an annual tradition so here we are... Big post.

NEW JOB
The ironic thing about this summer was that when the year began I wasn't sure what work would look like so in an effort to save money we opted out of any summer camps and then I got consistent work. Of course. But big hurray I got consistent work! I worked for a few months with my old friends at Airbnb and now I've been contracted until the end of 2024 with a nice video game company to produce for them. Another remote gig! The view from my office is still my own backyard! Hurray.

TROOP BEVERLY HILLS MOVIE NIGHT
Thinking that it was gonna be our own family camp and we'd be directing our own activities, I got us matching T-shirts for Camp Fredrich Summer Camp: Troop 91504. The shirts gave me an idea to throw an Outdoor Movie Night: Troop Beverly Hills.

The theme was 200% up my alley being a film about camping and also the Beverly Hills Hotel which is pink stripes and martinique wallpaper. I been waiting my whole life to throw this party. My Golden Girls obsession paid off.

We invested in a few items we've been meaning to own one of which was a full sized popcorn machine. Is it so fun and delicious? Is it so dangerous for me? All of this is true. But come on I throw an annual Oscar party and at least 1-2 outdoor movie nights a year. It's gonna be worth it. 

One of the things amassed over the years was things that were perfectly on theme like this tablecloth which actually fits over the outdoor dining table. Can't find it on Amazon anymore but this is the company that makes them. I've actually bought 3 (one for pizza parties, one with nautical stripes) because it's v clever with a zipper that makes it easy to put on an off with the umbrella hole and goes to 120". I'm glad I bought this when I did!

We setup a cute little photo op/play area that small kids destroyed within minutes but that's what it's all about.

And of course all the pink flutes and Rosé and more palms and flamingos.

And the cute little camp mugs and Evian water bottles natch.

SUMMER ROAD TRIP

After the party I leaned hard into my Troop Leader role slash LEWK and have been rocking a lot of beige and green. I outfitted us accordingly for our Route 66 / Southwest family road trip to the Grand Canyon / Phoenix / Las Cruces. We stayed at the Grand Canyon Railway Hotel in Williams AZ. Oh right, yeah so ok, you stay at the hotel and you take a train a few hours to the Grand Canyon (helps keep too many cars out of the national park) and Wally was beyond hyped about the Cataract Creek Gang. They put on three performances a day! One in the morning at 9am before you leave for TGC and then they rob you on horseback and board the train and then in the evening in the town they put on a 7p show. Hardworking bandits I tell you.

The Grand Canyon with our crew was... mixed. I was pumped to see it, everyone ooh'd and ahh'd etc but it was hot and Wally barfed and no one wanted to keep walking the rim. A mama tried.

Matt did get this pretty epic picture when I took a moment to marvel at this place. #newprofilepic. 

The next stop on the way to Phoenix was Bearizona which is a drive-thru zoo so the girl could see wolves. It was actually a pretty cool little spot albeit expensive!

A detour delayed us an hour to our next stop: Sedona. I am a big fan of Sedona. I've been now three times and each time a different time of year and different crew and if it hadn't been SO hot I woulda had our crew do one of the many awesome hikes there.

My friend Anna introduced us to one of my favorite places: Indian Gardens Market + Cafe in beautiful Oak Creek Canyon. We went twice on my birthday trip there and I made the family make the pilgrimage. If you're ever in Sedona, highly recommend.

Phoenix was insanely hot, shocker, but we spent the day with my sister and her family and went to a crazy place called Jake's Unlimited  that kept us cool and entertained for the bargain price of $25/person that included I kid you not: arcade games, rides, laser tag, AND a lunch buffet with spaghetti and pizza and salad and soda and ice cream. I'd dump my kids there all day all summer if I lived there.

At the hotel however, the kids did the one thing they want to do all day every day. Pool. Pool pool pool. Water. Pool. Goggles. POOL.

Our journey ended in Las Cruces which by the way the whole point of the trip was to drive the kids to visit their grandparents and stay with them for a week of VBS and Matt and I drove home to have a week off in L.A. God bless grandparents. Then I flew to El Paso to pick them up on Saturday for their first ever plane ride! They loved it. Though some of Alice's faces were pretty hilarious as the plane rose to cruising altitude. Here we are waiting for ice cream in Las Cruces. The only way to live.

