Guest Post: Life’s Unfair, Enjoy It! (Max Roche)

Perceived near death experiences tend to put things into perspective, as much as the real ones, as long as the feeling of your approaching end is authentic.

Some three years ago, in the middle of the summer, I started to feel some numbness in my face.  It was strange, because it was exclusively on one side of my face and it was combined with a feeling of pins and needles in one arm and one leg, on the same side.

I was a bit worried and did not quite know what to make of it. So I did the only thing I could think of (even though I knew it was stupid): I googled the symptoms. The search result/diagnosis was bad: either brain tumor or multiple sclerosis. Under either scenario, life as knew it (and, in the short term, my life itself) would be over soon.

I started to consult a neurologist, she did not see anything obvious but took it seriously enough to prescribe a brain MRI. I was scheduled to take the MRI a week later. The way I saw it, this MRI would basically tell me whether or not I was dying. And there was a good chance I was actually dying, as this was the only way to make sense of these symptoms (at least according to search algorithms).

So it did a lot of thinking that particular week. I started by feeling sorry for myself and by resenting how unfair life was. After all, I had lived an honest and decent life so far… so much for karma. Why me? Why now? 33 years old is too young to die.  Everyone would agree on that, right? And what had I accomplished so far? Not much. I didn’t get a fair shot. It really sucked…

But, as days went by, my thinking started to evolve. I had the time to look back on my years on this Earth. After all, this decent life I had lived had been rather enjoyable and these 30 + years had all been good years. Of course I had felt frustration, aggravation, disappointment, regrets, even sadness from time to time. But, overall, it had been a great life so far. Then it got me thinking… how many human beings were lucky enough to have lived such an enjoyable, 33-year long life? Out of all the human experiences that I could have lived, what were the odds that I would end up living this one?

I mean, when you think about it, the possibilities are mind boggling: out of all the human being that have ever been born, I could have been much worse. First of all, I could have been a cave man fighting for my life every day against a hostile environment. That’s not an easy life. When you are trying to feed your family as a hunter-gatherer in the middle of winter… there is no app for that! I am no paleontologist, but I am pretty sure not many cave men or women reached the age of 33. Even without going back in for thousands of years, I could have been born in the Middle-Ages, at a time when 90% of the population were basically slaves in the fields. Or, even more recently, I could have lived some of these 33 years in a war torn Europe. Had I been born in the exact same place as I have (Paris, France), only 100 years before, I would have experienced the horrors of war, all the uncertainty and fear that goes with it. When I was a kid, my great-grandmother told me stories of her older brothers who died on the front in World War I. I was too young to imagine what it was like to be one of these people, even if they were my relatives. But, for some reason, it all came back to me that week, when I thought I might be dying. I realized how easy life had been on me. Even among contemporary human beings, I could have done so much worse. I can’t imagine how hard my life would have been had I been born in Syria, Afghanistan, or even rural India. The odds for me to live these 33 years as comfortably as I have were infinitesimal.

So let’s summarize: in my life, I have never been hungry or cold for too long. I have been uncomfortable, sad, and heartbroken sometimes, but it only helped me appreciate life better. I have never felt the weight of hopelessness. I have never been deprived of my freedom and was given reasonable opportunities to define and achieve my life objectives. Above all, I have been blessed with healthy kids with a bright future ahead of them.

So what if I have to die at 33… It would suck for my wife and kids, for my parents and brothers. But these 33 good years would not be taken away from me nor would it from them. They were in our memory bank. My death would be a bucket of sad experience in an ocean of incredible luck and blessing.

In a society where most people are either bashing or trying to join the famous “top 1%”, I realized that, whether I liked it or not, I belonged to the top 0.001% most fortunate of all the 100+ billions human beings to have ever been born.

My first reaction to this thought was that I should pass it on to my kids by writing it down or recording myself somehow. But, since I was still my lazy self, I decided to wait for the results of the MRI.

As it turned out, I was fine. There was no clear medical explanation to my symptoms. But after a series of tests over a few weeks, all the lethal conditions were pretty much excluded. I was relieved obviously. I could resume the course of my life having learned a valuable lesson: never use Google to diagnose yourself (next time, I’ll try Siri)!

Jokes aside, I felt indeed wiser after this episode. I was well aware that I could lose everything overnight. I was healthy and lucky, not immune to car crashes or domestic accidents. But ever since that moment, I’ve been feeling somewhat lighter about death (about my own at least). Life is unfair, but, overall, this unfairness has favored me considerably. I don’t even feel guilty about this unfairness, because there is little I could have done to correct it. I think I should simply be grateful, enjoy and try to give back as much as possible.

