I Hide My Chocolate

Midlife observations

Category: Midlife

April 26, 2020

Joy

What Matters Now

In Zoom Yoga this morning, our teacher had us conjure up a memory of when we felt joy. In this time of fear, loss, grief, depression, anxiety, terror, perhaps – if we can inhabit that memory of joy – it would be a resource of hope and light.

Without any hesitation, the memory of the birth of my children is what came up for me. I could not replace it by recalling some flash of ecstasy or awe at nature or pride in some personal achievement.

No, it is the extreme pain and effort and emotion of childbirth that resonated for me as joy this morning. I alternated between my two children. Seeing them for the first time as if it was yesterday. Vivid. I could see them. Feel them. Smell them.

Twenty plus years later, in this time of fear, loss, grief, depression, anxiety, terror – I worry for them. What now? Will they stay healthy? Will they find work? Will they find love? Will they have children? Will I stay healthy to see what happens next? When will I hug them again?

Perhaps this insistent and searing travel back in time to the birth of my children is a result of a mini baby boomlet our extended family is experiencing. The announcement of each new pregnancy over the last few months has been ever more exciting and hopeful in this dark time.

May the world waiting for these new humans be safe and secure, filled with love and new opportunities. May we all experience joy, even if it be born of pain and effort and emotion.

May we be healthy.

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July 28, 2019

Why I Run

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My Latest Obsession

My shoulder hurt too much for Downward Dog. Yoga had been my obsession for the last decade. Child’s Pose had been my refuge when I needed to cry at all the indignities of mid-life: career let-down, the appearance of jowls (jowls?!), the death of my mother, and the growing up of my children. Hand Stand had been my adrenaline rush, which I still hadn’t fully mastered. (Do we ever fully master anything?) I had pretty much let go of other activities and thrown myself into yoga, well at least as much as I could with a family and a full time job plus commute to Manhattan. I got certified to teach and continue to teach one class a week to appreciative middle-aged women, like me.

When it became apparent that I really had an injury – Degenerative Labrum Tear (ahem…aging) and Frozen Shoulder – and needed to practice yoga in a much reduced and more limited way, I wondered what I could do instead? I had run a little bit throughout my life but it was never a passion. I admired others who ran but never seemed to be able to achieve more than 3 miles and was certainly never happy when running.

I started walking. I would walk to Pilates class and back. (About 2 miles round trip). It was January 2018, and I would bundle up. Around March, I wondered if I could run. I ran a block. Literally. One block. Shocked at the huffing and puffing, I decided that no, I couldn’t run. The challenge remained, and so it went for the next 6 months. I added distance to my walks and lengthened the amount of time that I ran. When I did too much, my body let me know and I would have to take a break – never running two days in a row. By the end of last August, I was able to run 3 miles without walking. So, I entered my first 5K race in September. Why not?

My 22-year-old daughter was home at the time and decided to run with me. I told her I was very slow. “Oh Mom, that’s okay. I will stay with you.” We’ll see…I thought. The gun went off and everyone dashed ahead. After all, it was a race! I was left in the dust plodding in the back. My daughter tried to stay with me, but I shooed her ahead. I really didn’t need company for this torture. I thought I was going to die. At about the one-mile mark, the leaders were on their way back to win. I just kept plodding. My goal was to finish. At the two-mile mark, I started passing the walkers. When I saw the finish line, my daughter was cheering. I poured it on, (what was available to pour on) and – sort of – sprinted across the finish line. Under 40 minutes (woo hoo!) and not the last in my age group. Success! I was hooked.

Last Fall, I went for a physical. I hadn’t had one in about five years and was expecting a clean bill of health. Surprisingly to me, my cholesterol was high at 251. She told me to exercise more. Exercise more?! My husband, my friends, and I all laughed. How could I do more than I was doing? Well, Game On. I joined a cheap gym and started adding weight training. (My PT had told me that my upper body was weak, which was why I had the shoulder injury.) I kept up my 3-mile runs through the Winter and ran a second 5K in April, shaving 3 minutes from my time and no longer feeling like I was going to die.

