Why Not a Memoir?

It all started when I was examining my skin in the mirror one night, as women of a certain age are wont to do, and I noticed the crepe-paper-like texture of my neck.

By dint of DNA (thank you, Nannie), I tend to look younger than I am. I do not mean to brag, but it is true that people generally peg me anywhere from five to ten years younger than my actual age.

I don’t really dwell on it because, to me, most working adults, at a glance, could be anywhere from 30 to 55. It’s only when you talk to them and learn their cultural touchstones that you figure out where they stand in the generational landscape. Do they make references to Van Halen and Diff’rent Strokes?  Or is it Nirvana and My So Called Life?  Or, God help us, The Backstreet Boys and Felicity?  What you talkin’ about, Willis?

Anyway, so everyone “of a certain age” pretty much looks the same to me . . . except, I have recently discovered to my chagrin, the necks. 

Necks don’t lie. With all the bending and stretching, especially in our smartphone age in which we are all looking down all the time, they cannot lie. They tell people you’ve been looking down and around for a long time.

And mine is a brutally honest neck. My neck, an over-50-year-old neck, tells you it has very much been looking down and around for more than a half-century, thank you very much.

So when I was examining my neck the other night before bed, contemplating buying neck cream (which I did do, but have not yet opened because I have a generally slovenly skin care regime — more on that later, in a to-be-written essay) . . . . When I was looking at my crepey neck, I remembered a book by Nora Ephron called I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.

I remember when it came out in 2006 and, I confess, I didn’t really get it.  The When-Harry- Met-Sally-Silkwood-Sleepless-in-Seattle lady wrote a book about her neck. Weird. I didn’t read it. 

I didn’t read it because my neck and I were only 35 years old at the time and, while not quite swan-like, my neck certainly was no turkey-waddle either. It was an early-middle-aged neck, and it and I were unconcerned with fine wrinkles and horizontal creases at that moment in our history. 

Flash forward 17 years and here we were, contemplating neck cream. I finally understood the title of that book. 

So I bought it on Audible. And I started listening. Not only did I relate to Nora Ephron’s essay about her feeling bad about her neck. I related to a great many of her essays on what it’s like to be an aging woman.

I related so much to her essays that I started telling my slightly more middle-aged husband about Nora Ephron’s essays and how funny and relatable they are. I even related to the essay in which she talks about not being able to read maps and phone books anymore — even though we do not have maps and phone books anymore —  because I related to needing readers. (And . . . the essay made me nostalgic for maps and phone books. Remember Mapsco?)

So anyway, one hot Texas summer afternoon, after I’d shared with my husband Nora’s love for John LeCarre (whom we both also love), he sent me a text, a writing prompt of sorts. It went like this:

Meredyth writes the next Ephron memoir: 

"After 15 years of marriage, there seems no point to renewing any vows. Marriage vows have always seemed to me unnecessarily prolix and frankly unnecessarily vague. The terms of our marriage, I tell my husband, reduce to one fundamental rule: Our lives must never be so penurious that we’re forced to buy store-brand salad dressing. We must be sufficiently comfortable that I can guiltlessly buy Newman’s Own."

I sent this true gem to my two best work friends with this comment:

I feel like, perhaps, no actual memoir is needed, for he has perfectly summarized my views on our future retirement. I do not ask for much. Only that we are wealthy enough to afford non-store brand salad dressing in our dotage.

Then I added, “Perhaps, though, a memoir would be appropriate, after all, to explain how I arrived at this modest life goal. Hmmm.”

And then I dismissed that idea as nonsense. Who would read my essays?  I did not marry Carl Bernstein, nor have I written many famous movies and books. I mean, I would like to do that. I would love to write novels. I would love to write engaging novels that people can’t put down. And I’ve tried. I get writers block. But I find my own stories trite, tired, derivative. I bore myself. The characters are wooden. I grow to hate them and do not want to spend any more time with them, let alone create them and their stupid lives. You get the idea:  While I may have that one great novel in me, as the old saw goes, I am not sure that I have the capacity to get it out of me. 

And yet, I write essays. I write them nearly effortlessly. The words just come. I’m just talking to you, see?, telling you my opinions, my prejudices, my observations and frustrations. I’ve been doing it for years in a blog only a handful of people read. But the handful seem to enjoy my essays. So why not a memoir in essay form?  Maybe more than a handful would read it. Maybe?  Worth a shot?