I never took the time to share this piece of wisdom with my children (they are too young to understand anyway). Life caught up with me and I always had something more urgent to do than create a record of these thoughts. When Rebekah gave me carte blanche to write a guest post, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about (I just like writing, she and I have this in common). Then I realized it was the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. So here it is. I hope you enjoyed reading this. If not, at least please send the link to my kids if I get hit by a bus someday (hopefully not before they are much older). The unfairness lives on with them. They need to know how lucky they are and how grateful they should be.

30 Years in a Blur

I couldn't see the price for unleaded from the stop sign, and it was less than a quarter mile away.  The sign was huge.  The sign was illuminated.  The sign was blurry.  I tried squinting, like I do when I'm trying to see the clock on the cable box at night, but no amount of squinting was going to make those numbers clearer.

"NOOOOOOOO," I cried.  "Why?!"


You see, vision has always been something of a point of pride for me.  "Oh, you can't see that sign two blocks away in the middle of the night?  No problem, I got you."  It's like being tall and reaching things nobody else can reach.  I've come to associate it with who I am.  "You wear glasses?  What's it like to wake up in the morning and just see a blur?  I can't imagine.  That seems terrible."

I formally apologize here to anyone I've gloated to in the past about my vision.  Yeah, bad vision does suck, but it's only worse when someone's rubbing it in your face.  "What's it like to be genetically inferior to me?"  I might as well have said that.

Karma.

I told my mom the other night that I noticed my vision getting blurry, and she said, "Well, you did better than me.  I had to get glasses in college."  Really?  In college?  I don't know why, but I've always associated my mom as having decent vision in her twenties and thirties.  Sure, the forties hit and she started doing that thing where she holds papers super far from her face and squints, but that was forties.  Everybody's old and falling apart in their forties, right?

Like the time I learned that Mardi Gras isn't a national thing ("Wait, not everybody gets days off in February to catch beads?"), I'm beginning to realize not everyone has to wait until their forties to fall apart.  Some of us are starting the trend early.  Or maybe this is late?  Is this like how there's Mardi Gras in Mobile but not really?

I'm convinced that books and computers are what did me in.  I remember one sunny day in college sitting in a hammock on my then-boyfriend's front porch and looking up from the book I was reading to find that I couldn't see him clearly a few feet away.

"That's how it started with my sister," he said when I told him.
"My vision's fine," I said.  "That won't happen to me."

Apparently feelings of invincibility aren't exclusive to college males.

Eventually, I bought a kindle to reduce glare when reading outside, and then I stopped reading outside.  Maybe I could temper the damage by cutting down on eye-stressors?  An old roommate of mine--now an optometrist in the midwest--suggested eye drops and consciously blinking more as I read and watched TV.  Apparently extended periods of time without blinking cause damage.  I blinked like there was no tomorrow.

But like diets that last more than a month, eventually I gave up on the blinking and went back to staring at a computer screen for hours at a time, unblinking and bloodshot.

It wasn't until recently that I began to notice how hard it is for me to see things clearly from far away.  Can't read the fine print on the wall art anymore.  Can't read kid's handwriting from a few feet away anymore.  I haven't quite graduated to large print books yet, but give me time.  I am nearly thirty.

Nearly thirty.  I think that's why this bothers me so much.  With the milestone fast-approaching, I've started paying more attention to the body issues that have been cropping up.  Yes, I'm pretty sure I've been aging this whole time and that none of these issues are all that new (that college incident, for example, was a full nine years ago).  But society will make you think crazy things, and here I am, writing crazy things on a pseudo-Halloween Friday night when I should be out living up the last two months of my twenties.  Even when you resist peer pressure, it ends up thwarting you.

Once I started worrying about my vision, I began to notice other things.  My skin didn't have the soft and young look it used to.  My makeup-less days are a little more tired-looking than they used to be.  Twenty-three year old men have stopped paying attention to me.  My sleep has fallen into a terrible rut.

I mean, yeah, the sleep is probably mostly psychological trauma from attic rodents and living alone in a city with a crime issue.  And every day, makeup-less or not, is looking worse for wear because I'm having trouble giving a shit in the morning.  And the skin, well, the skin's been getting a lot more sun than it's ever seen its life.  So, not surprising that I'm a little rough-looking these days.

