Nowhere: SLM at SFO 11:07pm April 27.

I am in an airport.

It is late and the stores are closed.

I am tired, so tired. And I have two hours to go before my red-eye takes off.

I have a bit of a sore throat, and am exhausted all through my back and shoulders. I just finished four really intense, but so-satisfying, bordering-on-joyful days at work.

New new responsibilities and new teams, new ideas, so much energy and enthusiasm for all we are envisioning, and now the freedom to race ahead and build it together.

I am so tired, but this is my favorite, favorite feeling in the world: seeing what wasn’t there before, explaining it to others, feeling them capture the potential and bring to it their own touch and taste, being the agent of release for talent, and being seen for the grounded, creative, enthusiastic, encouraging person I know I am…..

I read the post I wrote here just before this one, and, again, I am forced to marvel at how very hard it is to stay open to what’s coming, even when you don’t know it’s there.

No, I am not moving to Garrison. No, I am not leaving my overcrowded apartment. Yes, I am back in fulltime swing of a more-than-fulltime job, no more working at home for me. My son is doing well, even though he has troubles. My boyfriend and I are letting go of our big plans and are instead living in what we have for the moment. And it all feels really good, right now. And right now is all we have, all we have, all we have.

I will never stop wanting to draw a perfect circle of stasis around myself, even though I know those few minutes or days of thinking I know what I’m doing—and the sense of calm, orderly destiny it brings—is a cardboard cutout, instead of the glimmering, shifting hologram life really is.

But I try to think of it this way: When I grab life with my two hands, the hologram disappears and I am left holding nothing, bereft. When I let life move around me and flow through me, I have moments of brilliance and joy and rightness.

Even when I am sick.

In an airport.

Waiting for a red-eye.

And still, here, in a late-night airport, surrounded by so much antiseptic white and empty, I feel full, full, full.

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

It all felt so sure: the move to Garrison, NY; the beautiful house we would live in (one of four, each of them with a special something); the life lived surrounded by trees; a place to put our things; a school where my son could thrive.

And yet, I find myself in that forever feeling of Stuck. Trapped. Immobile. The pressure of outside circumstance continues to shoulder its way into my life, complicating my decisions, clouding my dreams.

I am bereft. I know that it’s likely my fantasy of the new life would never have been matched by mere reality, but sometimes just the adrenalin of change can redraw the colors of daily life in fresher, brighter tones. And I am so, so tired of so many things feeling so hard.

I have to remind myself it’s not ALL hard. That I can’t give in to the bruised part and let it turn everything black. I have worked too diligently to dig myself out of confusion and chaos to so flippantly toss myself backward, into the gloom.

My faith is wavering, a support is giving way, and though I want to crawl under the covers, I must keep my eyes open and keep learning, until my decision is made.

I have accepted that life is constant change. I have accepted this truth in ways both grand and small. But still, I permit myself to weep for the part of me that feels like I will never be safe again, even if that safe was an illusion.

Pre-dawn at Dulles, just arrived from Roanoke, VA.

It’s a crazy-busy six weeks here, with business trips to CA, VA, TX, CA again, VA again and then a necessary and much-anticipated visit to my son’s only living grandparent, the lovely Grandma Barb.

So most days I’m a little upside-down-where-am-I? But I’m grateful that through the years of business-tripping I have learned how to do it well. I know my limits, know when I need to sleep, when I can or simply cannot take the red-eye home, and how much I can ask my son and his father and his almost-stepfather to do.

This week is the first week that my boyfriend is taking sole care of Zack for four days on his own. I’m nervous! But all seems to be going well. (We’re only one day in, but clearly my anxiety about this is higher than my boyfriend’s—which is a perfectly fine order of things if you ask me.)

Life continues to be unsettled and up in the air. We are supposed to be moving, all of us as a family, to upstate New York at the end of the school year. But the house is not yet chosen, my apartment is not yet show-ready, the school has not been personally visited. And here I am, all over the United States, when I feel I really should be at home taking care of these very large orders of business. But I remind myself that paying the bills and doing work I completely love are two things I was not at all doing just a few months ago…. so I take a deep breath and try to be easy.

The amazing stability that I take with me everywhere I go is the internet. No, not the J.Crew storefront (my favorite place to while away 15 minutes) or my trusty email. But all of you, the women who populate my life, my browser, my Twitter, my RSS feeds, my Facebook, my internal ever-revolving landscape. I will never cease to be amazed how very real you all are, and how important a role you play in my life.