Hmmm. 

Never Have I Ever . . . Thought I'd Write a Blog Post About Mindy Kaling

And Velma.

Mindy Kaling is the driving force behind a new "adult" cartoon take on the Scooby Doo characters, minus Scooby, called Velma and centering on a character called Velma Dinkley, beloved nerdy member of the Mystery, Inc. gang.

Mostly, people hate.  I've watched a few episodes and I am not a fan.

SOME of the criticism comes from dude-bros who decry it for being too "woke":  Velma's Indian, Daphne is Asian (with two moms), and Norville (not called Shaggy in this show) is mixed race (black mom, white dad).

I could give a fig about their races.  I'm cool with these originally white characters being a different race.  They come from an era where white was the default and any other race was exotic, at best, and a comic relief caricature, at worst.  It's high time that we have people of other races and cultures in our stories as just regular people.  Regular people aren't always white.

My beef with the show is deeper than the epidermis.  The characterization of Velma, Daphne, Fred (who remains white), and Norville bear no resemblance to the original characters in the countless iterations of Scooby Doo over the past fortyish years. The Velma in this show is not a confident nerd who employs her intellect to foil the villains, but an insecure, unpopular, obsessive, and, honestly, kind of mean girl. She's not even the smartest of the bunch anymore, asking "Norville" for help with math at one point.  The others are equally out of character.  This is not so much a "fresh look" on the old characters as a gutting and remodeling, like a 1920s bungalow in a gentrifying neighborhood.  Outside, looks similar to the original.  Inside, unrecognizable.

But this Buzzfeed article attempts to cast Velma as the next iteration of Mindy Kaling's self-loathing portrayals as an Indian-American female.  The writer says that Mindy Kaling has "a long career of writing and performing a specific kind of Indian woman:  dorky, self-absorbed, insecure, obsessed with attaining the romantic validation of caustic white guys, and eager to fling cultures under the bus to get it."  The Buzzfeed writer says, "More damning than her characters' obsession with white guy is their casually racist self-hatred" and notes the "collapse" of Kaling's characters into her actual self, or vice versa.  Essentially, the author is saying that all of Kaling's characters are about Kaling's own self-loathing as an Indian woman in America. Quite a casual and distant psychological analysis.  Quite an indictment of her work too.

I'm no expert on Mindy Kaling's career.  I’ve only ever actually seen her in the American version of The Office, and wasn’t taken by or offended by her character.  But I didn’t watch much of the show either because I found it sub-par to the British version. And I never watched The Mindy Project or Sex Lives of College Girls because everything I read about them suggested to me that they weren't my style.

I have watched Never Have I Ever, every single episode.  Mindy Kaling doesn't actually appear in it, but is the show's creator and executive producer.  It's a show about a teenaged Indian girl named Devi Vishwakumar, growing up in suburban Los Angeles.  She's dealing with the death of her father at a young age and generally growing up and being a teenager.  It's hilariously narrated by John McEnroe (and occasionally other people).  Devi has some rage issues, partly stemming from the death of her father and partly stemming from teen angst.  So the choice of McEnroe to be the one to tell her story is inspired. I love the show.

I feel that Never Have I Ever is NOT just a show about an Indian-American teenaged girl.  It's about an American teenaged girl, who is culturally Indian.  Distinction without a difference?  Maybe, but Devi Vishwakumar IS an archetype.  She's not an archetypal Indian teenager, but an archetypal American teenager, who is culturally Indian.  Devi’s repeated lapses in judgment and in the same general direction are infuriating sometimes.  WHY does she keep being so stupid?  But that’s a teenager thing, continually making the same or similar dumb mistakes and then, finally, FINALLY learning from them.

I saw Devi not as an archetypal ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) teenager, but as a confused teenager who happens to be Indian. She often rebels against her culture, and other times embraces it. I completely relate to that, even though I am definitely not an ABCD.

However, I was a smart teenaged girl once.  I could relate to Devi's desire to fit in, her being proud and feeling weird about being smart, her competitiveness competing with her laziness.  I even related to Devi alternately rebelling against and relating to her culture, only my culture was Southern-American-Cowboy, not South Asian.

