The keys to a happy new year

There are four ways that any given day can pan out. ONE: You wake up in a good mood and you have a good day. TWO: You wake up in a lousy mood and have a fantastic day. THREE: You wake up in a good mood and have a horrible day. FOUR: You wake up in a shit mood and have a shit day. And on January 1, 2011 my day turned out to be a solid THREE.

We were in Tahoe with friends for a long weekend of skiing, sledding and ringing in the New Year. I woke up around 7:30 and the house was quiet, so I lay there for a while listening to the MR. snore. I let him do that some times because I know he loves it. Usually about 20 snores is all I can take before I politely ask him to roll over. But it was New Year's, so I gave him 25.

Opening the blinds, I was greeted with an even bigger winter wonderland than we'd had the day before. I've never seen so much snow in my life as when we first pulled up to the house. It took the MR. over an hour to shovel a path to the front door! And over night, another foot-and-a-half of fresh white powder had silently fallen.

Downstairs, our godson Jake and his dad were starting to shuffle around, getting ready to go to Jake's ski lesson. Realizing they'd need a ride, I got dressed, put on my boots and bounced downstairs. No foolin', I bounced. It was a new year! A new beginning! This day and 2011 were surely going to ROCK! Because 2010 didn't really turn out the way we'd hoped on the whole becoming-a-family front.

To save some time since Jake and his dad were running a tad late, I decided to go ahead and warm up the car. Broom and keys in hand, I headed outside and made my way up the MR.'s award-winning path, making fresh tracks the entire way. Rounding a big snow drift at the top of my trek, all I could see were the wheels of our car. The entire thing was covered in almost two feet of snow. For whatever reason, I decided to start in the back. The snow was so light and fluffy that I could literally just brush it off with a broom. Piece of cake, I thought.

Working my way around the sides and to the front took about 20 minutes. I was just finishing up clearing off the hood, when suddenly I looked down at my gloves. A flame of panic worked its way up from the pit of my gut to the middle of my throat. After what seemed like 8,000,000 slow-moving minutes, my brain finally found the words. The car keys. THE KEYS! Where were the keys? I'd had them in my hand. And now I all had was a broom handle. Holy shit. Holy shit. HOLY SHIT!

Looking at the ground, all I saw were miles and miles of white snow. Yep, I was in hell and it had frozen over. Frantically, I started searching the pile around my feet, digging through and scooping up snow all around me. Nothing. The panic was now turning into a full-on anxiety attack. No, no, no, no, NOOOOOOO! This couldn't be happening. It was New Year's Day. It was supposed to be a good year. It couldn't be starting like this! But it was. And I wanted to hurl. But instead, I ran full throttle down the path to the house.

Barging through the door, I ransacked the room, thinking that maybe just maybe I'd set the keys down and hadn't really carried them out with the broom. I dumped my purse out, hoping and praying I'd put them in there. But I hadn't. They weren't on the counter. They weren't in the bathroom. They were flat-out NOT in the house. Nope, they were buried in an avalanche of snow and I had no idea where. Happy F-ing New Year.

As my best friend tried to talk me off the cliff I'd settled myself on, I heard the MR. walking around upstairs. I knew what I had to do. Slowly, I faced my fate and made my way up the stairs, my legs feeling heavier and heavier with every step I took.

Once I got to the top, I just stood there until the MR. noticed me. He was a little fuzzy from the New Year's Eve revelry, but he registered pretty quickly that all was not well in the land of Darrah. "What's wrong?," he asked with great concern. "Are you crying?" And with a quivering lip, I answered: "I messed up real bad. I lost the keys in the snow." His eyes widened and then he said the one thing I never remotely anticipated: "My wedding ring was on there. I took it off before I went skiing yesterday." And that's when I really lost it.

My shoulders slouched forward and I succumbed to total defeat. Giving me a big hug, the MR. tried to comfort me, telling me it was all going to be okay. But what else could he do? His wife had turned into a flood of salty tears. In reality, I'm sure he was thinking the same thing I was: We're screwed.

For an hour, we all looked for those damn keys. Even our godson was out there with his little purple shovel. We cleared every inch of snow within three feet of the car, on all sides. And nothing. We found nothing. Staring at the 20-foot mound of snow in front of the car that had been pushed there by the plow, I had a thought. What if I'd flung the keys with my sweeping motion? Lord, help me. What if the keys flung out of my hand and into that Mt. Everest-sized snowbank?

Desperate beyond reason, I started pulling the snow down from the pile in large chunks, pausing between each effort to scan the snow. Ten minutes in, I'd found nothing. But there was nowhere else to look at this point. So I continued to pull and scan, pull and scan. And then. There they were. The *$##$#&*#$# keys.

I wish I could say I learned some kind of lesson in all this, but for the life of me all I can come up with is this: Don't carry a broom and your keys in the same hand when you're clearing off your car after a snowstorm. And don't hang the entire balance of your year on a key ring. Because you just might lose it in a snowbank.


A re-enactment of the MRS. losing her keys...

Happy Holidays from the Mrs.

The Game of LIFE

About this time every year, I get nostalgic for a lot of things—for my old friends, for changing leaves, for the sound of football games (a.k.a. tailgates) and, quite simply, for the Midwest. Yet, at the same time I’m filled with happy fall memories, a familiar sadness seems to settle inside my soul. It’s kinda like Sunshine Barbie and Debbie Downer deciding to throw a party together.

Someone somewhere told me once that a shift in seasons can trigger memories deep in your heart—both happy and sad—and sometimes it takes a while for your head to catch up and get a clue. For me, it’s the shift to fall that dredges up a mixed bag of emotions.

I remember in vivid detail driving home to St. Louis after a weekend with friends in Bloomington, Indiana. It was September of 1997. Rather than take the highway, I decided to drive a two-lane backroad for as long as I could. A Son Volt cassette was blasting, the windows were down and colorful trees lined both sides of the road.

I’d just accepted a job in San Francisco and knew that my life was changing. Forever. And the tears just came rolling out. They were happy tears for making a dream come true all by myself, but they were also big fat sad tears for all that I was leaving behind. In my mind, it was the end of an era and I don’t handle good-byes well…with people, places or moments in time. Little did I know then that the biggest good-bye of my life was yet to come. A month later, on October 30, 1997, my youngest sister died.

