“Back off! It’s my holiday,” you retort. “The sleigh bells are jingling! It’s going to snow! Why can’t you just have fun?”

Maybe it’s an odd perspective that comes from having supported non-Christian families for my nearly two decade career, but I just can’t get past that while you’re up to stocking stuffing, the Jews are going about ramping up Hanukkah nine times beyond its original importance, the African American community is working hard to instill in its youth a sense of heritage and singular culture, and Ramadan, the holiday of approximately 1.8 billion on the planet is a freaking WHOLE MONTH LONG. And of course the trees and the North Star and all, well, that’s all co-opted pagan ritual. But that all goes along invisibly as the public streets are decked in sparkly lights and wreaths with red and green ribbons. Christmas time doesn’t feel like a spectacular winter melting pot to me. It feels like an undiagnosed global episode of Stockholm syndrome.

It’s the worst voice to have this time of year, I know. Cloyingly grinchy. But don’t worry. No one listens to me.

Last year I tried to celebrate Solstice. It feels the truest winter event to mark for me, a humanist with little tolerance for the Catholic goings-on of my childhood, and since turning back toward the sun is universally appreciated, the little grass shoots and tulips and bunnies all agreeing that change and newness and more daylight in the northern hemisphere is a good time, I thought I had a chance of getting everyone excited about it. I even dressed the holiday up, got everyone liquored, invited some favorite people and plied their emotions with a table full of Dungeness crab.

My sense memory comes into full action this time of year and my childhood is more vivid than ever. Early fall rains remind me of slow roasting persimmons on our wood stove aside the teakettle. Fields of thick, dew-heavy grasses surrounding my quiet house atop a small hill overlooking the American River canyon. Fawns poking around below the apple tree with quiet expectation in the front yard. Watching the stars develop in a dusky sky from the roof in a guttural, body-filling, forever and everything quiet. The kind your senses will remember, no matter how old you are, or how much you turn your back on your origins. Pervasive, graceful silence, punctuated only by stray geese and a lawn sprinkler somewhere, clicking and hissing in rhythm.

Lately I keep catching myself trying to find that slowness and to feel actually in the moment of fall calm while still in my buzzing and urban surroundings. While a coworker curses the rain falling outside my office window, I’m secretly longing to run outside and to hold on to it somehow. To find the scent of crushed pine needles and dried blackberry leaves amid the exhaust and whirlwind of a workday and to-do lists. Maybe to just stop and be silent as things change, and have the luxury of not needing to nurture anything at all.

Perhaps it’s the settling of the fever, or that I’m antsy because in this state I cannot work hard OR lay down and milk this for all its worth by watching Blue Crush for the 634th time, but today I’m having this distinct feeling that I’ve been suffering from niceness for years, and it’s got to stop.

I’m good at accommodating. It’s my job. You want to throw a cocktail party for 30 in 24hrs? Absolutely! I’ll start churning out spreadsheets and get the rental people on the horn, and totally make that happen for you without once mentioning you’re out of your mind. You want to refinance your house tomorrow? Sure thing. Those 600 documents are already on their way to the loan specialist and I’ve wrapped them with a big fat bow.

This skill, however, has seeped its way into my personal life. I’ve been so busy checking to make sure everyone else is okay, the ratio of returns has taken a nosedive.

Enough. Having two kids, perhaps, has changed me. We need function and process and most of all we need peace in these 1100 square feet. It’s getting real in my Whole Foods parking lot.

The cure, of course, is not meanness. I just could stand to be discriminating. Selective. Not a big welcome mat with champagne on ice waiting inside. Let me take your shoes off. Here’s a pillow. That sort of thing.

All my lawyer clients are so damn good at that. They’re hardly ever gracious (that’s what I’m brought in for) but they’re very good at putting a foot down firmly and telling it like it is. Might as well learn from the pros, I suppose.

Throughout my career, I have been surrounded by an awful lot of wealthy doctors and lawyers who all speak a language that sounds like a teabag of English dipped in a hot, over-educated bath of anxiety and micromanagement. Summoning compassion for that personality takes a LOT of understanding if you’re the kind of person they make fun of behind closed doors (“No Ivy League degree AND a musician? She must be a MORON! How does she even make executive decisions? Does she even speak the LANGUAGE?”).. fighting on their behalf takes even more. Even if you’re faking it, you still need to do it because deep down you believe they deserve good in life.