It was like a new relationship. Completely infatuated with the endorphins, my mind wanted to run more than my body could handle. I still find I can’t run two days in a row. So cross-training it is. Weights, Pilates, and yes, Yoga. My shoulder is healed. (P.S. I love yoga after running – it gets everything stretched out.)

I joined a running club in May and started going to weekly running clinics with interval training. It has made a big difference! The camaraderie of other people, the discipline to incorporate speedwork, the chance to run new routes and the inspiration to try longer distances. I’m up to a solid four miles 3x/week and my goal is a 10K this Fall. Plus, I’ll go for my annual physical in October and see what I hope will be a drop in my cholesterol. I’ll keep you posted about that.

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March 11, 2018

Thank You Cooper

Mwah!

He never learned to say any words. Occasionally, though, his intonation sounded just like how we say “Cooper,” but it was a stretch. He did, however, mimic the sound of kissing. When I walked in the house, “Mwah!” When my husband walked in the room, “Mwah!” When he wanted to fly about, “Mwah!”

I thought we had more time, but Cooper died this week. He was 6. We always think we have more time, don’t we?

He’s a sweet, generic, blue budgie from the pet store. I am heart-broken. Slightly comical, I suppose. I find I am embarrassed to tell people that my parakeet died. Embarrassed that I care so much. Guilty that I didn’t do enough.

I’ve been pondering the ethics of “owning” a “pet.” My kids desperately wanted a dog, but we didn’t think we were home enough to give a dog a good life. A bird was the compromise. But is a life in a cage a good life for a bird?

I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it is better than a life in a cage in a pet store.

We certainly tried to give Cooper as good a life as we could. His cage was in the center of all the family activity and we let him out every day. He had his flight pattern, circling around the first floor of our house, making his navigational chirps as he negotiated the turns with the utmost speed and accuracy before alighting on my husband’s head. His favorite human. I was too busy. My kids were too impatient. But my husband would stroke him and play with him every evening.

Cooper loved music and had pronounced preferences. His favorite was B.B. King, especially “The Thrill is Gone.” On weekends, we would have long family dinners in the dining room with conversation, joking, and music. Cooper was right there with us, singing along.

It seems salt on the wound that he would die shortly after my youngest left home for college. We joked, “Ah, just the three of us,” as Cooper would alternate between the top of my head and my husband’s hand. Well, now, it really is just the two of us and the house is much much quieter without his bright chirping, squawking, mumbling, and of course those air kisses.

He is very much a part of our family history and it feels fitting and painful that his life ends as the childhood part of our family story ends.

My husband told our son the news before bringing him home for his spring break. Our daughter is spending the semester abroad, so I facetimed with her to tell her the news. It must feel like an integral part of their childhood and homelife has died. They were both upset. I am proud that they are both connected to their feelings and cry easily. I do not. May they always love deeply and feel deeply.

My daughter said that Cooper was the reason she has chosen a vegan lifestyle. If he was so sweet, with so much personality — clearly a sentient being — how could anyone eat another being? Indeed.

Perhaps that is why we have pets. I don’t know that we make their lives better, but they make our lives better. Perhaps we are better humans for having known them.

Thank you Cooper. Mwah.

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July 30, 2017

Conversations with my Father

Remembering

We wait until the last hour to let the emotion crack through. It’s always my mom that breaks open our hearts. “I miss her so much,” my father sobs. I was taking photographs of old photographs. Photos of her I had never seen. The photos were in the front hallway in an envelope carefully labeled with instructions to himself in my father’s unmistakable handwriting: “Take to get copies.”

I search her face for a trace of my face. I don’t see any resemblance. Maybe, just maybe, there is a hint of my daughter in her face. My mother didn’t like photographs of herself and tended to avoid eye contact with the camera. She didn’t think she was pretty. To me she was beautiful. On that, my dad and I agree.

