Back to school announcements

About once a year I go to see a therapist. I began after my father died, and it evolved into this annual “tune up” - that’s how I think of it. Of course, I’d go more if I needed to, but this is what works for me currently. I book the appointment and by the time I get there I’ve usually worked out whatever is ailing me. Still, it’s helpful to talk through the activities that help me feel my best (exercise, writing, good sleep) and whatever the variables are making me feel less so.

The need seems to arise every year around this time: back to school. Getting back into a rhythm after summer’s hazy days, with schedules that are mere suggestion.

It is, about this time, that I get most indignant about all I’m called to do, especially working a hybrid job that is, thankfully, flexible, but also makes it easy for me to be the go-to parent and home coordinator. Take the dog to the vet between meetings. Make yearly pediatrician’s appointments and then do all the follow-up rearranging that allows me to take my children to them on the appointed day months later, when who knows what activities will have been added to the mix. RSVP to birthday invitations. Decide on a dinner plan, oh my god, are we seriously supposed to provide dinner every single day? Surprisingly, managing it has become harder as the kids have gotten older. There are more places all three of them need to be, often at overlapping times, and activities aren’t as easy to outsource. I don’t want to outsource them. We want to be there for all of it.

I think to myself: the opposite of no flexibility shouldn’t mean that one is endlessly flexible. That anything that happens to fall upon any given day should be achievable. I think to myself: women are amazing, they shouldn’t have to be so amazing all the time.

The always-caveats, not-exactly-excuses apply, like how this gender imbalance isn’t news to anyone with similar life circumstances, like how I am married to a person with a demanding onsite job and decidedly less flexibility, who made our son a “kanban board” to help him keep track of school assignments and who turned out garage into a bar and then told me I’d be able to watch the evening news in there with a glass of wine and I was like, “Ok then, nobody knows me better than this.”

And how, because this is a broader cultural issue with a whole set of questions I’m not able to tackle on my own (like, who the hell created this system?) what I do instead is talk it though with my J, and with my friends and once a year with my therapist. I do less big-picture more productivity-focused things too like try to schedule uninterrupted times for work, writing and the minutia of daily life. It’s easier, for instance, to fill out the medical forms for the 800th year in the row (with the same information on all three of them, you guys, let’s make this electronic or something?) in one designated time block, rather than letting the nagging feeling of having to do them drag down an entire day.

I bought myself a really nice paper planner for this academic year because while we keep an digital one, I remember things better when I physically write them down.

In this paper planner I am trying to manifest what I think is one of the most meaningful practices, overriding all the hand-wringing about the rest of it, which is to do the most important things first. And if you cannot fit in the most important things along with the rest then you have to make decisions about how much you actually can fit in your life and ask the most crucial question - what is most important to you? This is something I’m trying to grapple with as we begin the 2025-2026 academic year. I am working to weave it in to the other maxims I live by, including (family, take note, I’m going to say it again) I cannot be asked to make any decisions after 8 pm.

This is why I made time for writing this morning.

And the kids, that’s an easy one. They come first. I don’t mean this in a morally superior way, and believe me when I say I’ve hightailed it out to dinner with friends more than once on frenzied nights, overjoyed to separate myself from the chaos. You know what I mean, though. The kids! It’s a way to prioritize, the only way that makes sense to me. Them over the rest.

Today, Nora started her senior year, Gabe had his first day of high school, and Aidy began sixth, marking her last year at our elementary school. What a doozy. We are looking at colleges, Gabe’s trying cross country, Aidy’s worried about how hard math will be and I’m going to keep it together emotionally, ok? (positive thinking!)

My father used to say to me and my brother - when he was trying to explain financial preparedness or how to make the most of our lives, or whatever - “Let’s say I get hit by a bus tomorrow,” and then he’d outline the principles or plans he had in mind, all casual about it. I’d be like “OH MY GOD DAD, can you not be so dramatic?” I couldn’t believe he could be that settled with his own demise as long as we, his children, had the chance to thrive. I couldn’t see past my own youthful sense of self-interest

To be clear, my dad would relay these little speeches while taking a pause from re-reading some Ralph Waldo Emerson essays, the news on mute, from his chair in the den. He’d bring it up while cutting himself a wedge of good parmesan after an afternoon nap. He was a lover of life, an avid fan of all its glories. He was simply trying to make a point and that point worked best with a “getting hit by a bus” storyline.

I didn’t get that, but I get it now. Now, following my fair-haired mermaid child to some lounge chairs by the pool on her last day of being ten-years-old this August, as she demanded that I “watch her” do the best jump ever, I totally get it. Listening from my bed, half awake, as my oldest and her friends make their way out of her bedroom, laughing, for “senior sunrise,” on the high school football field the Saturday before school began. Telling Gabe that, considering the way his musical tastes are leaning lately - exploding really, the same way I remember discovering music when I was exactly that age - he might enjoy De La Soul.

I get it, though I might not say it the way my dad did, mostly because Aidy would devolve into Shakespeare-tragedy-level histrionics if I ever said anything about getting hit by a bus, I totally get it. And if I stay focused on the feeling, it provides immediate perspective on all those other concerns, you know? Puts it all in place.

Observing them head out on new (last! first! epic!) adventures this school year, I’m oh so content to simply bask in their brightness.

Happy first days, everybody.

I’m crying, too.

