This is much harder (and better) than I expected

How is it possible that I have gone an entire month without writing here? We are just days from Christmas and my last entry was during Thanksgiving.  It tuns out that being newly married, moving to a new home, commuting more than 1000 miles for work, overseeing ongoing home renovations and trying to keep the holidays jolly is much harder than I expected.

Dozens of times over the past few weeks I have wanted to carve out an hour to blog, but every time I open the computer I am greeted by an avalanche of unanswered emails, half checked to-do lists, and stark reminders of the writing I have to do as a contractual obligation rather than as personal journaling.  I am not sure if all 37-year-old, mom-daughter-wife-writer-teachers feel the constant threat of drowning in guilt, but I do.  No matter how much I do in a day it feels like there are still ten people who wished I'd done one more thing, answered one more email, placed one more call, graded one more paper or attended one more meeting. During the past month it has often felt like this journey has just meant a busier life, not necessarily a bigger one.  So, guilt or not, I am pausing all other obligations and taking a moment to reflect.

Here are my lessons from the last month.

Kids are ridiculously resilient.  My biggest concern about the move to New Orleans was the transition for my daughter.  Her life in New Jersey was grounded with good friends, a great neighborhood, and a familiar school.  I worried that she would be sullen and disoriented by the move. But Parker has, as always, proved to be the best among us.  She started her new school on the Monday after Thanksgiving.  One week later I went to see her sing in the holiday concert. She was standing in the front row singing a song that she had just learned during week.  She was confident and radiant.

A week later I went to school to have lunch.  When I arrived she was sitting on a bench on the playground with her arm around another student, comforting her because the girl's parents were unable to make it to the lunch.  Parker was still the new girl, but she was offering support to a long time student.

I never had any doubts about the academic choice of this school, but I worried that the social and emotional changes would be tough. Parker is still talking often about her NJ friends (she is determined to go to college with her BFF Nicole) but she is also making new friends.  She remembers her great dance and gymnastics lessons, but looks forward to her classes in New Orleans with just as much excitement. She misses having a white Christmas, but loved that just days before Christmas she could ride her bike through City Park for hours. I know all parents think our kids are the best thing since peanut butter and jelly, but this kid keeps amazing me with her joyful embrace of the changes in her life.


Time is the currency of marriage. Having maintained a long distance love, James and I are accustomed to having to having to squish our relationship into the corners of our busy lives. But our travel schedules, work responsibilities, and parental roles have made the past month particularly tough. Our texts, calls, and conversations were fast becoming business transactions. Who's picking up Parker? Are the contractors working on the bathroom today? Can you tell mom how to get to the dry cleaners? Do you need a ride to the airport? Has anyone bought groceries this week?

Last week I got the best gift of the holiday season: two full days alone with my husband.  We managed to get these days by driving my car from New Jersey to New Orleans, and the experience was delicious.

Last week James and I were both in New York for business and decided to drive the car back in order to New Orleans to avoid the extraordinary costs of shipping. This meant two days behind the wheel.  It was both a completely ordinary and somehow profoundly wonderful task. James told me dozens of stories I hadn't heard before and a few I had heard many times but still crack me up. We discovered new music.  I introduced him to my Steak-and-Shake fast food obsession. We stopped at outlet malls and finished up Christmas shopping.  The trip was a reaffirmation of the reasons I married this gentle, brilliant, hilarious, committed, sexy and unexpected man.

Renovations are even harder in smaller space. We are almost done transforming James' bachelor pad into a family home.  Thanks to the contractors we now have two working bathrooms. Thanks to James we now have a door on our bedroom. (I know! but that is another blog)  Thanks to mom, we now have a great patio with stunning potted palms and even blooming pansies. Thanks to me we have a ten foot Christmas tree and lights on the front porch.  We also have dust in every crevice, nails in the driveway, a constant stream of workers who arrive at 8AM, and a long list of "little things" that still need to be addressed.

I have lived through a major renovation before, but it was in a house that had more places to escape. When we gutted the kitchen in Princeton, we just camped out to a makeshift kitchen in the basement. When we painted one bedroom, we crashed in a different one. But in New Orleans we are living a more streamlined life.  We need every square inch and lately many of those inches have been occupied by ladders, drills, and stacks of bathroom tiles.

Still, it is amazing (and a little dusty) watching this historic home take shape around us.