Today a personal someone (not a work someone, thank god), freaked out on me. And I am just left with the plain reality that she did not give me the courtesy of calming herself down before lashing out, of taking the high road, and being a grown up.

Only once before in my life, has someone decided to discard all my efforts to honor the relationship, even if it was ending badly, and instead hide behind closed doors. To throw me back to the wolves. It stings.

In the end, all ou’re left with is a question mark as to how everything went so HORRIBLY wrong when you did everything you could to make it right, and the reminder that self-reliance is king and Emerson wasn’t whistling Dixie when he said it.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m an asshole to be married to sometimes, probably a crappy mom in my worst moments, and have done lots of shitty things to people in my life (Megan from the 1st grade, I’m sorry Reyme and I stuck our tongues out at you while we were getting on the bus after you peed your pants in class. I really do think about it still. Your mom was mean to you. It wasn’t your fault). But this time I know, I KNOW it wasn’t me.

And that’s where it ends, because the relationship is over. Somewhere out there, that person goes on living their life and so do you.

In tribute to this mess of a totally therapeutic post, I am posting the brillz Money Changes Everything performance of everyone’s favorite trashcan-kicking lesbian, Cyndi Lauper. If I could change the lyrics I would say that a sense of entitlement, often resulting from a wealthy upbringing, changes everything, but that wouldn’t really have the same lyrical zing.

After the private school fundraiser this year, I had learned that drinking three mojitos was not a good precursor to silent auction bidding and I barely escaped purchasing home delivery of four weeks of pastured eggs for $180.

The tshirt buying went somewhat the same way as they make those paypal transactions incredibly painless and before you know it, your bank account has been drained and your mailman is shoving cute white envelopes through your door.

The tees, all in all, are awesome. The tragedy struck when I realized nearly all the ones I had chosen were 80’s themed.

Nicely folded in my drawer now are Lloyd Dobler holding his boombox over his head, Miss Scarlet in the Ballroom with the Leadpipe, and lots and lots of printed references to Analog being of superior quality, surrounded by images of cassette tapes.

Around this time, the tax refund check came and I splurged on something ridiculous I had been eyeing. Anyone recognize these new additions to my garden?

I freaked and got a bunch of brand new music and proceeded to watch The Social Network three times to shock my nostalgia into submission. But secretly, I’m totally geeked.

I posted it on craigslist for free and within 20 minutes had 9 takers. Ususally a sign that you should have sold the thing but NO MATTER. It went to a multi-generational family who really needed it and after cramming it into the giftee’s CR-V I was free of the ugliness and looking forward to something new.

I hauled that monster box in from the garage and unpacked violently (see earlier post about how I am all action now). I did it with such determination, scissors flying, that my six year old asked me to consider if a new BBQ was really something worth losing a limb over. And then, the assembly. Twenty minutes in had me hollering “Honeeeeeyyyyy? Can you helllpp meeeee?” into the kitchen for backup.

Ultimately, It was not the take-charge-of-your-destiny event I had envisioned. Nothing sucks the air out of a self-actualization balloon like a loosely translated from Chinese assembly manual for a Kenmore appliance that uses a highly flammable power source.

1.5 hours into the madness we realized we had put the damn thing together backwards on the frame.  As in, the front black panel that makes it took all chic and fancy was facing the back fence and we were staring at all the wiry mess that should be concealed. My wife, tired and wishing we did not tend to a Spanish mealtime schedule quite so regularly, sighed and wondered aloud if we were really the kind of people who cared. My last burst of energy was spent unscrewing the base, walking the million pound thing around counter-clockwise and forcing it into place.

Et voila! It is gorgeous and spaceship like.

And a little large. But capable of grilling 28 burgers at once (or so Kenmore says). We had Moroccan night and the lamb was the BOMB.

Burnt shoulders, check. BBQ sauce on my fingers, uh huh.

The ease and delight of summer is here and I’ve climbed on board. The last six months of baby stress have eased somewhat, and recently I’ve begun to participate in normal activities that don’t involve financial fiascos, anti-depressants or mad-dash runs for diapers. I’ve been walking cautiously among those of you with normal sleep schedules and children who at least drink from sippy cups and trying to blend. I’ve even looked cute once or twice, though credit for that is likely due to the new clothes I keep ordering because I’m so deprived of normalcy I can’t remember what’s in the laundry basket, much less keep up with emptying it into that machine in the garage that makes whirring noises.