I hug him awkwardly, neither one of us very good at it. He resumes cataloging his assets for me, verbally, so that when he dies I will be able to deal appropriately with all the stuff accumulated in the house. If nothing else, he has always been meticulously careful about my financial wellbeing. But it’s not just a catalog. Each item has a story. I only half listen because he’s been pontificating at me for 54 years and I have always dealt with it by only half listening. I will myself to pay attention.

There are 3 violins and 5 bows. The Nicolas Lupot violin has some value. It’s an early Lupot – not one of the later, better ones. Nicolas Lupot was an 18th century French violin-maker in the style of Stradivarius. The Lupot is not the violin he is playing right now. I’m not sure why. It needs to be repaired perhaps? I try to remember the name of the place where I should take the violins when he dies, should I want to sell them. Weaver’s? Potter’s? I think one of the violins might have been my mother’s. I’m not sure. I really should get clarification on that.

They met playing string quartets, but my mom stopped playing after they got married. Relieved of what was mostly a chore for her. My dad, on the other hand, whispered to me at dinner the night before, “I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t play any more.” Playing the violin is his lifelong passion. Even though his short-term memory is fading in an alarming way, (“Did we do anything yesterday?” he asked me this morning), and he has trouble adding the tip to the dinner bill, he practices the violin every day and plays string quartets once a week. It keeps him alive and in the house. I hope he lives as long as he can and then drops dead of a heart attack. The lingering withering away that my mother experienced is the worst…for all concerned.

Every year when I visit, I take inventory of how he’s doing. Pretty well by all accounts. Not much worse than a year ago. Maybe better. He has his routines, and he has mostly mastered his grief. The house is clean, (cluttered but clean), thanks to Pauline, the woman who has been cleaning the house since 1964. But he now holds on to things for support, acknowledging that a cane may soon be in order. I harangue him about doing his balancing exercises. And really Dad, cut out the sugar! His nutrition information is from 30 years ago and frankly he doesn’t really care. Why should he. Even though his post lunch stupor prevented us from our annual outing to the National Gallery. I could not get him out of his chair. Out of his house. Out of his routine. Inertia.

I am ambitious for him. For me. For us and our visits. This time, I will ask the meaningful questions. This time, we will have a special outing. This time, I will tell him more about me. Do children who live close to their aging parents and see them frequently feel as urgent with their visits? But, we fall into our habits. Overly protective of our private selves. It is not until the last hour that we really connect.

Each year, I ratchet down my ambition. There is more patience and love in our quiet togetherness. I watered his plants, nurturing the living beings in the household. I read. I practiced yoga. I listened to the birds. Waiting for him.

I walked around the house. Remembering. I looked at old photographs. The ones of me when I was growing up. The ones of my mom when she was younger than I am now. We walked around the neighborhood, remembering, and tut-tutting with mutual disgust and judgment at the hideous Mcmansions that have cropped up in our middle class mid-century suburban development. We went out for dinner. We watched tv. We remembered. Maybe it’s enough to just be together.

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January 2, 2017

Choosing Peace

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Uttanasana

I am at peace with my not being at peace. This sums up how I feel this New Year’s.

Gradually, year over year over year, I have moved away from setting ambitious goals and resolutions and moved toward setting intentions – to choose to be more happy and open to love, to listen to my heart more than to my ego, to see what is good – not what is lacking.

Of course, I still want to have more money, achieve more success, eliminate meat and sugar, be a better citizen of the world, read more books, stop picking my cuticles, throw away stuff, get organized already, be a better mother, and so on. And on. And on.

I am familiar with these goals and make mild progress on them from time to time. Really though, it is exhausting. Bordering on boring.

But when you really stop and ask: what do we want from life? Isn’t it: To feel joy, experience love, reduce suffering.