Anyway, the idea of a smart teenaged girl, struggling to fit in and trying to distinguish herself from her cultural heritage is a universal theme everyone can embrace.  I do not see Devi Vishwakumar as a manifestation of one Indian-American woman's self-loathing, but a smart take on what it's like to be a teenaged girl in America.  As I said earlier in this post, it's high time that we have people of other races and cultures in our stories as just regular people.  Devi is a regular teenager who happens to be Indian.  We need to normalize the idea that not being white is normal. Never Have I Ever does that brilliantly.

Because I haven't seen the entirety of Kaling's oeuvre, I can’t speak to the larger point the Buzzfeed writer makes of Velma fitting neatly into Kaling’s own self-loathing.  But I can say this, I do not think that Devi Viswakumar is a manifestation of Kaling's self-loathing.  So I am not sure that Kaling even hates herself in the way the writer thinks she does.

But back to Velma . . . .

Because I'm not onboard with the idea that Kaling in some Freudian way repeatedly creates characters manifesting her own self-hatred, I can't say the Velma fits into that mold.  But I can say that the only resemblance the Velma TV show shares with Scooby Doo are the character names and character wardrobe.  There’s not a hint of the classic characters’ personalities.  They’re all loathsome and self-absorbed, except for “Norville,” who is now apparently the smart one.

Also, the idea that this cartoon was apparently made for grown ups is ridiculous.  It's filled with sexual innuendo, unfunny political jabs, and references to drugs, sex and violence. It’s the very essence of what children think adulthood is all about.  What makes Velma bad is not Mindy Kaling’s alleged self-loathing, which I take issue with, but that it thinks that puerile jokes about sex etc. is what amounts to adult humor.  It's not smart.  It's not funny.  And it's not even fun nostalgia because it makes these beloved characters unrecognizable.

Also, there’s no dog. 

On Second Acts and Second Chances

Recently -- this past August -- I changed jobs.

God, I was so optimistic.  This was the thing that would take me to the next phase of my career.  The next level.  It was going to be great.

It was going to be My Second Act.

Except that it wasn't.  It didn't work for me or for my family.  The people at the new job were nice, but it just didn't fit for me, for my family.  Maybe I didn't fit.

I knew pretty quickly that I had made a mistake.

We all, my family, were miserable.

You might say, "Surely, you should have given it more time, Working Mom."

Some might say that, yes.

But I will tell you something about being fifty-two years old:

Somewhere around age 50, you receive the gift of clarity.  (Well, I did anyway.)  More time would have been more misery . . . and, indeed, it was more misery, months more while I figured things out and allowed processes to do their thing.

But I was literally depressed as I watched things fall apart.

My Second Act was not so much an act, but an intermission.

Still, I knew that this was a terrible mistake.

Giving it more time would not have made it better.

So I called my old boss, and I told him that I'd made a mistake.

Actually, no, first I called two of my old co-workers, friends, and I told them that I'd made a mistake.  And I sobbed and sobbed.  Real regret.  I asked them if they thought that my old boss would take me back.  They said, "Yes," and encouraged me to call.

And THEN I called . . . and I got good news.  After jumping through a lot of hoops, I could come back.

My Second Chance.

I still beat myself up about having, as I thought at the time, done this thing to my family and my co-workers at my old (soon to be new) job . . . and at the new job, soon to be old, too.

But . . . .

One of my work friends, from the job I left and have now returned to, told me that I shouldn't feel foolish because I had learned something from this and that is valuable.  She's right.

When I told my sister-in-law what my work friend had said, she added, "She's not wrong.  Even at this age, if we aren't failing at things, it means we've stopped learning."

Another of my work friends said not to feel foolish because it's not like I'd left my son and husband to join a biker gang.  I told her that, while that was true, I sometimes felt like I had done the professional equivalent of that.

Not that the firm I joined, ever so briefly, was anything like a biker gang, not even close. There were a lot of really nice people there.  But the disruption that it caused in my family and my professional life felt like a similar sort of existential violence.

I did feel foolish, despite the words of my wonderful friends and sister (in law).

But I have come to see that, they're all right.

Growing, learning, and not having done the WORST thing to my family and my career . . . it's been a valuable lesson . . . a series of valuable lessons.

