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

 I’m going to be honest. I take a weight loss drug. These days, we are hearing constantly about Ozempic, as if it’s some cure all catchall miracle- and don’t get me wrong, these drugs can do miraculous things but there are a lot of misconceptions, as there are with so many other miracles. In 2016, I wrote several blog posts about my attempts at exercising and losing weight, so I figured I would do a follow up now that I’ve lost 103 pounds. I would also like to point out that I will be the first person to tell you to love yourself as you are, and that we are all beautiful. This is a personal journey for me, and not in any way indicative of how I feel anyone else should approach their health or their weight.  Fat people and poor people tend to get a lot of blame hurled at them, with people who have never been fat or poor finding a way to diminish the human experiences of others by placing blame. Fat and poor people must be lazy, they’re sponging off the healthcare system, they m...

    There is a moment in Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams when Doc Graham abandons his dream of playing baseball to walk across the border of heaven and earth to save someone's life. It may be THE moment in the movie, although my son argues that the true moment is when Ray's dad agrees to play a catch. Either way, I leak like a sieve throughout the movie, a timeless film about nostalgia and dreams, and a little about reconciling the losses we have endured.     I was five when I decided to become a doctor. There wasn't a moment of wavering from the time my sister was meant to be born in our two bedroom apartment to a midwife (with me watching). Not throughout elementary school, when my friends wanted to be MTV VJs or famous actresses. Not in high school, when I spent every spare moment writing poems and essays and novellas, when my mother urged me to be a writer, to be the next SE Hinton, as if there could be such a thing. And not in college, when I took eighteen cred...

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 abl...

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....

As moms, I believe we are somehow taught that the busier we are, the more productive we are. If we are stay at home moms, we are meant to believe we are failing our children if they are not in every sport, every musical class, every scouting group or playgroup. As working moms, we are meant to believe that by earning a paycheck outside the home, our children are somehow neglected.  This virus has upended life for every parent. What was once up is now down, what was once left is now right. Working mothers are now experiencing life at home, and stay at home moms are now experiencing the crushing weight of the feeling of having to provide for a family when the chips are down.  In a week, or a month, or a year, there will begin a new normal. Perhaps concerts and movie theaters will have gone by the wayside, germophobia running rampant. Perhaps families will begin a great stockpiling of goods as they did in the days of the depression, with an ever looming second foot waiting to ...

I was a different girl once. I suppose we all are like the layers of an onion, and maybe we end up with the brittle skin as we age, a shell from the tender fruit of our youth. But I sometimes like to gently peel back the layers to remember the girl I was. As a child, I was a voracious reader. I would forego the outside play during a snowstorm to huddle by a candle with a mystery, gnawing it like a bone. I was an on the fringe girl, watching the other girls on the playground as they all seemed to inherently understand the ways of the American pre-teen. I was hopelessly boy crazy, falling in love at the drop of a dime- first with a boy in kindergarten who called me Cinderella. Later, an all consuming crush on a neighbor boy who put his books down on a puddle for me to sit on the bus. Despite all of my eager puppy loves, I didn't begin to date until the end of ninth grade, a time when we are all at our most angst ridden, our most self-doubting. He looked at me like I had hung the moo...

On December 1, 1955, a young woman in Montgomery, Alabama sat down. And like the flap of a butterfly's wings, the ripples began and have continued throughout the decades. She has been revered for her protest, silent as it was. Along with Dr. King, Malcolm X, WEB DuBois, Nelson Mandela and scores of other African Americans, she paved a road often riddled with potholes, toward civil rights. But let's go back in time before Rosa Parks sat. Let us go back to 1501, when Africans began to be enslaved. Today, we would call this human trafficking, and if we found even one of our friends guilty of being involved, would disentangle ourselves from them faster than one could say Knockoff Purses. (But that is a story for another time).           We know from our history books the abuse dealt to the slaves- the beatings, the rapes, the death by illness and neglect, the starvation. We know that they often had no one to cling to but the families they made in the fields and in...

