Mother Airways

"I am so sorry for you. How are you doing?" she says, squinting in the light filtering through the canopy of green leaves shading her driveway. Shuffling with age but appearing as polished as she did when she was my mother-in-law two decades ago. 

It takes a moment for me to understand what she means because the words sound like death. And I'm only there to take a carload of donations from the basement. Items my adult daughter is discarding because she is leaving for Scotland for her master's degree.

I want to say that Conner and his family left a third-floor apartment, and Alexis is leaving a basement. But I don't. I smile and tell her it is sad, but mostly I'm excited. 

She gracefully turns in her own shadow and leads me inside to a house that still feels a little like home even though I don't want it to. 

I was fifteen when I first set foot in that house; thirty when I stepped out. 

As I haul my daughter's belongings into the back of my car, just as we did with her brother a few months ago, I know I have done something right to have raised kids who are brave enough to fly the nest.

Welcome aboard Mother Airways. The airlines refer to passengers as souls. Their job is to safely move us about on our journeys. We have three souls in Alaska. One in Moscow, Idaho. Two under our roof plotting their path into the world. 

And one on her way to Scotland fulfilling a lifelong dream. 

In a half-hour, I will drive her to the airport, and we all cry. But this is the job of a mother. We hold onto them with our hearts, not our hands. 

Thank you for flying with us. Your destination awaits you.

 

 

the road

The road makes us laugh. The way it heaves, buckling at the ice below. It splits and curls like white caps. Welcome to the edge of the Alaskan Highway. I drive it like a bull rider, watching for the dip in the shoulders to tell me which way to lean. 

"You're good at this," he says from the passenger seat as the last of the Yukon peels from beneath the tires.

"I am good at it because I'm good at not trusting the road, and this road is certainly not to be trusted."

He laughs and cracks the window to smell the air.

I would stay forever in the Yukon. Tucked inside the isolation and a tent behind a bear fence. I sleep better in the shadows of mountains than buildings. And I live better in the face of real danger than I do walking with the fear in my head.

I have bitten through my lip, the metallic taste of blood minges with my cold cup of coffee. 

Wild swans swim in pairs out on the mountainous lakes. They are so white and alluring we pull over to see them. He rolls a smoke and adjusts his hat gestures from another time.

Then we get back in the car because we have somewhere to be. And that somewhere is not the Yukon; it is Alaska. So we drive the Alaskan Highway to the border and slip back into the US after four days and three nights of driving the Canadian Provinces. Passing through mountains cradling gravely blue glaciers. Watching the rivers of white water and stone roll down yawning valleys and spotting herds of bison, elk, caribou, and sheep.

All the coffee was good. I can't say the same for the beer. The road always made us laugh, but it's what is at the end of the road that makes us truly happy.

what fear creates

 

Last July, I stopped writing here. The final post was about how a man with an overflowing bucket of entitlement and anger had frightened me so badly I stopped going to the dog park. The fear of angry people pushed me into the mountains where I could hike alone. Where I felt safer stumbling through the trees in the dark than I did in the valley in the middle of the day. 

Three days a week, I would set my alarm for 4:30 AM, make coffee, grab the dogs, and drive fast to avoid people and parking issues.

Near the end of July, I had hiked most of the top of the canyon and begrudgingly shifted my hiking to lower trails. What I didn't shift was my alarm clock. One morning, I got up, a little earlier than normal, and drove half as far. I ended up on the Overlook trail hiking in swallowing darkness. 

I was so scared I forced Juneau in front and Ginger Dog behind. I didn't have a light other than my phone. 

I remember thinking I should go back. Of course, I didn't. I hiked in the dark, safely tucking into my own fear. And a conversation began playing in my head. From that conversation grew the first chapter of a book. The timing of which was unfortunate because I was just finishing a not so horrible manuscript/novel and considering attempting to publish it. 

Fear is a house of mirrors.