Point is, I know I'm writing crazy things.  But I can't help it.  Age.  Gah.

Pretty soon, you'll hear me talk about my hair or skin or weight the way my mom does whenever pant sizes come up.

"I have to run back to my house to get some jeans," I tell her.
"I'd offer you some of mine, but they wouldn't fit."
"I'm a size six right now," I say.  "You're not a six?"
(I'm like a man when it comes to women's pant sizes--totally clueless to anything other than what my own tags say.)
"Honey, you might be able to find a size six in the vintage closet in Matthew's room, but I haven't been a six since I was on my honeymoon and weighed a hundred and ten pounds."

The bright side of the inevitable decline into reminiscence that age brings is that I will never have to talk about back when I was 110 pounds.  Because I think the last time I was 110 pounds was when I was twelve.  And if you knew me when I was twelve, you wouldn't daydream about that time either.  Poor dental hygiene and poorly-cut hair and a serious shyness problem.  And I wore a boat hat every single day.  Nah, I'll reminisce about that brief streak in my mid-to-late twenties when I habitually dated men who were way too young for me.  I was a cougar before my time.

The truth is, I'm mostly worried about all of this aging because it's new to me.  Retinols to slow wrinkles?  Essential oils to help with sleep?  Glasses?  I'm not one of those people who used to wish they had glasses. (I learned from that time when I wished for braces, got them, and then was submitted to something akin to torture for three years).  I don't know what I'll look like in glasses.  I don't know what kind of glasses fit my face best.  I don't know what to do when I'm wearing glasses.  What if I'm playing a sport?  What if I need to lean over?  What if something hits my face? What if I scratch them?  I have scratched every single pair of sunglasses I've ever owned.

The good news is that I'm still tall.  I may lose my smooth skin, my minimal eye bags, my soft hair, and my good vision.  But at least I'm still tall.

Until the osteoporosis kicks in.

Bane of My Existence

Sub plans.  They're the worst.


In approximately one week, I will be traveling across the lake with thirty three fifth graders and six parents to spent five days in the woods learning about science.  Am I excited?  Well...


Seven years ago, I went on this trip for the first time, and it was incredible.  I bonded with my students.  We all learned things about science we didn't know before.  I checked zero emails the whole time I was there.  My biggest worry was whether or not my students washed their hands before going into a stall to avoid getting poison ivy on their bums.  We even got to have a snowball fight on our first night there.  I remember sitting on the long bus ride home at the end of the five days, thinking: Did it have to be over yet?

The second year I went was nearly equally wonderful.  I loved my class, and I'd forgotten a lot of the surprises of the program.  We get marshmallows and a campfire again tonight?  We get to pretend Mike and Ikes are bugs and eat them?  We get to go up a tree and see the forest from the top?  Yes, please!

The seventh year, not so much.  I actively avoided the small group lessons and stared at the fire or the stars instead of listening to the stories.  I even occasionally snuck off to take a nap or read a book while the kids were out with their leaders (if the program director knew this, she'd kill me...so you're sworn to secrecy).  I knew all of the surprises.  I knew all of the words to all of the surprises.

I expect this year to be much like the last year.  No surprises.  Little excitement.  It's still fun, mostly because the kids make it fun, but if I'm being honest, I miss the way it felt the first few times.  I miss the way I felt about it.

Sometimes it's hard to be away for five days for personal reasons, but the worst part is personal only in the sense that I'm personally exasperated by everything that needs to be prepped before I go.  I've got people staying at my house that weekend (which means Thursday night cleaning), I've got to pack (which I dread and thus means Thursday night packing), and I've got to write sub plans.

Ugh.  Sub plans.

If there was one thing in the world that I would like to free teachers from, it's sub plans.  I mean, no sub plans and no grading would be nice.  But eh, I'd take no sub plans.

Every year, I wonder how I'm going to keep twenty-five fourth graders busy for an hour and fifteen minutes at a time while I'm gone, and every year, I try something different.  Sometimes it's textbook work (no good, they riot).  Sometimes it's worksheet packets (no good, they finish early).  Sometimes it's stations (no good, substitutes hate stations, and it's in my best interest to keep subs happy).  So this year, I'm trying something different.