Peace. Inner peace, if not world peace.

B.K.S. Iyengar says that Uttanasana is “a boon to people who get excited quickly, as it soothes the brain cells. After finishing the pose, one feels calm and cool, the eyes start to glow and the mind feels at peace.” Indeed.

When, at the height of my mid-life anxiety, I would do forward folds in yoga class, I would weep. Turning inward, calming down from my busy busy busy pursuit of not feeling, I would feel. My hamstrings. My breath. My sadness. Of time passing. Of rejections. Of goals not achieved. Yoga class was the only place I would let myself be still, still enough to feel.

Folding forward is private. You can be with your self. Feeling your body, your breath. Just feeling. Just being.

Now, on the other side of my mid-life anxiety, Uttanasana is a pause. A transition. A comforting place to breathe and reflect. Kind of like New Year’s. When I look back on the last year (or years), I see a woman who is happier, more open, more grateful, more able to laugh, more loving.

Instead of focusing on what we don’t have, can we focus on what we do have? What is good, not what is bad.

As this year has ended with great uncertainty about what our world will be like under President-elect Trump, I have to fight against anxiety, anger, panic, despair. It is easy to succumb to the swirl of anxiety.

I will not contribute to negative energy. I resolve to be a force for love, compassion, and positive change.

I will choose peace.

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October 16, 2016

The Mirror

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Homework

I am in the middle of a yoga training with Colleen Saidman Yee. She has designed thought-full and specific sequences of poses to enhance or mitigate significant emotions and life transitions. All with a goal of achieving peace and confidence in ourselves, in order to be able to say: I Am Enough.

Our assignment this week, among other things, was to look in the mirror, see ourselves, our souls, and say I Love You. When I looked in the mirror, I felt so silly. Who says that?

Why not? Why don’t we give ourselves permission to love ourselves?

It brings up a long buried memory. I am at the wedding of our neighbor. My first wedding. I am about 8, perhaps. I am wearing a fancy dress and my mother did my hair in her favorite way, pulled back into a top-knot. I feel excited and grown up. At the wedding we are chit-chatting with another neighbor who remarks how pretty I look. Feeling confident and pleased, I respond, “I know!” My parents are embarrassed and scold me. One should be modest and humble, not braggy and conceited. The neighbor smiles indulgently and defends me. But the damage is done. A lifelong struggle with how to be in this world begins. Pretty? Smart? Assertive? Confident? Bossy? Slutty? Ambitious? Bitchy? NICE?

It is more socially acceptable to commiserate: I am so busy. I am so tired. I have so many problems. Or to be self-deprecating: I’m too heavy. I’m too thin. I’m too old. I hate my hair. When was the last time someone asked you “How are you?” and you answered: “I am beautiful, healthy, and strong. I like my job. My kids amaze me. My husband loves me.” Well, dammit, that’s how I am. I’m tired of complaining.

Don’t get me wrong. I could complain! My beauty is one of a middle-aged woman now. My wrinkles, age-spots, thinning eyebrows, and jowls (wtf?) shock me. SHOCK! I am not passionate about my job, but it’s interesting. I wish I had more time for yoga, both practicing and teaching. I’ve been hurt. Badly. A lot. I worry about everything. But… I am who I am and I am enough.

What is beauty anyway? We women are encouraged to meet an impossible external standard. Tall, thin, fit, young. Those of us who come close work very hard to get closer to the standard and feel like failures when we don’t. Those of us who don’t come close work very hard to get closer to the standard and feel like failures when we don’t. Or, we give up. As we get older, perhaps we find more peace with who we are and how we look, but our fading looks are a bittersweet reminder of the fleeting impermanence of youth and of life.

We look in the mirror and see our soul shining through our eyes. The same soul from 50 years ago, from 40 years ago, from 30 years ago, from 20 years ago, from 10 years ago. Real beauty is self-acceptance. Self-confidence. Pride. No more wishing to be someone else. No more wishing to be richer, thinner, smarter, nicer, more successful, more popular, more badass, more happy. We are enough.