Above here you can see I was faithful to my lewk for the trip and my favorite thing I bought were those off white high top Converse. How did I exist without them? Seriously they are so versatile and if you see me this summer, I'm rocking them. 

Summer is flying by... we have Alice's 10th Birthday party this weekend and it's also Camp themed and you know, our troop loves a theme. It's a Summer Camp kinda life! 🏕️

Our Joyful Winter

March! How is it March? In a few weeks we will celebrate a resurrected life and welcome the feast of Easter and usher in Spring and Eastertide. The snow will thaw (figuratively I mean come on I live in Los Angeles), the flowers will bloom. 

It’s been quite a winter. Our best ever! I took the bull by the horns and knew that if I didn’t set up a system in place to survive the winter and fight the dementors of depression that the winter would feel barren and dead instead of how the Creator intended it with hibernation and rest. I wanted to embrace the beauty of winter and surrender to its truths and rhythms. There is a time for everything and this was the time of preparation for growth and life. 

I started small and found a pinterest article on how to embrace winter and one of the ideas was to try some “Hygge”. Oh boy did I! It’s the Scandinavian way of embracing the cozy lifestyle during winter. I listened to the Little Book of Hygge and got the basics down and I was ready to begin. The Hygge Manifesto lays out the 10 basics of Hygge: Atmosphere, Presence, Pleasure, Equality, Gratitude, Harmony, Comfort, Truce, Togetherness, and Shelter. Listening to the book with the author’s Danish accent transported me and filled me with hope for a joyful winter. Joyful Winter, two words that I never imagined putting together.

I used to decorate for Christmas primarily using silver, black and white (except the colorful office) in a scheme I called Cozy Cabin with buffalo check, pine cones, camping lanterns, wood, cozy textiles, and so many candles. The past few years I craved red and green so instead we keep the Black and White cabin things for use post Christmas. It’s a nice transitional decorating scheme for my brain that likes her environment to indicate her state of life.

Not that the Hygge lifestyle requires any type of purchasing of things but we did find one item to be crucial to add to the whole vibe… a little electric fireplace. You should have seen the puppy dog eyes we pulled on Matt to get him to agree to it and how hyped the kids were when it arrived!

I have created tiny Hygge cozy monsters with my children and spouse. They have leaned into the cozy and it makes the long nights feel fun and loving. We have warm lighting with electric candles, nice scented candles, the fireplace going, a corner of the couch we call ‘cozy corner’, a heated blanket, books, magazines… I make soup and fresh bread. We slow down. We Sabbath. We nap. We take walks when we can as often as we can. The strangely rainy days have not hampered our spirits. My mental health this winter has been the best it’s ever been. Even when we added Lent and fasting! 

It’s literally my job to get ahead of everything, to see the future and where things could go wrong and anticipate the pitfalls and steer my team away from failure. I am good at it. I am good at imagining possibilities and problems with my vocation. But. It’s a lifelong lesson for myself to be in the current season and not get too ahead of myself either. To be grateful for where I am and where my family is and take it the next right thing at a time. A step and step again. I’d be tempted during this time when reading a terrific magazine heralding the coming of Spring to start plotting the Spring recipes or parties or decorating or trips and start feeling like I am already behind. But that’s not true. Advertisers and retailers have to be constantly in the future so you feel that you can’t keep up. Lies.

Where you are is just enough as it is. Be present to the current season. Even if it's winter.

2 bundt cakes and 15 books

 How do you measure a year? 

Is it counted by how many Trader Joe’s frozen soup dumplings I’ve eaten? How many days I’ve worked which is under 60. Is it how many friends we’ve made? Right now in early November I did a little tally and found that I’m gonna count it as the year with 2 bundt cakes and 15 books.

So far, this has mostly been a year of loss. Job loss and family loss. Matt lost two friends and one grandfather. We lost our dog too. Woz went to doggy heaven under a series of unfortunate events that is still hard to talk about. Then his parents, who’ve been instrumental with enabling Matt and I to have any sort of weekends alone together, moved to New Mexico. We took a break from hosting our home church and merged with another group and no longer hosting. Two entertainment union strikes kept a lot of our friends unemployed and my usual work was non-existent. We were sick for maybe 2 months total this year with colds and really intense viral stuff that felt RSV-ish. Loss and loss.

