According to Trish

I never thought that I would be the person who was having a spat with her neighbor. But here we are, in a veritable turf war over dandelions.

I posted on facebook the other week that I was committing surbuban heresy by not using chemical dandelion killers on my lawn. My immediate neighbor — let’s call her “Fern” – has let me know on several occasions over the years that she hates dandelions worse than she hates Republicans and that if she sees one (a dandelion, not a Republican) she has to immediately rip it out of the ground and flog it as if she were Dick Cheney and the cursed weed was a Gitmo detainee (or something like that). After a while I got the feeling that her general outrage might just be a thinly veiled plea for a specific action on my part.

We have done the chemical treatment once or twice over the years but I try to avoid it when I can. I’m no hippie (despite the presence of a Phish CD in my hybrid vehicle — OK, two Phish CDs…) and yes, I do shave my underarms and attend to various other forms of personal groundskeeping. But I’m not a huge fan of the Suburban Steroid Lawn. Really, to me, it’s just grass. You walk on it. Animals crap on it. It’s not a carpet and I find it silly to treat it like one. Also, I have a toddler in my house. Toddlers spent 90% of their waking time on the floor. Chemicals on the lawn get tracked into the house and all over the actual carpets and floors — where my darling Little B is picking up every teensy little thing and taste testing it. Not to mention, the runoff from all the chemicals is very bad for local water sources and everyone on our street has private wells. So the way I see it, I’d rather deal with some dandelions than deal with spreading poison all over my entire lawn. (I will admit to using occasional targeted weed killers like Round Up — I just hate the idea of covering the better part of a half acre with the stuff.)

However, I know people get nuts about their yards. And after a certain age in particular, people get absolutely obsessed about their yards. I’ve seen “the change” happen to people I know…  And I would like to tell you all now that if I ever get that crazy about my grass that I would like you to take me to an art movie house and duct tape me into a seat because I will clearly need some reprogramming. It’s one thing to get some sort of peace and joy out of gardening. It’s entirely another to patrol your grass for weeds as if you were a Minuteman doing border patrol.

But even I had to admit that this year the dandelions were getting a bit much. I knew that we were probably ticking off the neighbors, which I didn’t want to do. So we bit the bullet. I nagged the husband to go outside and do the dirty deed. Our front yard is now one unbroken stretch of green.

Then there’s the back yard. Last year we removed an old above-ground pool that we inherited from the former owners. Problem is, when you remove an above-ground pool, what you’re left with is an enormous round depression in your yard that looks like a meteorite may have once landed there. And our landing sight is full of sand and rock, which is on top of a membrane that I can’t seem to dig out. Oh yeah, and there are weeds. Lots of ’em.

We let the big mess just sit last year because our financial situation was changing and we didn’t want to put out the money to pay contractors. But Tom and I both agree that it’s an eyesore and we have already starting getting estimates to get it done this year. But in the meantime, the dandelions are having a dandy time in there.

Then one day this week I returned home from picking up my daughter at school and my husband says, “You’re going to love this. Right after you left today, Fern came over and started pulling dandelions in the backyard. She left just a few minutes ago.”

Now Fern and I have always been friendly. She had keys to our house. She let our dog out a bunch of times when we were away. She once drove me to the doctor’s office when I was having strange pregnancy-related symptoms. But I have felt the tide turning in the past few years — ever since I told her that I was voting for Obama in the primaries and not Clinton. Seriously.

Now it’s important to know that this woman is home all day every day. She spends a LOT of time walking around her yard, talking on her cordless phone and smoking. So I guess she has a lot of time to look things over.

I began noticing little comments here and there after Benjamin was born. She emailed me to water our grass seed after we had some work done — I was uncertain whether to be amused or annoyed (I decided to be grateful because I honestly had forgotten). Several times she complained about leaves in her yard (that we both knew had blown over from our house) and talked about how some pine cones from her one tree fall on the other neighbor’s property and that she feels bad about it and has to go over and pick them all up.