The summer after my first year of teaching, I created a website called Lusher Links that gave students a ton of options for games, interactives, and practice in math, science, and social studies.  (I don't want to brag, but I wrote the website.  Like, from scratch.  In html.  Yeah, man, I got skillz.)  After years of putting in check requests for reimbursements for the hosting and server fees, I finally wised up to free website options that the world wide web offers and transferred all of the links over to a google site.  Which is great because it links to my school email address and it's easy to edit.  It's not the prettiest, but if you've seen my bulletin boards at school, you know that "pretty" is low on my list of priorities.

Recently, I've been using it as a hub for when students do research or activities that require a lot of different websites.  Kids type slower than old people drive, so giving them a paper list with addresses to input is asking for frustration and death.  Nothing will get done.  Literally, my end of class alarm will go off, and they'll say, "But I just finished typing in the first website!"  I know that they just need typing practice, but seriously, small people.  I typed that slow when I was your age, but that's because back then personal computers were less common than Tickle Me Elmos.  Wait, Tickle Me Elmos are easy to get now, too?  I can't speak to you right now.

We've been working our way towards human systems recently in class, and so I've decided to try a modified version of the flipped classroom while I'm out.  For those who don't know what a "flipped classroom" is, it's the flip of the traditional classroom.  Instead of learning about something in class and practicing at home, you learn about it at home and practice in class--where you have someone who can help you and give you feedback.  I dig it.  While I don't expect that my classroom will ever full transform into a flipped classroom, I'm going to try something like it while I'm gone.  Students will watch videos about the circulatory system, the respiratory system, and nutrition and do activities on the computer while the sub is there.  When I return, we'll do the harder stuff.  Or at least, we'll try.

I spent about an hour and a half amassing and formatting the links for this video/activity page.  By the time I was done, the inside of my right eye was bloodshot and my vision was blurry.  (Although, I've been noticing a steady decline in my vision these days, so take that with a grain of salt.  Right now, I have to squint to see the clock on the cable box clearly...twelve feet away.  You have no idea how sad I am about this.)  Even with all that time spent staring at a screen, I still haven't written the actual plan for the sub.  Despite my copy-paste habits in sub plan writing, chances are, it'll still take me 45 minutes or more to put it together.  So basically, I'll have spent more than two hours on a lesson that will only last an hour and fifteen minutes.

And that, my friends, is why sub plans are the worst.

[Completely unrelated side note: This is my first post without mind-mapping this week.  It was an accident--oops, I forgot--but I'm kind of glad I did because I noticed how much time I spent staring off into space trying to figure out what to write.  I'm not sure how it compares in terms of time, but this mind mapping business...it's growing on me.]

Mind Mapping

So, the other day when I was musing about a potential participation in November's National Novel Writing Month, a dear and wise friend of mine sent me this email.

After reading your post about writing a novel and not editing throughout the 30,000 words, I wanted to send you the link to Daphne Grant’s posts. They’re great—and she’s got lots of tips about mind mapping and NOT editing while in idea-flow mode:

http://www.publicationcoach.com/500th-anniversary/

Hugs,

Becky

What with the Atlas-sized globe of grading on my shoulders at the end of last week, it took me a few days to click the link and read about ways to speed up my writing, but on Sunday, I finally did.

If you read the post that the above link sends you to, you'll get a few tips on writing faster.  One of the biggest strategies that this woman pushes is something called "mind mapping."  If you're an elementary school teacher, there's a good chance you've already heard of this.  You probably teach it.  In education, we tend to call it a pre-writing "web."  In any case, I clicked the link and read all about mind mapping and all of the benefits of it, and I won't lie to you, I was somewhat unconvinced.  Sure, mind mapping was probably wonderful if you spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling or playing Candy Crush on your phone because you can't think of where to begin.  But if I already have the ideas stewing in my brain, does it really help?  Does it make my writing faster?  Does it make it better?

So I started to try it.  I used it on my post Monday about suburbia.  I used it on my post yesterday about budgeting.  I even used it to create my budget.  See:

In doing so, I spent probably 5-10 minutes creating each mind map, and then I made sure not to edit anything until after I was done writing the full piece.

My take thus far?  Inconclusive.  I really can't tell if the writing is faster...or better.

It doesn't help that the two days I've used it happen to be the least-rushed, most disrupted days of writing I've had this month.  It also doesn't help that I spent a chunk of my writing time resisting the urge to edit before completion or staring at the wall, wondering if this mind mapping business isn't more trouble than it's worth.  But this woman, Daphne Grant, she lives by her mind maps, and this dear friend who emailed me, Becky, she trusts Daphne Grant's advice enough to send her blog my way.  So, I've decided to stick with it.  If nothing else, it might be valuable tool to keep me on track as I write my novel next month.