Sometimes it fools you. Fear can amplify, replicate, reflect, and it can create. 

This past week at work, I had a similar angry person encounter. It was a woman, and she did something I have never seen someone do. It has shaken my faith in the rules of bad behavior. It wasn't her swearing at me and threatening to "come in and kick my ass." Blowing up the phone for half an hour. Or her showing up demanding to speak to my boss. At least in my job, anger and rudeness, I know how to deal with. I am a fixer. I talk anger down. I make mad people happy. 

But this woman lied. I know people lie, but they do it when they think they can get away with it. She was so bold, so empowered, she didn't give a shit that WE both knew she was saying wasn't true. 

She accused me of doing what she had done to me, swearing, threaten her, and hanging up on her. Then she threw out another threat pretending to be a police officer, which she is not. 

And as I kept helping the customers in front of me, this woman stood two feet away, complaining loudly to the authority figure we provided for her. Sneering over at me victoriously boldface lying ABOUT ME- basically to me.

Lied about what was said, who she spoke with, who had helped her the week before. EVERYTHING she said was untrue. I couldn't interject. I couldn't defend myself. It was like being held down and being punched in the face.

She thought she had all the power and that I was helpless. And in the world of customer service, she wasn't entirely wrong. Customer service is a tar pit. It's hard to work in and not get your ethics and morals (and self-esteem) a little dirty in the name of being paid to be nice.

So it's nice that no one at my work believes her. They all have my back. Nicer still that I have witnesses to all my encounters with her. It's great that the owner researched all the data on the computer, which proves I was doing my job by the book. Except for one thing. I broke police when the week before I did the woman a "favor." After a rambling account of child support and illness, I let her prepay for a spot in a full class if it were to come available. And if not, she was to use the credit she created for the following month. 

I fucked up by being nice to her. And as far as breaking the rules, we allow people to prepay for classes as gifts, so as a rule follower, I want it noted I only bent the rule. 

But that niceness was my downfall. She knew she had pushed me the week before to get her way, and so she figured she would do it again. But it didn't work, and so she was angry. She wanted revenge, and she got it.

I am being told not to worry about it. I'm not in trouble for not doing anything wrong. I'm not in trouble for being verbally assaulted at work. That's good to know. 

Logically, of course, she was a crazy-ass woman, just walk away from her- after you do your job, of course, and after she gets her say, but you don't get yours. Don't let her bother you, just like the angry man at the dog park. Walk away. Into the mountains. Into darkness. Through fear. Into the light.

"There is a space in my mind where monsters lay in wait."

I have now written the book I will hopefully publish. And after I thank all the people who have supported me, I suppose I will thank all the angry people who made it possible to write an entirely fictitious novel about fear.

To keep down on the word count, it will simply say: fuck you.

the days that follow

I don't want to be up at 4:30AM making coffee.  I don't want to hike that trail. I don't want to be so in love with what I have learned is politely called a reactive dog. 

I don't want it to be July.

But most of all, I don't want to be on a 7-mile hike at the top of the canyon on a Sunday morning because I am too afraid to go back to Tanner.

What is there to say?  I was yelled at by a man, probably having his own bad day that had nothing to do with me.  I know, I was with Juneau, give him a couple of minutes you will find plenty of things to yell about.  

However, this man had no issue with Juneau or Ginger.  He was yelling at me. 

 Tanner, on the dog park side, is an off-leash trail every day of the week, all year long.  We go there just about every other day. Or I should say we did.  

This man decided I had let my dogs off-leash a hair too soon; a couple of feet from the arbitrary line he himself drew on the trail.  

"What makes you any different from anyone else!" he screamed repeatedly in my direction and then dramatically threw down the leashes of his 2 dogs.  

At first, I didn't even realize he was addressing me.  

There were at least 4 other dog owners with their off-leash dogs on the trail with us. My dogs were both at my feet.  And yet he was singling me out. 