As midlife crises go, this one was pretty gentle, really.  (Because I will live to be 104, obvs.)

And ultimately, I have emerged with gratitude and a better appreciation for what I need versus what I want.  And so . . . .

My Second Chance, as it turns out, is My Second Act.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 36, Beginning of Week 6, in which I contemplate a thing that I did.

I put a color conditioner through my hair this weekend, which dyed the lighter parts of my hair a lovely, pale blue.

I truly, honestly love it.  I may just always have blue streaks, now that I've done it.  I plan to run the rinse through my hair again tonight to try to darken up the streaks a little bit.  Because why not?

I am, of course, not the only person doing things to their hair during this COVID-19 social distancing period.  Enough people are doing it that others are writing article about it.  And this quote from an article in Allure struck me:

"Hyperfocusing on the physical can be an attempt to escape the emotional; and in the midst of a global pandemic, everyone is experiencing new, sometimes scary emotions (fear, sadness, existential dread) in new, sometimes scary ways (home, alone, with no diversions)."

Even though I do sincerely like how my hair looks with the blue streaks, I think a little bit of escape is going on here for me too.  I think that putting a blue rinse through my hair and getting instant blue highlights is also helping me work through my anxiety.

I've had anxiety all my adult life -- probably all of my life, really. I've mostly dealt with it without medications, though there was a period early-ish in my career in which I had a couple of prescriptions to help me get through the day. Changing jobs eventually made the medications unnecessary, but there were many days early in my career when I would need to place a half a Xanax under my tongue just to calm down enough to be able to work.

Anxiety steals your focus and confuses your thinking.  It makes monsters and creates invisible enemies. It turns your psychological distress into a perceived physical threat.  You really do feel fight-or-flight, but it's your own thoughts that you need to fight or flee, so you feel trapped, causing you more distress. It's an ugly condition. And it's not simply enough to tell yourself to calm down when you're in the midst of an anxiety attack. You have to figure out how to break the cycle. Xanax can do that chemically.  But when you're not taking medication, you need other ways.

For me, anxiety is a lot about control, or the lack of it. The less in control I feel, the more anxious I can become, and the faster I can slip into a cycle of anxious dread and full on anxiety attacks.

For the past more-than-a-decade, since I changed my career focus (if not subject matter), I've dealt with my anxiety with lifestyle type stuff:  exercise, rigorous scheduling and planning, lists, meditation, the dog, magnesium, Disneyland (for real), wine, chocolate, mint tea, making sure I get enough sleep, setting and enforcing clear boundaries between work and home and self . . . .

That last one, the boundaries, has really been difficult to do during this quarantine time.  It's important to do, but with work and home and recreation all being in the same place, the lines are difficult to draw and maintain.

So I think that, this weekend, I drew them in my hair.

The blue:  It makes me feel lighter.  It makes me happy.  I like the way I look.  Importantly:  This is a thing I can control absolutely.  And feeling that certainty, feeling the control, is calming.  In a world where there is so little I can control right now, and in which there is so much to fear, having a little bit of control, however frivolous, is important.

And so, it's not just that blue is traditionally a color associated with calm and so my blue hair calms me. This blue is part fashion and part meditation. It is my certainty and my control. And, being that, it delivers to me inner peace.

Have a good week, friends.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 29, Beginning of Week 5, Utterly Unimportant Numbers

I'm doing better than last Monday.

In fact, all last week, I did better than I was doing last Monday.  Nadir Monday.  I think . . . .

The thing about this historical event we are all living through is that it will change us.  It has to change us.  We have to change in response to it.  And change is hard.  And forced change made rapidly out of fear and necessity is harder.  Psychologically, we aren't built for that.  It's bound to take it toll.

I've been thinking a lot about what's not so important and what is.  In the "not" column are a lot of numbers:  weight on the scale, size of my clothing, number of York Peppermint Patties I consume in a day, number of screen minutes my kid gets in a day after he's finished all his schoolwork, number of projects actually completed.  These are utterly unimportant to whether we live healthily and happily.