There’s also been some good stuff. I rented so many movies and 3 seasons of Gilmore Girls from the public library. Did you know there’s this thing called the library and it lets you borrow books and tv shows and movies for free?! Crazy right? Earlier in the year I deleted all social media off my phone and logged myself out of all accounts. I don’t miss it in the slightest though my propensity for oversharing is suffered by my group text friends. In place of social media, I added learning another language and reading books. I’ve done over 300 days of either French or Japanese lessons on the Duolingo app. I can ask for rice and water in Japanese and where the train station is in French. Où est la gare? 

My personality type dictates that I measure my success in achievements and affirmations. My other personality type dictates that I fill my time with beauty, art, and nature. Right now only one of these mes is steering the ship while the other is asleep in a cabin possibly tied up in a mutiny type situation, I’m not sure. I’m living my best and broke-est life right now. It’s weird. 

During the dark pandemic days we quickly realized that the things that give our life meaning have nothing to do with money or possessions or jobs or success. I know that. But the waiting, this fallow season is unsettling. I trust God will provide and trust that something is on the horizon with no evidence other than just feeling and faith. 

I don’t feel depressed. I don’t feel settled. I don’t feel worried. I just find myself marveling at the strangeness of this abundance of time. I mean, how much time is there in between raising children and social obligations but I’ve had moments where I have an hour to kill and had earlier in that day done all the things I wanted to do that were leisurely during the designated leisure time. I had watched a thing, read a thing, crafted a thing. I had an hour of leisure time to kill, that’s something that people kill themselves to accomplish even just an hour of a week. I am not those people since I have designated a weekly practice so restful joyful artful time is never too far away but if there’s too much of a good thing here at the end of November, that time has come.

In the time I started writing this post and finished it I had read two more books. 2 bundt cakes and 17 books.

Mom's Summer Backyard Essentials

Welcome to our home and backyard during the summer!  My mom play heaven (more on that later) is away and now it's time for the Kid Kingdom. I used all the stuff we had from last year with some purchases to make my life and summer duties easier and decided to share with you all my summer wisdom for backyard kid things.

Here's my recommended items to save your back and sanity. If I indicate a brand it's because I am serious about it and it's tried and true and don't settle for anything less. Mom's honor.

Don't mess around and cheap out on a junky hose or nozzle. Finally invested in a good one this year that doesn't annoy me to death by its weight and cumbersome nature. This is helpful year round with watering plants and rinsing off of backyard furniture so do yourself a favor and get a Zero G Hose at least 50 feet in length.

Then get one of these Orbit $16 hose nozzles at Lowe's. See how the trigger is on the front? Anything else is bullshit. 

Ok next: water guns. Gone are the days of that tiny little hole to fill water guns that takes 5 minutes only to be used up in 10 seconds. Get you one of these X-Shot Fast Fill ones that fill up in ONE second. Get a 4 pack so the kids can cool each other (and the adults) off.

Parenthood will involve a lot of blowing up of shit. Pools, balls, airbeds... save your lungs!

Speaking of blowing up of things... ball pump. This one came with some set but I love it 'cause it's compact and the needle stores into the top part of the pump to keep it safe.

This summer I put all their bubble stuff together including the accumulation of so many freaking bubble wands from every holiday and birthday party! The kids began this game on their own of making bubble potions and bubble babies and who knows what and keeping them together is great self-service backyard fun.

I also put all the balls and outdoor toys here easily accessible for backyard play and seeing it there encourages them to do it!

The laundry room is the room you first enter from the backyard and becomes our dumping ground for all things backyard that we want to keep OUT of the sun so we have a beach bag with their swimsuits.

On the shelf I repurposed that metal bin to house the three Thermacells we have, the chlorine for the kid pool, and the sunblock. For now the sunblock is on the shelf since we use it frequently but eventually it will all be stored in that bin.

I also have a tray here for the summer ready for impromptu hosting or promptu hosting. 

Few things in life make me happier than the sight of the kids stuff in the summer.

Other than maybe you know... the kids.

Happy Summering Everyone!

Chilaquiles

Matt peeks into the office as I am wrapping up my Solo Sunday…

“Hey. Do you wanna hear Matt Berry say chilaquiles.”

I nod enthusiastically and emphatically and follow him to the living room.