I knew what she was getting at. But I have two small kids, a big commute every day, a job and a husband with a very hectic work schedule. And even if I didn’t, I still don’t care enough to spend time patroling her yard for foliage that might have blown over from ours.

But I couldn’t blow off the Weeding Incident. So I emailed her. I tried to be dispassionate about it and just state the facts. This is what I said:

Dear Fern,

Please do not weed our yard. I know that dandelions bother you and because of that, we treated the grass with dandelion-killing chemicals last week. I personally do not like to use chemicals unless I have to, but we felt that we should do it because we do not want to upset the rest of the neighbors.

As for the site where the pool was, we realize that it is an eyesore. There is a thick membrane underneath the sand and rock and we have decided that we want to bring someone in with heavy equipment to remove and re-grade the site. To do it ourselves would take forever and Tom’s work schedule is extremely hectic. We could not afford to have someone do it last year, as it was the first year that we didn’t have the income from Tom’s day job. We have already asked our lawn guy to give us an estimate on what he would charge to take care of it this year.

If you have concerns about our yard, please feel free to talk to us about them.

Trish

Within the hour, she approached Tom outside and returned our house key. Then I got an email which I won’t reproduce here because I don’t think it’s fair to post something she intended as a personal correspondence. But the jist of it was that she was just making a neighborly gesture but if she had known that I was so touchy she wouldn’t have. She gave me a big explanation of how dandelions are spread. She said she didn’t think much about the former pool site in our back yard, but now that I mentioned it, it probably was a big breeding ground for mosquitoes but, oh well, it’s been that way for years. And also, she will never step foot on our property again.

I replied that I had no intention of turning this into a turf war, that I just wanted to let her know how I felt. I mentioned that we’d always been neighborly and I hoped that that could continue. And I pointed out that the pool had been that way for less than a year (which made the email feel a little less magnanimous, but that one pissed me off).

So at this point… whatever. I have bigger fish to fry than getting into a pissing match over this. If she’s going to sit in her home and feel hostile toward me, so be it. But I have to admit, I was outside with the kids yesterday wondering if she was inside her house shooting daggers at me. Maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t. I honestly hope that she has something better to do.

And while I try to act like I’m above all of this, I will admit that the big joke in my house right now is, “Did you feed the dog? No? OK, don’t worry about it, I’m sure Fern will be over to do it later…”

But I’m me. And for me nothing is ever about only what it’s about. It’s all gotta go big. So my thoughts on this one are along these lines: In trying to be a good neighbor, a good citizen of the world, a good spouse, a good mother, a good sister, a good daughter, etc., how much do I need to conform to other people’s ideas of how I conduct my life? I think in a lot things, there’s what I would do based on what I want to do, and there’s what I actually do based on how it will affect the people around me. It’s a compromise — “No, I don’t really want to go to your jewelry party but you are my friend so I will show up as long as you don’t expect me to buy a bunch of expensive crap that I don’t need.”

And from the other perspective, how often do I scrutinize my friends and neighbors and expect them to live up to my expectations? Do I expect perfection? Do I make unreasonable demands on things they “should” be doing when maybe those things just aren’t important to them? Is it unfair to expect the people around me to adjust their behaviors for my own comfort? And to what extent are their quirks really affecting my day-to-day life anyway? Are they just a few dandelions on the lawn or are they causing little earthquakes?

I think the bottom line is that very few of us exist in a vacuum. I think you have to be true to yourself but be considerate to people around you. Don’t be the neighborhood jackass. Accept that people are rarely going to give you perfection — and that you will rarely have perfection to offer them. Decide what you can live with.

And if you see a few dandelions here and there, sit your ass on the grass and take a good look. They’re actually sorta pretty.

