When I’m out running errands for work, I’ll write haikus in my head. Usually they’re silliness about the neighborhood or a shot of brilliant blue sky, but this week they’ve been mostly about singed nerves and knotted wires. Rust. Newsprint stained fingers. Cold feet. I’m feeling absolutely uncomfortable in most ways. I’ve been eating the strangest things too. A chicken nugget (big mistake. they are disgusting). Girl Scout Cookies. A burger and fries at 11am. Obviously trying to find some comfort outside my comfort zone.

This house I’m sitting in, perhaps for the last night, is the one my wife and I bought together, primarily for our daughter. We were so excited to find its adorable back patio for tricycle racing, cheerful three stories for her to bound down on weekends mornings in search of cheerios and cartoons, and proximity to the coffeeshop with great smoothies (she called them “smoodies”). We started as a family of three here and are now four. It’s not my perfect home by any means, and I never thought we’d grow old here, but I feel like I took an oath to it when we bought it, and have nurtured it along to greatness all these years. The promise of possibility in our lives- a new passion, friend, the decision to go back to school- was met happily by new art and color palettes for the walls, designs for a new kitchen and planting bright bougainvillea along the fences. I studied for my sommelier certification in this office- sticky notes of varietal types taped to the walls and maps of Germany tucked behind the cabinets. My mom came here to plan her retirement over brunch on the patio.. a press pot and filtered sun through the flowering vines along the back trellace. Lisa single-handedly pulled our vintage armoire up the steps one afternoon while I was at work, to have it in perfect position that night.

It’s got to be done now, for more interesting reasons than financial ones, and ultimately I’m going to just trust that an unmarked path can be okay, even for a family. Who knows. Maybe it will be awesome. But it’s sad, incredibly sad, to let my eyes wash over the living room with its perfect maple floors and original enamel doorknobs and know it will never be mine again.

I’m usually a wicked fountain of optimism. Really, one that realists go running from, scared and rolling their eyes. But right now I’m going to sit in the middle of this puddle of awfulness and soak it in. Tomorrow I’ve got to pack up and leave and that just kills me.

My wife’s mother had the same exact experience. Discussing it one day, we realized that part of the superglue bond must have had something to do with these dogs being the *one* all attention went to, once our dominant moms were out of their miserable marriages and done for good. We asked around among our friends for supporting evidence and consistently found the same situation: a newly divorced parent with a supreme and undying devotion to a new pet. We call them “divorce dogs”.

This weekend, I traded my old, terminally ill Volvo in for something new. It was my idea and I was feeling great, until it was time to clean it out and put the stroller into the new trunk. I got weepy and actually thought the car I was leaving looked physically sad all alone in that parking lot. Her frame suddenly seemed slumped and I felt like I was turning a child out into the cold night. How could I leave her after all we’d been through together?

“I love this car. This is a great car”, I affirmed to the family over and over, as we drove one last stretch from the test lot to the office for paperwork, as though sole repetition of the phrase would calm my anxiety and take the sadness away, or jolt my consciousness into remembering that change is good, cars are made of metal and molded plastic and there is no such thing as an emotional connection between a person and a Volvo, no matter how cute it is. But it didn’t.

My wife went upstairs to start signing papers while I swept through the compartments, gathering up my daughter’s stray hairclips, stashed parking tickets and pen caps. I felt overwhelmed, as though the car held some place in my life that I didn’t have permission to give away. It was then I realized- it was my divorce car.

Long ago, in what now seems like a different lifetime, I worked for a family for many years as their Personal Assistant. After a few years my employers decided to reward my hard work on all their remodels, events and goings-on with a car, and leased me a gorgeous car. It was LOVELY and came with all bells and whistles: leather, navigation, sexy hard-to-find dusky blue, beautiful detailing and even 6 JBL speakers to blast while doing my job running their lives. This car, which became known as Joan for the alert system voice’s uncanny resemblance to that of Joan Cusack, took us on fun roadtrips all over the West Coast, and we highlighted its expensive glamour to finally convince friends that my career in private homes, though strange sounding, was legitimate. I had never had a brand new (or free!) car in my life and was overjoyed to hop into it each day.

