Tag Archives: musings

Here to have tea

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I am behind on my column posts and the only excuse I have is that I dropped my computer in Arizona and that created a certain chain of events that have made things like posting here annoying but mostly work has been relentlessly busy in the way that has been good but also all-consuming to the point where I’m starting to miss the part where I actually climb a hilltop and find perspective every once in a while.

Good thing coaching a 4-year-old soccer team also gives me some of that.❤️🥰

And also, opportunities like the one I wrote about a few weeks ago in this column.

HERE TO HAVE TEA

Recently I spoke and sang at a local women’s event in my hometown. It was a tea party and the room was full of ladies dressed in their best seated around sweetly decorated table settings. I stood on the stage in front of them and imagined how much needed to be arranged and rearranged on their schedules to get them in these seats on a Saturday morning. The sitters or the kid’s sports runners. The newborn baby holders so she could get a shower in. The grammas leaving early for the grandkid’s birthday party they wouldn’t miss for the world. And so I said it out loud into the microphone. I said that I understand how much is going on in their lives and the schedules each one of those women had going on in the back of their minds.

 

I had just dropped my oldest daughter off at soccer camp on the way to the event and we almost didn’t make it to town because I forgot to fill up with gas on my way home from a late event the night before. Miraculously Jesus took the actual wheel and I made it the thirty miles without the assistance of a gas can. And while I sat and enjoyed my tiny sandwiches and tarts and coffee I was checking the clock to make sure I could get out of there in time to get back home and change clothes, grab a bite to eat and bring the girls back to town for a rodeo I was working.

 

My low-on-gas Chevy might have been a metaphor for my life at the moment. Also, the pile of laundry I was trying to tackle in between, and the fact that I realized for the past two-weeks I have been using dishwashing tablets instead of proper detergent in the washing machine. I suppose that’s what I get for buying the fancy, no plastic, good for the environment product with the tiny label that keeps popping up in my feed, beckoning me to be a better person the same way all the creams and exercise programs are trying to convince me my skin’s not smooth enough and I’m not lifting weights enough for my age because I’m not lifting any weights because I can’t even remember to get gas for crying out loud. 

Needless to say, I think I needed this little two-hour women’s tea as much as anyone in the room.  And, as the hired-speaker, if they were looking to me for inspiration on how to balance it all, how to make it all work together and not wake up at 2 am worrying, that’s not what I brought with me. It’s never what I bring with me. 

A bag of lettuce from my little sister’s and the bag with my daughter’s peep she’s supposed to be treating like a baby but keeps leaving in her aunt’s minivan? That I’ll bring with me…


I did, however, bring with me reminders of why living with gratitude tucked quietly in our pockets can help when we feel like we’re drowning. And probably that explains the tears that kept welling up in my eyes as I looked out at that community of women, some my dear friends, some my relatives and some I had yet to meet. I needed to hear own my words the same way I was asking them to hear the story about my dad and how he used to take us along to work cattle when we were kids, and no matter the rush we were in, he always stopped and got off his horse to pick up a fallen feather to put in our hats. With us along, he never passed up an opportunity to pick a ripe raspberry or point out a deer or pick the first crocus of spring. I know now, as an adult raising young kids in the middle of my life in the middle of a family ranch, how busy he was.  I didn’t realize then how easy it would have been for him to rush past all of the special things on the way to get work done. 

But instead, he picked up the feather. 

A picture of the first crocus my dad sent me last week, still doing the noticing for me into my adulthood
And a picture of our first calf he sent the day before

Scheduling time on a Saturday to have tea and tiny sandwiches was that feather for so many of these women in that room. Turns out, they were way ahead of me.

And I might forget the gas, and I might not take the time to read the labels, and I might have found Rosie’s lost earring by stepping on it, post up, with my bare foot last night, but I’m trying hard not to miss the tiny things that make all of this worth it. Because we are not here getting older and more wrinkly in the name of the freshest laundry. We’re here to notice that bald eagle sitting in the dead old tree every morning on our way to school. We’re here to hear the song our seven-year-old is writing in her new notebook.  We’re here to sit in a room together and talk and listen. We’re here to cry a little bit because it’s hard and we all know it but also because it’s beautiful too. 

We’re here to have tea.

To be wild with us…

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When I was a little girl, my favorite book of all time was “My Side of the Mountain.” It’s a classic, about a boy who finds himself living away from home in the wilderness of the mountains inside of a giant hollowed out tree. I can’t remember the exact story now or why he was alone out there, funny how those details escape me no matter how many times I went over the pages and marked my favorite parts. The parts where there were diagrams of how to build a fire with no supplies and something about a windmill and making a spear for fishing.