I still moved to San Francisco in November and went about trying to create a life for myself, but honestly the first years after my sister’s death are, at best, a blur. I look back at pictures and I hardly recognize myself. I was lost. Profoundly lost. Somehow, some way I scraped and clawed my way out of the black hole of depression, sadness, loss and loneliness I’d fallen into and began to see glimpses of blue sky. But it was hard. Damn hard. Before I knew it, my calendar said September 2002. And a few weeks later, I met the MR. How fitting it was to meet the man that was to become my best friend…in the fall.

After going through two miscarriages in the last two years (both in the fall) and a failed match with a birth mom in September this year, I decided it was time to stack my deck with some happy fall memories. To be with friends. To be in the Midwest. To laugh and laugh and laugh. Because I was sick and tired of tears. So I headed to Indianapolis to spend the weekend with the same two friends I was with back in September of 1997 when I accepted my job in San Francisco.

We drank Bud Lights. We laughed. We played Go Fish with my friend’s two daughters. We sang “Don’t Stop Believin” at the top of our lungs in the car on the way to dinner. We danced in the living room ‘til 1 a.m. We visited IU and reminisced about working at Kilroy’s Bar as seniors. We talked about our college loves (and how they were mostly fools). One of us did a cartwheel in Dunn Meadow (not me). We tooled around the cul de sac on Betsy’s Vespa back at the house. We shot hoops (at least we tried) in the neighbor’s driveway. We drank more Bud Lights. And then we played the board game LIFE.

Now I really didn’t know much about the game. My family didn’t play LIFE when I was a kid. We liked CLUE (Miss Scarlett in the Study with the Candlestick, anyone?) and I also remember playing King’s Corner with our babysitter Mrs. Lilly, who seemed at least 150-years-old to me at the time. So it was a learning curve with me and LIFE. The first question I had to answer before I could spin the dial was: Do you want to go to college? If I said yes, I’d start the game $40,000 in debt. Well, that just sounded ridiculous, so I decided to take my chances and skip higher education all together.

Once that decision was made, I drew two cards to determine my occupation and salary. Turns out I was an entertainer who made $70,000 a year. Now I’m assuming that by “entertainer”, the makers of LIFE didn’t mean stripper, so in my mind, I pictured myself with an acoustic guitar touring the country, singing and writing songs. And that’s when it started to get a little weird.

It was like I went into fantasy mode, creating this parallel life for myself. Let me tell you, it was FUN! I bought a cool two-level loft in a big city. I got married. I had a son. I adopted twins. I changed careers and became a cop who made $100,000 a year. I won the Nobel Peace Prize. And last but not least, I retired with $1.6 million. I gotta be honest, I didn’t want the game to end.

But end it did, leaving me to continue playing my own personal game of LIFE, where seasons change and people pass, where Sunshine Barbie and Debbie Downer hang out, where all I can do is move forward one square at a time.

Conversations to look forward to...

Taking care of business

Walking past the hallway bathroom the other night, I glanced in (because the door was wide open) only to find the MR. standing in front of the toilet…peeing. Rather than keep on walking, I actually stopped in the doorway and asked him a question about something random, to which he answered me by…farting. He thought that was pretty funny. I, on the other hand, did not. And that’s when reality hit me like a martini hangover: I was actually engaging in a conversation with my husband as he peed and farted. How the heck did we get here? And when the heck did we stop closing the bathroom door?

Now, to be clear, the door is shut when anything resembling #2 is involved. Thankfully that is still considered a classified situation. But if it’s a quick pee, well, we seem to have adopted an open-door policy. I’ll admit, I’m just as guilty as the MR. on this one. For whatever reason, that extra little step of closing the door just seems like a bother.

It wasn’t always like this. When we were dating and even when we were living in our first apartment together, we always closed the door. Always. Yet somewhere along the way in our 1620+ days of marriage, things changed. I remember the first time I left the door open and the MR. found me sitting so daintily on the pot. He couldn’t stop laughing and I think he actually said it was cute to see me so vulnerable. Funny thing about a lot of habits that seem "cute" when you're just getting to know someone is that they seldom hold their charm over the long haul.

One of the best things about buying a house is that we no longer have to share a bathroom. Our apartment in the city only had one teeny tiny bathroom and it was a challenge, to say the least. I think the lowest point came one night when I was brushing my teeth and the MR. sauntered in, lifted up the toilet seat and started…peeing. Now I don’t know if it was the smell of someone else’s pee or the random drop that splashed onto my cheek as I leaned over the sink (GROSS!) that did me in, but from that point forward I insisted that all potty business had to be done when the other person was out of the room. (Clearly, I forgot to also include a clause about closing the door.)

When we first moved into our house, the MR. was bummed about the idea of separate bathrooms because he said it felt like we were roommates. Truth be told, I also think he was a little bitter about having to share his bathroom with the cat. I don’t blame him, really. She’s one pretty kitty with one stinkin’ arse. But the master bath was way too small to share, let alone house the litter box, so there really wasn’t another option. Besides, I’d had enough of finding his nose hairs in the sink. And I’m sure, if he was honest with himself, he’d had enough of cleaning my long locks out of the shower drain.

If you think about it, there are a lot of names for that most sacred of spaces wherein the toilet lives. Bathroom. Loo. Water closet. WC. Lavatory. Commode. Privy. Shithouse. Shitter. Latrine. Crapper. Boardroom. Office. When I was in the first grade, a substitute teacher asked if anyone wanted to go to the “RESTroom”. Thinking that this was some marvelous hidden room where I could take an afternoon nap, I raised my hand. After all, first grade is exhausting, is it not? Seeing my hand in the air, the sub said loudly so all could hear, “Darrah, you just went to the bathroom!” And that’s how I learned that a bathroom is also called a restroom, much to my profound disappointment and embarrassment.

Speaking of elementary school, I can only thank my lucky stars that we didn’t have computers way back in the 70s and early 80s. Because, you see, on the earlier versions of Word (and potentially recent versions too), if you spell-checked “Darrah”, the first word that popped up was diarrhea. Can you imagine? I would’ve been Diarrhea Darrah for all of eternity.