Sadly, what had begun as a support role for a totally amazing, overachieving couple turned sour. My principals, fully able to commit to their careers due to my long term presence, no longer were required to participate in their home lives. I was the one answering the door. Managing the nanny. Talking to the orthopedic specialist about grandma’s prognosis. One of my employers had not been in a primary role at home for years and thought this was fabulous development. Though I worked hard to ensure the decisions I made on their behalf were true to their family culture and priorities, the abdication of that responsibility proposed a real dilemma for the other: it enabled the kind of work time and concentration necessary to build a career but created an empty space at home where participation was once vital. Success and money-making can still leave you feeling unhappy and lonely. If your wardrobe management is staffed, your mealtimes are staffed and your dog is staffed, do you even need to show up? Between you and me, I sensed that they kind of didn’t want to show up.

Our interactions became strained. Our tepid and courteous conversations, once familial and chatty, became less frequent until they were nonexistent. I tried to redefine my role and be less obtrusive, but they were nowhere to be found and the decisions I had been hired to make still needed to be made. Dinner parties for 100 don’t plan themselves! Easter dresses for the twins don’t magically appear in your closet! My office was suddenly and awkwardly remodeled and I tried working from the kitchen table. My tasklist grew thin and those lingering obligations were impossible to achieve with an absent party on the other end of the phone. The tone of my incoming emails became more threatening and manic, voicemails panicked and aggressive, though I continually responded with evenness and compassion. I stuck to my workload and focused on successes, but nervously scanned the sidewalk for headlights at night, worried that any interaction was going to be traumatic. I cried. I got migraines.

Driving around in this amazing car, trying so hard to manage an impossible situation, my eyes would well up every time my blackberry light went off. I was devastated after years of prioritizing their family’s needs over my own, to have it all fail. I had done so much. I worked though every vacation and weekend; I worked daily for six years. I would respond to emails at 3am, rebook itineraries for changed minds in the middle of the night before travel. Respond with enthusiasm to impossible and ridiculous requests, like making extra welcome baskets for Bar Mitzvah guests in the middle of the hotel parking lot at 1am for relatives invited at the last minute. Or fishing a dead rat out of the basement toilet because the nanny was having trouble breathing, just knowing it was in there. I had truly once believed in the family and wanted to see it succeed but things had become unbearable. Leaving my job meant real complications, as the industry was changing and opportunities for positions like mine were growing thin. Eventually even the fact that my wife was newly pregnant didn’t matter. I had to leave.

I gave ample notice, and a good exit plan, and on my last day I handed over the car. I think I left respectfully and honorably, considering the situation. At home and unemployed, I slowly nursed my ego back to health. I packed my corporate clothes up in boxes, cut my hair and re-imagined the next phase of my life. When I landed a fabulous new job, I took over my wife’s Volvo, made it my work car, and started over from scratch, getting to know the intricacies, priorities and needs of an entirely new family (with, thankfully, much better communication skills). And with night falling all around me in the car lot last weekend, so many years later, all that came rushing back. It was not the car itself, but what the transition represented. I was in agony like nothing I’ve ever known, and I figured a way out. I was lost but now I’m found. The car and I survived, and we’ll never have to do that again. Goodbye, sweet divorce car.

Then I spent the rest of the day on a crazy fix-it rampage. The photo wall on the stairs has been bothering me for six months. The housekeeper has been taking the replacement frames out from under our bed sweeping and mopping, and then putting them back every week like a torture cycle. I’ve done one of those montage hangings where everything is haphazard in a “I just threw this up” way that actually requires a design degree to pull off.  So of course, once I printed out all the replacement photos and got everything in order, it took forever to get them all back up.

Also now no longer stored under our bed are the reading sconces we bought last winter. I installed those babies and rehung the art to accommodate. Then I got all jazzed about rehanging art and continued my rampage throughout the rest of the house. In between tapping tiny nails into the stucco walls, I also wrapped all the presents my mother in law mailed (why doesn’t she wrap things first. I really don’t know), installed a new sound system downstairs and set up the old one in the kids’ room. Oh, and bought and prepped the dog treats for Xmas so they don’t wail when I crate them for dinner.