I still have the book buried somewhere deep in the rubble of the basement. It was one I could not give up to charity or to my younger sister. It’s sitting there among the books about horses and misfit dogs, prairie children and my other favorite, “Misty from Chincateague,” about two siblings who save money to save a rescued wild horse from an island.

I wanted to be these kids. I wanted to be the free-spirited girl who broke the free-spirited horse. I wanted to break the rules. I wanted to tame a wolf puppy, train a wild falcon to hunt, catch fish with a spear I sharpened out of a tree branch and exist in a faraway time where those things were necessary for survival.

Forget microwave popcorn and video games, I wanted adventure!

I’m sure I wasn’t unlike most kids at 9 or 10 or 11 years old. At that age most of us were lost in some sort of fantasy with little more confidence than we had experience at the real world. So I’d like to think that it wasn’t that unusual that as a kid who already lived about as far out in the middle of nowhere as anyone could live, I had convinced myself that I could survive out in the wilderness alone. Without a house. Or a toilet. Or my mom’s cheeseburger chowder.

In the evenings I would step off the bus from a day at country school, grab a snack, and head out up the creek behind our house. For months I would work on building what I called “secret forts” all along the creek that winds through our ranch. Looking back on it now, these forts weren’t that secret at all, in fact, you could probably see one from the kitchen window, but I was deep in my own imagination as much as I was in the oaks and brush that grew along the bank. I would identify just the right tree and use it as a frame to create a sort of tent-like structure out of fallen logs. And then I would begin the tedious process of locating and dragging fallen branches out of their place under overgrown vegetation and fallen leaves back to my tree to hoist them up to rest next to the last one I had managed to maneuver. And when it was complete I would lay down inside of it. And under the flawed “shelter” of fifty logs leaning on a tree and plan my next move. I would need a door. Yes. I could make it the way I imagined Huck Finn made his raft. I would need some rope. And a knife. I wonder if dad had an extra knife in his dresser drawer. I need some sort of blanket. Oh, and a fire. Of course!

I would be scouring the creek bottom for granite rocks to arrange in a fire circle when the sun sink down below the banks and I would decide I wasn’t quite ready to spend the night. Besides, I forgot to bring a snack and the wild raspberries weren’t quite ripe yet. Taking one last look at my creation and deciding to reevaluate the next afternoon, I would turn my back to it and follow the cow trail back toward the house where my little sister was likely lurking in the shadows, having found my path again, begging me to let her help next time. Begging me to let her in the fort as the sun gave off its last light and we argued and grappled until we could smell dad’s steaks on the grill or mom’s soup on the stove.

This was my daily ritual for months and one of my signature childhood memories. Eventually I gave in and helped my little sister build her own fort. A much smaller fort. Across the creek. Out of site. I thought I wanted to be alone out there, left to my own survival skills, but it turned out that having company was a nice addition, no matter how stubborn and annoyingly curious that company might be. So we built a tin-can telephone that stretched from my fort to hers and brought down old chair cushions from the shed, searched for wild berries, tried to catch frogs and minnows in the beaver dam and spent our evenings planning our next move: spending the night.

But we never did it. We never spent the night. Summer gave way to fall, and the leaves fell and covered the floor of our paradise. We would pull on our beanies, mittens and boots and trudge down the freezing creek to clear out the fire ring we weren’t yet brave enough to use. And then the cold set in and the snow came, and the neighbor girls called us to go sledding and our dream of being wilderness women collected snow and waited on a warmer season.

I can’t help but think about those girls on days like these when the warmer weather finally gives in and releases the snow to flow as wild water in the draws and you can smell the dirt again at long last. I get a call from my little sister. She’s driving our daughters home from town. “Can I steal your girls and bring them to the crick? The water is running, I want to take them to follow it.”

Ten-year-old me would be happy to know it, our little sister still just over the hill, a tin-can telephone call away, still following that crick and begging to be wild with us…


Five ways to love January

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Yesterday the girls Facetimed my in-laws to show them their new rooms. Their grandparents are spending the first three months or so of 2025 in the desert, away from the frigid temperature that is North Dakota. As their granddaughters pointed the phone toward their new purple walls, their grandparents talked to them about the pool and the nice weather and the hikes they are going on.  This weekend they will meet up with other North Dakotans who have fled to the south to survive the winter.

Meanwhile, back at home, we’re in the middle of the hardest three months. Between the dark and the cold, the taxes, the constant little illnesses and my husband working outside in the volatile weather, these are the days convincing the kids to get out of their warm beds and out the door is a bit more challenging.  One day on our drive to town we watched the temperature fall as the sun rose, a whole ten degrees in a matter of minutes. From 2 to -8.  No outside recess this morning, Rosie declared.