As it turned out, the only nickname I had as a kid was Big Ears and it didn’t stick past 2nd grade. My next official nickname came in middle school when I was christened Double-D Darrah because I developed some rather large ta-tas before most girls. Living with that nickname was hardly a cakewalk, but I still think Diarrhea Darrah would have been worst. I mean, I can just imagine how the kids would have taunted me at recess.

“When Darrah’s slidin’ into first
and her pants start to burst
Diarrhea, diarrhea.

When her stomach really hurts
and she knows it’s the squirts
Diarrhea, diarrhea.”

The moral of the story? For the love of God, spell-check your favorite names before you give one to your kid. As a side note, you should also be careful what you wish for. I always let the MR. read my rants, raves and revelations before I post them because I think it's important that he feels comfortable with whatever I write about our personal lives. Funny thing is that after reading this particular rant, the MR. started closing the door every time he goes into the bathroom. And for some odd and potentially disturbing reason, I feel left out.

For more stanzas of The Diarrhea Song, go here or for a sing-along, go here.

Sometimes it pays to get lost

Ever get lost on the web? I have. Plenty of times. Damn Google. Sometimes it's about procrastination, other times it's about... well... I guess it's always about procrastination. The surfing starts out innocently enough, where I'm just trying to kill a few minutes between projects. Next thing you know, it's an hour (or two) later, and I'm frantically searching on eBay for a black-and-white photo of Molly Ringwald from her Pretty in Pink days because I've suddenly decided to create a photo gallery dedicated to 80s idols. (True story.) When I'm in that deep, all I can do is click my ruby slippers three times and hope that somehow I find my way home from Oz.

Trouble is, I'm a freelance writer and I can only bill for work I'm actually doing. So unless I have a client who also shares my nostalgic yearning for John Hughes movies, I'm sorta screwed when I waste precious working hours on randomness. But every once in a while, the mindless surfing pays off. And today was one of those days. I don't know how I stumbled upon Communicatrix, but it was worth the trip (pun intended). So as I work on the next installment of The Mrs. Chronicles, I thought this story, written by another quirky writer, was worth sharing. It gave me a new laugh line.

XOXO,
The MRS.


The black hole between okay and fantastic
"I quit smoking about 20 years ago. (Go ahead—applaud. I’ll wait.) Thing is, while my 2-pack-a-day habit wasn’t doing me any favors, neither was it impeding my life in any major way. You X- and Y-ers might not know this, but back in ’87, you could still smoke most places, like…indoors. In your hospital room! Plus lots of other people smoked, too, so you had your pick of people to date and hang out..."

Want to know how it ends? Keep reading

Sorry folks, the uterus is closed. The test should have told you.

Ignorance is a funny thing. (And just to be clear, I don’t mean funny as in haha.) Before the MR. and I walked into the first fertility clinic, I said with complete confidence and total conviction that IVF was not for me, and that if we got to that point, then we would simply adopt (as though that would be a piece of cake in comparison). Because I wasn’t going to put all those drugs in my body. No way, no how, no thank you. I really and truly believed in what I was saying at the time, but looking back now on five rounds of artificial insemination and three rounds of IVF, I think it’s safe to say that I was full of shit. Or ignorance. Same same.

The rollercoaster of infertility gains fierce momentum with each passing period that screams, “NO BABY FOR YOU.” Before I’d have a chance to take stock and catch my breath, I’d find myself signing up to ride it again and again and again. And each time, my doctors would add more drugs or new drugs or stronger drugs. Toward the end, my belly looked like a pincushion and my hormones were so jacked up that I was in a perpetual state of the worst PMS you can imagine for a looooong time. Kinda like this.

Adding insult to injury are the damn pregnancy tests. My personal favorite (and I say that with serious sarcasm) was the one with the sad face/smiley face indicator. It’s like the test was mocking me: “Sorry, but this just isn’t your month. Here’s a cute sad smiley face to commiserate with you.” Even better is the one that boldly states Not Pregnant. I remember thinking as I sat on the toilet staring at those two frustrating words, “Yea, I get it already. Why not put it in neon lights and add a little sing-a-long jingle, just to really drive the point home?” After lamenting about the tests to a good friend, she told me how one month she’d truly thought she was pregnant, until while peeing on the pregnancy test she got her period. We laughed—until we cried.

After the last round of IVF failed in the worst possible way, I can safely say that I wanted to try again about as much as I wanted to run straight into a concrete wall with 5-foot spikes sticking out of it. After three years of trying to conceive, the MR. and I were utterly defeated and deflated. We’d picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves off so many times. I knew I couldn’t do it again. I was done. The uterus was closed.

What I’ve come to realize is that every woman dealing with infertility has her breaking point. And it’s different for each of us. There is a couple in our adoption workshop that went through six rounds of IVF. Six f-ing rounds. But I get it. Even though I couldn’t have done it. I get it. It’s sort of like playing the slots in Vegas. You keep throwing dollar after dollar at it because maybe, just maybe, you’ll hit the jackpot on the next spin. And then the next thing you know, you've lost $80 in 15 minutes. (I speak from experience.)

More than anything, what feeds the dream is that some people do hit the IVF jackpot—they get pregnant. Sometimes they hit the double jackpot and get twins (kinda like a 2-for-1), which makes it that much harder to walk away. But, like Kenny Rogers said, “You gotta know when to fold ‘em.”

I’ve found peace with the idea that I’m not going to be pregnant. And I have to tell you, in all honesty, I’m so completely okay with it. I’m 39 years old and I really want to just get this mommy show on the road already. Because you see, I don’t think giving birth makes someone a better mom. As one woman in our adoption workshop so eloquently put it: “For me, mother is a verb. Not a noun.”

I daydream about being in the hospital room with our birth mom when our child is born. It brings tears to my eyes to know that I'll be a part of the process, a witness to the miracle of life and to my child's first moments in the world. Just like any other mom.

A Mr. and Mrs. Who Tweet Together...