What is important sometimes does sometimes involve numbers too.  Regarding health, for instance, I'm just not worrying about weight and size numbers anymore, but I am going to continue to worry about numbers related bloodwork, blood pressure and cardiovascular health.  Those numbers bear no real relation to the size of my clothing and the force of gravity on my body on this early.  At best, the relationship between the two is marginal.  (How do I know:  I've been "overweight" a large portion of my adult life and I can assure you that my bloodwork and blood pressure have been good-to-excellent for decades.) But bloodwork, blood pressure and whether I can walk a mile or more with relative ease are measures of health that seem to matter with regard to how I feel and how I function.  So those are what I will pay attention to henceforth.

The number of hugs given and gotten is a happy number.  The number of laughs with your family . . . the number of times your child's eyes light up . . . the number of chin licks from the dog . . . the number of York Peppermint Patties to give you joy of them . . . .  These are also good numbers.

But number of blog posts about a scary event . . . not so much.

I noticed last week that when I stopped writing so much about this event, I stopped thinking so much about it.  When I'm not physically writing, I'm still writing.  I put together ideas, words and phrases, sentences, even whole paragraphs, in my head before I even put fingers to keyboard.  Because I have a good memory, I can do that and then come back to the keyboard and unload it all.  Then I edit.  It's how my work-writing works too.  Letting ideas form and reform, marinating in my brain, before I ever commit them to paper or the digital screen just works for me.  But it also means that my brain is marinating in whatever it is I am writing or intending to write.  It's why sometimes my work is so exhausting . . . because I don't just quit at quitting time, when I'm writing something.  I can't.  That's not how my writing brain works.  It keeps working.  So any brief I've written for work, for instance, has been written over many days and many moments of so-called free time.

Last week, after my Monday post, I decided not to write any further posts that week.  Shutting off that self-imposed task allowed me shut off my brain about the pandemic.  I mean, I still thought about it. But I didn't ruminate, marinate, write and rewrite in my head.  And that was good for me, very, very good for me.

So I've decided to cut back writing this disjointed history for my own well-being.  I'll check in once a week, maybe.  Check in, as well, if I have a good story to tell, like The Frog.  But I am taking the pressure off myself to write and, really, to perform here in this blog.

I do think, sometimes, in hubris, that maybe this blog would be a useful document in 50 or 100 years to study the effects of the pandemic on regular folks.  Maybe it will.  And maybe it won't.  But if it will, a few fewer blog posts to save my sanity will not hobble any future historian's work.  (Hello there, future historian. Creepy, huh?) Mine will be but one drop in a sea of personal narratives about the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.  I'm sure that their dissertation or historical extract will not suffer from my writing less, and less often.  In fact, maybe the fact of it will be just the anecdote they need for their chapter on mental health.  (You're welcome, future historian.)

Stay safe, friends.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 22, Beginning of Week 4, Anonymous 49.6 Year Old Female

I've been having a hard time.

I'm scared.  I feel safe in my house and I feel like my family is safe.  We have developed systems here that I think are the best we can do to keep ourselves safe in our house.  It has been more than three weeks since we have really had to go out into public at all.  I haven't been anywhere beyond my neighborhood (other than a recreation drive in the car) since we started shelter-in-place, and the only place my husband has been is the drive-up window at the pharmacy to pick up our son's and his mom's medicine.  Anything and everything else we need we have delivered.

But we can't be here forever.  We won't be here forever.  Eventually, we will have to go back out into the world.  And there will not be a vaccine to protect us.  Our systems won't protect us out there.  We will have to develop protocols to come back into our house.  My husband can dress fairly casually to work.  I will be in a suit most days.  How does one sanitize a suit?

I made two face masks this weekend.  It was hard.  The fabric is thick, which is a good thing, and I'm terrible at pleats.  (Plus, the tension on my thread got screwed up on the second one, which slowed me down, but I fixed it.)  I need to make more, though.  I need to make at least enough to last each member of my family for a week.  That's a lot of masks -- 21 masks.  It's going to take a long time to make those masks.  And, yes, I know that two-ply cotton masks (even if they are made from high-thread-count Laura Ashley sheets) are not tremendously effective at stopping the virus, but they're better than just relying on our nose hairs to do the filtering before the air gets to our lungs.

I have a very public-facing job.  I am literally in court nearly every week, sometimes multiple times a week.  And those courtrooms are filled with people.  Sure, the Court is going to video court soon and my office is going to telephonic meetings of creditors.  But, again, that can't last forever.  Can it last until there is a vaccine?