Thank you for being my stable and my secure as I fly all around the world, trying to find my safe and making a few dreams come true (for me and for others). My parents may be gone, my ex-husband in the rear-view mirror, my boyfriend uncertain about where life may take him next, but you, great Women of the Internet, are always at my side.

Namaste, and blessings to us all.

work work work work work work work me work work

I’m always looking for a way to have a little time to myself. And one of the truly bizarre truths of being a working mom is that business trips = time to myself. I’ve been at the BlogHer offices in California all this week. First of all, it’s truly great to see co-workers who are mostly just voices on the telephone or words in my email. But second? I got up yesterday and the day before and this morning and exercised for 45 minutes! And watched the morning news! And had two cups of coffee while noodling around on the internet, uninterrupted!

Wow.

It’s been so long since I’ve taken a business trip, I forgot how rejuvenating they can be! (And I’m saying this despite the fact that I had a blinding headache from dehydration until 5am the first day, and that I had no dinner one night because the hotel didn’t have a restaurant and I didn’t want to eat at the Wendy’s next door.) I literally couldn’t wait to get up at 5:45am today to have another workout. It’s crazy what passes for thrills when you’re a working mom.

So this recent reminder of the strange joys and challenges of my station in life is making me all the happier that I am speaking at an intimate retreat for working moms in just a few weeks. The event is called “ReTreat Yourself.” (Isn’t that genius? Who doesn’t think she deserves a treat?) And my topic is a favorite: “Balance is Bull$#&*” That’s not to say that I don’t think women can find their own personal equilibrium—it’s that I believe the very word “balance” has too many implications that are impossible to attain, so I think we should all agree to walk away from the idea of equilibrium in these busy, crazy times.

What I do think we can and should reach for is this: A sense of having made choices that please us, a knowledge that the power to change our choices is always at our hands (even if those changes aren’t easy), and an acceptance of the simple truth that life in America right now is fraught and frenetic—and not something we have done to ourselves.

I’m still working on my “speech” (I don’t really give speeches: I gather my many thoughts and insights I’ve gathered over the years and collect them into a shiny collage), so I’d love to know: What is hard for you about being a working mom? Or about being a working woman? (Life is just as busy, I know, for those of you without kids.) What are the questions you ask yourself when you’re lying in bed at night, wondering if you’re doing “the right things?” I’d love to think about your questions, and add them to mine, and use them all to stir up a really meaningful and interesting conversation with those 50 women who are ReTreating themselves in Virginia.

I promise to come back and share whatever I learn. And I will also come back with a better word than “balance” as the goal for which we should all be reaching. Maybe if we can change the language around what we expect out of life, we can all feel better without changing a thing in our full, dynamic, passionate, crazy lives.

(And P.S. I’m also speaking here: at Smart Start Divorce Expo in NYC on April 1. Read about it on my other blog, Falling Apart In One Piece.)

It’s funny how age sneaks up on you. This is not new news, of course—I remember always speaking about it with my parents, who were unusually open in discussing life’s (and consciousness’) essential confoundery, the way one is constantly craning one’s neck to try to get the big view. But nonetheless, there’s no preparing for its eventual descent.

These days I am feeling age. Not feeling old, but feeling the years lived and collected, like dust bunnies under the basement staircase or layers of paint on woodwork. The last of my shiny and new is disappearing, both inside and out, and I’ve been surprised at the weight of that shift.

I remember when my ex-husband and I were breaking up that I said to him one night when we were more sad than mad, “You took my young. No one will ever have that again and now you are taking it away from me,” by leaving with his memories, which we would no longer share in casual banter or knowing jokes. Those wild years when you think every dream you’ve ever had will come true, when you wear clothes that raise your own eyebrows today, when the world really does feel like it belongs to you.

Today I feel that I belong to the world.

I welcome this change—as I finally know that no matter who or what I am, no matter what kind of day I’m having, I belong—but it still has its embedded loss. Because I see not only myself more clearly with age, but also the world. I carry sadness that there is so much abuse and hate in the human experience. I feel heartbreak that my voice isn’t loud enough to help people to truly understand deep within that wishing and insisting others be like themselves is the most egotistical, cruel and small thing a human can do with his or her intentions. I know why people are seduced by fear’s siren call—the way it can so mysteriously invert itself from inside us and turn outward, appearing as false strength and certainty—but I wish I could convince them that event the coldest comforts of truth are better companions for this journey.

But those are my large, grandiose desires. (Why else be a human if other than to have grandiose idea and desires?)