If my life were a purse, this would be the month that it got picked up and dumped out all over the couch. It’s time to sort through all the crap I’ve been carrying around. Let’s see… what has been shoved into the deep, dark corners? What is still useful and important and just needs a good wipe down? There are crumbs everywhere… too many emergency baby snacks have been left to their own devices over the last year. My children may be the constant in my life but that doesn’t mean that I have to carry their residue everywhere… I’d rather just carry them or hold their hands and walk next to them. 

Things need to be dealt with. Even if I don’t see every object every day, things are still taking up space and weighing me down. They are affecting me. I can pretend that they’re not in my purse but at some point, I’m very likely to find a melted piece of something or other congealing in the corner – possibly dripping out, even – and making a mess of everything around it. And how did this damn purse get so heavy? What have I been putting in there? Best to do the hard work of figuring this stuff out now before I have an even bigger mess and my purse gets so heavy that I can no longer walk upright. 

Someone recently said to me that you have to clean out your proverbial closets before you can put anything new in there. I like that. But it’s not a job you can do on the fly. You need to carve out some time. You need some space to spread out so you can sort, assess and decide. You need to look at that empty closet and decide if maybe it needs a paint job before put you everything back in. Maybe what it needs is pretty polka-dot wallpaper. Maybe it needs some shelves or something to help you get organized. Maybe it’s begging for a glass door so the sun can shine inside. After all, if you let the sun in that old closet, it’s less likely to get all cluttered again – dusty, ugly things like to lurk in the dark but you’re not likely to keep them around if they’re staring you in the face everyday. Maybe you even want to put a sound system in there so you can listen to music that makes you feel good. And after you do all that, maybe you find that the closet is so nice that it doesn’t even want to be a closet anymore, but part of the room. It could happen. 

And so I begin, blogmuffins. You’re all welcome in my closet anytime.

I am having what Oprah calls a full-circle moment.   I’m sitting in a certain coffeehouse near-ish to my home. I was writing about something else and it wasn’t going well. Then they put Jeffrey Gaines on the sound system. (Do you know him? You should…) It occurred to me that it was RIGHT HERE, one table away from where I’m sitting right now, when I saw Jeffrey Gaines perform for the first time several years ago. It’s not a big room and Jeffrey is a big, passionate guy. It was one of those shows were time and space sort of bend and the air gets thick with magic.

At the time, I was a new-ish mom. I didn’t get out much. As I sat there listening to these powerful songs about longing and truth and being who you really are, it occurred to me — more like hit me like an anvil over the head — that this life I was living didn’t quite fit me. I was stifled and lonely. I loved being a mom but I also wanted to be so much more. I needed to speak. I needed to find my voice. I really, really needed to start writing again — and not about OSHA violations.

And I found that what I was waiting for for so long was something that I had to give myself. I wanted permission. I wanted someone to say to me, “You have great potential. You were born to do this. You MUST write. The world needs it.” But things rarely happen like that in life. There’s no American Idol for most of us. We just do what we do — put in the work that we really want to do anyway. We put in the work whether anyone notices or not — because it brings joy, because it fulfills a need, because it makes us feel whole and allows us to appreciate life a little more. 

And now I sit here in the same place, listening to the same music four or five years later. I have not written the Great American Novel. But I have two great chapters that I’m really proud of that I think could someday germinate into something lovely. I’m not a columnist for a national publication. But I have this little blog here that a bunch of you read and I got a nice little bit of recognition for it recently. I’m not a size whatever. But my pants are loose and I’m learning how to be kind to my body. I’m not 22 and I’m glad about that because I’m a lot smarter now. I’m not meeting my husband at the door with lingerie on but we’re talking and being honest about what we need. My kids are cute and healthy and smart and funny. I feel like I’m on the path I’m supposed to be on even if it is extremely rocky sometimes.

For right now I feel like I’m pointed in the right direction. I’m not sure where I’m going to end up. But that’s OK. I have this step right here in front of me and when it’s time to take the next step, the direction will be clear.