(ps. I decided to write a novel in November.  So...yeah.  Don't be surprised if the blog posts are few and far between, or if I opt out of fun things sometimes.  I promise I'll share at least some of the writing with you when I'm done, but understand that 50,000 words in 30 days will probably produce something far less crafted than I'm used to sharing.  So, critique with kindness.)

Excelling in Adulthood

I unexpectedly got the above email yesterday (by the way, the balance was WAY under $1,000), and (not unexpectedly) I proceeded to freak out.

How do I have no more money?  I just had plenty!!  I don't get paid until Friday, and I have to pay a contractor tomorrow.  I'm going to go into overdraft and then I'll have even more debt and then I won't be able to pay my mortgage and then my credit rating will drop and then everything will tailspin and I'll end up stuck in my parents' house forever!  And why is the Capital One website never working when I really need it???!!!!!  Load already!  Why aren't you loading?!?  Curse you, website updates!!!!  Just let me on so I can see the devastation firsthand!!!!!

Of course, there weren't actually any website updates being implemented at that point.  The website address had just changed, and as a result, my browser bookmark wasn't working anymore.  A quick Google search revealed as much, and I edited the bookmark so that it would perform properly again.

Which gave me time to take a deep breath.

It's been a while since my account has dipped into the low hundreds, and even longer since it's happened without me expecting it.  Ever since college (when I overdrafted on the regular, much to my parents' chagrin and my own), I've been fairly vigilant about making sure that I always have a cushion in my bank account.  When I finally got tired of paying the bank for my own overdraft mistakes, I also set up several alert notifications on my account, including one for if my account balance ever dropped below a thousand bucks.

Apparently, that alert works.

In addition to changing my notification settings, I became an insane person (as I usually do) about budgeting and tracking expenses.  I set up a detailed excel spreadsheet, and every month I would transfer all the expenses and income I had written down in my checkbook that month (aka everything) into the document.  Needless to say, this was the behavior of someone with severe control issues.  (Rumor has it, normal people don't do this.)  Then one day, I was introduced to Mint.com and a therapist, and I've shown quite of bit of progress in the letting go of insane things department.

Unfortunately, letting go is not as financially advantageous as penny pinching.  Back in the day, I had loads of money in my savings, which allowed me to travel to various places throughout the year, including an annual or biannual trans-Atlantic trip.  It was awesome.  Of course, I was miserable during the rest of the year.  But sacrifices, right?

Well, years later, with this laissez-faire attitude towards my finances (which is actually not that laissez-faire considering the amount of effort and money I've put into buying a house and saving for retirement), I find myself at something of a financial disadvantage as compared to my earlier adult years.  Sure, I had less friends back then and spent most of my money on dvd rentals and book purchases (cheaper than alcohol and restaurants, I'll tell you that much, but lonelier, too).  Still, I had more travel opportunities and more cash in the bank.  And I keep thinking, wouldn't it be nice to have a little bit of both?

Since the pendulum has made its full swing from OCD to Oh-Shit, it seems like it's about time to swing back the other way.  Hopefully with a little less force.

And so, I sat down today--on my day off of adult things like work--to do other adult things like make a budget and get a better rate on my home insurance.  The latter has meant more phone calls than I've made in two months.  The former has required me to spend a lot of time on my online banking and credit card sites, analyzing where my money is going and anticipating where I can trim costs (dammit Amazon, stop taking my money!) and where I actually need to spend more (because $40 a month in donations is pretty pathetic).

The result of all that work was a little confusing.  Here I was, with a dangerously low balance, and my budget analysis results show that I should have plenty of money left over each month to put into savings.  And yet, I drew money yesterday from my savings to avoid overdraft.

So, confusion aside, I've set a plan into motion to get my money back.  Well, not back.  That money's gone.   I've set a plan into motion to keep as much of my future money as I can.  The plan is fairly simple.  It's effectiveness is still to be determined.

Every day when I come home, I'll check receipts and online banking to record any money I've spent that day--cash or credit.  This will keep me on top of all of my expenses (aka guilt me away from overspending), and it will also help prevent cyber criminals from stealing my money without me noticing (I'm looking at you, guy who bought $1,000 in auto parts online with my credit card two months ago).