I have small ones, too: Please let my son find his way in life, locate his tribe and make the right choices when I am no longer here to guide him. Please let me live long enough to see some of his own successes, whatever they may be. Please allow me the luxury of living a few years in the countryside, so I can be close to nature and walk many miles of pathways through nearby woods to balance out these years in New York.

And the other night, I heard this desire, for the first time: Please let me die without too much pain.

I have never been afraid of death. But I am realizing I am now completely afraid of dying “after a long but brave battle” with fill-in-the-blank.

Yesterday, I went to see my Ob/Gyn, the woman who brought my son into this world, and with whom I have become great friends. She talked me through my divorce (when I told her at my six-month postnatal checkup that my husband was ending our marriage, she said, “Oh, no, you too?”), through depression, through crazy-busy all-consuming career times, the illness and death of my parents. And yesterday she said, “I’ve been looking at your records and I think you should see a genetic counselor.” Because of the cancers in my family background, and the heart disease, and the diabetes and and and…

And I just thought: And so it begins, like this.

I guess it really is a midpoint in life. I’ve been blessed with 43 years in very good health, despite my ever-changing weight (fortunately it isn’t on a perpetual up; there are some downs in there through the years as well). And when I look at what’s next, I think 43 years more seems about right, if luck stays on my side. But my parents weren’t lucky, both dying quite suddenly at 70 and 71. However, I’ve always been active, much more active than my parents. And I’ve always loved fish and not loved steak (until the last five years when suddenly steak just seems so delicious!). I have crazy-high good cholesterol and crazy-low bad cholestorol. And I tend to my mental health and am conscious of managing the stress I perpetually seek out. I even have periods in my life where I meditate regularly! Right now not being one of them. (Note to self.)

So I add all these new things to the list of what makes up the contents of my head: medical tests, cancer diagnoses, cruel and sudden deaths, car accidents, friends’ children struggling with special needs. My upcoming mammogram. My already scheduled biannual colonoscopy (remember that’s every TWO years, not twice a year). The anniversaries of my parents’ deaths. I’m waiting for different things now, marking time with different life events. I’m older.

I continue to believe life is magical, mysterious, confounding, fair and unfair in equal measure, unknowable, but above all, worthy. That’s the optimist in me, I suppose. But I admit that, aside from the mystery of being forever 27 in my head as my body counts each passing day, I’m most surprised to discover that the act of turning in my innocence for the gift of widsom comes with a wistful side of poignant, the pinpricks of which I feel in my side just a little bit, every single day.

A starry sky, photographed exactly one year before Susan's death. (Photo by cliff_R/Flickr.)

Today, an amazing woman and spirit and human being died, after battling inflammatory breast cancer for four rounds and five years: Susan Niebur, @whymommy, an astrophysicist (!) and the blogger behind Toddler Planet. I have never met Susan in person, and she and I never exchanged comments on her blog, but when I heard the news today that she had died, I sat at my computer and bawled. And then I pressed my palms together, and bowed my head, and prayed that her soul should alight again on this planet, because this woman was a serious kind of wonderful.

She wrote about raising children (she has two sons, 4 and 6), women in science, her work for NASA, and the horror of the treatment for inflammatory breast cancer, a rare but brutal kind of breast cancer that appears without a lump, and moves very quickly, overtaking other tissues. Her words on the blog are so alive and filled with wit and smarts. And the words are also filled with the awe at the community her words built, the hundreds of women who took up her cause—not her personal cause, but the cause to spread the word about inflammatory cancer. Susan did not want one more woman to hear about IBC for the first time when they were diagnosed, as she had.

Susan had an incredible knack for seeing beyond herself, and taking in the big picture. She would turn her own personal struggle into meditations on life and compassion and community and what this journey is all supposed to mean. She faced her death with a rare grace, which is what kept me coming back to her posts. Seeing that it is possible for someone to die with wisdom and love in the forefront of her mind has soothed the wounds I carry because of my parents’ twin deaths of disconnection, denial and fear.

The day she came home from the hospital, to make her final retreat into the comforts of home and hospice, she wrote a post I will probably read every day for the rest of my life. I’ve copied it to my hard drive so I never lose it. I will probably print it out and carry it in my wallet. I will attach it to my living will and be sure my child or my partner or my caretaker knows to read it aloud for me as my own time approaches.