My family in order, Our life in place

Sometimes when you’re deep in the gamut of raising babies you live in a phenomena that Matt and I call “treading water”. You’re not really getting anywhere closer to the island you’re just trying to stay above water and not drown. Maybe a floating plank gives you some respite for a while but mostly you’re gonna get back to treading water. Until one magical day… you don’t quite realize is it as it happens but your babies are sleeping in beds, sleeping all night, communicating, peeing in toilets, and you turn off the baby monitor all night. You’re no longer treading water. You’re able to swim toward a destination and even stop at little islands along the way and prolong drowning. Maybe even recreationally swim or enjoy a sunset. 

Until that time you’re not really thinking long term. Which is actually good. Just surviving the day to day is the way to go. Suffice is the trouble for the day etc. But once survival becomes insufficient, the goals, identity, values, and dreams of your family materialize or start to form into matter that makes sense. All of a sudden you’re realizing what things, as a family, give you life and which suck it out of you. And WHO you are as a family. There’s an identity that is formed as a unit that as a concept I was unable to grasp until I was out of the trauma survival, including early childhood and a pandemic. 

Now I can see a little more clearly who we are.

We been in this game 15 years and in that time, Matt and I have developed an identity and values as a family. Chief among them is that we are an organized and intentional family, which is kinda awesome and hugely unexpected. Matt and I are both fairly neat and organized people in general with our home and habits but I didn’t realize how much the organization was bleeding into our communal life as well. We are all about the calendar and what is happening when and what we can do to prepare for the upcoming event. We will talk about the day/weekend/what’s coming and work backwards.

Matt runs a tight ship with the kids’ daily schedule and has since they were babies. He has them regulated with food, naps, bedtime. He feeds them at 12:30p and 6pm and snack after school and the kids are so used to it that you could remove every clock in our house but one to check and I could tell you roughly what time it was by “I’m hungry”. I on the other hand, am not disciplined when it comes to time itself, the hours. I like to block out chunks of time and work within those hours on whatever thing I’ve committed is the priority. Currently as I am in a waiting time with work, I have mornings free and when the kids are in school the hours of 8:45a-11:45a are sacred and for quiet reflection and study. Or a walk or writing. There’s no order to when and how long I’ll do any one thing only that it’s blocked out and that gives me some order. My job currently only requires that I am at my desk for certain hours and at meetings for certain hours. My other job, on set: the hour by hour matters and counts in that big sense where 100 people are getting paid every 15 minutes we don’t stop to feed them lunch! I’m no stranger to the organization of time but am honestly not very good at the detailed daily time management. Working on it still! 

But. I am getting much better at organizing our days and I’m seeing very fruitful results! One of the things I’m working on is an old spiritual organization tool called “Rule of Life”. Which to be honest I hate the name because it’s really not a rule it’s more of a layout of life or a blueprint of life priorities. The Rule of Life was begun by monks who lived in a monastery and they had their day organized to the minutes for prayer, reading, cooking. All their days, weeks, months, years built on the things they prioritized which was living a spiritual life with God. Sort of a trellis where you build on it. Honestly I couldn’t think of analogies that work in explaining the Rule of Life. Our church has one where we focus on certain things at certain times of the year. I had been wanting to make one myself and wasn’t realizing that that’s what I was doing when on one of my annual solo trips I jotted this down in my notes app:

I was trying to find a way to re-organize my days, my life to make room and time for my priorities. In the same way that every week God made a Sabbath, a day of rest, my family had made days dedicated to alone time and couple time and family movie night. And then I wanted more of it. And then I wanted to pin that time in our life so that nothing else would invade it. I wanted to organize our days so we would never feel pressure about making time for the things that matter because we already wrote the things that matter into our life and family calendar. 

One thing that Matt keeps talking about as we’ve journeyed into a healthy life and particularly a healthy spiritual life is that discipline = freedom. And it sounds completely ass backwards because discipline is one of those words that carries such weight and a ruler I’ll never measure up to. How can it be freeing to have to make yourself do something hard? BUT when you discipline your calendar, then you’re free with your time. When you already have a set time for a meeting, you never have to waste time setting up the meeting. When you make dedicated weekly time to talk and check in and connect, you never have to feel disconnected for too long because you know the connect time is at worse, 7 days away. Regularity is great for pooping and sleeping. Regularity is good for your life. Consistency. Order. It is incredibly freeing. 