Any money I get from AirBNB will immediately go into my savings, so that one day in the hopefully near future I can finally pay off the renovation loan that I have to-date only paid 10% of.  Eventually, assuming the city doesn't shut AirBNB down, I'll reinvest the money into the house, so that my backyard doesn't look like crap and my fence isn't more horizontal than vertical.

Today, I spent about a half-hour creating monthly donation accounts with several local and international charities (ones that I had been giving to before my credit card numbers changed...oops).  Now, on the 15th of each month, money will go out to these various charities, and I will feel less like a Scrooge.

When I go out to eat, I will choose the least expensive thing on the menu that appeals to me.  When I drink, I will choose the least expense option that appeals to me.  (Because let's be real.  I'm not a foodie, and I like drinks better when I can't taste the alcohol, anyway.  The value of a more expensive beer/meal is wasted on me.)

When I go to Walgreens, I will have a list, and I will stick to it.  When I go to Amazon, I will wait at least two days before confirming a purchase.  That way if I still need it by the time it would've arrived, I know it's worth it.

I will call various insurance agencies for a quote so that I'm not spending $4600 a year in home insurance because that's CRAZY TALK.

I will go to the grocery store today and cook each night so that I'll stop eating pretzels and peanut butter (like I'm doing right now) and actually get some real food.  Before I go, I will make a list that meets my precise servings needs, including snacks so that I don't go out and buy things on my way home from school.

I will still go to therapy because God knows I'm really gonna need it now that I'm headed back to the crazy train.

On the Outside in Suburbia

Decatur, where my brother lives, is a city of families.  Full of child-centered activities and child-centered amenities.  Non-parents are definitely in the minority.  I don't think I've seen a single one in the three days I've been here.  My guess is that any non-parents who might live in Decatur are either in their houses working on becoming parents (yes, I mean it what way) or holed up in a coffee shop somewhere, scanning realtor.com as they realize what a terrible mistake they've made.  Because living in Decatur and not having kids is like marrying into a family of a different ethnicity and culture: you're the outsider, and the only thing that's likely to make you less of an outsider is having kids.

I didn't realize this when I got onto a plane Friday morning to come visit my brother and sister-in-law.  I assumed that it would be similar to the last few times I've visited, when they lived in a loft apartment right off the interstate in Atlanta.  They'd work during the week, we'd play with the kids the rest of the time, and when we walked around their neighborhood, there would be other people like me to remind me that I'm not the only person on this planet that is my age and does not have a kid.

I never thought I'd miss Atlantic Station's Target so much.

The new neighborhood is undeniably better for my brother and sister-in-law.  There are families in every house, and they've just started to bond with some of the younger ones, creating potential play dates and parent get-togethers.  I'm happy for them, truly I am.  They used to talk about how nice it would be to have parent-friends, and their dream is finally coming true.

Of course, it's not perfect.  On Sunday around 3, we drove downtown to a local book store for story time before hitting the street for a local Halloween parade, where some of their parent-friends met up with us.  Which wasn't the plan.  The plan was for everyone to meet up at one of the houses at 2:15 and walk to story time together.  I felt bad for my brother.  There we were, sitting on the steps in front of his house, wondering where everybody was, trying to call to find out where everybody was, while Alice--who had no nap whatsoever--tottered around the driveway, and Paige--who we woke up early from her nap so that we'd be on time--cried whenever you tried to get her to do anything.  Sometimes, even when you weren't.  I mean, I get it.  I recently cried into my mom's shoulder after a few sleepless nights.  But being an adult, I've learned how to hold it together when I need to.  Being a two year old, she has not.  She was GRUMPY, like tired, snot pouring from her nostrils as she screamed grumpy.  And Chris wasn't in the greatest mood, either.  Here he was, risking the wrath of Paige to be on time for parent bonding, and the other parents flaked because their kids weren't ready yet or were sleeping.

I think I hate that most about some parents.  They've always been flakes, even in their pre-children days, but now that they can blame it on their kids, they feel like they have a legitimate excuse.  (You do not!  Be realistic about the plans you make!  Call as soon as you know you're going to be late or if you can't make it!)

Story time was not bad.  But when a 28-year-old hipster walked up and took a seat in the reader's chair, I have to say, I was a little surprised.  Chris had told me that Decatur used to be a hipster's paradise, but that their northern yuppie money eventually attracted families.  I thought the hipster race had been banished by this point.  And yet, here in living flesh was a fully-committed hipster.  He wore the standard skinny jeans, plaid shirt, and knit cap, completed with glasses and ironic facial hair.  Had the other store clerks been dressed up for halloween, I would've thought it was a costume.  I couldn't stop looking at him.  Surrounded by families of all different colors, shapes, and sizes, he was the one who stuck out.  Put him in the Bywater in New Orleans, and you may not have noticed he even was there.  But Decatur is not the Bywater.  Not by a long shot.