For her final post she didn’t write an article. Rather, she gave us a scene, an image to remember, an idea that her passing was just a part of the fabric of her life, as all the previous posts had been. It’s filled with casual banter, Susan gently teasing her husband as he’s trying to get her settled and take care of her. She pokes at him, saying, “What, aren’t you going to blog any more goodbyes?” He responds: “I am not saying goodbye to you yet. I won’t.” Then as he teases her about dressing for the hospice nurse, Susan crafts these final lines of the post:

[I'll wear] Purple. I’ll change clothes and listen to her when she comes, but I can’t promise that I’ll be sparkly to the hospice lady.

[her husband, Curt] I’m willing to bet the hospice lady is not expecting to be greeted with confetti and song.

Good point. More tomorrow, my friends. I hope.

There is no more tomorrow for Susan, except the beauty and strength of what she built and has left behind. But there is plenty of hope, galaxies of it, left sparkling in her wake. When I click over to her home page, it’s impossible not to be struck by the subtitle of her blog, small but strong letters plastered right in the middle of the banner made from the starriest nighttime sky I’ve ever seen: THE JOY OF LIFE AFTER CANCER, as if she’s already smiling down from the heavens, having a grand old time being an official member of the firmament, a glinting and oh-so-bright star now in the very galaxies she studied.

I cry because she was brave and smart and dared to be open to all we cannot control in this world, to me the fiercest act of bravery. And today I read her About page for the first time, and found this:

All that survives after our death are publications and people.

So look carefully after the words you write, the thoughts and publications you create, and how you love others.  For these are the only things that will remain.

And these things she did indeed, and she did them well. I consider these words a guide for how I’d like to live the years I have left, along with that folded-up post of hers in my wallet.

Susan, thank you for your example. The open mourning for you on the internet today was a beautiful expression of your power and reach, and we were all comforted and saddened by all the company we had, the proof of your gifts. May your light shine on forever, in the words your wrote and the love you ignited in each of us.

I find welcome solitude in the mountains, too. Lake Placid, December 2011.

” . . . be patient and trust the great and indelible solitude at work in you.”

Rilke always brings me to the place inside where my humanity resides: not my desires, nor my to-do list, nor my ego. And it’s such a precious relief to feel that simplicity (though it’s a complex simplicity). I am human. I am a being. I am an experiment, an accident, a chance. Therefore I can do no wrong. Therefore I am always okay.

Thank you, too, to Lindsey and her beautiful, thoughtful blog, for being the source who brings me to these thoughts as often as Rilke. (And some days she just brings Rilke, like today.)

Happy Friday, friends. Enjoy your being today, if only for a moment.

Christmas tree 2012, for mom and dad.

I’m so, so happy to say I’ve just arrived in Lake Placid, where I’ll be spending Christmas with my son and my boyfriend. There isn’t as much snow as we’d hoped (no cross-country skiing), but the trees and ground are kissed with white and the giant evergreens are wearing their wisdom as grandly as ever. Ahhhh, my spiritual home.

This is my second Christmas without my parents, and even though it’s still a sad and lonely time, I am buoyed by how much less dire it feels than last year, when we were preparing our final celebration in our parents’ home, ever. Bittersweet is too gentle a word to describe what that time felt like.

I wrote a bit about this for BlogHer, who—by the way—is officially my new fulltime employer, as of January 3. I will be the editor in chief of the website, and we have plans, plans, plans! galore and I can’t wait to unveil them throughout 2012. So yes, one key anchor in my life has been planted, just 18 months after everything went upside down. It has both been a deliriously slow and painful time, as well as the just-right amount of time for things to start to come together. I’m still standing on incredibly insolid ground.

But, dammit, I’m standing!

Wishing you and yours a warm and fulfilling holiday week.

Without further ado, here’s my piece about Living Grief (And Love) During the Holidays.

It was as delightful and celebratory as it looks: Fun-due.

That’s what I had for Thanksgiving. Well, no, actually we had fondue. (Can you hear the record needle scratching across the LP of tradition?)

But before I started cutting up all the seafood and vegetables for our Un-Turkey dinner, I sat at my computer and thought about the holiday, and my parents, and how much they loved holidays, and worked so hard to make them super-duper memorable specialicious. And in that soft, empty place in my mind, I kept coming back to the internet. No, not because I was doing shopping to get away from my grief, but because I was inspired by how much I found here this year, how many things that I really needed. So I wrote a Thanksgiving Day post to the laydeez of the internet for BlogHer.com. Yeah, that means you. Here it is.

