Author Archive
Adulthood is Change
It has been a while since I have updated. Lots of changes have happened to me as of late. I recently found myself single after a very long relationship. I won’t hash out the sad details here. It was just an unfortunate case of: he was not sure that he loved me, but wasn’t sure enough to let me go. Thus, a relationship that went on too long and ended too abruptly.
Adulthood is sometimes about heart break and loss. The goal is how to learn from each experience and grow stronger, brighter, and more whole.
So I find myself moving out of a home and a life that we had spent many happy years building. I pack my books, my wine collection, my picture frames, my clothes — but all I will take with me from this place is my unbreakable capacity to love.
In my upcoming blog posts, I will be experiencing adulthood as a single person. I am committed to living “a life less ordinary” and I intend to take lots of adventures and share all of my learning experiences with you.
Cheers to new beginnings!
Mara
Guest Blog: Dying
Dying
by Mim (who blogs at www.saidsally.com)
I have not lived a life close to death. My grandfathers both died before I was 10. My grandmothers each passed away when I was in my 20s, both of them after prolonged and wasting illness. When each of them died, I looked at my parents and wondered: How does it feel when your mom dies? What does that grief look like? In both cases, my parents took their mothers’ deaths with cold stoicism that took me by surprise.
Because I expect something to happen when someone close dies. I expect an earthquake that everyone can feel. I expect boulders to push up from under the surface of the earth and create a monument that will stand forever to commemorate that My Loved One died.
I’m thinking about death because a coworker was killed last week, struck by a car on her walk to work. They say she didn’t suffer, and I hope that’s true. She was a gentle soul who never – and I mean this truthfully, not in a we’re-saying-good-things-about-her-because-she’s-dead kind of way – never said a bad word about anyone, never got impatient, always made the best of what she had. At least while I was around.
The thing that hits me is, this grief business is all about US – these souls still hanging around in their bodies, feeling things, thinking things, eating things. Grief, I think, isn’t about the person who has “moved on.” It is, of course, about learning to live without someone who you took for granted was alive. (…) read more
The Adulthood Newswire
What other themes and topics about adulthood are being discussed in the blogosphere?
Check out these great reads on pressing topics:
*The New York Times explores whether going to an elite college is worth the cost.
*An unmarried, non-religous 38-year-old women goes to a yenta for matchmaking. Modern Love’s newest post will put you in the spirit of holiday miracles and give you a mini chuckle. And if you haven’t checked out the NYT’s Modern Love column, you are missing out! In fact, Modern Love is one of my inspirations for this blogs — as it is a repository of experiencial narrative about adulthood written by some very talented writers.
*And finally, some Holiday Parenting Tips published in Family Magazine here in San Diego, and republished with permissions on San Diego Center for Children website (the wonderful organization that I work for!) This article is thoughtful even if you don’t have kids, and was written by the Center’s head-honcho psychologist.
Guest Blog: Hungry for Thanksgiving
“Forget all the other bready options on that buffet table and give me the weird-looking celery-studded stuff. So GOOD to get a bite of stuffing, a bite of turkey and gravy, and a bite of cranberry sauce all mixed up together in your mouth!” – Excerpt from Hungry for Thanksgiving
‘Tis the season for guest bloggers!
This holiday season, I am thankful for my amazing group of blog collaborators who continue to inspire and amaze me with their incredible writing abilities, and wonderful stories.
Here’s a guest blogger, the sassy Mim, who gave us a personal perspective on death that was a quiet little blog entry but was packed with meaning and was incredibly moving. I always learn from her (especially lately — on a personal level, Mim is about as wise as they get) and I am so excited and honored to feature her again on Welcome to Adulthood. Did I mention that Mim is about to jump into the world of blogging? Her blog will be launched next week. Stay tuned right here for all the juicy URL details.
I am also excited to feature a guest blog from two of my favorite ladies at 2GirlsonaBench, Tricia and Siana. Stay tuned, because after the holidays we will kick off our first blog in our Inhabit series from two little ladies that you will not be able to get enough of. (Luckily, you can amuse yourself for hours on their blog.)
But for now, enjoy this little diddy courtesy of Mim that is so good you can almost taste it. Happy Thanksgiving!
Hungry for Thanksgiving
by Mim
When I was a kid, my family celebrated Thanksgiving at our church by helping serve a community meal. I don’t know if we ever had a conversation about the great effort to feed the hungry on the holiday that’s all about gluttony and counting blessings. We just showed up, cooked, served, smiled. Seems maybe there should be some great life lessons in there somewhere. But really, for me, Thanksgiving has mostly always been about the food.