Something struck me as beyond funny when I got to my Twitter page and saw that my tweet and the MR.'s tweet were stacked together. Between his photo, his Twitter name, his post and my post, what can I say. He's quite the catch, no? Too bad more gals can't find hillbilly martini drinkers who waterproof basements of local strip clubs.

1620 Days and Counting

A few months ago, I created an account on The Knot because I’d just started working for a wedding photographer who needed some help with her marketing. In the middle of procrastinating on another project this week, I decided to check the site to see if the new bio I’d written for her listing had been posted yet. I logged into my account and up popped a green tab in the lower left corner that said:

Hi Darrah Jane
1620 days since your wedding!

Holy crap. It’s been one thousand, six hundred and twenty days (and counting) since the MR. and I said I Do, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, through laughter and tears. As I pondered the inconceivable (said just like this) realization that I’d been a MRS. for that long, I nearly spit out my green tea when it hit me that it’s been almost 8 years (or 2,920 days if you want to keep it apples to apples) since the MR. and I met at a barbecue.

I’d been living in San Francisco for 5 years at the time and had been single for just about all of it. I’d gone on a few dates here and there, but the longest “relationship”, which is really a stretch to even call it that, was three months. For me, this was revolutionary. I’d had a boyfriend consistently since I was 17. Actually, it was three boyfriends over the course of 10 years, with a few months…or weeks…of being Little Miss Single thrown in between each one.

My favorite between-boyfriends crush was on a bass player in a cover band in St. Louis called Paint the Earth. His name was Ben. I don’t think I ever knew his last name. And he didn’t really feel the same about me. But it didn’t matter. He had long hair. And he played guitar. In a band. Okay, a cover band. But still. A band. Three friends and I would follow those guys to every gig, every weekend. We’d dance right up front and give the stink-eye to every other girl groupie. Yea, there’s a good chance it looked a little psycho.

About this time was when I got my first tattoo...on my rear. Clearly, I was starting to pound out a tiny crack in my sorority-girl, goody-two-shoes, rules-following shell. More than anything, I wanted to ditch the Sandy-image from the beginning of Grease and be the Sandy at the end of the movie. But it wasn't going to happen overnight.

Case in point: When I got the tattoo, I wore my bathing suit bottoms to be sure that it’d be in a spot where no one could see it. Because even though I wanted to stand tall and be my own person, too much of me was still concerned with what other people would think. Basically, I had the will, but no balls.

Walking into the tattoo parlor, I felt like I'd come home and was totally out of place all at the same time. As though it was scripted, there were three burly gents sitting there, all with a lot of tattoos and probably a Harley a-piece parked in the back. The guy who did my tattoo literally looked like one of the guys from ZZ Top. Beard and all. Watching him ink dainty flowers on my arse was a picture-perfect juxtaposition. At work the next day, I went to the bathroom every half-hour just to look at my new addition. Hiding in that stall, I experienced my first waves of rebel freedom.

Fast forward to 1997. I’d moved to San Francisco (sans boyfriend) and, feeling the need for a growth spurt, I got my first piercing. On my belly button. Then I dyed my forever-blonde locks a dark chocolate brown, much to my mother’s dismay. Then I got my second tattoo. Then another piercing. I was on a roll. Not sure I knew exactly where I was going, but I believed that if I changed the way I looked, people's perception of me would change, too. They'd stop seeing the tall blonde Barbie and start seeing the girl I really wanted to be: a free-spirited, creative, alternative chick. Took me awhile to realize that I was actually the person I needed to convince the most.

And then I got invited to that barbecue.

I didn’t know a soul besides my friend who invited me, and so, feeling a little awkward and sorta shy, I focused on getting myself a burger. But by the time I got to the fixins’ table, there were no more hamburger buns. In a moment of what I still think of as sheer creative genius, I used two flattened-out hot dog buns instead.

Looking around, I saw my friend sitting at a table across the lawn. There was an open seat across from her so I high-tailed it over before someone else grabbed it. I didn’t really register who else was at the table as I sat down; I was concentrating too hard on keeping the ketchup on my plate and off my shirt. Picking up my brilliant burger/hot dog bun concoction, I was poised to take my first bite when I heard a male voice next to me say: “Nice buns.”

Now I wish I knew what I said in response, and I really hope it was something damn witty, but what I really loved (and still do) about that moment was that the MR.’s humor was the first thing I knew about him. And he’s kept me laughing ever since. Even through the tears.

Speaking of Balls

Anne Taintor is my hero and since my last post was about all the balls in my life, I just had to share this magnet. If you want to laugh your ass off, check out her collection at annetaintor.com. I can only hope to someday be as clever as she is.

Help Me Obi Wan Kenobi, You're My Only Hope

I’ve got a lot of balls in my life right now – figuratively and literally. I’m juggling my freelance work, the adoption process and my own writing. Balls. I’m trying to learn how to play tennis. Balls. I’m figuring out how to make things grow in the garden. Root balls. I’m cleaning up after my cat. Hairballs. And then there are the white hairs that the MR. has discovered on…yes…his balls. Upon learning this last little fun factoid, I think my exact words to the MR. were: “I got enough balls to worry about right now. I don’t have time to worry about yours.”

Worrying is a big theme with me. Not sure if I was a worrier as a little kid, but somewhere along the way, the fear switch turned on and got stronger with each passing year.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve worried about people liking me, about following the rules, about being really bad at sports (kickball, softball, basketball, dodgeball. damn balls.), about people dying, about whether I left the curling iron on, about getting cancer, about letting a friend down, about whether people like my writing, about being a good person, about getting complacent, about gaining weight, about the new wrinkles on my forehead, about watching too much TV, about spending too much time thinking about sad things, about being a failure, about getting pregnant, about…everything.

It’s an exhausting list to write—let alone live—and I imagine it’s overwhelming to read. But fear and worry are powerful things. They’re like Darth Vader and the Emperor from Star Wars, plotting in their evil chamber about how to bring others to the dark side. Defeating them takes a lot of courage—not to mention a killer pair of Princess Leia hairbuns.