Sure, I’ve appeared normal to the parents at morning school drop-off. For months, I’ve managed to be chatty and cordial with the friendly parents I know, and aloof in an “I’m staring at my iPhone because I’m receiving critical information in my important job where I run the whole world” way, with the ones I don’t. At work, I’ve appeared as though I easily remember casual requests and have infinite brain capacity and patience for new challenges, even though my to-do list has been the size of Arkansas for months and I often forget whose number I’ve dialed, just as they are picking up.

I have walked the line. The long dark hallway of sleep deprivation and infant-rearing. And it’s high time we got back to business around these parts. It is warm and lovely. I want my life to feel warm and lovely again, not crunchy and gloomy and on the verge of disaster. I would like for my brain, body and level of self-actualization to resemble that which attracted my wife in the first place.

I’m on this kinda-sorta stint of maternity leave and feeling like this is the perfect opportunity for a quickie life makeover. But rather than one where I turn out drastically different, improved and fabulous, like an 18 year old Vespa model in Greece (though, come to think of it, that would work too), I just want things to GET BACK TO NORMAL.

I would like to be able to move my ideas forward, instead of wishing them along on the couch while I do nothing but watch some awful rerun of Laguna Beach and listen to the baby monitor. That’s the jist of it; forward motion. I’m crying out for it. To-do list items crossed off, for once and for all. No more mulling things over. Action time. The house will be lovely, I will take care of myself fully and listen to good music again, actually cook new things instead of relying on standby and brought-in foods and, above all, regain the ability to examine my life.

This will require sleep, breathing fully, eating as though I have more than three minutes to spare. It will require the time to make conscious decisions, rather than issuing quick fight-or-flight reactions. The kind of decisions one makes when one isn’t living in a constant state of panic. I do recall this state of being, but everything has changed with the new baby and now I’ve got to relearn these basic ideas. Like a remedial class on, well, living.

It all begins tomorrow. With the BBQ.

Finally listen to the newest Grace Potter which I was so excited about I accidentally ordered three separate times.

And try to get someone to take me to Remedy for a scone.

Simple, but worth sacrifice, all.

The dogs, they are bad. They sneak into the kitchen and clean up the garlic soy butter leftover from the rib eyes and broccoli rabe, licking it sideways off the counter in a way previously thought by mere humans to be a physical impossibility. They paw at their bowls insisting grumpily that the first round of feeding was merely an appetizer.

The five year old dances impatiently, chewing on a tortilla chip, always wishing that she were instead watching a movie and talking about wine. She likes wine. Not in a CPS sort of way, but in a “this smells like black cherries and licorice and can I dip my pinky in and do my come hither eyebrow move” way. She decidedly requests sushi for every meal and impressively lives up to her middle name, which carries a general meaning of “life force” in Sanskrit. She describes the way the boys team “tricks” the girls team each day during kindergarten recess with such outrage and detail, one would think she’s compiling notes for the lawsuit she’ll soon file against the school administration.

One very pregnant thirty-something lesbian putters around the lower, and cooler level of the house, feeling guilty about not having folded the laundry she went through great pains to finish yesterday, while simultaneously wanting to collapse into a fluffy bed of flower petals like they do in movies and take a long, sweet nap, followed by a binge on Orange soda and pretzels without raising an eyebrow with the nurses who keep her on a tight dietary leash, concerned with her newly discovered gestational diabetes. She knows the best she can hope for is a reasonable portion of vanilla ice cream in a few hours, but the visual in her mind holds steady.

The kitchen light has been turned off; its counters left practically unrecognizable by the cooking style of her wife who, not with child herself, has been incorporating as many leafy greens as possible into the family diet, to raise everyone’s iron and antioxidant levels. She has recently begun stopping at the neighborhood bakery, butcher and produce market on the way home from work to pick up something to make for dinner, rather than doing one massive food haul on Sunday, and it conveniently makes her feel French. It is typical of her to destroy the kitchen with passion, utiliziing every pan as the menu literally grows with each opening of the refrigerator door: discovering a still firm yellow bell pepper has a snowball effect and suddenly there are three courses where there first was just one.

As dusk settled it moved from these yellow green hues into purple and powdery browns. It reminded me of Montana. So beautiful! I wanted to redo our entire house in this palette right then and there.