Mom would get up early and, following Grampy’s recipe, she’d sauté celery, onions and poultry seasoning in Crisco until the whole house smelled festive and edible. Before we kids had finished our Frosted Flakes, she had stuffed the huge bird and heaved it into the oven. And by the time we arrived to deliver the finished, golden-crisped turkey to the fellowship hall kitchen, we were bouncing off the walls from the anticipation of eating the magnificent thing. (…)
Lessons on Adulthood: November 22
Life is about learning lessons–that is how we keep growing and evolving. Lessons I learned this week involve friendship, relationships, and…shopping!
1) Friends come and go — even friends that you think are kindred spirits. But you see their faults, and you think, “But I am special. They would never do that to me.” And then it happens. A betrayal can be as small and unspoken as a silent phone, an unanswered call, or a secret. But the loss is heavy, the rift is wide. So you try to accept the change, set aside the bitterness, appreciate them for their moment in time, and move on. Call it a lesson learned.
2) Recently, I ventured to Sonoma for a weekend of wine and hibernating for a dear friend’s bachelorette party. One of the days we were there, we drove down Sonoma’s coast to an epic iPod soundtrack and then stopped at a little restaurant for dinner. We had to wait a few minutes for a table, so we stood outside on the patio deck looking at the ocean.
A couple, who appeared to be in their early 50s, was also waiting for a table. We chatted with them a bit about where we were from and why we were in Sonoma. They were vacationing for their 25th wedding anniversary.
“Do you have any advice for the bride-to-be?” I asked them, expecting some cheeky response.
The couple thought for a moment and the woman said: “When you get married, you have fights sometimes, you might disagree, you might even be attracted to another person, but on our wedding day, we made a vow to always choose each other. So, no matter how angry we may be when we go to bed, no matter how stressful life may get, we wake up every day and think ‘I choose you’ and we are happy.” (Note: it is not “I chose you”, it is “I choose you.”)
Then the husband spoke. He had a slight accent which he indicated was because he was born in Israel. He said, “Never hit below the belt. Because hitting below the belt leaves a hole of hurt so big that no amount of apologies can ever fill it. And you can never take the words back.”
Duly noted.
3) And on a lighter note….From Kaitlan, a reader in Arizona, “Adulthood is seeing a pair of boots you want, being able to buy them without devastating your budget, and walking away because it is the season to give.”
(Photo via AlyssaFilmmaker on Flickr.)
Wordless Wednesday: Adulthood is Innovative
(photo of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain via Hisgett on Flickr.)
The Wisdom (Teeth) of Adulthood
I had just had ‘one of those weeks’ at work. There was nothing really bad about the work week (luckily it wasn’t one of THOSE weeks), but I was on the heels of large event that our agency was organizing and that resulted in many late nights in the office. Some nights I tiptoed into my house at midnight, using the light of my iPhone (so as not to wake my sleeping beau) to help me find pajamas in my dark bedroom. Yep, it was one of those weeks.
It was also a week that I had a toothache. It started as a dull ache, near the back of my bottom left jaw. It was that kind of nagging ache, rooted deep in my tooth, which could be minimized by throwing back a few Advil. My busy days in the office didn’t have time for the ache, and I didn’t think much of it after the Advil took hold. My ‘work adrenaline’ was on high, and my bandwith already too full to worry about a tooth ache.
The event came and went successfully, but as I drove home from the event that Friday night, I realized I had taken 12 Advil that day to manage this pain in my tooth, which had grown from an ache to a persistent and acute throbbing.
When I went to bed that night, the pain was so intense that I could not fall asleep. I took two Aleve this time, half of a valium that I had left over from my recent international trip, and willed myself into a numbed sleep.
When I woke up on Saturday my face was swollen. In fact, my left cheek was so swollen that I couldn’t open my mouth very wide. But what was extremely troubling on this day was my left neck gland was so swollen that I couldn’t turn my head. Slowly, I began to panic as a startling realization swept over me: I did not have insurance….
read more
Coming Up: Adulthood and the Uninsured
Hi everyone,
Sorry I have been MIA for a while. After my dog bite, I had another traumatic medical incident. In the haze of the subsiding pain and antibiotic cloudiness, I had an idea for an interesting entry that I think may add another nuance to our ongoing conversation of adulthood.
Stay tuned.
[photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/angel_ina/]
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