Then I spent all evening freaking out about how little I accomplished from my actual to-do list, which contained an entirely different set of tasks. Mostly holiday stuff. Which (as you may have noted) I am not so super jazzed about.. until we start talking about the

CRAB WITH CHIPOTLE BUTTER and TURKEY TAMALES that we’re going to have on Sunday. If you want to talk about THAT, I’ll sing “Oh Little Star of Bethlehem” wearing only my stripey socks, or whatever you need.

During my late night run to Whole Foods and had to actually tell myself OUT LOUD that I needed to relax about bypassing my to-do list and most of what I was expecting to accomplish. The thing is, these last few months have sucked. The baby hasn’t been sleeping, I’ve been all distraught over what I’m doing with my life, I’m pretty sure the nanny share thinks I have an undiagnosed mental illness because I constantly show up late, unshowered and wild-eyed. Despite having all this help, I work constantly and just can’t get to big projects or even reframing photos with any reliability. Christ. I can hardly return personal emails within a month of receiving them.

I only realize I need a vacation when I’m actually ON vacation and then I feel bad saying “hey work, I know you’re being all cool about the holidays but when can I go to Buenos Aires for three weeks and totally screw you?”  It’s absurd that it took six months to install those freaking sconces.. but then again everything babies do is totally insane and we just take it. Like punks.

Oh and did I mention the 10lbs of gingerbread I just made? Chilling for tomorrow’s homemade gingerbread house decorating extravaganza? Clearly there is something wrong with me. Like a chipotle pepper with no butter and crab to belong to.

“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.

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.

Sigh. Makes me happy. Thanks, Clevergirl, for filling my ego bank with watermelon jolly ranchers, eyes with tears, and writing something as rad as “It’s summertime/ I’m on the road/ Fill the tank and feed my soul/ I dream of things/ You make them true”.

Tomorrow night I’m headed east to be the officiant and lesbian of honor for most fun wedding ever. I’m super honored and excited to be a baller in this hell of a good time ceremony and I can’t wait. We’re closing down a gorgeous bar in Brooklyn for the good part of Sunday. I bought a dress that is slinky summertime city awesome. I’m wearing the strappy sandals that I bought for my own wedding several years ago when Newsom opened the floodgates, but never got to wear because the voters of California dammed them up with awful cement bags before we could get inside. And because we couldn’t agree what to wear, but that’s another post.

I am still living in California, clearly. I smile at people and generally obey crosswalks. I get upset when fellow Bay Area inhabitants are awful to one another. I eat cheeses and drink wine that grew up about 30 miles from where I’m standing. It’s never humid or freezing, and my hair doesn’t frizz. Skies are usually blue, there is a totally amazing feeling of freedom in escaping to Point Reyes for oysters and wandering among coastal cypress trees, or hopping down to San Diego and teaching the kids how to boogie board before joining friends for a palm tree patio bbq in the easy summer sun. I can ski, surf, hike, dance, perform, work, thrive here easily. My kids are happy. I grew up under this hopeful night sky with clear full moons and it has all the makings of the rest of my life.

Except it doesn’t. I am positive that I have the best job in the universe. Like, the kind you don’t ever leave. If you work in private service long enough, you become aware that the golden positions are all about who fits you, much more than who you fit. Working for someone who’s right for me improves my life quality by leaps and bounds. And truth be told, that, and the amazing school my daughter attends, a handful of old friends, and widely available taquerias and decent coffee roasters are the only thing that’s keeping me here. (Yes I know, Brooklyn, you have Blue Bottle finally. Go, you.)

I go to New York with equal parts excitement and sadness. I want to be the person who pops in for a weekend, has a blast and then comes back to the life she prefers, the life she intends to live forever, all full of goals and thriving and sugar cookies.

On the bright side (see, I’m from California. I have to have one), the aforementioned perfect dress, a total Tahari score at Bloomingdale’s, makes me feel a way I’ve always wanted to feel: like the women in the opening of Something’s Gotta Give. Breezy and badass in a TOTALLY sexy way. Silly, I know, but it’s a thing.