He had middle guy's clothing choices...

...with this guy's facial hair...

...and this guy's average looks.

Of course, I was out of place, too.  I was the only non-parent, non-nanny, non-hipster at story time, and I felt it.  I carried Alice around for ego protection and read book recommendations to avoid human interaction.  Hopefully no one would ask me how old my "daughter" was.  I didn't want to sheepishly explain that I was a poser, a fifth-wheel aunt visiting Decatur.

By the time we got to the parade, there were already families lining up along the streets.  One of the sets of parents that Chris knew arrived shortly after we did, and while the kids ran around and pushed strollers with no one in them (not in the street, of course), the adults tried to talk a little.  Most of the talking centered around their children (of course), but I appreciated that a few of the parents tried to make small talk with me about non-kid things.  One had gone to UVA and had been in the Curry School, too, and one used to live in New Orleans and knew the mother of a kid I teach right now (small world!).  Otherwise, I listened quietly to the goings-on of parent-to-parent conversations: where did you get that costume, how was your kid's nap, etc.  When the parade started, I started to relax.  Between the throwing of things (candy, this time) and the music (brass band called AfroBeat), I had a super odd sensation that I hadn't had all weekend: I was comfortable in Decatur.  The parade was mostly cars and people in costumes, but it felt more like home.  It was like a Georgia-fied, more appropriate, Halloween-themed Krewe du Vieux.  The most scandalous it got was when a local belly dancing group showed up.  "They naked," Paige said, worried they'd forgotten the other part of their shirts.  My brother and I laughed.

The truth is, I'm a little worried about my future as a non-parent.  Not so much about the lack of children (if anything, I'll be glad to get some quiet when I return home).  But this weekend has gotten me thinking about the social repercussions of childlessness.  I'm worried that in time, all of my friends will have kids, and I will feel the feelings of this weekend every day of my life.  I'm an extrovert.  I need people and social activities to keep me going.  What will I do?  Will I have to make friends with much younger people?  Or way older people, like empty-nesters?  Will I have to find a contingent of other people like me, who can come out drinking on a Saturday night and we can become our own special group of outsiders: The Sometimes-Babysitters Club?  Will I have to come up with small-talk conversation starters that don't require parent knowledge but don't exclude it either, like: "How about those wars in the Middle East?  Pretty crazy, right?"

Or maybe it's not that complicated.  Maybe living in New Orleans instead of Decatur gives me some extra options.  Maybe I can just continue to live the way I currently do: amongst parents and non-parents alike, bonding over things we have in common and seeing each other when we can.  Maybe the reason I felt like an outsider this weekend wasn't because I wasn't a parent, but because I don't live here and I don't have much in common with the people I met.  Suffice it to say that had it been another city with non-parents instead, I might have felt similarly out of place.  Maybe it's not about being a parent at all.  Maybe it's about finding people who you want to talk to, no matter how much snot they have on their pants.

Guest Post: I Do It (KVH Davis)

So… Rebekah graciously asked me to write a guest post for her October blog series, and I agreed and was very flattered! At first. Then I started reading her posts and the first couple of guest posts and realized I’m probably out of my league. So I did what anyone would do in that situation… I procrastinated.

Here’s my thing. I wasn’t completely sure what it is that I have to say exactly. I was blogging a while back when I first got married and moved from New Orleans to North Carolina. It went pretty well til I started my most difficult (and ultimately final, for the time being) year of teaching elementary school. Then I got bogged down in life and stopped.

I *very* briefly started another blog when I got pregnant with my son (www.bayvh.blogspot.com if you’re interested in seeing the few posts I managed to put up). But again, work and pregnancy and the daily 2-hour naps that those two things required got in the way of continuing. Then I had a newborn, and went back to work, and well… you get the picture.

So here I am, out of excuses. I guess the real roadblock I’ve had the past few weeks to writing this guest post is… what do I have to say that is remotely interesting? I am a working mom with a physician husband, a 2-year old, and a baby due in April. Though I am thoroughly overjoyed with my life as it stands at the moment, I’m not sure it’s terribly interesting to anyone else.