And? Thank you. Truly.

xxoo

Dear Women of the Internets or Blogosphere or Whatever You Call It,

As I sit here in my pajamas on Thanksgiving morning, and think about all that I’m grateful for — in what turned out to be a very challenging and upside-down year for me — my mind keeps drifting back to You. I am so grateful for all of you. And since women as a group have an unfortunate tendency to be pretty hard on themselves, I thought I would write down the reasons why all of you have mattered so much, and changed the way I think of myself, and the world. And for this, I am grateful beyond words. But I will try to put some words together and do my best to express it. Because I think ALL of you should give yourself a few moments today to bask in the warmth of what we do here, and what we put out into the very confused and upside-down world, every day.

1) You dare to tell the truth, even when the truth doesn’t feel good. Every day, I discover a new blog where a woman is struggling with something, be it her child’s illness, her marriage, her finances, her sense of self-worth. I know there are so many people who want to turn their face away from these kinds of ordinary struggles, as if it can keep the struggles from reaching their own lives, but to me it is all company. Company because we have to know that life is hard, as well as that life is filled with joy. We are better prepared to be resilient in the face of life’s challenges if we understand they come to everyone, that “deserve” doesn’t mean much to the fates, that there are no golden people for whom everything goes easily. Thank you for being brave to share these tales of griefs big and small. You help keep us all honestly connected to the fragility of life.

2) You react to everything with compassion. One of the big reasons women feel they can share their struggles, is because they can be pretty sure they will be met with a wall of support and love and friendship. Time and again, we read in the blog comments “You will be fine,” “We are here for you,” “Please know we care.” In some ways we seems to have lost the ability to do this in our own local communities, so crammed are our lives with commitments and hurriedness and tasks to complete. But when our attention is focused online in the minutes our hours we take for ourselves, humanity’s natural tendency to connect and to care comes out again and again and again. And through this we learn to value people who may not be like us, we can see where differences fade into commonalities. What a powerful gift to us all!

3) You are so creative and so generous. Oh, the ideas and inspiration we can stumble across on a casual wander through the links. Every day I find a new idea, a new spark, a piece of beauty, a family memory waiting to be made. You share so many of your own gifts whether it’s crafts or recipes or humor or curating images of beautiful homes. And you give away your secrets! The number of fantastic ideas women are sharing for free is remarkable, and yet, you’re also being smart and selling some of them as well. I can make a faux-fur vest, a headband, some jewelry, wall art, a caramelized pear tart, authentic mole sauce, a pillow, a new way to display family photos and on and on and on. I’ll never believe that hopping from link to link on the web is a waste of time; I consider it an investment in my imagination. Thank you for feeding it every day.

4) You express delight. I will never tire of the many expressions of joy and congratulations and FTWs and laughter and high fives and “oooooh!”s and “check this out!”s. Life is meant to be filled with small joys, and that’s evident every day in the Twitter feed we all swim in. And no matter what it is that you’re enthusiastic about, you can find your crowd who shares the same passion.

5) You mean it. You really, really mean it. Whatever it is that each of us puts out there (out here?) every day, it’s obvious that it is all deeply personal, deeply genuine, and connected to a living, breathing person. So much for the dehumanization of life because of the internet. I’ve found the opposite: Since I started spending most of my time online, for work and for play, I have made at least 47 truly close, keep-’em-for-life friends. (And yes, of course I’m talking about you.) I have discovered at least 465 other people I care about deeply, even though I may not be a presence on their blogs. I have learned 6,214 unbelievably interesting pieces of information. And I wrote approximately 42 posts about my own upside-down life which were met with love, support and care, even though I hadn’t met many (or most!) of those people in person. If that isn’t something to be grateful for, I don’t know what is.

So today, when I am missing my parents and missing my family traditions and also, yes, feeling grateful for the family I do have, for my brothers and my son and my boyfriend and my kind ex-husband, I am counting on more than 10 fingers why I’m so happy to have all of you, in my life, in my feed, in my Twitter stream, and on my side. I bow to you with gratitude, and hope that you will take a minute to feel proud for the creative, compassionate, resilient, giving world you build with your own words and presence, every single day.

Oh, how many blog posts I have in my head! Which is, of course, of no use or interest to you at all. But I did manage to write a post for the lovely Sarah Bryden-Brown (she who was my roomie at Mighty Summit) and her terrific Blogstar project “My Life As A Blog.” Great writing and insights in that series, so check it out.

As for my contribution? It’s about how the many months I couldn’t blog led me to here. Please hop over to read it!