Anyway, the goal here isn’t a public complaint about North Dakota in January. If you’re reading this, you likely know what we’re in for and have long accepted it like the rest of us. But lately I’ve been thinking about the little ways I can make our already pretty good lives better and more bearable during these cold months when escaping to Arizona isn’t an option for us.

And maybe it’s more of a resolution thing, like how can we love one another better? Who doesn’t need a little extra dose of it these days, no matter the weather. If I were a magazine writer I would come up with a tidy little “How to love January” list for you, but honestly, I don’t think there’s anything tidy about my life, so I’ll just start with

Number 1: The Cooking. Lately I have had cravings for fresh vegetables and new seasonings, which is the opposite of the usual noodles and cream I want to hunker down with in the cold months. But these cravings have sent me to the kitchen with a little more enthusiasm to try a new recipe and to the grocery store to purchase ingredients I don’t keep in my cupboard. In the past few weeks of this month, between my oldest daughter’s interest in her new cookbook and my online searches, we’ve tried out five or six new recipes. Some were wins. Some were too spicy for my Midwestern pallet, and, well, our new brownie recipe was a downright flop. But it has been fun. The reward is always to see what my husband thinks. And to give him a hot meal after a long day in the cold makes me feel valuable and helpful and makes him feel cared for. Bonus is that he does the dishes and that he always gives everything a thumbs-up. Except the brownies, no one could stand behind those things. 

Chopped Thai-Inspired Chicken Salad was a hit. Here’s the link to the recipe on Pinterest
https://pin.it/5Yx57mDil

Which brings me to Number 2: The games. Over the Christmas break the girls got a few new board and card games and so we’ve tried them out only to be reminded that the only thing our daughters want in the entire world is to play games with us. Honestly. It’s as simple as that. So we’ve taught them how to play Spoons and they taught us how to play “Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza.” And if we have time for nothing else, we whip out the trivia at supper time and they’re plum happy and so are we. Games are love.

And so is snuggling, which is my number three. Intentional lingering in a hug and more of them. Movies picked out together instead of watched on separate screens in separate rooms. Sitting closer in the house. Sometimes, for someone like me who is just fine with having a wide swath of space around me, I need to be more intentional with the affection, for my family and for myself.

And then sometimes, when it’s not twenty below, we need to get our butts outside together, not just for work, but for play too. Over break I helped the girls build a couple snowmen in the yard. I had plenty of shoveling to do, but I skipped that to roll giant snowballs with them instead and it was great, of course, because building a snowman is always great. And then I took off for a walk in the hills to fill my lungs with cold air and get the blood pumping. Which is my number four. Getting my butt moving. Seasonal depression is a real thing for me and that’s why I have a treadmill and the hills. My husband and I have a loose goal of running a little race this spring (and when I say run, I mean more of a slow jog. And when I say loose, I mean we’re not aiming for any marathons here.) The two of us haven’t had a shared couple goal outside of family and business in our almost twenty years of marriage, so overcoming our shared hatred of running feels like a little thing that can connect us. How romantic.

Which brings me to the sweetness. Which is number five and maybe the most important. I have enough hustle in my life, deadlines and goals and the day to day we’ve built that keep me up at night. Stress. We all have it. And it sucks more when you can’t have a backyard barbeque or get vitamin D from the sun. So I am going to try to dig a little more gentleness out of myself to see what comes back to me in the next few months. In my tone of voice and the way I brush their hair, making his coffee and fixing their meals. Our meals. It’s for me too. The tenderness.

Except maybe when we’re playing Spoons. All bets are off then. Who needs the desert when you have a kitchen table card game and better brownies in the oven? 30 below zero, you don’t stand a chance.

May you find what you need in this construction phase of life

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For the past six months, every time we visited our local Cenex store, my daughters would pick out a color swatch from the paint section and ask to re-paint and redecorate their rooms. I would tuck the swatches, bright purple and dusty pink, inside the folds of my purse and tell them, yes, we’ll put it on the schedule, and then dread the day they would ask again.

The task of a redo — a cleanout — always feels so daunting to me. When you live in a house long enough with children, things seem to pile up in the corners and crevices of every room, stacks of papers and tiny pieces of their imagination, creations and childhood spread all about waiting for you to come digging or looking for that lost piece of paper or the most important Lego part in the world. It takes diligence to contain it and to help teach them how to do the same. Truthfully, I’m not so good at it.

While my daughters have been on winter break, I’ve done my best to focus on them in a way I don’t do as much anymore now that they are 7 and 9 and much more independent. I used to sit with them and color. I used to coordinate art projects. I used to have to supervise every outdoor excursion, cut up every meal.