Miracles Do Happen: Advent is easily my favorite time of year. It is, after all, the moment when we wait with baited breath in anticipation of a miracle. Just a month into this life altering change I am completely confident of the daily, immanent reality of the miraculous. The fact that I finally managed to take time to blog, no matter how rambling and unedited, is itself a miracle.

The First Thanksgiving

We made it to New Orleans!

On Monday night Grammy, Parker, me, the dog and two cats headed to the Newark airport. We flew during one of the biggest holiday travel weeks of the year. We flew in the midst of controversial, heightened TSA screening procedures.  Grammy has two replacement hips that always require her to be patted down because she sets off the metal detectors. TSA procedures require taking  cats out of their carriers to go through the scanner and one of our cats is an 18lb gray tabby who was not at all pleased to be in the airport. By the time I made it to our gate dragging kid, Grammy and pets I was ready for a nap (or a drink!)

We arrived in New Orleans after 10pm, retrieved the bags and made it to our new home late on Monday night. Everyone was utterly exhausted but also incredibly excited.  Construction dust and tools were everywhere. All the clothes were still in boxes as was all the bedding. But we managed to create some pallets on the floor and get a decent night's sleep...until 6AM when a dozen contractors showed up to continue work on the house. We are installing a new bathroom so that James and I will have some privacy. We are building a wall and door on Grammy's space, so that she will have some privacy. We are rebuilding the rotten side porch so that we can have some outdoor family space. And we are painting, freshening, and generally spiffying up James' historic little home. Much of the work was already done, but there is still enough work to be done to create huge clouds of dust and displace us from every room in the house.

Tuesday and Wednesday were crazy dances of family, pets and workmen. We were determined to unpack and the contractors were determined to make progress on the renovations. Parker was insistent that her dolls and bears be freed from their boxes, but her room was the main staging area for cutting tile.  It was nuts and not necessarily in a "good family fun" kind of way. It was just nuts.

 Let me be really clear, I am not a patient person.  Because I actively cultivate a calm, rational demeanor in my public appearances, those who know me only from television and radio sometimes mistakenly believe that I am patient. But those who are my intimate friends and family know all about my short fuse and my last nerve.  Travel, moving, construction and an impending holiday had exposed the tender, raw ends of every nerve in my body and I was snapping at everyone in my path.

Finally, on Thursday morning the saws and hammers fell silent. Parker's boxes were unpacked and her smiling stuffed animals greeted me first thing. Grammy had also unpacked her room and slept in her own bed. The kitchen was peaceful: every dish, pot, pan, cup and fork had found a place. James woke up first thing Thanksgiving morning and filled the house with the scent of  New Orleans chicory coffee. I felt my shoulders relax for the first time all week. I took a deep breath. I looked around and felt very grateful for this journey we are on together.

The first Thanksgiving in New Orleans was truly perfect (if a little dusty).  We had 75 degree weather that allowed Grammy to get out in the garden. James made gumbo. I baked a turkey and all the traditional sides. The four of us sat in the kitchen and shared our first holiday meal. I looked across the table at my eternally patient husband whose life had just been invaded by three women, three pets and a truckload of traditional furnishings. I felt grateful beyond speaking. In my mind I just kept saying "thank you, thank you, thank you."

We are here. We have shared our first holiday meal. We are a family.

Leaving a Mark

In just a few more days we will make the final move to New Orleans.  I will continue to commute to Princeton to teach, but Grammy, the kid, the pets, and I will soon officially call ourselves residents of New Orleans.

Over the past two months we have told everyone in our Princeton lives about the move: neighbors,  teachers, coworkers, friends, students, fellow church members. We even hosted a little farewell party during our last weekend in the New Jersey house.  Everyone has wished us well and a few people have expressed regret about losing Grammy and me in the community. But everyone, I repeat EVERYONE, who knows my kid has all but fallen prostrate on the ground, gripped her ankles, and begged me to let her stay. Over the next three days this 8 year old is the guest of honor at five different "last play dates" and farewell parties in her honor.  Parents of her classmates are offering to let her come spend the summer with them. Her dance teacher nearly wept on Thursday night. Her gymnastics teacher behaved as though I was committing a capital crime by taking my own child with me to a new city. And her classroom teacher, well she poured out such expressions of distress about my kid leaving the school that I worried she might try to hide Parker in the crafts closet on the last day.

In just a few short years this little girl has truly left her mark on Princeton, New Jersey.