Besides, it’s not about me anymore. I want my daughter to be happy and to love herself and to know – really know – her value. If I can’t model that kind of love and confidence for me, what makes me think she can do it for her? If my love for myself is a bit tentative and embarrassed and filled with buts and what-if’s, my love for her is fierce.

Dear girl, you are enough.

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August 21, 2016

The Pause

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Before What Is Next

Well. Here we are. Already. August. End of Summer. End of his childhood. The pause after the exhale before the inhale. Before September, the new school year. 12th grade. Before he begins whatever he will be beginning a year from now. Because we don’t know.

Our vacation this summer was a quiet week in Vermont, just the three of us. I missed my daughter, but it felt important to have this time with him. It was sweet to be away from our routine and entwined together, synchronizing our lives to be focused on each other, if only for the week. We listened to music together, impressed that he had such eclectic taste and appreciation for “our” music of the 1970’s. (Thank you, Guardians of the Galaxy.) We adventured together, zip lining down Mt Mansfield and rock climbing a wall. We walked in the woods, read by the pool, and found restaurants with wings for him, pasta for my husband, and vegetables for me. It was a delicious, restorative break, nothing fancy, and I am trying not to be too sad that it is over.

17 years. Over.

I stare at him. Often. He hates it. He thinks I am judging or noticing something he wished I wouldn’t notice. He is self-conscious. Embarrassed. My gaze is really more about wanting to connect. Wanting him to know, to really know deep down in his soul, that I love him and want him to be happy and to know that he is enough just as he is. I want him to know that I am sorry for all the times I do judge and nag and wish for something to be other than it is.

I spend a lot of time judging and nagging and wishing for something to be other than it is. Like the end of August. The end of summer, the end of vacation, the end of childhood. I don’t want it to be over! Hell, I’m just figuring out how to do it … and it’s over?

So. Instead of clinging and resisting, I am trying – trying! – to be patient with the pause. Open to possibility. Open to change. With not knowing what is next. With not rushing to the inhale, but fully and completely exhaling all the air out and pausing. Appreciating the breath. Appreciating the boy who is becoming a man. Gazing at his graceful shape, searching for eye contact with his soul that is embarrassed to be seen. Trying not to be frantic about the college application process. Trying not to grieve for the time that is gone. Trying not to regret all that I could have done differently. Trying not to regret that I’m not a different mother, but to accept that I am the mother I am. Just as he is enough, I am enough.

We are here. Abiding in the pause. Open to what is next. Because we don’t know. Now is enough. We are enough.

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July 28, 2016

The Beautiful Subway Singer

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Finding Love Right Where We Are

Monday, instead of walking across town in my usual commuter bubble to catch my train home, I decided to take the subway. It was hazy, hot, and humid and the sky had turned ominously black while all our cellphones were sirening the alarm that a storm was near. I’ve been caught in that 5:30 pm summer downpour.  Not today.

I headed down the tunnel below ground and just missed a shuttle. In my bubble, I headed toward the next train. Everyone was standing, crowded in the entry way, even though there were plenty of seats in the middle. I made my way through the crowd to sit by myself in my bubble. When the train started moving, the beautiful woman next to me started singing. Well, at least I think she was beautiful because she gave off a beautiful vibe. Beautiful energy. I didn’t actually look at her. I didn’t actually make eye contact with her. After all, I was in my bubble in the city where I was taught not to make eye contact with strangers. Somehow connecting with others was threatening and could incite danger. This was understandable advice to the young single woman I was many many years ago, but it doesn’t really serve me that well any more. I am capable and savvy, unlikely to be accosted by strangers, and far more inclined now to make a warm connection with someone who could use a smile (and usually that someone is me).