You all know I will scream ’til I’m blue in the face about how good for me it’s been to have a Solo Sunday night every single week for my sanity. Matt and I added a Meaningful Monday where we are just us no TV that’s been so great for us. The rest of our time falls around those times. We know what to say no to because we have those things we say yes to. 

As I continued thinking about the concept of ordering our life I, for some reason, wanted to practice and still wish to practice learning how to make a French omelette. I was on Youtube watching Jacques Pepin make one and on third viewing I noticed his ‘mise en place’ setup. Do you know the concept? It’s what chefs do when they’re making a meal where all the ingredients have been properly measured and prepped and are lined up in little bowls near them while they’re cooking. So when it’s time to add onion, the onion is right there waiting. They don’t have to stop what they’re doing, grab a knife and cutting board and onion out of the pantry and cut it up. The onion is ready for the next step. As are all the other ingredients for the dish. They disciplined their prep and now they were free to cook. It was the only concept that finally clicked.

So I drafted my own Rule of Life and as I looked at the finished product I thought: this is a good life. If I do these things, this is a solid, balanced, joyful, fulfilled life. Order in our days. Freedom to live.

why a show about a teenager's romantic life clicked so much

 Do you guys watch Never Have I Ever? You must. 

It's about a teenager named Devi Vishwakumar's high school experience in Greater Los Angeles. Not just any experience but one from an adorable, funny, nerdy, intelligent, grieving, healing, and horny young woman from a culturally strict family unit. I mean... replace strict Indian parent with Mexican parent and it's... familiar. But having someone up there getting the hot boy and the cute nerdy boy on top of just dealing with friendship and death and therapy and life gave us a girl that is so much more multi-faceted than a lot of television has given us in the past. We'd either get the nerd or the popular one. We had to remove our glasses and get made over to fit in. BOO. We're so much more than that. We should be loved as we are.

This season Devi seemed to get a lot of what she wanted in the boy department but just as in life, when you get that relationship you thought would complete you guess what... it doesn't magically solve all your problems. You still gotta deal with you. And if you wanna see what it's like to be loved, you gotta love yourself. All of your mess and all of your wins and all of your beautiful luminous being. 

I know, I'd hate listening to me too if I hadn't also learned this lesson first hand. Not just about the boy, I got the boy, I love the boy. But about the job. The house. The kid. The other kid. None of all those checklists make a lick of difference if inside of you keeps resisting the truth. That the relationship you really need to come to terms with is how you think and love yourself. How you listen to your voice within and learn what you need and what you want. It's a hot topic this 'self-love' thing and I'm not going to debase love by stooping it to the level that the world thinks is self-love. It's not narcissism, it's not self-care and treat yo-self. It's so much more than that. Love is so much more than that. 

I think of it as well, perfect love casts out all fear and I think of it as being unafraid of what you are when you're stripped of everything. It's wonderful and all well and good to have all those wonderful things. But when you're alone in a cave with nobody and nothing but your thoughts who are you? When you're left to your own vices amongst strangers, who do you default to, and would you want to spend time with that person? Is your life one of character, faith, growth? Have you confronted the bears in the cave, have you looked at the scars, have you asked the hard questions of yourself?

Also, love is not greedy. It is the opposite of greedy. So if you're wondering what a life of genuine self-love and not narcissism looks like, it is evident in the people we pour into. It's evidenced in the generosity we live life in. It's loving others well. Or at least it looks like someone that is TRYING to love others even if she sucks at it sometimes. 

Summer Time 2022

 Friends! It's summer at the FFF and we are... loving it. (Also I wrote this post during a more optimistic moment and now I'm fighting the pessimism!) 

After two summers of being at home and not much else, we were proactive this year and decided to get the kids signed up for something to cut down on their being home too much. Wally's pre-school did the work for us and offered an additional month for June which we went for and he finished on the 22nd. He has thrived in preschool. What a difference of a kid. He used to play by himself and not engage with the kids and now he has friends and best friends and knows colors and letters. He'll be starting Kindergarten this fall and we'll have both kids in the same school! 

We scraped by and got Alice signed up for art day camp for 3 weeks in June! She's made a pretty good buddy and her mom is cool too so we've had lots of park time together. Fills me right up that she gets to have a friend with her and that she looks forward to it. I never know with Alice what she's gonna like or how she's gonna react but she surprises me sometimes.