For the last year, I’ve been talking about my fears in therapy because I believed that if I talked about them, they would shrivel up and die. But something clicked at my tennis lesson a few weeks ago when my coach said, “You have to hit the ball with COURAGE, Darrah.” I realized that I was saying all the right things in therapy, but wasn’t actually walking through the fire. At some point, talk is cheap. If I really wanted to stop living my life frozen by fear, I was going to have to take a different approach.

So, I hung a photo of Princess Leia over my desk and called Obi Wan (a.k.a my tennis coach) to increase my lessons to twice a week. It may take me a lot of court time to find my courage, but I’m going to grab my fear by the tennis balls. And then I’ll try applying it to the rest of my life. And my writing. May the force be with me.

Something More

There's gotta be something more
Gotta be more than this
I need a little less hard time
I need a little more bliss
I'm gonna take my chances
Taking a chance I might
Find what I'm looking for
There's gotta be something more

Thanks for the kick in the ass, Sugarland. Get the song on iTunes.

Potty Talk

I head to Seattle once a month for a client meeting, which works out perfectly because I get to stay with my sister and hang out at her house. On a recent trip, I arrived one day after my mom’s departure, an unfortunate case of bad timing and busy schedules made it impossible to sync up our visits.

Now here’s the thing, my mom loves her purple pens and her post-its. If you have any reason to interact with my mom on any level, no matter how obscure, you’re going to get a post-it informing you of something. Got a package to deliver? You’ll find a post-it telling you to leave it at the door. Wondering if the dishes in the dishwasher are clean? The post-it knows all. Walk into her kitchen and you’ll find post-its. Go to her office…post-its. Walk into the laundry room…post-its. Seriously, if my family were smart, we’d all buy stock in post-its. And purple pens.

So it came as no surprise to find a post-it waiting for me in my sister’s guest bath: “Toilet not flushing properly! ☹” I don’t know if it was the thought of my mom writing a post-it about a toilet that I found so funny, or if it was the sad smiley face, but I laughed out loud–—until I realized I had to go to the bathroom. I’ll be honest, I used that toilet with some serious trepidation for the rest of my visit. And it got me thinking about how a toilet is sort of like life. No matter how smoothly things run 99.9% of the time in our day-to-day lives, the unavoidable truth is that are inevitable moments when the shit just keeps swirling around and won’t flush down.

I Got the Blues

A little over two months ago, I took on my first and biggest challenge of 2010: to conquer two sticks. (That's insider lingo for skis, by the way.) Throughout my two years of fertility treatments, I swear I became so tightly wound that a 50-lb lump of coal had surely found its way up my ass and was slowly turning into a million-carat diamond. And so, the idea of putting myself in a position of being horribly out of control rather than so unbelievably structured felt...in a word...freeing.

Driving to the ski resort over New Year's I was really nervous. And for good reason. I'd only been skiing about 3 times in my 38 years up until that point. The first time was in middle school when I went to Mt. Holly in Michigan with the ski club. I don't remember much about that excursion, except for one thing: my sheer and utter panic as I flew down the hill (and in Michigan it really is a hill) with absolutely no idea how to stop. After that there was skiing in France at 16 on an exchange trip (it didn't go well) and a trip to Tahoe in 2007 (it went okay because I only did two beginner runs and called it a day).

Fast forward to Tahoe 2010. I spent that first morning on the bunny hill, which was totally fine by me. But, after lunch, the MR. thought I should graduate to the grown-up lift and try an easy green run that I'd done back in 2007. Feeling confident in my snowplowing after practicing with all the 5-year-olds learning to ski for the first time, I agreed. If I'd done the run before, surely I could do it again. Right?

Doing my best to move towards the ski lift (not an easy feat on flat ground wearing skis), the first thing I noticed was a big-ass sign that said NOT A BEGINNER SKI LIFT. Um. Yea. Not exactly a confidence booster. Turning to the MR. I said, "Are you sure I did this run three years ago? I don't remember that sign." And he said, "Yes. Absolutely."

As the lift slowly brought us up the mountain, I racked my brain trying to find anything familiar about the scenery. Getting a little nervous and sweaty in all the wrong places, I asked the MR. again, "Are you sure I did this run before? I just don't remember it." To which he said, in his exasperated, why-don't-you-ever-believe-me voice, "I can't promise you enough that you did this run before. I don't know what else to tell you so that you'll believe me." Well, geesh. If you're gonna put it that way.

The triumph was that I got off the ski lift without a hitch. Score one for Darrah Jane. But then, we skied over to the start of the run. From my perspective, I was staring straight down a white vertical wall. Surely my death was imminent. My heart started racing, tears formed at the corners of my eyes and all I could think was, "How the hell did I do this three years ago?" With no way to go but down, I tentatively pushed off and hoped for the best.

Now, for all I know, I was only going .025 miles an hour, but it felt like I was going 250 miles an hour. I honestly think I held my breath the entire way down, and I am not ashamed to admit that I truly considered pulling off to the side, plopping down in the snow and crying...hard. I didn't care if I'd have to live on that mountain for the rest of my life, just as long as I didn't have to ski the rest of the way, I'd do anything.

By an act of God, I didn't fall and I made it down in one piece. That's the good news. On the flip side, I was a nervous wreck. My hands were shaking and my legs felt like Jello. At the bottom, the MR. actually looked at me and said, "Do you want to try it again?" Are you insane? Seriously? Try it again? I almost died of a heart attack up there! So he headed up the mountain in a huff and I headed back to the warm womb of the bunny hill.

I didn't see the MR. for the rest of the day. I was annoyed with him and he was annoyed with me. So we were even. Around 3pm, he came skiing over to my side of the mountain and hockey-stopped right in front of me. He took off his goggles and said, "I owe you a huge apology. That's not the run you did 3 years ago." AH-HA! It was like the sky parted and a heavenly host of angels started singing Hallelujah. Turns out, not only was it a run I'd never done before, but it was a BLUE, people. That's an intermediate-level run. And worse than that, the run is called THE CHUTE! The name says it all.