When we first came to Princeton she was just a pre-schooler and we were both still filtering through the rubble of our lives that was left in the wake of my difficult divorce from her father.  I worried about her all the time. I worried that because of her father's absence and my distractions as a single, working mother that she would have a hard time developing self-confidence and trusting others enough to make friends. I worried that as one of the few African American children in her class she would not develop a good social network. I worried that teachers, parents, and other kids might judge her harshly for being black and from a single-parent, relatively moderate income household. While I was chewing my nails with worry, this kid was apparently out conquering the world, forming friendships, winning over authority figures, and developing a distinctive identity in our town.

The impending move has made my daughter's accomplishments during these last five years highly visible to me. I am incredibly proud of the girl she has become. And I am very clear that she is this girl not as a residual of my (or even Grammy's) parenting, but as an accomplishment that belongs to her. It is her resilience, her courage, her talent, her joyous embrace of life that has earned her such loving camaraderie and respect.

Just over a week ago I walked through our beloved NJ home one last time before handing over the keys to the realtor.  Stripped of the familiar furniture, the decorative art work, the life giving plants and pets, the house seemed sterile and alien, almost as though we had never lived there at all. Then I walked into the kitchen and looked up at the back splash tile over the stove. There was the tile that Parker designed and made at a local crafts store  more than four years. When we were completing the kitchen we had this tile incorporated as the focal point behind the stove. Like Parker, it is an original. When I handed over the keys to the new owners I realized that we were gone, but Parker had indeed left her mark.

I have no doubt that she will do the same in New Orleans.

Whoa! I am married...really really married

I have not written for nearly a week. And what a week it has been.

One week ago today I closed on the final sale of the New Jersey house. It was a wonderful but also bittersweet day, and it is the subject of my next entry. But I had very little time to feel wistful about the old house, because there was so much work to do getting us into our new home.  Remember, that my mom, the kid, the dog, the cats and I are all living at the extended stay hotel in Princeton. (By the way the free breakfast and on-site workout facility are enough to make me want to stay permanently.)  But while we are all in NJ for another week or so, the movers had packed our stuff and started heading down to New Orleans.

On Saturday I left the family in the hotel and went to meet James and the moving truck in New Orleans.  Next week the family will relocate, but I wanted to go in advance to get things settled a bit before the family arrives.

A few things to know about the New Orleans house.  It is a beautiful, historic, shotgun style home. It has soaring ceilings and wide plank wood floors throughout. On the first day James took me to his home, I loved it despite the fact that it had no doors, broken window panes, unfinished walls and floors and was covered in at least a foot of dust.  James bought this house in a blighted condition more than five years ago. In those years he lovingly restored this home on his own even in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the additional damage it caused. This home is truly his. It is his great project, his beloved bachelor pad, his triumphant personal space.  So when James offered to make this our family home- complete with kid, Grammy, and pets -I knew he was truly committed to making a life with me.

Over the past several weeks as Grammy and I have purged the NJ home to get ready for the downsize. And in New Orleans, James has been purging his place of its distinctive bachelor flair. To clear a room for Grammy, he has stored all of his equipment from years of a successful college DJ business. He used Craig's List to sell dozens of crates of records. When I arrived this weekend a couple guys were hauling out the bench and weights that once figured prominently in the bedroom that will now be occupied by my daughter.  He got rid of tons of clothes and made room in the closet for my wardrobe.  Honestly, it took my breath away to see the ease and graciousness with which James made room for me and for our new family.

And then...the moving truck arrived.

I thought I had purged a lot. I felt like I had given away a ton. But when that moving truck pulled up in front of the house I realized just how much I'd held onto and just how completely I'd underestimated the effects of a 1000 square foot downsizing effort. More needed to go. We started making decisions on the spot.  Within hours James managed to harness Craig's List magic to sell end tables, a washer/dryer combination and some shelves even while the movers were still bringing in boxes. Then we called family to pick up some toys that my daughter willingly donated by phone. We kept the items we really needed (beds for everyone) or that I really love (my favorite rugs and lamps).

By the end of the day I was exhausted. All my nails were broken. My feet ached.  Finally, I sat down on the couch in a room I've always thought of as "James' living room."

There, in that room, were my favorite framed prints, by mother's beloved house plants, my daughter's painted rocking chair.  It was, honestly, a little weird. James and I have very different styles. He is European, clean-line, contemporary. I am homey, traditional, ornate.  Each room of the house is now a wild, eclectic mash-up of these styles.  It works...sort of...yes, I think it works. As I sat there cocking my head to one side, considering every corner, the placement of every chair, the brown boxes stacked to the ceiling, it occurred to me that I am married....really, really, married.