In July the kids will be at VBS for a week and we'll be in Coastal California for a week. I had big lofty goals for Cancun this year but I couldn't figure out the timing so the flights were too much by the time I got it together and opted out.  Then we'll be home another week then... they start school August 15. Boom. Flash. That fast. Every single day this summer has flown by. Work. Camps. Schools. Fun. 

40 for 40 Number 3: On being a w4 and Federico’s daughter

After I learned that I was an Enneagram 3 I mostly ignored the fact that I was also a w4. The 4 types are the artistic creative types that thrive on being original and creative and moody. I used to say that “I’m not creative” but boy is that not true. I think I put some stock into creative having to mean artistic in that we can paint, draw, or sculpt or play an instrument. But being creative, or feeling that need to create… to exist in creative spaces and to put beauty into the world is vital.

As I’m writing this I am sitting in my “Room of Requirement”: the home office that functions as playroom, den, tea parlor, lady cave, guest room, home school, and sometimes office. I painted the room in a beautiful grassy green and I have a mauve couch, pink chair, and yellow sideboard. There is a disco ball and plants and framed art and drawings made by the kids and all kinds of colorful and happy things surrounding me. I wanted this space to be a reflection of me and the things I love and you would never guess the person that owned this room was ‘not creative’. 

I made mention of the troubled relationship I had with my mother but there is another figure that exists in my life that is half of me… my father… Federico Camacho. 

During the pandemic, my mother decided to go to the denial route and fell to conspiracy theories and all that. My father on the other hand decided to do the right thing and stay home, make masks, tended his garden, took up drawing, and befriended the neighborhood cat and bought it a jacket. While I grew increasingly frustrated with my mother and had to block her toxicity, my father was regularly texting me Bible verses and FaceTiming me to show off his latest garden adventures and I mine. Since I lived with my mother, that was the most influential person in my life and I realized that it was a squeaky wheel gettin the grease type situation. I kept focusing on the parts that were like hers but I rarely ever thought about how my father had made me who I am today. It was always so strange how my mother loathed all living creatures and my father would go out of his way to talk to my dogs. That part of me that is curious, creative, in tune with nature, that is my father’s contribution. I don’t know why it took a pandemic to slow me down enough to realize all I was missing out on and neglecting my relationship with my father but better now than never. 

Sometimes we feel out of place or that there’s a part of us that is not paid enough attention to. A part of us that is quieter than the other. That part of me took a whole new meaning during a time when I was unable to perform or achieve the way I normally would. I leaned into that quiet and that curiosity and found myself bewildered by it but it was right there all along, living and breathing in my father. 

It finally all made sense. 

I was Federico Camacho’s daughter too. 

40 for 40 Number 2: On Being an Enneagram 3

About… 3 years ago my former church (recently former, we dissolved and that’s a whole essay) got really into talking about the Enneagram personality test. Out of curiosity I took the test and learned to my chagrin that I was an Enneagram 3 (w4). The Achiever. “The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type: Adaptable, Excelling, Driven, and Image-Conscious”. When I read the description of my personality type I said “no, this can’t be me, this person sounds like an asshole.” So I took the test again and I got the same result. Dammit, I am the asshole.

Once I came to terms with the numbers being correct I started reading about what that personality types’ driving forces are. What makes them feel seen and appreciated. What their underlying motivations are. It was all true. I was driven by wanting to feel valuable and worthwhile, I did want to feel that I was the best and that I stood out. I was acutely aware of how I was projecting my image at work and in life. 

The 2nd day of my journal writing at age 12 had this written in it: “I have to try not to talk so much. Everyone thinks I’m a show-off. Have I got news for them. All I want is for everyone to like me and I want the teachers to think I’m smart & I know. I get really angry at my friends can’t they realize I need them? But I guess I need to change as much as they do.” Even then I knew what I wanted out of people. 

Why I wanted it is multi-layered. I realized in 2020, watching my daughter’s school experience completely taken from her and going to online schooling, that school had always been a safe space for me and a place where an adult paid attention to me and affirmed me positively. I don’t think I got any of that at home. At home I was selfish and lazy and whatever other accusations could be made of me in a home with a mother that most likely has ‘narcissistic personality disorder’. But I stood out in class and I liked it. 