I woke up sometime this year and realized I sort of miss them in a way that feels sneaky, like it would be easy not to notice. I’m nostalgic for their baby faces and their baby voices that I’ll never hear again.

And that imaginary red thread that connects me to them, it used to be close and tight, but slowly, surely, inevitably, it’s unspooling, and I’m not sure what to do with all that slack.

I suppose these are the types of musings many of us are doing at the cusp of the new year between planning the dip for the party and undecorating the Christmas tree. I want to say something profound about how the past 365 days have taught me lessons and I’ve abided, but after I am done typing this, I’m taking my daughters to town and we’re picking up a few gallons of paint and I’m doing what I’ve done all year — the next thing there is to do.

Surprisingly, lately, I don’t feel much like pontificating.

Yesterday, in preparation for painting over nail holes, scuffs and the occasional crayon mark on their walls, my oldest daughter and I unloaded the clothes from her pink hand-me-down dresser drawers and repainted them a dusty blue to match the new bedding she picked out on a recent shopping trip. She helped me unscrew the glass knobs and sand and scuff the bright pink paint, sang along with every word of every Taylor Swift song on the speaker, and made the funniest little digs and jokes as she worked, and I thought, oh yes, this girl, like me, like her father, she likes a project.

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A project. I suppose that’s it right there, the word to sum up a year if it doesn’t sum up a life. What are we doing if it isn’t project after project?

Specifically, this year featured an album release, a music video, art classes and events, and a new retail store for our non-profit, taking care of cows and bottle calves, teaching the girls about horses, a new garden spot, fences and water system fixing, and wrapping up the loose ends of a five-year-long house renovation. I just bought the toilet paper roll holder for the new bathroom last weekend, finishing one thing so we can move on to getting that wall the right lavender color for Rosie’s room.

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Putting the floor in in our new addition

Anyway, I wanted to find a way to make this New Year’s note to you inspirational even though you are all probably running into as many encouraging quotes as you can handle this time of year.

Regardless, I think I’ve finally come to what I want to say since the winding journey from the Cenex’s paint section where we started. My husband and I, when we were young and first married and searching for where to land, or where to go next, made ourselves a life motto that has carried us through this year, and all the years since, for better or for worse: Our life is a series of choices, and you’re allowed to make a new one anytime you want. If you don’t have the tools, if you don’t have the muscle, someone you know does. Replace those old knobs. Build a new wall. Take one down. Ask for help to undo the hinges.

I’m realizing now, with my daughters growing up, that I don’t want to say “right before my eyes” at the end of it all, but more “right by my side.” That red thread, when you’re building something together, it seems to tighten up a bit. That’s always been the case for my husband and me, so of course, why wouldn’t it be for our relationship with our children?

Happy New Year to you and yours. May you find what you need in the construction phase.

Mom and Daughter in the Middle

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Today, my oldest turned 9. Here she is, wearing and holding all her bday presents. Her earbuds and baby doll perfectly depict the sentiment of a girl her age ❤️

“Mom, I’m disappointed about something,” my almost-9-year-old daughter said as we were walking out the door together after school art class.

“Oh no, what is it? What happened?” I asked, knowing it could be anything from spilled milk on her favorite crispito lunch (recent occurrence), friend trouble at school, or a bad grade on a test. When you’re almost 9, the possibilities of disappointments are endless.

“It was picture retake day and …”

“Oh no,” I replied before she could even finish her sentence, suddenly remembering something that I forgot about entirely “And …”

“And Daddy did hair!”

We said it at the same time, locking eyes, her looking at me for my reaction and me looking at her in her favorite stained pink Nike sweatshirt and long, slicked-back hair. 

Was this going to be a crying situation? I wondered in the 2 milliseconds before we both busted out laughing.

“I am so sorry!” I declared between howls. “I totally forgot!”

“Well,” she replied, running both hands through her mane to mimic the slicked-back hairstyle she left the house with. “But these aren’t going on anyone’s fridge.”

“Why did it have to be the day Daddy did hair?!” I wondered out loud to the gods of parenting. “And why didn’t you tell him you don’t like your hair that way?”

“I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” she replied, melting my forgetful heart before her younger sister, decked out in a purple athletic tank top, grubby sweatpants and her sister’s hand-me-down cardigan, chimed in. “I’m pretty sure I blinked.”

I laughed and apologized all the way to the car knowing how much it must have killed my type-A oldest daughter to be surprised by the news without the picture day ritual of the special hair-do and special outfit we’ve done every picture day before, and no time to remedy her slicked-back hair in the mirror before the big “Say cheese!” I would have felt really bad about it all if we both didn’t think it was so funny.