I was startled out of my bubble. Listening. She started out tentatively, a little out of tune. It was a hard song, Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud. I certainly couldn’t sing it. I certainly wouldn’t have the nerve to burst into song in the subway. I don’t even sing at home if anyone else is around. I just listened. She gained confidence and strength. I suppose she does this all day long and this was just another iteration for her, but it was magical for me. It is such an intimate song. Her timing was impeccable, singing the climax “We found love right where we are,” just as we pulled into Grand Central. One of the more exuberant souls on the train exclaimed “Beautiful!” And it was. She was.

I went back today to the same shuttle train to see if she would be there again. Of course she was not there. That anonymous, ephemeral, magical moment could not be repeated. Imagine, finding love, all around, on the subway – in this stormy time.

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July 23, 2016

Bunny and Doug

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Thank You for the Tomato

“Go ahead! You can eat it.”

I am in Bunny and Doug’s vegetable garden. I am 8 years old. Maybe 9. I don’t really remember.

Bunny and Doug lived behind us. But it was a world away. Not the reserved intellectual atmosphere of my household. Bunny was a beautician and ran a hair salon in her basement. Think Steel Magnolias meets Madge “You’re soaking in it!” My mother, who I do not recall ever getting her nails polished and who maybe got her hair trimmed every 3 months – too self-indulgent for a serious academic type – got her hair trimmed by Bunny on those rare occasions. It was fascinating to see my mom and the other ladies sitting under the helmet of the hair dryer. I got to help out, feeling important, sweeping up the hair. Bunny would always pay me a few dollars for the odd jobs for which she earnestly employed me.

One summer I had a “job.” Every other Friday afternoon, I would go over in the afternoon to clean Bunny’s house. I dusted. She showed me how to dust. I got to go in every room, including the bedrooms, which were already perfectly clean in their matchy matchy style of 1971 and completely different from the rooms in my house with mismatched modern pieces and real art on the walls. I would carefully spray the Lemon Pledge and polish the wood frames of the beds and wipe the silver frames of the family photos, the family Bunny adored but who was not near by. I couldn’t retain who was who, but I am pretty sure I was the surrogate granddaughter, an arrangement that worked for me, a quiet only child with no living grandmother.

After dusting, I would go visit Doug who would be in the back yard tending his pigeons. Yes, pigeons. He had a pigeon coop. This completely fascinated me, because really, who has a pigeon coop! Especially in the suburbs of 1971. He didn’t have a few birds. He had dozens. Maybe a hundred? I don’t really remember. It seemed like a lot. I suppose he must have built the coop himself in the back of the yard. It was messy. Lots of poop. Doug knew all the individual pigeons and introduced me to them. He would fly them. They would soar and swoop and dive and soar and swoop and disappear. And come back again. It was very exciting. Choreographed to the second. You could hear and feel the energy of the flock. The flock was one being as they flew home, finally separating, each settling into their individual cubby back in the coop.

Then it was dinnertime. They would let me stay for dinner and sometimes I even slept over, which made me feel very grown up. Bunny would watch all the silly game shows I loved but my parents deemed, well, silly. Out in the vegetable garden – which also fascinated me because really who has a vegetable garden in the 1971 suburbs, at least we certainly didn’t – Bunny would instruct me how to pick the corn and the beans and the tomatoes which we would eat for dinner. Bunny would cook (overcook) those beans until they melted. I never had beans like that at home. It was summer and it was hot. The tomatoes were about the size of tennis balls and red and the perfect texture. Not firm, not mushy. Not grotesquely oversized with unusual colors. Just a regular red tomato.