I’ve learned that my personality type is very charming and a chameleon which explained why I thought I wanted to act or why I thought acting seemed easy to me. It wasn’t that I had the gift of acting like dear friends of mine do, it was that I was performing a part and that part was whatever I wanted or needed at the time. I enjoyed having large and varied groups of friends and didn’t like being tied down to one best friend or one group. My type is fickle and shallow when unhealthy, we move to the next cool thing fast. We excel in life because we want the appearance of perfection or having it all together. We want to be admired and liked by everyone. We are rarely satisfied with enough. We can never be satisfied, God I hope you’re satisfied….!

I gotta tell you, something about learning that I was not an insane person and that I fit into the characteristics of a certain type of personality that has certain tendencies and motivations was a freedom and understanding of myself I had not found in many searches. I own it to the level where I admit insane honest truths like “oh no, I’m fine to do this, I love attention” “hey you know how I think everything is a competition..” “I have to be the best at this pretty fast or I won’t care anymore” and other things. 

I check myself regularly on all these tendencies and by and large try to use them to the advantage of whatever group or work environment or organization I’m in. Naturally inclined to leadership and outspokenness I have to figure out when to put that into effect in a way that's selfless and more for the good of the team. I suffer from a deplorable excess of self-assuredness which many find baffling. Insecure about things? Millions? But by and large I walk around with confidence in who I am and what I am capable of. 

So yes, of course I am a producer. Of course I am the breadwinner. Of course I get chosen for committees and such. That’s how I’m wired. But let me tell you… none of that external fluff meant diddly squat compared to learning who I am in my identity with Christ and God and Holy Spirit. The work of mental health and healing has brought so much satisfaction to my life, more than any awards ever could. I know when the pulls to be that achiever are coming at me and when I need to listen and when I need to ignore them.

The other fun part of this equation and something that I really leaned into this pandemic has been the other side of my personality which is being a w4 (wing 4). Speaking of which… 

40 for 40: Number 1 - On Journaling

I started journaling when I was 12 years old, 2 months shy of my 13th birthday. The very first journal I bought was at the 99 Cent Store and the first entry was December 11, 1994. It had a green spine and a photo of a grey kitty cat on a branch with some pink flowers. My parents have been divorced as long as I remember and it was a dad weekend and he gave us some money to buy whatever we wanted at the store and being the stationary nerd I am I, of course, bought a blank book! I took it home and immediately started writing in it: “This is my journal. I keep it to write down my most private thoughts about everyone including myself. I want to express my feelings in many ways but everyone thinks I’m weird as it is.”

Annoyingly this will be told from the point of view of a person who’s spent time in therapy, counseling, and has learned a lot about herself and grown as a person so I’ll have very obvious notes about 12 year old me. Then again, do we want to ask a 12 year old what she thinks is going on? Doubtful it’ll reveal much. 

Now that I’ve been through the life I’ve been through and walked through the fire of childhood trauma and emerged through the grace of God and diligent work, it is still very hard for me to think about this 12 year old girl. From the time she was about 7 or 8 until who knows when she was sexually abused by her step-father. My family has 5 children and my mother, who I’ve realized later was also abused was trying her best to keep that man, was told she could not do any better or that he would hurt her if she left. I’m not sure exactly, only that I was left alone to figure out what was happening and why and I really don’t know what that poor little girl felt. We didn’t talk about feelings, we couldn’t afford that. We lived in a 2 bedroom apartment with 5 children and carving out space anywhere was near impossible. It’s clear that she needed an outlet for everything inside of her and by some miracle learned to love reading and then probably read about writing in diaries, keeping a journal. The idea came to fruition that December 1994.

I am not by any means a disciplined person or one that sticks to things. I am very fickle and very flaky but keeping a diary, writing in a journal as I refer to it to the day, made so much sense to me that it was practically breathing. It required very little money, only to buy a new one when I was near the end of the current one. And while I couldn’t talk to anyone in my family about what was going on in my life, I could pour my little traumatized heart into those books. 