So, little blogmuffins, what I have learned that’s worth sharing here? I’ve learned that you have to be honest. And that there are sometimes many layers to honesty and it takes time for them all to come up. But speaking that first truth, even if it’s hard and not very pretty, will start the ball rolling. I’ve learned that to live a good life, you  have to be authentic. You can’t be who other people “need” you to be — you have to be who you are. You can’t wait for someone to annoint you or validate you, you have to take those first steps forward. And I’ve learned that I am the only person inside my crazy, overactive brain. I better make sure that I’m good company.

Someone somewhere once said that an acorn can only be an oak tree. So don’t pretend to be another kind of tree if you’re not.

And with that, I will sign off, my dear, sweet bloggy pals. I wish you all an authentic day.

Dear Glee,

I want to fake a pregnancy and I want you to be the baby daddy. If I had a shiny, polyester track suit I would wear it today just so I could spend the entire day thinking about you. I want you to give me a slushy facial and then lick it off slowly. I want Mr. Schu to tell me to find myself by singing an OK song by an overrated band, backed by an impromptu collection of musicians who always seem to be hanging around waiting for me to break into song. I want to grease a Wok with the hair product in your overdone do. I want to slip a mystery pill into your drink so I can take photos of us in bed together. I want you to steal my set list for sectionals. I want you to threaten me so I can threaten you back and we can ride the currents of our underlying passion as we try to destroy each other.

I also want to finish watching the last 3/4 of last night’s episode….

Oh, Glee. What have you done to me?

Guess what, little blogmuffins? We got noticed! (I say “we” because I couldn’t do this without you.) According to Trish is Blogher.com’s Voice of the Week! Forgive me as I channel my inner Vicki Gunvalson for a quick “Woo hoo!” (Real Housewives of Orange County reference. If you didn’t know that, congratulations. You clearly have more of a life than I do.)

Here’s the link with the writeup:

www.blogher.com/blogher-voice-week-according-trish

I urge you to navigate around the site a little bit, too. Lots of thoughtful, interesting writing by lots of intelligent, fabulous women. Dig in!

I unfriended my scale. I threw it out. We’ve never been real friends anyway. My scale was one of those fake friends who pretended like it had my best interest in mind but then acted like a catty little bitch whenever it had the chance. I heard a phrase a while ago that reminded me of my scale: People who believe in brutal honesty are often more interested in brutality than honesty. Yeah.

There was no positive reinforcement from my scale. There was no “You had a great day yesterday! You said no to birthday cake and you know that you love birthday cake!  But you didn’t take any! So here! Check out THIS number, which is reflective of the emotional sacrifice that you just endured! Yippee! Go, you!”

None of that. Instead it was more like, “You saw cake. You thought about cake. I’m going to have to charge you five pounds for that.” But I didn’t eat it! Not one crumb! “Doesn’t matter. You wanted to.”

All scales must be Catholic.

So I’m done. I don’t need that kind of judgment in my life.  

I threw out my scale once before. When I was in my early 20s I moved to New Orleans and went through some life-changing stuff — living far away from my family, getting my first “grown-up” apartment on my own and also dealing with the tiny little detail of horrible, soul-crushing betrayal and heartbreak. I hit bottom. The bottom of the bottom. At one point I sat there in my apartment and said, “You know, no one knows me here. I could just stay in my apartment and quietly go crazy and turn into an alcoholic and there’s not a soul to stop me.” And I realized that that wasn’t going to be an option for me. I chose to survive as a real member of the human race. I chose to not go running home because my romantic life blew up in my face in a spectacular fashion. And I chose to be me.

So I said to myself that if someone wanted to love me, they were going to have to take me exactly as I was, at whatever weight I was. And you know what happened? My clothes started getting looser. I had to buy smaller sizes. Friends came to visit and remarked on how great I looked. And I felt good. I had no idea what I weighed but for the first time I felt like I had a decent figure.