My husband made room in his heart, in his life, and in his home. Together we are making a brand new family out of all the pieces and parts of our separate lives.  I looked around that room and it felt like love. Tremendous, overwhelming, inexpressible, crazy, mix-matched love. It did not look easy. It did not look settled. But it looked right.

At the top of this blog I have posted my favorite picture from our wedding. It was a moment I did not know had occurred until I saw the photos. Apparently just as the minister announced that James and I are husband and wife, my daughter leapt with spontaneous joy.  This picture captures that moment.  Honestly, when I looked around my new home on Saturday I felt my inner self jumping with that same joy.

I headed back to Princeton on Monday morning thinking, what an adventure we have begun!

Things fall apart

I have been pretty self-satisfied in my first few posts. I am happily downsizing, sharing my stuff with charities, learning I can live in a smaller space, yada yada yada. But let's be honest, this is not easy and some things have started to fray at the edges a bit.

The hotel room is totally overheated so I keep thinking it is much warmer outside than it really is. The other day I sent my kid to school in a sweatshirt and then it snowed and sleeted. Whoops.

Everything is in strange places so my mom accidently picked up the wrong prescription medicine bottle and downed two pills that she was *not* supposed to take. That meant a hurried trip to the pharmacy, but luckily no stomach pumping required. Whoops.

Parker needed to do her math homework, but apparently I had mistakenly allowed the movers to pack her "HomeLinks" workbook. It is now on a truck to New Orleans. Had to write an explanatory note to her teacher. Whoops.

I have been determined to prove that my creative writing will not be deterred by cramped living quarters. I spent more than two hours on a column last night. I was writing in a web editor instead of a document program. Lost internet connection and somehow deleted the entire piece.  Had to start again from scratch.  Screamed, cried, and missed dinner while hunched over my laptop. Whoops.

Woke up, got dressed, went to bedside table, could not find wedding ring. ANYWHERE. Crawled around on the floor. Shook cat upside down. Finally found ring, in box, in a dark corner under the bed.  Whoops.

I am stepping back and giving myself permission to recognize that even though change is good, it is not always easy. Sometimes things fall apart. And that is ok too. Ashe.

It's Done!

Just got a call from my real estate agent. The NJ house has officially closed. Farewell lovely home! Hello new adventure.

New Homes for My Stuff

Ok folks. I am basically at fifteen on a ten point stress-o-meter today.  No matter how systematically one approaches the process of moving, it always takes a million more steps than originally thought. Today I was running up and down the road getting my TV boxes mailed back to the cable company, getting the house cleaned for final walk through this afternoon, dragging all the trash to the curb for a final pick up, making sure the storage unit was returned, and oh yeah, finding a million tiny things in the corners of closets and behind doors that had been left behind by the movers. ARGGH!

I know life is going to get simpler soon, but the process of downsizing is exhausting.

Still, the best part is watching so much of my "stuff" find new homes where I know it will be better loved and put to better use. I decided to pause in the midst of this madness and share a little about how we shared our stuff as we got ready for the move.

Those business suits that are too big or too small
Donate them to Dress for Success to help women survivors get back on their feet.

That wedding dress that your daughter is NOT going to want to wear in 20 years. 
Donate it to Brides against Breast Cancer so that your joyous day will help another bride and help fight cancer.

The furniture you are holding onto that no longer fits your style, your house, or your life
Donate it to your local Habitat for Humanity where it can help new residents to start fresh with the chairs, couches, and tables that make a house feel like a home. In most places Habitat will come pick it up for you. They even carried my things out of the basement up some pretty steep stairs! Whew.

Toys that no one has played with for two years or the toaster over you never use.
Donate household items to Goodwill Industries where they will make a huge difference in the lives of so many people associated with this great organization.

All the unopened cans of soup, boxes of pasta, and pounds of sugar on your pantry shelves.
Donate them to your local food shelter. Ours went to Trenton Crisis Ministry here in New Jersey.

A ton of old clothes and the moving van coming the next day.
No one solves this better than the Vietnam Veterans of America. They come right out to your house, pick up the clothes, and put them to service for the soldiers and families who have served our country.

These are just a few of the places where I found new homes for my stuff. I'd love to hear in the comments section if you have other suggestions. This is the time of year when people often seek opportunities to give and I would be thrilled to point people in the direction of worthy causes. As we approach the holidays I hope you too might be willing to share your stuff, making your own life simpler and the lives of others richer.

See just writing about this has made my stress return to a much more normal level.