I am really tired of seeing the blogs written by complacent women in their suburban homes, self-righteously shitting on the women who took to the streets for the march on Washington last week. We can pussyfoot around the subject and take care with our words, because as women, we have been taught to be non-confrontational, to be demure. But I am taking back those silly notions and raising a big fat middle finger to the people who deride others for defending the very rights that have brought them to their complacency in their suburban homes. If you chose not to march, that is absolutely your decision, and I will not criticize you for it, for we each have to be comfortable in the ways we raise our voices. But if you are a female who has ever voted, who has ever held a job in the workforce, who has ever used birth control, had an abortion, been assaulted, been harassed, bought a home, owned a credit card, or given birth, then for you to tell the women and men who marched on our behalf th...

"Mommy, you look as pretty as a picture", he said, his three year old arms enfolding me, as I tried to leave the house. "I don't know what I would do without you", he said, his twelve year old arms enfolding me, as I tried to decipher all the mysteries of our family's future. It's funny, with all of the books they write, the articles in magazines, the blogs by mommies, they don't touch on the period of mourning you will endure. They talk about the best rocking chairs (none of them, by the way. The kid doesn't want to rock, they want to suck on your boobs. 24/7. They don't give a shit if it is in a rocking chair, a folding chair, or an electric chair in a lightning storm. They especially don't care if it is a Pottery Barn rocker made from organic free range goose feathers. Boob- it's pretty simple.) They don't tell you how you will blink a handful of times, and that baby who was once content to just lay on your chest, with the...

When I was nineteen years old, only a year into adulthood, and only hesitantly an adult, a man sexually assaulted me. We had met in our apartment complex one night, at the community pool. He was good looking, a military man, cocky and confident, and I was going through the end of my first relationship away from my small hometown. I invited him into my home. I kissed him. I let him into my bedroom. That was where my permission ended. When I told him no, he proceeded to try to shove his genitalia up the leg of my shorts, and when I began to cry and told him to stop or I would scream, he told me I was a tease. And I felt guilt. I am going to say that again- I felt GUILT. As a girl, I had been preconditioned to believe that I could feel bad for getting a guy "worked up", and I didn't kick him out. I slept on the floor next to my bed, while he slept in my bed, and I woke to him trying to do the same thing, only to my face. That time, I was done. Typing these words out makes ...

I am going to preface this with the fact that this story may or may not contain anecdotes about poop. If you have never pooped, you may want to opt out. That's the last warning I will give. Like a prairie dog, it will pop its head out without notice. In June, I took a spectacularly large fall down some spectacularly hard stairs. The sound I made upon landing most certainly broke some sound barriers, and the fuckity fucking fucks that I howled reverberated through our neighborhood of old people. Luckily, they are mostly all old and can't hear that well anymore. The hematoma that decided to grow out of my ass, like an alien in a Sigourney Weaver movie, made my one side look Kardashian-esque. The other side stayed firmly in the middle age mom jean category. Needless to say, my workout routine, scant as it was, was put on the back burner. I gained a good fifteen pounds in two months. I am pretty sure the hematoma weighed at least ten. The other five was sympathy wine. Pinot Grig...

We have all been there, in the throes of self- flagellation, our children leaving hurricanes of crumbs and syrup, our spouses closing a door on us, either literally or figuratively, and we make the ultimate mistake. We open up Facebook. We do it in search of validation, or friendship, and we end up falling deeper into the spiral of self doubt, and I am angry. I am angry that women are already told how high the bar is set from an early age. We should be this thin, this smart, this athletic, this strong. We must be domestic, but not too domestic, as our feminist foremothers would have fought for naught. We must work, but not too much, or our children will suffer. We must live for our kids, and our spouses, but always remember to put ourselves first. The lists of suggestions on how we should be better mothers, better wives, better females is endless, and the pieces of advice seem to contradict each other so fast and so furious, that we realize we must make up our own rules. What we see ...