Will there ever be a vaccine?

I input my information into the COVID-19 Survival Calculator.  Here are my results (which were somewhat amusingly entitled "anonymous 49.6 year old female"):

The 52.9% infection risk scared the shit out of me.  Basically, I, who have been sheltering in place with all the precautions I can think of -- we wash the dog's feet after every walk, FFS! -- have a 53% chance of getting this disease.  But the mortality risk and survival probability were heartening.  From what I have read of first hand accounts like this one, though, having this disease is awful, even if you're not hospitalized.

I had the flu in March of 2017 and there were a couple of days when I really could not move without great effort and I had fleeting thoughts of "so this is how this bug could kill someone." And compared to what I have read about COVID-19, that really bad case of the flu I had for merely a week was a walk in the park.  I don't want to get this disease.  I don't want my husband or my child or my parents or my in-laws or my brother's family or my friends or my work colleagues or even those other lawyers that I may not like very much to get this disease.

Nevertheless, I'm bending my mind to the idea, attempting to accept the idea, coming to terms with the idea that one of us will probably get it.  Maybe more than one of us.  And the best I can hope for is . . . we suffer a miserable two to four week illness at home, not requiring hospitalization, and that we do not spread it further?

So, I've been having a hard time.  I've been depressed.  I've felt a little hopeless . . . a lot hopeless.

I cried when I walked the dog this morning.  Not single-tear-down-the-cheek crying . . . audibly sobbing, that was me, as I walked the dog.  Not loudly, but audibly.  Like, if there'd been someone on the other side of the street walking their dog, they'd have heard me and looked in my direction.  Mournful.

I guess I am in mourning.  But for what?  For my old life, my pre-novel-coronavirus life?  The halcyon days when I could scratch my eyes, pick my nose, and do facepalms with impunity?  Maybe I'm prematurely mourning the loss of the safety I feel in my home now, the loss that will come in a month . . . or maybe two . . . when we have to go back into out there.

I even told the people at work on our MS Teams chat (which is now and, I think, shall ever be, an omnipresent distraction on my desktop) that I was not doing very well this morning.  It's not like me to own stuff like that very often.  I'm as stiff-upper-lipped as a girl from East Texas can be, I suppose.  I push a lot of stuff down.  Probably not healthy, but I do it.  But I couldn't keep it down this morning.  I couldn't keep it down as I walked the dog and tried to image going back out into the world where, to me, the novel coronavirus is everywhere.  I couldn't keep it down when I logged onto work and it was all just too much.

Almost immediately, one of my lovely colleagues sent me a private message commiserating and trying to buck me up.  Another two with whom I regularly text, took it to private texts and urged me to take care of my mental health.  All three of them were just what I needed.  I felt better.  We are all suffering.  We have our ebbs and flows.  Today, I ebbed and these three wonderful ladies flowed toward me.  One day, it will be my turn to flow toward them.  We all, every one of us, need each other now in ways we never have.  Now, is the time to lean in, but not in the way Sheryl Sandberg meant several years ago.  Now, is the time to lean into and on each other.  I think it's the only way we get through this.

The COVID-Telework: Day 18, I'm so tired.

By Wednesday, I am tired.  It is hard to get out of bed.  It is hard to walk the dog.  It is hard to do my job.  It is hard to be a substitute teacher for at-home school.  It is hard to stay focused on anything.  It is hard not to lose my patience with people or things or animals.  This thing we are doing is hard.

Things that make it easier:

• Hugs and cuddles.
• Coffee.
• Chocolate.
• Ice cream.
• More hugs and cuddles.
• Fun books to read.
• Star Wars, anything.
• Specifically, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Season 7.
• Cheese.
• Tortilla chips with salsa.
• Ranch dressing.
• Dried pineapple.
• Walks with the dog.
• Watching the Boy play.
• Reading the Boy's writing, which is surprisingly good.
• Text messaging silliness with my friends at work about work and about not-work. 

And one more thing:  checking on others to make sure they are okay.  That makes it better, makes it easier.  Try reaching out to someone else and check on them.  Make sure they're okay.  It will lift your spirits.

Have a good weekend, friends.  Hang in there.  Stay safe.