Case in point: One of my oldest and dearest friends is an actress. (Like, legitimately, not in air quotes.) In one of our many text conversations recently, we were talking about everything that she has going on (scenes on network TV shows, auditions for a freaking BROADWAY SHOW), and I found myself thinking sarcastically, “Well… my toddler slept til 7 am and ate his vegetables without my resorting to bribery today, so clearly our lives are equally exciting.” I’m not usually so self-deprecating but it’s just never seemed to me like mommyhood would be all that interesting a topic for the general non-baby-having population, and that seems to be all I’ve got lately.

Look. I work very hard to make sure that I am not one of those moms women (why should I refer to myself automatically as a mom? I think to myself as I reread this post. #feminism) who defines herself entirely by her children. I do things to take care of myself and follow my interests, and frankly working is c50very important to retaining my sense of self. Here’s the thing, though: it’s really hard not to define oneself by parenthood, when having children so starkly divides one’s life into before and after.

Before you start thinking how ominous and horrible that sounds, I don’t mean that you become a different person or you lose yourself in some way. What I mean, and what I’ve finally decided this post will be about (seven paragraphs in, unless Rebekah decides - wisely - to edit down the beginning) is that my life has undergone a fundamental shift since I’ve become a parent.

Now, there have been a number of major shifts in my life. Going from high school to college, and the freedom/responsibility that accompanied it, was a major game changer for me. So too was moving home to New Orleans and starting my adult working life. Getting married, of course, was a huge and life-altering shift, though it wasn’t so much the marriage part as the move to a new state, new name, new job, and husband entering medical residency that rocked the boat.

All of these huge changes pale in comparison to becoming a parent, however. And in my opinion, here’s why: as a parent, for the first time, your life is not really about you anymore. I mean that in both a large-scale, philosophical way - in that I have one (and now two) tiny beings whose needs must come before mine - but also in a quite literal, mundane way - in that I haven’t gone to the bathroom alone in my own house in over a year, and now that we are starting to think about potty training I not only have an audience but have to narrate my bodily functions. (I like to think that it gives me a glimpse into what it was like to be Marie Antoinette or someone. It helps.)

It’s strange to sit and reflect on how vastly different my life is now than it was before I had my son. Not better and not worse, let me be clear - I am neither complaining about parenting nor getting on my high horse about how it’s the only thing that gives life meaning. It’s just different. I was so worried when I was pregnant about losing touch with friends, losing my social outlets, feeling bored/trapped/lame because children limit what you’re able to do. And it’s true, my husband and I do lament the severe lack of adult dinners at nice restaurants in our lives now, something we did quite a bit of before. And there are definitely friends I don’t see as much as I would if I didn’t have children, but there are equally if not more friends that I see more of because they also have children. Happy hours have just turned into playdates and birthday parties (wine included, frequently).

But by and large, I don’t remotely miss my life before my son. (Do I miss adults-only airplane travel? Hell to the yes. Does going to the grocery alone now feel like a vacation? You betcha.) But for the most part, everything just feels right. Not easy, and not relaxing - if you’ve ever spent more than five minutes with a two-year-old I assume you understand - but right. I thought it would be so taxing to constantly put another’s needs before my own, but in truth I don’t even do it consciously. It’s just a reflex, like when your mom has to hit the brakes on the car and puts her arm out to be your seatbelt.

As I am struggling to come up with a way to end this post that isn’t incredibly sappy (something I despise), my son looks up from lining up his Sesame Street figurines on the coffee table and comes over to me. “Mommy work,” he says definitively (I have a fantastic boss who lets me work from home some, so it’s not unusual for me to be on my computer in his presence.)

“Kind of, sweetie. Mommy’s writing something.”

“I DO IT!” he says and tries to bang on my keyboard. (This is his current motto. It’s adorable until he wants to button his own sweater when we are in a hurry. He literally CAN’T do it but God forbid I dare to help him.)

“Do you want to type something?”

“Yeah!”

Now here I am thinking, this is so great! What a perfect vignette to close this post with - it illustrates my toddler-centric life perfectly! Plus, what if he wants to type something adorable and/or profound? Like I love Mommy or I happy or any of the other precious sentences that have just begun to come out of his mouth on a daily basis?!? This is absolute gold.

“OK, sweetie. You tell me a word and I’ll tell you how to type it.”

So. Since you’ve all learned who’s really in charge here, it seems only fitting that I close with the two-year old wisdom that my son would like to impart to all of you:

ELMO.