But I didn’t stay that way, unfortunately. A couple of up-and-down years went by and then the babies came.

I don’t need much in the way of an excuse to pig out, so pregnancy was the perfect scapegoat. One of my lowest points was after my first child was born. I was downstairs early in the morning, bleary-eyed after watching bad TV all night while nursing the baby who never stopped crying. It was 6 AM and Tom came downstairs to get ready for work. He was greeted by the sight of his disheveled wife in her giant bathrobe, nursing the baby while standing in front of the TV with the phone in one hand and the credit card in the other, ordering a $300 Pilates machine from QVC. I could actually feel the crazed, guilty look in my eyes when he came down and found me there. (Which reminds me, I need to put that gadget on Craigslist — anyone want to make me an offer?)

It took forever to lose the baby weight. I thought it couldn’t be as bad the second time around. But — you guessed it — it was worse.

However, tossing that scale back in January has been empowering. Since then, I’ve dropped one pants size. And the new pants I got two weeks ago in the new size are already too big. I don’t have to unbutton my jeans to get them off — which is sure to be useful in all kinds of situations.

Granted, it has taken me a long time to get to this point. This has taken a lot of reading and self reflection. One that I really love is called I Can Make You Thin by Paul McKenna. The very over-simplifed concept of the book is that you eat when you’re hungry. You stop when you’re full. You pay attention to what you’re eating. You fully enjoy it. You eat what you REALLY want to eat, even if it’s cake. That way, you don’t get all rebellious later and binge on stuff you’re not supposed to have. (And by “you,” I mean “me.”)

And the baggier my pants get, the more motivated I am to be aware of what I’m putting in my mouth.

For example, a few days ago I was at the car dealer for a long time. By the time they were done with my car, I was starving. I haven’t had a doughnut in a really long time (for me, anyway) and decided that that was what I really wanted. It felt like a little treat to myself and I was looking forward to enjoying it on the way home in the car BY MYSELF — no kids yapping at me, no Hannah Montana on the CD player. Just NPR, me and a coffee roll. Ah.

But about halfway through the glazed mess, I realized it didn’t taste as good as I thought it would. I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. And I also wasn’t hungry anymore. So I decided to stop. Just stop. No more eating just because there happened to be food in the vicinity. In the past, stopping would’ve required me to toss the doughnut out the window so I would be FORCED to cease and desist. But not now. So I tried to put the doughnut back in the bag. But I dropped it. Near my feet. Near the brake pedal. I got scared because when I was in college a girl died because a soda can rolled behind the brake pedal while she was driving and she plowed right into an intersection.

And that’s when I realized it: This doughnut was trying to kill me! It was like it decided that if it couldn’t take me out with its fat and sugar, it was going to find another way.

I managed to wrestle it away from the brake pedal and keep the car on the highway at the same time. I returned the evil little bastard to its bag where it couldn’t hurt anyone else. It took me a minute to catch my breath but then I had to laugh. There I was, feeling so proud of my recent weight loss success. What if I had been in a fatal accident? The police report would say, “Cause of malfunction: Glazed coffee roll under brake pedal.” (Incidentally, I drive a Toyota. I wonder if that would’ve sparked a new inquiry into the cause of Toyota’s recent defects. Perhaps Toyota owners have a higher propensity to eat — and drop — baked goods while driving.)

So I survived. To write another day. To eat another day. To live. To enjoy. To quit beating myself up! To be KIND to myself! To be loving to myself so I can be loving to others. And to share another story with you all.

Have a lovely night, peeps. Watch out for those devious doughnuts.

(NOTE ON COMMENTS: I started the blog because I wanted an easier way to look back on conversations without having to weed through the landfill of my facebook account. However, some of you have mentioned that you don’t like to login to make comments. I have twice attempted to set the blog so you can comment without logging in and both times I have gotten murdered with spam. So dear friends, I ask you to please not be afraid to comment here if there’s something you want to say. It only takes a sec to login and no one else will see your email address unless you want them to. You will not get spammed in return for your comments. And that way I can look back on our conversation and remember how smart and witty you were. And how nice your hair looked when you wrote your smart, witty comments. And how nice your breath smelled. Do you want to cuddle?)

