About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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May 23, 2019
We tried being a one car family (involuntarily) and it’s just not realistic at this point of our lives with a kid and two dogs, so my enjoyment of the Bitches’ rant here had everything to do with their writing and nothing to do with my opinion.
Tami on dental health. I had never made the connection consciously but Mom was a diabetic who had serious dental problems (that I thought we had resolved) but she died young of heart issues. I have to wonder now if she would have gotten better if I had been better about making sure she had regular cleanings annually.
Angela, on living with high functioning anxiety.
Tanja’s Don’t Let Life Pass You By While Saving for the Future really hits the nail on the head with my realization this week.
Rich and Regular on Robert Smith’s amazing gift to the Morehouse 2019 graduating class: One of the worst things you could do is replace the burden of student loans with the burden of guilt disguised as gratitude.
Now I have to start reading Laura Lippman, on the strength of this essay and feeling like I like the person she is here: “Motherhood is a story where I don’t control the ending.” On second thought, I don’t think I can hang with her thrillers. Possibly too much tension.
Similarly, I’ll never read anything by this author: Dean Klein. I can’t decide which combination of adjective sums him up: ridiculous pompous entitled?
Chuck Wendig on Poop noise.
Then Sam Sykes waded in
May 20, 2019
I’ve always pushed myself professionally to be the superstar, to deliver beyond expectations, to perform at my highest possible point to justify the raises and promotions I’d then advocate for.
It was important and right for the growing my career stage of life but I deliberately slowed that pace down a bit in the last few years as I focus on my family. That tendency to operate at a fever pitch has stuck with me, though, and the decision to pursue our path to financial independence turned it back on to an unhealthy degree.
There’s a strong correlation between my job hitting the level of Unbearable Stress, my impatience with work, and desire for FIRE growing into an unmanageable monster. After half a year of every possible thing going wrong at my job, and all sorts of nonsense at PiC’s work for the past year, my brain latched onto FIRE as The Way Out. I had always been on this path subconsciously because of my health, why not crunch the numbers and make it a reality?
I planned and planned and fretted. That fretting even helped me understand an anxiety that’s been bubbling under the surface, and that was good.
What was not good? Crunching the numbers revealed how much time we still have left before we can take off into the sunset (a lot considering my nerves around the idea of age 50-55) and that was its own problem. I didn’t like discovering that we need to plan for at least 15 or more years of income-producing work, not a bit. I didn’t like the idea of having to figure out how to either hold on to my current job for a “really long time” or finding a better way to produce the same or more income. I didn’t like that this was the best case scenario because I plan for worst case scenarios, I never formulate plans that bank on everything breaking our way. That is not how life works.
All of these pointed to two big problems.
First, I was trying to resolve a short term (I hope!) problem with a long term solution. It’s no wonder that produced more worrying than it solved. While it was a distraction, and in some ways a good one because I focused deeply on streamlining our financial efficiencies, it became counterproductive. (more…)
May 17, 2019
1. Friday: I dropped small Mother’s Day notes in the mail to a few people who mean a whole lot to me. I haven’t ever been able to write them before.
2. Saturday/Sunday: As usual, JB was up bright and early and I let that early wake-up drag me out of bed earlier than usual too so that I could start the laundry and catch up on work. Made good headway (Monday will thank me) and PiC spoiled me all weekend with taking JB so I could work, rest, and generally deal. I have extremely conflicted feelings about Mother’s Day (my loss, many dear friends have lost mothers too early) and like to keep it very quiet.
3. Monday: I was stumped for dinner ideas. Thankfully, PiC steps up when my ideas run dry and took care of it.
4. Tuesday: One Day at a Time was on in the background and I really enjoy that show.
5. Wednesday: Spinach and kale greek yogurt dip + cucumbers make a good healthy snack.
6. Thursday: We traded morning routines today and it worked really well. I got the dogs walked and fed, we saw a rainbow and got drenched. He got JB ready and ze didn’t whine or complain about getting ready! (I think. I don’t know, I was busy elsewhere.)
:: Tell me some of your good things!
May 16, 2019
Matt on the cases people make against charity. I definitely have a scarcity mindset and things like the unpredictability of the health insurance landscape (an example: the squeeze of high deductible high plans) or the high cost health care in general feed mine. But I still give, one way or another, to people who need help, to small creators, to causes we care about.
Related: activism is exhausting. For those of you who care about the world as it feels like it’s disintegrating around us, especially with the attacks on reproductive rights of late, this thread helped me do a little something for the people actually on the ground fighting for those rights.
Bitches Get Riches: I Was Happy to Marry a Poor Man. Then Things Changed.
Nicole Cliffe’s told the funny version of her grandmother (CW: suicide, substance abuse, and sexual abuse) online but this is the serious version.
Men who behave like this at first look like any other men, thus I look at all of them askance until I KNOW I’m safe around them. I also think he should have been moved to the worst seat and arrested coming off the plane.