Because this week that type-A daughter turns 9. We’ve been planning her sleepover birthday for weeks now, the cake and the food and the sleeping bag arrangement. She asked for teenager clothes. And also, maybe for the last time, a new baby doll.

Recently, during a late-night scroll session, I ran across the term “middle mom.” 

It’s a new-age term that describes the time in motherhood when a parent no longer has a baby on her hip, but she’s not planning a graduation.

She’s in between raising the “littles” and the “bigs,” with random sippy cups still shoved in the forgotten corners of her cupboard and neglected baby toys lying low in the depths of the toy boxes. I welled up by the light of my phone screen and switched to an online search for that baby doll.

Because as much as I’m a “middle mom,” my daughter is finding herself in a similar in-between phase of her girlhood, playing with her dollhouse and requesting that her hair be done like the varsity volleyball players we watched last week. 

She’s pulled to play pretend in the woods behind our house after spending the school day navigating the cliques and nuances of friend dynamics, wondering through tears why some kids can be so mean. 

She’s the teacher in the pretend classroom game with her younger sister and cousins and she’s upset when they switch mid-game to pretend they’re mermaids.

She believes in Santa Claus, but if she thinks about it too much, she knows that it’s just because she’s holding on.

Because it’s fleeting.

Reading stories to her youngest cousin

Fashion show for a friend’s children’s boutique

Darling girl, I know it, too. Some days I wish you could stay that chubby-faced, frog-catching, blue-dress-only-wearing baby girl.

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But then you look at me and laugh the laugh of a young lady who knows what’s important and what to let go. You laugh the laugh of a girl who understands how lucky she is to have a dad who does her hair and a crazy mom who forgets things and then, well, I’m so happy to be in the middle with you.

And happy to have a perfectly imperfect photo to look back on and remind me.

Taking care

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It snowed for the first time on our drive town this morning. It started with rain and then suddenly we have a new season on our hands. I was not prepared, of course. My oldest daughter doesn’t fit into her snow boots, snow pants or coat. Two of the three things are still coming in the mail. The third I forgot about until the drive to town.  I wonder how a weather change could have snuck up on me like this, as if I haven’t lived with the promise of snow any moment my entire life.

I wonder how I am surprised every time I realize my kids grow, as if I don’t watch it happening with every second helping of oatmeal and spaghetti.

Waiting around every corner is a way to fail at parenting. I spent the past three days away from my family, on the other side of the state performing and singing for my supper as I do. I never worry about leaving the kids back at the ranch with my husband on the scene because, honestly, he has about as much control as I do at any given minute, which means sometimes he doesn’t. We’re aligned in that way. Neither one of us is too uptight because we’re both bordering on being a little too laid back. And so I understand that a spic and span house is not in the cards for me when I arrive home from a long weekend away, because, frankly, it isn’t really in the cards for me when I stay home.

But when I’ve been driving for six hours and surviving on coffee and fast food and I arrive home past bedtime and find a bowl of crusty butter noodles and a bag of open and half-eaten sour cream and onion potato chips on my bedroom nightstand I couldn’t help but wonder—if the kids were going to eat every meal and snack of the day in my bed, they could have at least hidden the evidence.

Judging from the countertop relics, it looks like they had fun without me. They made brownies and quesadillas. Ate Halloween candy and made friendship bracelets. The entryway indicated they rode dirt bike and shot bows. A phone conversation said they had friends over and ate goat steaks and who knew, goat steaks are good!

I reported from the road that things were going fine. I was on my way home and I still had hours to go, so my husband stayed on the line to visit. We talked about the cows and the water tanks, holiday plans and shipping calves and the big drama that occurred when our youngest found the elf on the shelf hanging out in a drawer like a civilian stuffed animal.

It was almost a tragedy, but he saved it somehow and he thinks the magic can continue.

Like I said, a parenting fail just waiting around every corner…

On our way home from school on Election Day, my six-year-old asked me if I would be happy if she wanted to run for president. I said I would if that’s what she wanted. And then she said, “No, I don’t think I would like that. It would be like having 100 bazillion kids to take care of. That’s too much.”

The next morning, we woke up and the nation decided on a new president. Some were devastated. Some were elated. Some were just happy it was over.

And despite the six-year-old’s sentiment, or where you fall on the scale of scared and elated, I’m here to remind you, the taking care of one another has always been up to us.

Do your boots still fit? Do you have a warm coat?  Can you stay for supper?

Night worries

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This morning I dreamed of the rain.

The window to our bedroom was open and in my dreams I smelled it and heard it falling on the oak leaves still clinging tight to the branches. In our bed, between my body and my husband’s, our youngest daughter slept. Sometime during the darkest hours of the night, she wedged herself there, as she usually does, on a sleepy hunt for her father.

