are you there, dog? It's me, kerensa

Last year, I became disenchanted, or perhaps I should say more disenchanted with our political system. Looking around me, I found thousands of people willing to bitch and none willing to do anything about it, and I made a pact with myself that I would no longer give myself free rein to complain unless I also followed through on a plan to change things. I ran for office, and in the year it took to fill out petitions, to design signs and placards and write speeches and attend meetings, in the year of raising money and taking abuse, and worrying about my family, and feeling defeated, I felt like I put a check mark next to the box that said "do something".       And now, I have to once again put my figurative money where my mouth is, because my complaints and grievances are drowning out my reason and my motivation.       I joined Facebook about twelve or so years ago. Once a Myspace fan, it took me a bit to get used to the new platform, and I missed being able to add my own kic

It was the summer of 1986 when Micah Allen told me he needed to show me a movie that would change my whole life. I was nine years old, and it was before the days of being able to afford a VCR, when going to the theaters to see a movie was an extravagance done once in a blue moon (except the Hollywood DriveIn, which would allow a clown car in for a mere $5). We sat in his sunroom, me on a bean bag, he on the floor and watched The Breakfast Club without pausing. When the credits rolled, I was lost in a way I would only be a handful of other times in my youth. It was the first time I had ever seen someone write childhood as if we were all being seen. Even as a fourth grader, those common themes were beginning to run rampant, and we had all begun to wear either an invisibility cloak or one of potent popularity.   I walked home that early evening in a heightened sense of reality. Thirty four years ago and I can still remember what the neighbor's lilac bushes smelled like as I took t

It was one hundred degrees the evening I decided to stay at home with my first child. She was three days old, I was 8, 018 days old. In retrospect, the decision was astronomical. I was choosing a life of relative poverty and social pariahdom. But the moment came in absolute clarity, in the parking lot of a Video Update on a Phoenix night. Because the alternative was unfathomable, and maybe that is how many decisions are made, by choosing a path of lesser evils, by the process of elimination. We want the least terrible option. After moving to Florida to be near Jake's closest friend when Rhiannon was three months old, I found myself not only jobless (which, it turns out, is a job hazard when you opt to be a stay at home parent), friendless, and carless. From the early muggy morning hours till the sun had begun to slither its way down, I sat alone in a third floor apartment with a newborn. Jake and I had one car, a black Honda Civic, with a payment of $183 per month that was $183 mo

In 1995, as I was curling my hair in my dorm mirror, I heard a fervor outside my room door. When I opened it, I found a dozen or more kids, some wrapped in towels, rejoicing in the hallway. The verdict for the OJ trial had come down, and the jury had declared him innocent. I was quiet and introspective about the pronouncement for a few reasons. One of them was that I had an odd dream, in which I was babysitting the Simpson children, when their father had quietly come to me to tell me he was innocent. It was a crazy dream, and surely one born of stress and confusion, but made even more so with the unabashed celebration in his acquittal. I often find myself on the wrong side of the popular opinion. I don't believe Carol Baskins killed her husband (for those who with the Tiger King). I don't think the Bachelor is good TV. I don't think Shakespeare was the genius he was hailed to be, and recently, I don't hate our quarantine. I have been a mother now for twenty one yea

There was once a girl who traveled across the continent to go to college. At 18 years old, she thought herself a trailblazer, a nomad with lofty goals. She left behind a life many would envy- loyal friends, a nuclear family (fractured but not broken), and a town still small enough to invite small town jokes by its residents, many who would live there for a lifetime.  As many eighteen year olds do, she thought herself the nucleus of her world. In her bags, she had love letters from boys she left behind, and gifts from her childhood friends. She had a copy of The Places You'll Go, a course catalog she had highlighted in the early summer days, her dreams of being a doctor between every line she marked. She had the heartbreak on her sleeve so many girls her age wore, a puppy love that ran its course, the tragic deaths of adoring grandparents, the divorce that had fractured (but not broken) the family. But she considered herself an optimist, a true glass is half full kind of gal, with

Years ago, PBS aired a television series about a family who was temporarily placed in a “little house on the prairie” type situation, as a learning experience and obviously for viewers’ voyeuristic enjoyment. When Jake and I heard about it, we both agreed that we wished our kids could be put right smack into our childhood for some perspective. This last month has been a huge learning curve for so many people. I’m speaking, of course, of the banal and the frivolous, because to  speak about the deaths and tragedy is unspeakable. But it’s felt like an era long gone. Over the last two years, I’ve become frustrated with the status quo. Everyone in my life too busy to hang out, my own family constantly on the run. Between lacrosse practices and instrument lessons and photography sessions and Jake’s traveling and all of the random little errands that fill a day, it was like all of the people I loved were standing just far enough away that I couldn’t reach them. Life felt a little blurry. My