Contentment is dramatically underrated.
K Wright nails what I think when people or companies like Chase are flippant about why people struggle with money.
Nicole Dennis-Benn: “I Wanted to Be a Mom. I Didn’t Want to Be Pregnant.” This is beautiful and has so much truth.
Don’t be a Natasha Tynes. I don’t get why people feel the need to police (particularly black women) people for doing necessary things like eating.
The politest (puppy) eviction
May 13, 2019
Sleep hiccups
JB has been having sporadic nightmares last and this month. It’s been frequent enough that ze has started asking us to sleep with zir because ze doesn’t want to be alone. Ze doesn’t have trouble falling asleep when left alone but there have been quite a few nights when I hear zir calling for one of us (mostly Daddy) because of some disturbance. I reassured zir firmly that I used to have lots of nightmares too when I was little and my parents never came to me because they were too tired, but I understand that nightmares can be scary and will always come if ze calls. (I was too afraid to call them because they were tired but that’s more detail than ze needs.)
I’m pretty sure some of it is fear driven but some of it is a touch of the dramatic. 2 minutes after PiC turned off the lights we heard: Mooommmmyyyyyy I’m having a nightmare!
My child, you have to be asleep to have a nightmare!
(more…)
May 10, 2019
1. Friday: A day that started too early and ended far too late – we were quite glad to close the book on it with no one MUCH the worse for having lived it. Except for the almost disastrous fibro flare up that continues to frustrate.
2. Saturday: Not that “productive” = “good” but I do enjoy a productive day that doesn’t wipe me out entirely and includes naps. It’s so satisfying. And it can only happen with a healthy husband who happily does more than his fair share to ensure I can get those naps. Today, despite a bone deep fatigue, the dogs were bathed (him) and their bedding washed (me), stocked up on groceries (him), naps were grabbed (me and JB) and two parts of PiC’s vision for organizing a messy corner of the house were picked up (him). Bet your bottom dollar that PiC did most of the heavy lifting. I like to think we do a great job of defying the norms: “married women actually do more domestic work than their single mom counterparts—provided their partner is a man.”
3. Sunday: Didn’t do a lick of work-work because I was so tired this weekend and I’m just glad that I was able to get some of the rest that was desperately needed. PiC got to have his morning outing, JB and I hung out all morning not bothering with any of the usual routine until we brunched at 11:30.
4. Monday: Caught up on a healthy amount of the workload that would normally have been winnowed down by a few hours over the weekend so it’s ok! I can preserve our weekends sometimes!
5. Tuesday: USPS managed to lose a week of our mail which happens to include some really important stuff, so I reported it today. Cross your fingers it all turns up?? Also I cooked two days’ worth of food so dinners are set for a couple nights. Go me.
6. Wednesday: I was having a pretty tough day and needed some wisdom from a soul sister. Three texts later, a dear friend and mentor was asking me probing questions that helped me see to the heart of my problems and find patterns and solutions, sharing personal stories for me to learn from, and my heart was filled with laughter and love. I’m typically anti-phone call but this was so needed.
10. Thursday: A young member of my family asked me for investing advice! 😍
:: Tell me some of your good things!
May 9, 2019
I don’t follow basketball but I enjoyed this Muffet McGraw and Peter Sagal interview.
I relate so strongly to this letter about chronic mystery illness taking away one’s identity touchstone. I felt such loss when I had to accept that my illness had irrevocably, irretrievably, altered the course of my life. It still echoes sometimes when I remember everything that I hoped to do, or the things I would still love to do but cannot. I lost a huge measure of who I was – strong, unbreakable, defiant against any and all odds, brave and undaunted by challenges (at least on the outside!).
Blogging your way to a million – but not the way you think.
Lisa of The Traumatized Budget is a writer in her mid-50s facing down some pretty serious financial circumstances. I’m not convinced that formal financial literacy is the answer though. Anecdotally I’ve seen many friends grow up with frugal and financially capable parents and they just ignored every lesson in front of them. I’m not sure how one gets past that.
Whew, talk about “who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”: Behind the New, Gloriously Queer Emily Dickinson Movie
Wild Nights With Emily spends significant time with the person Smith now knows is responsible for mutilating Emily’s letters: Mabel Loomis Todd, a woman who was having an affair with Susan’s husband (and Emily’s brother), Austin. Despite never having met Emily face-to-face, Todd acquired the letters after Emily’s death via Austin and Emily’s sister, Lavinia, and set about removing Susan from them before publishing them. “When I showed this movie to the Emily Dickinson International Society last summer,” Olnek recalls, “the president of the board said, ‘What people need to understand is that when Emily Dickinson scholarship started, people didn’t know that Mabel was Austin’s mistress. They just thought she was the nice, young wife of a faculty member at Amherst College. They didn’t understand her stakes in spinning a certain kind of story about Emily.’
Muffet McGraw