She is still only six. Or, she’s almost seven! She should sleep through the night on her own by now! We go back and forth on where we land with this, but in the middle of the night when the child needs someone to hold on to, neither one of us feels the need to fight it too hard. She’ll be grown soon. The bed is big enough. She won’t need us like this forever. I pull back the covers and I let her in.

I woke this morning to my alarm singing. Last week at this time, the sky would have been pink with the sunrise. This morning it was black.

“It’s time to wake up,” I huffed into the dark as my bare feet searched for the floor.

“Did it rain? Or did I dream it?”

My husband rolled over to try to wake our daughter and told me it wasn’t a dream. I pressed my face to the window screen to smell it the way I smelled it in my dream.

Even with the rain falling, my sleep wasn’t restful. My mind woke my body to worry about bills and things I shouldn’t have said and the work I should have done by now. And then enter the state of the suffering in the world, then of people I know and love, and things I can’t possibly change. Not at 3 am. Not ever.

Why is the quietest part of the night the loudest in my head?

Last week I visited a tiny town in North Dakota to play some music for a special event. In my career as a touring musician, I’ve had the privilege of learning how so many rural communities choose to bring people together, on a blocked off Main Street, in a Legion Club steel building, in an old high school gym, in parks and on patios. I perch myself up behind a microphone to tell stories to people listening intently or to a room full of folks who just want to visit, my music the backdrop to their conversations about the weather, the hay crop, the football team, the latest local tragedy or scandal. I use the word privilege because I regard the opportunity that way, even when the night is long and it feels like no one is listening. I get a front row seat to watch it all play out, who’s refilling the punch bowl and swapping the casserole dishes. Who’s folding programs and is the only one who knows how to turn on the old sound system. Who makes her rounds to each table to say hello. Who sticks around after to put away the folding chairs. Who’s kid grabs the big broom when the room is all cleared out.

Usually, I’m sent down the road with an extra centerpiece or noodle salad or a bag full of sandwiches and plenty of kind words and “thanks for coming all this way,” sometimes apologetically, as if their community isn’t as deserving of a visit as any other community in this country. 

The air feels heavy as the weight of an election year makes big waves, moving through our conversations, across our kitchen tables, streaming through our speakers, screaming in the street. I lay awake last night and wondered, after all my life experience on the road and working in small towns, why it’s easier to holler enemy than try to understand one another. We’re making rivals out of our neighbors. It’s unsettling.

If I’m being honest, I’ve written and re-written the next two paragraphs a dozen times. Because I’m not sure what to say next. Here’s what I chose: Maybe you too were up in the quiet hours of the night with a loud head and a heavy heart. Maybe you felt lonesome or helpless, even with someone lying right next to you. Maybe you stood up and walked to the kitchen to feed your body and look at the moon. Maybe you slept soundly and dreamed about rain. Maybe you didn’t sleep at all.
And maybe, in the midst of your insomnia, your daughter crawled in bed with you because she needs to be close. She needs to feel safe and loved. She needs something to hold on to.

And maybe, in the most tumultuous times, we could be brave enough to consider she’s all of us…

Memories in the closet

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My husband and I spent an entire Sunday cleaning out the closets and drawers and nooks and crannies of our bedroom in our loft in an effort to officially move into the new bedroom he built for us on the main floor of the house. This room was part of a home addition project that went on longer than…well…let’s just say babies have been born and have had their first day of school in the time it took us to finally paint the walls.

But the fact that I won’t have to climb the stairs to our bedroom with my laundry when I’m 90 and my knees are bad is something I will thank us for when I’m 90 and my knees are bad.

For over ten years we’ve been working on and living in a house that we have no plans to ever move from. And so, unlike other families, we haven’t had the whole “moving house” excuse to force us to sort through my husband’s 30-year t-shirt collection or deal with my need to have two or three pairs of boots in every color. I think the last time we tackled that project was when we moved into this house over ten years ago.

Anyway, since it should be obvious that absolutely none of my boots need to be given or thrown away, let’s talk about my husband’s inherited traits that beckon him to save things like tiny little washers and screws, bits of wire, one thousand stray plumbing parts, non-working batteries and every feed store and oil company ball cap he was ever gifted throughout his entire adulthood. The instincts he has to fight when presented with the idea that maybe he isn’t a polo-shirt kind of guy even though he owns four to five perfectly good polo shirts is distressing.