I'm proud to say that I've come a long way since that first trip back in early January. I'm skiing blues now and have only fallen a couple of times. Of course, one fall induced a panic attack in the middle of the run, but let's not dwell on that. No doubt, looking straight down at a vertical strip of snow is still equal parts humbling and balls-out terrifying. The fear burns white-hot in the middle of my chest and all I can think about is giving up. But then I hear a small, timid voice inside my head say, "You can do this." And that's my cue to go for it. The MR. said it best, "You're better than this. You're better than the fear." He wasn't saying that I couldn't feel fear. Instead, he was telling me to believe in my ability. I'm better than I think.

Last weekend, I had the best run of my life. It was so much F-U-N! The rush of cold air on my face was life changing. I didn't want it to end. To say I had a big grin on my face when I got to the bottom would be an understatement. After looking back up the mountain from where I'd just come, I turned to the MR. and said, "That was my best run yet!" To which he said, "That was The Chute." Well, I'll be.

Home Sweet Homestudy

Being a writer, there are some things that people assume come easy to me. Like writing, for instance. But it doesn’t. For me, there’s nothing more intimidating than staring at a blank screen with that cursor blinking, blinking, blinking. It’s like every blink is taunting me and waiting for me to throw out my first sentence. And then once I do, inevitably the sentence is crap, so I delete it and try again. And again. And again. It’s torture.

Writing is damn hard, and I’ve never been so reminded of that fact as when I sat at the kitchen counter of our Tahoe house trying to answer 32 autobiographical questions for our homestudy application. There I was, with the snow falling down outside, a fire roaring inside and a cup of hot cocoa in hand, staring at the first question: “Briefly comment on the relationship of your mother and father (a) with each other, (b) with you, and (c) with your partner.”

Ummm… I’m sorry, but isn’t that three questions? All I could think was… this isn’t fair. Here we are, two good people who just want to be parents and because we can’t do it the old-fashioned way or even the high-tech way, we have to jump through hoops and put our lives on the chopping block so that strangers can decide if we’re parent material.

I’ll be honest, I sat in that puddle of self-pity for a good hour. I thought about the fact that we had to be fingerprinted for FBI clearances and have physicals to prove that A) we’re not criminals and B) we’re not going to drop dead in the foreseeable future. I lamented the idea that a social worker was going to come into my home to make sure it was suitable. I was pissed and annoyed and frustrated and sad and angry and consumed by negative thoughts.

But then, as the answer to that 3-part question started to flow out of me, I thought about the child that would surely come into our lives someday and realized that these questions weren’t meant to be fun or easy or entertaining. They weren’t designed to make me feel all warm and fuzzy about myself. In fact, they were meant to be difficult and time consuming and intimidating because they were designed to protect an innocent child. Plain and simple.

So I put on my writer’s hat and stared that cursor down until all 32 questions were answered. And then I spent two hours typing out the MR.’s answers because he types with two fingers. And yes, that was the one thing I said I wished I could change about my spouse in response to question #20.

So far so good

If you were going to give $30K to a stranger, what questions would you ask before you handed it over? That's exactly what the Mr. and I have been trying to figure out as we interview adoption agencies and attorneys. And yes, that is the average price tag on adopting a child in the U.S. Actually, it can go up from there depending on the "situation", like maybe the birth mom doesn't have medical insurance. Or maybe she changes her mind once the baby is born and we have to start the search all over again. Good times.

It's been a rough month. I'm not gonna lie. For starters, I've turned to self-grooming to try and save a few bucks where I can. Feeling really resourceful, I bought a $20 facial trimmer to solve the overgrown mustache and eyebrow problem. I'm not sure, but I may have created stubble on my upper lip and potentially my trimmed-up brows make me look like Spock's sister. Sexy stuff.

Besides coming to terms with the cost of it all, the Mr. and I have had to engage in some pretty honest conversations about what OUR vision for OUR family looks like. Because the agencies ask. Point blank. So basically, we have to say out loud to complete strangers, "We want a white baby." Talk about feeling like a horrible, selfish, racist person. I mean, what we really want is just a healthy baby with ten fingers and ten toes. But if you're going to ask and we're going to be honest, then yes – we'd like the baby to be white like us. And the next thing you want to say is: "Please don't think we're bad people."

And then there's the home study application that's packed with 32 questions that the Mr. and I have to answer. Separately. Like this little gem: How do you think parenting will affect your current lifestyle. Is that a rhetorical question? Or how about this one: Describe yourself. Okay, that's a little open-ended, don't you think? And my personal favorite: If you could change anything about your partner, what would you change? How about nothing. I love him the way he is.

Mixed in with what sometimes seemed like dark clouds of reality, the Mr. and I have had some beautiful rainbows, too. Like seeing our friends with their adopted son and realizing that it's not a matter of IF we'll be parents. It's a matter of WHEN. Or standing in the room that will one day be our child's nursery and planning how to decorate it. Together. Because really, these hurdles along the way aren't meant to keep us from adopting a child, but rather they're designed to bring us that much closer to meeting the child that is truly ours. So far so good.

Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson

Watching a movie or televison show where the dialog is spot-on completely inspires me. I have such respect for a writer who just nails the cadence of conversation between two people. Friday Night Lights is one of my all-time favorite examples. I can say with all seriousness that I strive for the Mr. and I to interact like Eric and Tammy. Not sure if he's on board entirely, but the new season should be starting soon. We'll see how that goes.

The Blind Side was packed with priceless dialog, but one of my most favorite moments was between Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, played by Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw. Let me set the scene: They're in their foyer greeting Nick Saban from Louisiana State who has come to the house to talk with the Tuohy's adopted son about playing football for LSU. As Saban walks into the den, Leigh Anne and Sean remain standing in the foyer. The exchange between them goes something like this:

LEIGH ANNE (with emphasis): I find him VERY attractive.
SEAN: Yea, I'm standing right here, Leigh Anne.
LEIGH ANNE : Mm-hmm. I know.

How could you not bust out laughing at such a candid moment between a husband and a wife? What makes it so perfect is that there is no doubt throughout the movie how in love those two characters are, and yet the reality is, we ALL notice the opposite sex. If an attractive man or woman crosses your path, you take in the scenery. And that's a fact. Whether you're single or married. Same, same.