Here’s another comment from “friend #1.” He emailed it to me and asked me to post it. (He actually sent this back when the conversation was still going but I was having technical difficulties and didn’t get to it until now.)

I guess the reason I get upset when I hear about picketing at a conservative Christian school is that very often people go into a situation wanting to work through the differences verbally, but then if they don’t get the end result they wanted they resort to other means, case in point, the dating site E-Harmony. E-Harmony was created by a conservative Christian named Dr. Neil Clark Warren. A few years back the dating service was sued for not offering a gay dating service. The law suit was won and E-Harmony was forced to offer a gay dating service to complement their regular/straight service. So here is a situation where a person with conservative Christian beliefs is sued and forced to offer a dating service that is in direct violation to his morals. This was not a car dealership who denied a gay person the right to buy a car, or restaurant that wouldn’t serve a gay person, or bank that wouldn’t give a gay person a loan, or hotel that wouldn’t give a gay person a room for the night, you get the point and all of which scenarios I think would be wrong by the way, this was a non-critical service started by a Christian man. He started the service based on Christian principles and going with his conscience made a dating site for men and women that ended up being successful. Again I use the same argument here that I did for the school. Was there a shortage of gay dating sites that it was necessary to sue E-Harmony to force the founder to compromise his beliefs? Far from it. There was Match.com, Chemistry.com, Yahoo Personals, Friendfinder, Perfect Match among others that were offering services to both straight and gays. Add to that list of heavy hitters the myriad of dating services that only specifically cater to the GLBT community. So why was it exactly that E-Harmony had to be sued? This is why many conservative Christians feel that when situations arise like what happened at the school the other week that it’s only about dialogue if the person with the conservative beliefs bends. Otherwise it often seems to end up being about forcing them to bend. Religious beliefs, respect and conscience be damned! I do actually have a lot other comments regarding your response Trish from the religion angle but I’m too tired to write anymore now.

I just bought Disney grapes. I sort of hate myself. In my defense, I didn’t realize that they were Disney brand until I was at the register.

I get distrustful when a company gets that big. Coming soon: Disney trash bags! Disney drywall! Disney multi-purpose lube!

The day I have to pull Mickey’s tail to dislodge my tampon is the day that I will buy a small tent and move into the woods… where I will make friends with small woodland creatures, who will respond to my melodic whistles and sew dresses for me.

Why the need to picket a conservative Christian college for said beliefs as if a decidedly Christian school holding to such doctrine would be such an incredible shock to even the most hard core atheists? Is there such a shortfall in non-Christian colleges or even more liberal minded Christian colleges for people to attend where they could live as they please on campus, party hard, have loose sex and lead a life of general debauchery101 for their college experience with no ethical or moral code being expected of them? Why not simply um, now this is a radical idea I know…..not attend a school if they don’t believe what you believe? If you’re going to say it’s because it’s the civil rights issue of this century as the argument, then what you’re really saying is that conservative Christians, or anyone else who thinks that homosexuality and/or promiscuity is wrong, can only think what they think in private (sound familiar?) and can impose no restrictions on the attendees of their institutions regardless of whether it conflicts with their beliefs or not. If that’s the case, goodbye freedom of religion (and thought) and hello absolutism.

Dialogue is always important, but what if after the friendly, hopefully non-confrontational dialogue has taken place the school still wants to hold firm to its beliefs? Are they not permitted their beliefs at a private Christian school? What if I wanted to go to an Eastern Buddhist temple and I insisted that they serve meat in the cafeteria and started picketing them because they don’t serve meat? Why should I respect what they think, after all meat is tasty and good for you and besides that, they’re wrong to not eat meat aren’t they!?! …