Of course, knowing full well I hadn't done anything wrong I instantly began apologizing.

Most likely realizing he was actually in the wrong with me still apologizing, the angry man with his 2 dogs walked away.

I altered my route to avoid having to trail behind him the whole time but otherwise continued on our walk. We did have to pass him one more time on our way out; it was uneventful. 

Two other women who had seen it go down went out of their way to tell me how wrong he had been, laughing it off as a nutty guy. 

And I told BC you would be so proud of me I didn't even let it bother me. 

There is a space in my mind where monsters lay in wait.  

It did bother me.  It bothered me a lot.  

Finally, I had to admit I was afraid to go back.  With support from a few friends, I gathered my nerve and three days later returned with my dogs. Successfully twice saw and passed the angry little man. Problem solved. 

Only it's not. 

It's July and I now run the outside trail from 2300 to Wasatch and back. Dogless and alone as the bikers clip by me. Sometimes I startle so badly I have to stop to calm down. 

I go out in the heat on the heavily exposed blacktop walking the biggest hills, running the small ones. 

I look down at the dogs in the dog park and wonder 

what the hell I am so afraid of? But it changes nothing.

The canyon is better.  The trails yawn and stretch.  The dogs run free.  When you are alone in the city it is seen as a weakness. In the mountains, it is a strength.  

I didn't want to hike Dog Lake this morning.  It's not a trail I love but I owed the dogs something.  

Driving in the dark looking for deer stepping out from the trees I followed the canyon road to the end.  

Alone in a dark parking lot.  Alone on a dark trail.  Alone when the sun splits the trees. And alone at a beautiful mountain lake. 

Walking among the trees pockets of hidden snow, breathe the breath of winter over the smell of a distant wildfire.  The world is pine and dust nothing else even exists. 

All of it is for this dog who can't tell us about his past.  Who can't explain why some things scare him so badly while other things don't. 

I suppose the same could be said of me.   

     

lessons from home school

First of all please try to trust me when I say YOU CAN DO THIS.  You can teach your kids from home.  

I promise. 

What you probably can't do is SCHOOL at home. Trying to copy the school day isn't going to work for you or your kids.... because you aren't at school. 

The first thing you do is take all your kids' school work and put it away.  While you are doing that put away the guilt about not doing it.

The next thing you do is find your supplies. 

Pull out all your art supplies, board games, dice, cards, magazines, newspapers (even the junk mailers), interesting books, legos, straws, flashlights, spare change, toothpicks, sewing stuff, broken stuff, and if you have one a junk drawer out on your kitchen table.

What you are looking for are things that might interest your kids. Let's say you find a bag of old gummy candy or marshmallows add the toothpicks and you have a stem project. 

Put scissors on a pile of magazines (you can even use old damaged books).  Make art, make poetry, make a vision board, signs, write notes, etc. 

Make your own board game.  Make it personal about your life.

Create a newspaper: write breaking stories about members of your house, ads, weather, etc.

Pull a recipe out double it (yeah math!). But no really bake something, bake lots of somethings. Make pizza from scratch. Play with dough. 

Make a comic book. Make a storybook. Make a wanted poster. 

Listen to stories on Youtube while you paint or draw together. 

Design a park, a dream house, a treasure map.

Look up science experiments you can do.

Look up math games! So many, so much fun!!!

Clean together- yeah, clean, organize, repair, paint, cook, etc.

Play some of those board games you own.  In fact, play all of them. Make a game and a chart (yeah math).  See how many days (or hours) it takes.  

Didn't like one of them- give it to someone else or make an art project out of it.

Assign each kid to find a strange fact to share with the family. 

Create a list of interview questions and interview each other.  Call family and friends and interview them.

Egg drop!!! Remember the egg drop challenge. Do that!!!! 

Make paper airplanes.

Make a diorama. Create a dance. Play super old music.  Write a play and act it out.  Better yet, write ads for things in your house. 