Of course, nothing was written about the abuse itself. I think acknowledging it on paper would be too much. It would make it real. I reference the abuser as ‘someone I have a hatred for’ but not much else. I wrote about crushes, school, how things were boring, my family, fights with my mother, weekends with my father. There’s not much depth to gleam from those early years of journal writing only that it was a practice that carried me and has carried me to this day. Bishop Michael Curry refers to these actions as “rituals of faith”, things you do that carry you when you can’t carry yourself. I didn’t have any tools at my disposal and therapy was many decades away but I had my writing. I had this consistent practice that ebbed and flowed but was always a part of me, the place where I wrote in faith that someday it would make sense or even dare I dream, that someday it would all be better. 

Having a consistent writing space did have some side benefits like being able to crush AP history essays therefore making college a possibility. A poor Latina girl on welfare and food stamps from a family of 5 kids and a single mom dreamed of getting out and doing better and somehow that faith became a reality and I got out. I definitely thank the constant practice of writing as a way out. “I wrote my way out,” as Lin sings.

I still journal. Almost every day lately since you know… soul crushing pandemic and lots more time. When my 2nd child was born I didn’t write as much and barely had time to myself and that led to some bad PPD. A combination of things but not being able to have this very special practice was detrimental to my mental health. I never want to go back to that dark place again and so I write a lot or a little but I write out my thoughts and feelings as I had intended to when I started those 27 years ago. 

Journaling is what has lead to this rather ridiculous task I’ve given myself. But I wouldn’t be me without giving myself such a task. Speaking of which…

40 for 40: 40 Essays on Turning 40

 I will be 40 in less than a month and for some reason have the insane idea to write 40 essays on turning 40. 

Some will be long. Some will be short. Some will be funny and ridiculous. Some will be hard to read. 

Over the course of the year I'll drop them here.

So here they come. 40 for 40. 

Happy New Year 2022 & Lessons Learned in 2021

 I have been sending the same gif to anyone who sends me a "Happy New Year" Text:

Do I feel particularly happy or celebratory? No. So many factors play into this Lieutenant Dan on New Year's vibe... take a pick! COVID, kids, expectations, exhaustion from a long work year, COVID, but we know the real reason New Year's Eve became a national day of mourning:

We lost the last Golden Girl, our Rose Nylund, America's Grandma just a few weeks shy of her official 100th birthday. I gotta tell you, her death I knew, would hit me when it happened but the way it hit me was a little unexpected. I know she's a literal stranger to me but her face is in my house in multiple places and she's felt like a part of my life for decades. What a lady. What a life! I spent the last day of 2021 just watching Betty White clips, reading Betty White tweets & tributes, and watching Golden Girls episodes. I got it together enough to setup a little New Year's Eve dinner table and she was present there too. 

We celebrated at 9pm for the kids at New Year's Eve New York time. I don't think they understand New Year's other than they can make noise and throw confetti which after last year's mess we opted out. 

Matt and I watched Golden Girls episodes and watched the countdown on my Nintendo video game. We were dressed up from the top up because I'll be danged if I receive a new year without some sparkle. 

What a year these exhausted parents and partners had. It wasn't great but it wasn't bad at all. It was pretty good, an improvement over the year before for sure. We decided to focus internally on survival however we could manage it and in tiny increments we held it together. Weekly disciplines, daily practices (Matt read the Bible in a year!), breaks and breaking of rules and expectations kept us afloat. 

I made no resolutions but instead let the year reveal to me what it was gonna be and as we whittled away here and there and chucked what we didn't need and tweaked what we did like and in the end, here's my musings/learnings from 2021:

• Makeup remover is not the same as face wash. Remove the makeup, then wash your face.
• Wash and moisturize your face.
• A quick shower is possible. 
• Changing into cozy clothes is worth the effort. Take a few minutes to take the jeans off and put on sweat pants. 
• I am not responsible for that.
• Put on your oxygen mask before you help others.
• Learn to distinguish which is a hill and which is a mountain.
• Some years, we just bide our time.
• The opposite of love is selfishness.
• Freedom is in your mind. In your imagination. Freedom comes from within.
• Be gentle with yourself whenever possible.
• The shovel is the only one that gets you 8 hits on the rock in ACNH.
• Honor and keep rituals of faith. They carry you when you can't carry yourself.
• Do good because it is good to do.
• At the end of days, whose life are you living and it better be the one you fought for.
• Rest does not mean nothing.
• Live knowing you left it all in the ring.
• Love casts out fear and I want to live unafraid.

Hello 2022. 

We're gonna warm up before we run. 

And we're gonna keep a steady pace.