Dear Husband, you never wear these. Well, ok, maybe that one time we went on a cruise fifteen years ago. But maybe it’s time to let them go. They have collected literal dust while hanging in this closet. Maybe give the shirts to someone who spends his weekends golfing instead of fixing fences, water tanks and tractors. You are more of a snap-shirt kind of guy. Which is a good thing, because you currently own 325 of them.

Anyway, when it comes time for a great-closet-clean-out, I have implemented a system to help the poor, tortured soul. And it basically looks like me pulling out shirts and jeans so worn you can practically see through them, holding each item up so he can get a good view, giving him a beat to process his attachment, and then forcing him into a decision. Keep? Give? Toss? It’s easier if I’m the one with the garbage bags. And I don’t give him any pushback if he says keep. I have to remain an ally.

But truly, I must hand it to the man. He is as loyal as they come in the world, and that loyalty applies everywhere –even t-shirts. Which you can argue is a result of his low-key sentimentality, especially when you realize that he still has the one I bought him for his sixteenth birthday. Ask me someday about the pair of underwear he kept for long enough that the holes finally connected to turn them into a skirt.

Sentimental to the core. And a bit superstitious? Maybe.

Chad and the cat he doesn’t like

Anyway, lately my husband and I don’t spend long stretches of time together. With both of us working two to three jobs and running after our rapidly growing daughters, our idea of a date has turned into me riding along in the side-by-side to check water tanks without the kids.

And last Sunday, on a perfectly beautiful fall day, one of the last things I wanted to do was sort through piles of decisions and problems of our own making. But I caught my husband in a weak moment where he thought cleaning out the bedroom was a better option than cleaning out 85 years of stuff that has accumulated in the ranch shop, and so he joined me up there in my pursuit of a normal, tidy life.

And who knew moving dressers, throwing away three generations of cell phone boxes, flipping through half-read books and, eventually, piles and piles of t-shirts, would turn out to be a fun little exercise in reminiscing. We excavated that weird and worn “bear with the antlers” shirt he got from a thrift store in 1999 and suddenly we were back driving backroads in his Thunderbird. Two vintage camo-t-shirts that were his dad’s and he was twelve, bored in a hunting blind, waiting on a deer to walk by. Even I couldn’t let him part with those. Oh, there were plenty of plain ‘ol shirts in the pile, but when we came across one from a music festival or a band we loved, or a trip we took, we both agreed to keep those shirts, and we remembered to be grateful for it, this little mess of our own making…

Does this mean closet-cleaning qualifies as a date? In our world, probably.

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be tackling the bathroom closet, for the rest of my life…

Serenity now…

Changing the world one hairdo at a time

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News from the ranch: Rosie, my six-year-old, found out her uncle had a tiny little dirt bike in his garage and has been driving it around the loop in our yard incessantly for the past few days. This discovery was made when I left her home with my husband for a daddy-daughter weekend while I worked meetings in town and her big sister was at the sleepover of a lifetime at the lake.

As you can imagine, one sister’s announcement about a sleepover at the lake with friends could have been disastrous in the jealousy department if the next words out of my husband’s mouth weren’t, “It will be just you and me! We can do whatever we want!”

“Rollerskating?! Horse Riding?! Movie Night?! Waterpark?!”  Rosie’s list went on and on while my husband nodded and I walked out of the door that Saturday morning only to return fourteen hours later to find my youngest daughter wide awake in our big bed at 10:30 pm, my husband dozing next to her, both of them surrounded by a variety candy wrappers while a very dramatic part of the movie “Hook” played on the TV.  

“Oh, you’re still awake?” I noted, not really that surprised.

“Daddy, pass me the bubblegum would ja please?” Rosie chirped.

Turns out after they dressed up and went to town for a “fancy” supper at the steakhouse, my husband took his youngest daughter to the grocery store, let her push one of the kid’s carts, and told her to have at it in the candy section. And if you know Rosie, the girl didn’t hold back.

I looked at them all cozy in the bed after coming home from a long day of meetings and was immediately jealous. I haven’t been on a date like that with my husband in over a year. What a night!

And it turns out the day was just as good as Rosie tagged along with her dad to help with chores, played with her cousins (of course) and discovered that she was, indeed, born to be wild on that little dirt bike. Then, she returned home for lunch and to perform an extended version of her solo concert for her adoring audience of one on her guitar, singing at the top of her lungs without any threat of a “shush” coming from her big sister.

Sunday came and my husband kept the promise going (with a proper amount of prodding from his daughter). I came home in the afternoon to find them out in the yard shooting bows at the wild boar target. Rosie glanced over her shoulder at me with a slight look of annoyance and shot an arrow right over the back of that boar. “You missed all my bullseyes,” she declared, before pulling that little bow back again to prove her point. Then,  “Come watch me on this dirt bike.”