Simple yet tremendously popular blogs have tons of comments from people I imagine are wearing Target yoga pants and hopping online whenever Desperate Housewives goes to commercial, who sound like they’re cozying up to the teacher for a better grade.

“Wow such a great post. I wish I could be like you. Do you like cookies? I’ll make you some”

Then you have the ones who try to make snarky comments but fail embarassingly. I imagine these to be like my neighbor in Portland overweight hair-thinning gamer type with a pet lizard who roams free about the apartment. Smart sometimes when he can manage to put the bong down, but painfully introverted. Laughs with a short snorty honk. Oh, gamer. Poor you.

And finally, there are the ones who take to comment sections to air their bigotry within the freedom of anonymity.  I don’t have an example of what those guys look like because it’s only on blog comments that I am reminded they exist. Oh, and in election years.

In the end, there are a handful of more authentic “love this” type responses from folks who just want to profess their enthusiasm, but what’s the point?

I turned comments off. Not that anyone was commenting, but I’d rather have a handful of undated little time capsules than a diary with a running peanut gallery and shitload of spam. I hope that’s not lame, I just don’t see the value.

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.

They do it in magazines, ads, movies. Diet tips. Things to do with lemons and cucumbers (or were those for home spa facials?). They were for girls who know the names of nail polish colors, carry an assortment of cute purses and have long hair in ponytails and boyfriends. Not girls like me.

All my favorite, most close friends have had weight issues throughout life but they’ve been very private battles for some reason (right now I am wondering why, actually, because it seems like a very public issue). My mom and sister would periodically embrace some wholesale program like Nutrisystem, but my little knowledge of each amounted to what program-approved snack bars they thought were gross and would be left in the cabinets for me to sneak afterschool.

I have just not ever had the experience of eating particular things for any other reason than that it seemed good at the moment. I have always had a fast metabolism, boosted by years of ballet class, cheffing and event managing on my feet for 10 hours at a time, and am oddly driven to do weird things like wax the floors or rearrange the living room furniture at 3am, ALL the time. My zeal for life quality leads me in the direction of wine, prawns, butter, cream, sugar, chocolate, garlic, more butter, liver, oysters. I adore food. After eating it I was typically dancing around the living room or doing some show or running around carrying my 70lb electric piano or carting one of the kids on my hip while signing mortgage documents or something, and it’s never really been a passion of mine to be thin and suffice it to say it just didn’t affect me and it just didn’t matter.

But this is the 60 days of self-examination and improvement, and no stone can lie idle. I am TORTUOUSLY out of shape, and that is a sad state for a mom who DID NOT EVEN GESTATE the baby, but still managed to gain 30lbs. I got cocky midway into the third trimester, and once the little sucker was born I was stuck on the couch with no hope for anything but survival for many dark months.

So here I am, building my own wagon to hop aboard, trying to figure out how people actively pay attention to their eating habits. Suddenly I am on a journey through a strange land inhabited for years by most people I know but before now completely invisible to me, and I’m asking them for the most basic directions. They have houses built here that I didn’t even know about. Driveways, landscaping. They have established their particular neighborhoods, being able to discuss the merits of Weight Watchers v South Beach, or the optimal treadmill brand. I am Alice in Wonderland with my little calorie counting app, wandering through in a daze, asserting stupid impossibilities like that the elliptical machine calorie counter is totally accurate and I really did burn 460 calories in 30 minutes (note, best friend says no, which is tragic because I was about to declare this war over early). The sky here is a color I have not seen. People know very specific information, like that an egg is a good bang-for-buck and that bacon on top of a hamburger is a dance with the devil.

It’s not as though I’ve been oblivious to nutrition, but this is a very specific endeavor- to actually assess the amount of energy I take in, and put out.

Tonight I took the kids to the burger place to assert my independence over french fries. I would eat them, and something lovely alongside, and still come out under 600 calories or the above mentioned best friend would be able to call me Hank for a full week. I have succeeded, but am feeling trepidatious about optimism in this world where everyone but me knows North from South and there are no street signs.

Above is my very sensible salad with dressing on the side. I did not order like Meg Ryan though I wish now I had. That’s probably a tired joke to people in diet land.