“Go ahead! You can eat it.” Bunny gave me, the obedient little girl, permission to eat. Biting into that warm, juicy, perfect tomato. My taste buds were amazed. Intensely tomato-y. It was the best tomato ever. I still try to replicate it with every tomato I now eat, and I eat a lot of tomatoes. But they never compare. Kind of like the first time I had pesto with the ultra sophisticated and hip friend of my mother’s as I was emerging into adulthood. Kind of like the orgasmic peach my husband and I shared at a farmstand in Southampton in 1993. It was our first summer together and we were in that cocoon of infatuation, blissfully in love. I don’t know why we didn’t each have our own peach. But that peach we shared was amazing and I have never had as good a one since. Maybe the happy and innocent conditions surrounding that tomato and that peach are what made them special, carving out this insurmountable taste memory. Maybe tomatoes and peaches really are worse, not better. That’s a whole other topic.

As I grew up, my visits to Bunny and Doug faded. I barely remember them. They moved, probably to be with their children and grandchildren. I suppose they are long gone. I suppose at the time I dutifully thanked them for their hospitality. But it would have been a young child’s token thank you. I never really hugged them, never really looked them in the eyes and told them how much I appreciated that they took me in and showed me a different world and did it with such good humor and generosity and kindness. I never told them that they were the grandparents I did not have.

Bunny and Doug, thank you for the tomato.

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May 22, 2016

Why Are You Reading That?

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The Pile of Books by My Bed (Not to Mention the Piles on the Floor)

“Why are you reading that?” my husband asked. And asked. It started as gentle teasing, his questioning of my penchant for dark, sad, memoirs of loss and grief. It became a family joke. “Oh, here’s a tragic book Mom will enjoy!” He regularly would recommend fiction. He reads more novels than I do, having more time to read, and his repertoire is impressive. He has a fairly good handle on my taste. Recently his questioning has gotten more probing. “Seriously honey, why do you read these books? Why don’t you try fiction or something lighter?” Puzzled by my fascination with sadness and anxious about my tendency to be anxious and sad, he regularly contemplates how to bring more humor, lightness, and play into my life. I married well.

I have just finished reading When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi’s memoir about dying. And living. It’s a beautiful book, with a stunningly honest and eloquent epilogue written by his wife, after his death. As I was reading, and reflecting on my husband’s questions, it came to me why.

Death is life. When we come to grips, really come to grips, with the fact that our time is finite, we choose differently. What is important? Who is important? If I were to die in the next year, how would I spend my time? Who would I spend my time with? There is nothing so clarifying than contemplating those questions. If my husband, my children, my father, my friends were to die in the next year, have I told them how much I love them? Have we spent our time together the way we want to? Have I asked all the questions? Have I answered all their questions?

As with all books, I connect with the character or the narrator or the author. These books about tragedy and loss, I imagine it happening to me and am of course overwhelmed with intense emotion. These books elicit profound feeling. Through loss and grief, one feels acutely the full range of emotions that makes us feel alive, including love and connection and joy.

It was different than when I was young, devouring first Nancy Drew and then Jane Austen, reading for hours on end, learning how to live and to be a woman. Then, reading was an escape from boredom, anxiety, depression, loneliness. It was an education, an outlet for my imagination. I wanted to be a plucky, adventurous outspoken girl, like my favorite heroines, instead of a quiet and reflective and cautious/sensitive soul. It was a way of understanding the world.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less interested in escaping and intensely interested in real life. I find it almost impossible to read fiction. A troublesome evolution that I blame on my anxiety and the distractions offered by social media. As an English Major, I place great value on literature. I seem to no longer have the patience or the ability to focus on long and complicated novels unless they feature modern-day contemporary women I can identify with or dark and terrifying-to-imagine futuristic scenarios about the apocalypse, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

The pile (PILE!) of books by my bed expands to include a myriad of genres including books about Yoga and spirituality, books about cooking and eating, inspiring memoirs, self-help, books my son is reading for school, and fascinating non-fiction. But it’s the books that remind me that life is precious, time is short, and people are what matter that take my breath away.

P.S. I took my husband’s advice and am now reading All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr.  It is absorbing and immersive, just the way I like my fiction. Maybe I haven’t lost my love of novels after all.

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