The girl was living her best life. Round and round she went, each pass reminding me that she’s the culmination of generations of adventurous men, whose next step would certainly have been to build a ramp.

I suggested we go inside and catch up and cool off before it came to that. I stood in the kitchen attempting a conversation with my husband, but Rosie made sure to remind him that the weekend wasn’t over. I stepped away to change my clothes and came back to the kitchen to find our daughter sitting on her daddy’s lap, trimmer in hand, shaping up his beard (for real), deep into a game of barber/makeover. The amount of mousse she put in his hair made a quite permanent spike on top of his head, which she was pleased with after about 20 minutes of fussing and ordering me around as her assistant.  Then she picked out his outfit (but first had to try it on herself) and off we went to my parents’ for Sunday supper, my husband in his vacation shirt, Rosie in her fancy shoes and me, charged with the task of being their pretend professional driver on their trip around their private island.

Anyway, I’m re-hashing all of this because some days I worry about raising these daughters in a world that puts on so many facades. How will they find genuine people to love? How will they keep their confidence? How can they stay brave? Will they stick to things that bring them joy? Most days parenthood is clouded with all sorts of these uncertainties.

Some days it all feels so powerless, the task of changing the world.

But last weekend I looked at my husband plopping that helmet on his daughter’s little head and hollering out encouragements as she kicked up dust. In that moment he wasn’t afraid for her, but excited to see her zoom. Happy that she was mastering something with enthusiasm. Filled with patience and adoration for his little shadow and good Lord that man. Good Lord he’s doing it, changing the world, one little girl and one rock-solid hairdo at a time.

50,000 people singing….

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I turned forty-one walking along the streets of Minneapolis. It was midnight and we were laughing, all five of us women, about something I can’t remember, something that probably wouldn’t have hit us this hard if we hadn’t just left a stadium where we sat shoulder to shoulder with 50,000 people singing along, at the top of our lungs, to our favorite songs. 

50,000 people in one place who knew all the words to the same songs.

Five women who made space in lives that overwhelm us with ways in which we might be doing it all wrong. And, if we don’t pay attention the proper amount, take or don’t take the vitamins, wear or don’t wear the thing, vote or don’t vote this way, drink or don’t drink the milk, eat or don’t eat the meal, we risk screwing it all up. The parenting. The marriage. The job. The country. The earth. It’s a heavy weight to carry and it’s hard not to sprinkle it with a little dose of guilt when you decide to spend too much money on concert tickets, leave the kids at home, throw your cutest outfit in your suitcase, take the car seats out of the minivan and drive away for a weekend spent with four women who have done their version of the same to put some space between themselves and the notion that we might not all be ok.

It’s a heavy time in the news cycle, which just happens to coincide with the time in our lives where we’ve charged ourselves with raising the future. In the early mornings when I drive that future to school, I ask each daughter and niece to pick a song. This week “Jeramiah Was a Bullfrog” has been on heavy rotation. “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls…” we sing along as we drive, 65 MPH to 45 MPH to 25 MPH on roads they keep constructing. I park in front of the door to school and tell them I love them and tell them to be kind. They run into another day of childhood in middle America where we feel pretty lucky and pretty worried (I pause to wonder here if there are better words I could choose to describe it…)

Back at the stadium a young man behind me stands during the opening act, lifts his drink up in the air with one hand and puts his other arm around the girl he came with. Throughout the entire night, he sings almost every lyric with the vulnerability of a young child. But he’s not a young child, he is a man in middle America singing the lyrics of songs that describe what it feels like to lose someone, songs about addiction and fear, uncertainty and family and hope, tender things wrapped up safely in the sound of the fiddle and guitar and drums keeping time, coming from a man who looks like the guys in his hometown who maybe don’t talk about those things.

And maybe tomorrow, back at home, back at work, he won’t again. But he is here. Here he is, exposed, singing along.

I suppose if we admit that moments like this could save us, we must also admit that it could also be dangerous—50,000 people singing the same words…

I walked out of that stadium holding hands with the women I came with into a night bright with city lights. I turned 41 while the crowd of teenagers and twenty-somethings, mothers and dads with their daughters and sons, filtered out into that same night, sort of sweaty and tired and drunk with beer or feelings. 

Back home my daughters stayed up too late in the big bed together while my husband fell asleep. The next day I drove that minivan back west to pick corn with the neighbors, eat pot-luck after a rodeo, sit in bleachers to cheer on the volleyball team, take an art class, sing with my dad on the deck, make a fish supper for my family, take a ride with my husband to check on a bull, brush my daughters’ hair, pack backpacks and give rides…

“Joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me…” my daughters stop singing to open the car door and run to school…