Imposter syndrome, identity crises and how to find yourself in old stairways

Picking up on my last post about social media - specifically regarding feeling insecure about creating new writing-focused accounts because it felt self-important (and because social media might be the downfall of our society) - I thought I’d share more about the imposter syndrome I feel in various aspects of my life. This is a popular topic in self-help circles, and I don’t have any “help” to offer per se; only the promise of solidarity, and the recognition, as of late, that perhaps we all feel that way. Which means nobody really has to.

At the outset of this summer, we packed up our older two kids for a month at sleep away camp in Maine, with plans to stop and tour my alma mater, Boston University, on the way to drop them off. Nora’s a rising senior and our tactic has been to tour colleges in a practical manner when we can, tacking on our visits to existing trips, prioritizing seeing a wide range of campuses - different vibes and student body sizes, city vs. more secluded, etcetera.

(I like how the preceding paragraph makes it sounds like we are super chill, organized and knowledgeable in the preparing-to-apply-for-college space when, in reality, I can’t tell you, like, one fact about admissions percentages. What I can tell you is all about how nervous I was that our tour guide during one particular campus visit was going to fall down a flight of stairs because she resolutely committed to walking backwards the entire way; like she never turned around to see where she was going, not even once, which demonstrated so much integrity and was also very unnerving).

Visiting BU delivered a strong dose of nostalgia, as you might imagine. I made my family walk past Fenway Park to my freshman dorm, then over to Beacon Street to the apartment building where I lived for my junior and senior year with friends. I pointed out where PJ Kilroy’s used to be, a dive bar where we got beer by the pitcher and I played “A Message to You, Rudy” by The Specials on the jukebox every time I was there.

But while sitting through the BU information session, designed to inform the large, visiting crowd just how dynamic this university was, and the subsequent tour with an enthusiastic student studying political affairs, I was struck by a strange thought: “I went here. But did I really go here?” Like, did I take advantage of everything this place had to offer? And have I, all these years later, made the most of what was, according to the stats delivered in rapid-fire succession, an undeniably awesome education?

Even considering some caveats - that I graduated a long time ago, when BU was a different place and easier (if maybe not easy) to get into - it was, undeniably, that: an exciting, worthwhile place to be and learn.

When we finally got to the College of Arts and Sciences where, I, an English major and Philosophy minor (by determined choice, and not because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, which such a combination might cause one to assume) took nearly all my classes, I was reminded with a jolt: oh, I absolutely went here. I read Yeats in an Irish literature course and took my oral final exam on Nietzsche in my ultra-serious professor’s book-filled office. I marched up and down this sunlit stairway, drank beers in the BU pub in the bottom of the “castle” and wrote a very long paper on the incomparable mental growth that only comes from being alone (notable, as I can now say, as a fully-formed adult that my best thoughts come from engaging with others) for a beloved class taught by a semi-grumpy but also beloved professor that required the writing of a personal manifesto. He, famously, recorded his criticism and commentary by audio tape, then presented it to his awed and fearful students.

It took going back there and walking those halls, annoying tapping Nora on the shoulder more than once, and saying, “this is where I went,” to really remember and - more importantly - to connect that young student to the person I am today. The person who sometimes questions her very identify and choices which is an odd thing to do and yet, something I feel (maybe I’m wrong? tell me if I’m wrong?) a lot of us do anyway.

I’ve discussed how I’ve had a hard time calling myself a writer despite the fact that I’ve done it as an actual job. And I have a hard time calling myself a runner, even though not a week goes by that I don’t head out for a few miles; I’ve run one marathon and several halves and yet still think to myself, well, there are runners who are real runners. And then there is me.

I often think - and this one really bothers me - that, of the two of us, my husband is the one who’s “into music,” and I’m simply a passive observer, learning about new bands by proxy. When the truth is that I was browsing the shelves of Olsson’s Books and Records in Alexandria, Virginia borderline obsessively as a teenager, and later did the same at Boston’s Mass. Ave./Newbury St. Tower Records (another site, now the home of various, far less epic business and retail shops, that I eagerly showed my children on our walk through the city). I talked indie bands at 90s parties to a near-embarrassing degree.

I don’t know why I think like this; can’t provide evidence for these questionable takes. My best explanation is that it’s simply human nature to worry that everyone besides you knows what they are doing.

Going back BU was a portal to my old self and a reminder for my current one: a person who doesn’t - ever since having children threw me off course in terms of time available for leisure activities - consider herself an avid reader despite the fact that she determinedly chose an academic path in college that required near constant reading; a person who stayed up all night reading John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” in high school (of all things); who underlined sections of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella” so hard in ballpoint pen that she nearly tore the delicate pages of her Norton Anthology.

The reminder goes like: you can dig into the reserves of that old self anytime you need, you can inhabit them now. They can serve as the sturdy backdrop for something new (you can do something new, do it well, anytime you want!)

It’s a lofty line of thinking, I know, but it turns out I’m responsive to it (who would have thought that a proud English Major, Philosophy Minor would be receptive to lofty things?)

Which is why, while out running four miles the other morning, getting ready for the upcoming New Haven 20k Road Race this Labor Day - so sweaty with the humidity, running at my normal, never-fast pace - I saw another woman running the opposite way and thought, “she looks very real,” but didn’t immediately accept the statement like I normally would. I thought to myself, “And I wonder how I look to her?” A runner, after all, since high school cross country, who took the hobby to the Charles River Esplanade in Boston; to the suburban streets with a jogging stroller; to the orthopedist and the physical therapist. A personal history that answers the question, “Wait am I really?” with “Yes.”