Memorize a piece of poetry.  I highly recommend Shel Silverstein! 

Watch classic movies together. But don't do it in a regular way.  Create movie tickets, get your snacks together, and REALLY watch the movie together. 

Read a book together. If this seems like the greatest idea you never want to have to actually do try it this way. Find a book like Charlie and the Cholocate Factory or Alice in Wonderland (a classic that everyone thinks they know) set a goal to read 1 chapter a day. And I don't care how old your kids are.

Learn sign language. 

Pick an animal/country/person to study.  Read, draw, paint, watch youtube about your interest.

Make a lego zoo.  Write little signs for the different sights around your zoo.

Go old school with the yard games.

Teach a mini-course of auto shop, map reading, geology.

You don't need me or this random list of ideas you have the internet but if you have a challenge or a subject you want ideas for please feel free to ask.   

The main idea is learning at school looks one way because traditional SCHOOL has brick walls.  

Teachers have limited space, lots of kids, and limited resources and freedom. They spend years learning the set of skills they use to teach the way they do. 

Why is your 1st grader's homework so hard to do? Because the materials are designed to be used within the system of SCHOOL.

Teaching your kids is something you have done their whole lives. Think about it. You are their first teacher. Think of all the things you have taught them!!! 

You can do this! We all can <3 

2020

My calendar stops on March 14th, the week before the State Meet. The reds blues, and greens mark my work schedule and Beach's work schedule, our appointments, Beach's gym schedule, MVP, social activities, bills due, chores, all of it frozen on a whiteboard.

Has it really been a full work week? A Monday to Monday of life altered? That was fast...

I can say that safely because no one can come close enough to me to punch me in the face.

But yes, we have had a lot going on.  I have friends on the frontline working to save as many people as they can.  And I have elderly parents sheltering in place.

I have a partner still working, trying to do it as safely as he can for everyone.  Trying to keep work going for the workers who rely on him to put food on their tables.

My oldest son is a plumber, and he is still working.

My oldest daughter has an underlying medical condition and is in quarantine, fearing for her health and her life.

 Our youngest son was sent home from college last week, but he got stir-crazy in the city so he returned to the organic farm he lives and works outside of Cedar City, Utah.

During this time, BC was forced to travel 2x.  While he was gone, we had an earthquake of 5.7.  The aftershocks are still rolling in. 

The gym sent a conditioning program to do at home for Beach.  She began running for cardio and seemed hooked.

Utah's social gathering number is 10.  As of yesterday, our death count is 1. We are the state with the highest hoarding rate in the nation.  Police are patrolling inside the stores.

We have had to shop (3x) mainly because the grown kids keep showing up (and for care packages and RX's for Alexis), and also for fresh produce.

We have socialized thoughtfully and carefully.  We have chosen our contact risks.  We have a small circle... but they also have small circles... and their small circles have small circles.  It causes a lot of jokes about Sally; if you sleep with Sally, you sleep with everyone Sally ever slept with.

When someone leaves the yard, we yell, "Remember, don't sleep with Sally!" The way I see it, it makes just as much sense as yelling "wash your hands" to someone getting in a car.

I have seen a lot of good.  I would almost say the world looks better this way.  It's slower; it's more thoughtful and more focused on what is real. Resources are respected. Errands consolidated.

I see families out on walks. I see happy dogs. I see friends and neighbors reaching out to each other. Love and caring and kites flying.

This is the slow life that I have been living behind the fast life of being a Gym Mom for nearly a decade.  We plant a big garden, we raise hens for eggs, we homeschool, we bake (a lot), and we live close to the land.  We have a freezer full of meat that BC hunted.

I feel safe in this slow world. When I look up and out over the rim of our little farmstead, I get sad.  I think about the long stretch of not having choices about living little and slow or living big and fast.

I wonder about the surrealness of an earthquake in the middle of a pandemic.  Unbelievable. (How much I would love to be able to laugh about this with Wendi; so many things she didn't live to see...)