Over New Year's, the Mr. and I went skiing in Tahoe with two of our best friends (we'll call them Betty and Barney for the sake of privacy) and their 5-year-old son. (Let's call him Bam-Bam.) While my fancy new ski outfit had me looking like a pro, it's pretty safe to say that if there was a level below beginner shredder, that's where I'd be. Betty was right next to me on the skill scale, so we signed up for a beginner group lesson. I'll be honest here, for a few minutes I daydreamed about having a really hot ski instructor that would make our lesson oh-so-much-more fun. C'mon, I know I'm not alone here on that one.

Alas, we had weather-beaten Clay. A 55-ish man who smoked way too much weed in his day and really wasn't all that interested in being an instructor. Especially not for a bunch of green horns. Without getting into specifics, the lesson was completely useless from an instruction standpoint, but it did boost our confidence, which really is the hardest skill to hone. After our pseudo-lesson, we met up with the rest of our crew for lunch. While I contemplated going up the big-kid lift for some "real" runs with the Mr. (now THAT'S a FUN story for another post), Barney said he was thinking about giving his 1 o'clock private lesson to Bam-Bam.

And so, after our burgers and beers, Barney lumbered (and I do mean lumber... in the most loving way), up to the little red house where all the instructors hang out waiting for their pupils to congregate. Betty and I snapped back into our bindings and started to... what... ski to the bunny hill? That doesn't seem like an accurate description, especially since an ant could move faster than the two of us on flat, slick ground wearing two sticks on our feet. We shuffled. Slowly. That's a better visual.

As I continued to concentrate on speeding up my shuffling to catch up with the Mr., I see Barney heading back towards us. I look over at Bam-Bam who is in the middle of a full-blown meltdown and think, yea... that ski lesson is so not happening. And then...

Helloooo, Peter.

Gliding up next to Barney, Peter makes a beeline for Bam-Bam and before any of us know what's happened, he's got Bam-Bam holding on to a ski pole and skiing over to the bunny hill. Without missing a beat, Betty and I start to shuffle with exaggerated urgency. "Maybe Bam-Bam needs us to take the lesson with him... Peter's hot!" To which my Mr. says in his deadpan way with perfect timing, "Yea, I'm standing right here." Gotta love it when the Mr. pulls out the perfect movie quote.

Here's the deal: Peter was flat-out dreamy. For the next hour, we watched Peter and Bam-Bam go up and down the bunny hill. Okay, okay. We mostly watched Peter, but how could we not? Peter was exactly the kind of guy Betty and I would have been all over in college. We even joked about what we'd do "back in the day" if he walked into a party.

Did dreamy Peter know he had an affect on the ladies? Absolutely. Especially the ladies who fall in the cougar category, which I'm now convinced includes married women of a certain age and not just singles. In contrast to ski-instructor Clay's solid footing in middle age, Peter looked like he barely had a toe in the over-21 camp.

Which brings me to the revelation: It's a hard, cold reality when you realize you've officially entered into Mrs. Robinson territory. As much as I love where I am in life right now, I couldn't help but feel a pang of nostalgia for days gone by. They just went so fast. And looking back, I'm not sure if I took it all in as I should have when I could have. But, I guess that's the whole point. 20/20 vision comes later.

As we drove back from Tahoe, I began to think about Mrs. Robinson and how old she really was. So, I Googled. Yea, that's not always a good idea. Did you know that Anne Bancroft was only 36 when she played that iconic role? It's true. When I saw The Graduate, Mrs. Robinson seemed so... well... old. And to my 20-something self, she was. But to my 38-year-old self, not so much. I'll give her a little wiggle room here and say that maybe she was supposed to be 45 in the film, but even still, Mrs. Robinson is now a contemporary of mine vs. my parents.

Once I got beyond my intial holy-crap-I'm-getting-old panic moment (must start Botox, must take Pilates to firm up ass, must make new playlist that does NOT include any songs from the 80s), I started to think about what being a Mrs. Robinson meant to me (minus the whole cheating on my husband part, of course!). And I realized that I'd much rather be a confident, sexy, experienced woman who can still shake it with the best of them, than a 21-year-old, baby-faced girl who still has so much to learn.

Coo, coo, ca-choo.

Game. Set. Match.

Six weeks before our third round of IVF this fall, I literally woke up one morning and decided I needed to do something completely out of my comfort zone. For three straight years, every decision I'd made revolved around beating my infertility rap and turning into a fertile Myrtle.

In no particular order, I stopped running, stopping drinking alcohol, stopped drinking Starbucks short nonfat lattes, stopped drinking soda, stopped eating anything cold out of the fridge ('cause The Infertility Cure told me that my particular deficiencies demanded warm or room-temp foods), stopped using beauty products with potentially bad crap in them, stopped eating refined sugar, stopped eating anything with white or wheat flour, stopped doing sit-ups, stopped drinking water out of plastic bottles, stopped accepting new freelance projects so that I could keep my stress level down, stopped, stopped, stopped.

After all that stopping, I was ready to go, go, go. So, I jumped out of bed, went to the computer, found a tennis club near my house and signed up for private lessons. Why was this so monumental? Because I've never been what you'd call a super sporty gal. Heck, I wouldn't even say that I've been a mildly sporty gal. Sure, I go to the gym, but that's about fitting into my $200 jeans. Competitive athletics that require score keeping, where there is a winner and a loser, not my bag.

My first memory of sweat-inducing fear around sports is from 3rd grade gym class. One word sums it up: Dodgeball. I just don't think that a game where kids throw balls as hard as they can at each other has any place in civilized society. Especially when you're the kid that everyone tries to hit first because you can't dodge the damn ball. From there came softball and kickball and basketball and volleyball and all kinds of other games with balls. The panic was never ending.

Whether my sports trepidation was (is) about a fear of losing or a fear of winning or a fear of people yelling at me because I did something wrong doesn't really matter. But if I had to guess, I would say it's all the above.

The truth is that I don't like to do things unless I can do them well. Scratch that. I don't like to do things unless I can do them perfectly, even if it's something I've never done before. Talk about setting myself up for failure from the get-go. But I'm working on it. And that's why tennis was so huge. Not only was I going to willingly pay money to play a sport, but I was also going to walk straight onto a court of imperfection. It seems my desire to hit the crap out of something was trumping my fear of failure.