Those who know me have been joking that I have been preparing for this my whole life.

When I was little, I had a dollhouse. Three stories high, my dad had made it for me.  The year before that, he made me a huge train track on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood and turned it into a table attached to a pulley system so I could raise it to lay flat against my bedroom wall. When the train table was down, it was level with the third floor of the tiny house.

I would set up the dolls. Tiny bottles, plates, toys, books, mini forks, tables, beds, and porcelain dolls. Then I would run the train full throttle at a blocked track calculated to derail it straight into the dollhouse and play out the disaster.

Sometimes, I would set the dollhouse up and just shake it and play an earthquake.  Or bunker the family in one room of the house and play out a blizzard.

The disaster wasn't the fun part it was the hunkering down and the gathering of resources that I liked.  I liked to feel safe by playing out survival. I am a planner, an organizer, and a caretaker.

In adulthood and in a world of real people, I know too much to be having fun. This isn't fun. But it is what I am good at.

Only in very small moments do I get scared.  Mostly, I am sad.  I'm sad for those suffering.  I'm sad about the loss of things we haven't lost yet but soon will.

The gymnastics community is my window to the wider world. It is unimaginable these young athletes are not in the gym training. The end of the Season without warning was shocking. 

I happen to have Beach's very last floor routine from her last night at practice. Right now, I am too sad to watch it. How they will pick up and go back, I don't know.  It will cost so many of them their futures in this sport.

I look at the kids, and I wonder what happens next for them. There are a lot of unknowns. What I hope for is that when we are called out from our hiding places, we come out with renewed hearts.

Life is beauty.  Good is winning. We just need to all hold on. Take turns breaking down and building back up. There are people among us who will not see the other side of this. It's important that we walk this path in a way we want to be remembered for.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. ~Robert Frost

waiting for my life to start

The thing about depression for me is the shift in the horizon line.  

It's like you are traveling along on flat ground with everybody else, and suddenly you end up alone at the bottom of a steep valley.  

Sometimes it's a canyon or even a cave, but mostly it's a simple, plain dark valley.  Silent, cool, windswept. Grey hillsides that slope upwards alarmingly around you.

I have learned not to stop walking. 

But if I had been running or skipping before landing there, well, that's all over.  

The climb out is slow, and it hurts. Gravity is harsh. The steps are over colorless stones around leafless trees and flowerless shrubs.  The ground is mushy and damp. Not slipper but stubbornly weighted. 

Each journey out is different.  Months, weeks, days, hours... as different as the reason for falling in.  

But there are commonalities.  Like the questions that float as storm clouds: "when is my real life going to begin?" "What is the point of all this" "nothing matters," "nothing makes sense anymore"...

It's that feeling of deep failure or wasted time or inadequacy, false shadows—a threatening storm to avoid getting caught up in. A sky of doubt distracting you from moving forward.  Dark, swirling weather not to be encouraged. Tornados, not to be crossed. 

Looking like you are standing still; you walk. Seemingly getting nowhere but working harder than you think yourself capable of doing.  Walking without reason. Walking without will.  Walking without true direction. And nothing seems to change.

Yet slowly, almost unperceivable light begins to leak in. Dark greys fade to watery blues.  Green pebbles appear. Finally, there is the spot where you can see the slope breaking, giving way to flat ground. 

One foot in front of the other over the edge into a place like the sunrise. Dark and light and color all at the same time. Then the beauty of it is gone.  Spread out across the day, diluted and mundane.    

You find yourself out of the valley, back where you started right before you fell in. Standing in the pieces of your life. Gathering them up, shaking them off, and moving on. Traveling with the world once again.

The memory of the valley and its darkness rolls with you.

For me, depression is the dark contrast that makes my world so sharply beautiful. Waiting for my life to start for the hundredth time. Born over and over from the valley of darkness into a world of light.  

I am a collector of moments.