Knowing myself like I do, I was quite aware that I had to have a tennis coach who understood my fragile state and knew how to keep my confidence up. Someone who would follow the pro-con-pro approach: Great swing. Don't forget to follow-through. Good job on the footwork. Lucky for me, Terry showed up for work on my first day of lessons. Talk about patience. I wish I could record Terry's encouraging voice and carry it around with me all day long.

In so many ways, my tennis lessons are the best therapy I've ever had. Did you know that the reason people try to hold their racket so close to the head is because they're trying to control the shot? I didn't. Can you guess where I like to hold my racket? Yep. I play tennis like I play life: If I hold on tighter and with all my strength, I'll control the shot. But, guess what? When I let go of my iron-grip, my shot improves. In fact, the ball actually goes over the net. Fancy that.

Away we go...people like us.

Flying back from a long week of meetings in Seattle last Thursday, I settled into my roomy seat (I heart Virgin America) and decided to clear my head by watching a movie. Preferably a lighthearted comedy that required no thinking whatsoever. Something that would have me floating off the plane and into our first adoption workshop that night.

Scrolling through my options, I realized pretty quickly that the cards were stacked against me. While I loved The Proposal, watching it for the third time in a month sounded like a waste of 8 bucks. No matter how much I loved Ryan Reynolds' abs. So, I clicked on the one movie that the Mr. and I had been consciously avoiding since we first saw the trailer this past summer: Away We Go.

Going through IVF, the last thing I wanted to do was watch a quirky little film about a couple that got pregnant without trying. I mean really, when my bloated belly looked like a pin cushion from all the shots and my boobs were the size of the Good Year blimp times two and my moods were a swinging pendulum, is it any wonder?

But there I was. Staring at the screen. Before I knew it, I clicked "buy" and the movie was mine. For a solid 98 minutes I was going to follow Burt and Verona and her pregnant belly. From the start, I noticed something amazing. I didn't care if she was pregnant. Not that I didn't care about the character. I did. I actually loved the character. I loved the writing. I loved the story. But I didn't care that she was pregnant. This was their journey. Not mine. Until they got to Montreal. That's where they stayed with their friends, Tom and Munch (that's a girl btw), and their adopted children.

To set the scene: Burt, Verona, Tom and Munch were out on the town for a little adult fun. Tom and Munch seemed so in love with each other and their children. Their life seemed perfect. But that would be too... perfect, right?

Tom: She had another miscarriage.
Burt: What? When:
Tom: Thursday.
Burt: This Thursday?
Tom: Yeah. This is her fifth. I know she loves all those kids like, like they were her own blood. But, I wonder if we've been selfish. People like us, we wait 'till our thirties and then we're surprised when the babies aren't so easy to make anymore and then every day another million fourteen-year-olds get pregnant without trying. It's a terrible feeling, this helpless feeling. You just watch these babies grow and then fade. You don't know if you're supposed to name them, or bury them, or...

People like us. And there's the rub. But you know what, I don't think Tom's people and my people are the same people. My people, we're ready to stop pushing our bodies to do something they simply don't want to do. That's why my people and I get along. That and we all have a deep appreciation for Ryan Reynolds' abs.

I know this is painful...

After seeing The Blind Side last night, I had a lot of tears. Tears for the beauty of the story, tears for our own journey, tears just for the sake of tears. I woke up this morning feeling strong in my belief that adoption was my journey... our journey. I felt that strength in the Mr., too. Sitting on the couch, he started searching for books on adoption and we found a good one on Amazon. But rather than purchase from a faceless website, I thought we should go to a good ole brick-and-mortar store. Talk to someone in person who could help us.

The plan was to go to the gym and stop by Barnes & Noble to see if they had the book we wanted, and also to see what other books on adoption they might have. When we got to B & N, I immediately went to the Family Care section, assuming that the books on adoption would be with all the other family planning, pregnancy, etc books. At first glance, we found nothing.

Still feeling upbeat, I went to the information desk and asked the nice man behind the counter to look up the particular book we were searching for. They didn't have it. So then he did a general adoption search. The first books to come up were about adopting a dog. Hmmm. Not a good start. He narrowed the search to child adoption and a couple of books came up, so he took us back over to Family Care to find them. And there on the second to the bottom shelf we found a label for Divorce/Adoption. You're reading that correctly. Divorce/Adoption. On one shelf. Like they go together. Mixed in with books on how to survive a divorce and how to parent a stepchild, we found one book, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adoption." Okay... so what exactly is the universe telling us here?

Still feeling upbeat, I headed back to the nice man behind the information desk and asked if there was a comment card or something I could fill out with some feedback about expanding their adoption section. He said, "Well actually, let me introduce you to Laurel." (Laurel happened to be walking by. Lucky me.) "Laurel," he said, "this young lady would like to talk to you about a stocking issue."

Well, I should have known by her body language that Laurel really wasn't into getting feedback. She stayed a full 4 feet away and only half turned her body towards me. If you've ever taken kick-boxing, she sort of had that stance about her, you know the one where a sidekick is surely followed by an undercut punch. But, still feeling upbeat, I said, "Hi Laurel! I just wanted to give some feedback about the lack of adoption books and the fact that the one book you have is filed with divorce." To which Laurel said, "I know that it's really painful, but that's just how it is."

I know it's really painful...
I know it's really painful...
I know it's really painful...

Laurel, honey, you don't know shit. Not only is this NOT painful, but quite frankly, I find it incredibly peaceful and wonderful to embrace where we are and to know that we are going to give a child a home. And in turn, that child is going to give us the chance to be parents. It's not painful, Laurel. It's exactly the opposite in fact, and if it wasn't, then we sure as heck shouldn't be adopting.

The Mr. ended up finding 3 more books on adoption, bringing the grand total to 4 on a shelf with 30-plus books dealing with divorce. I'm just guessing here, but there was also a stack of about 5 shelves, 30-plus books deep, covering fertility and pregnancy. That's around 150 books, and I'm being conservative. And yet, there were four about adoption. And one of them was The Complete Idiot's Guide.

Needless to say, we left B & N without a book. Amazon. Here we come.