We moved to Chateau Travolta in 2007. Memorial Day. Which means we're coming up on our five-year anniversary here. 

I'm sitting on my deck finishing up work and watching my girl ride bikes in the cul-de-sac with her two neighbor friends.

I never imagined I'd be suburban. 

The boom box spewing nineties music is vintage, though. I got it when I was 16. Way to go, JVC.

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I remember how much work it was when we moved in. We're still not done, but I understand this is very common. 

A friend came over recently when I was staking my lilies and took in the deck we've festooned with bubble lights and hanging baskets and vegetable plants. She watched her daughter and my girl collecting worms for the terrarium, and she looked at me and said, "You've got yourself quite an oasis here."

It was one of the highest compliments I've been paid. 

I never set out to be a gardener.

I never set out to be suburban. City, yeah. Rural, I could see. But not a CUL-DE-SAC. Of course, I didn't realize that for an eight-year-old, a cul-de-sac means freedom.

Honestly, I tried to get my tubes tied when I was 18.

I never even set out to be a mother.

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Somewhere along the line, I learned the value in things that come back. Neighbors that return the favor. Flowers that sprout back reliably, year after year. Birdfeeders that don't break. Friends who write me after months of silence. Books that continue to fascinate me when my eye catches their spines on my shelves. Songs that bring me back to a golden moment.

I just don't see the point in planting anything that won't last.

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I used to see so many of these things as horrifyingly banal.

Now I see no point in doing anything that won't leave a mark, that won't come back after I'm gone and whisper with its existance she was here.

I feel ... pummeled. I went back to work too soon on Friday, still high from hydrocodone, glued together, sore. Ma and Pa left for home on Friday, then I realized I needed them to come back because Beloved had to make a last-minute trip. They turned around and came back, bless my wonderful parents. It got better, then it got worse, then it got better, then it got worse. This morning I had pain of a new kind, a more normal kind, but pain all the same. I hobbled downstairs at six to get ibuprofin then back to bed to apply counter-pressure and wait the twenty minutes for the Advil to kick in so I could stop moaning and get out of bed, because today is Monday and I need to go back to work and Beloved has another two-day trip. The poor guy stood there this morning no doubt wondering if I would indeed get out of bed and get the little angel on the bus and go to work or if I would just lie there and moan all day. I admit I was wondering, too.

I don't find out what was in my leg until a week from today. Until then, I'm not supposed to exercise, which I shouldn't want to do because it would hurt and might tear the glue and stitches, but that is how I regulate my anxiety easier. 

So I'm sort of sitting here looking at this list of shit I have to do and giving myself the best pep talk I can, because there is no one else here to do this life for me. I want nothing more than to lie down and dissolve into a puddle of needs, because there is nothing like having the guy in the coffee shop ask you if you got bit by a spider while gesturing to the black bruise on your hand and having to tell him, no, that was just where they put the IV two days ago to make you feel old and tired and sore. It wasn't major surgery, but the in and out and the forced ejection back into normal life before the shock even wore off has spun me around and left me wandering, disoriented, through my house, wondering if the cat has been fed. 

I don't want to push off the little angel, who wants to have all her friends over tonight for a Play-Dough party in the driveway. I will let her have it, of course, but there is a huge part of me that would prefer to scream FUCK PLAY-DOUGH. LIFE, PLEASE JUST STOP AND LET ME CATCH UP, THANK YOU. 

I know the truth is that I'm just allowing myself to have these few minutes wallowing in my pity party because I'll hit publish and open my email and dry my tears and maybe go take a shower so I don't feel like such a worthless blob and try to find some pants that don't squeeze my incisions and figure out how to haul myself through today and tonight and tomorrow when I have another doctor appointment to try to figure out what's been going on with my gut for the past three years. 

I feel so old and so tired today. Accomplishing something will probably help a lot. God, I can't even stand to read my own writing, I sound so whiny.

This weekend we went to a Royals game. And we got our seats moved. 

Her name, we think, was "Liz." Our middle-aged, shorts-around-the-armpits savior, who noticed the ten or so wasted twentysomethings in front of us smoking cigarettes in their stadium seats, dropping the f-bomb every other word and almost coming to blows when each of the large man-boys were armed with the souvenir mini-bats.

Liz was an usher/ass-kicker.

The kids, as I see them, even though they were probably early twenties, weren't all that bad until it came to the near-fight. Yes, their language was horrible, but hello, I'm me. It's not as though the little angel has never heard a driving word before. It would be great if it weren't used as EVERY OTHER WORD IN THE SENTENCE, but yes, it's baseball, I get it, I'm not a total prude. The smoking in the stadium was asshattery at its finest, but again, it didn't blow my mind. We were outside. 

When the one guy in front of me kept screaming THE FUCKITY FUCK, the girls directly in front of us kept shushing him, saying "there are little kids behind us" -- we were there with friends who had a six-year-old. He didn't listen. I remembered being the twentysomethings, shushing my fuck-yelling friends, smoking in the stadium, trying to keep my man-boy friends from fighting over something ridiculous, and being wasted enough that even if I did notice kids nearby, it didn't really compute. Kids nearby inspired a vague guilt akin to eating ice cream for dinner.

And now I'm that parent, sitting behind the kids, seeing them for what they are, what I was -- complete douchebags.

Someone in front of the kids complained and our savior Liz came up asking who had the lit cigarette and assuring us we'd be moved, stat. And she made good on it. We watched our old section and one by one, most of the kids got thrown out of the stadium.

Score one for the old people. Thanks, Liz.

After my whinefest on Friday afternoon, I ended up falling asleep on the couch Friday night at around nine. But on Saturday, the babysitter came! And she hadn't been here since it was freezing cold! Even though she had hurt her back! And we thanked her and thanked her and toddled off to see Jimmy Buffett in the Power & Light district of Kansas City.

It was a gorgeous night, and the P&L was packed with an older crowd sporting grass skirts and hats shaped like flamingos, and everyone was happy. As Beloved and I sat listening to the cheesier songs by Jimmy, I found myself thinking how much I love him (though I really love his ballads more than Cheeseburger in Paradise).

Why do I love him when he drives so many people crazy?

Because he loves life. This is a guy who made an entire career of pointing out how nice it is to be outside when it's warm. How little you actually need in order to relax. How to live in the moment. When I was anorexic and cold all the time, I became a bit obsessed with Jimmy Buffett music, traveling in my head to a beach free of self-induced pressures and mental anguish and problems. When I was in college, I got a tattoo of a sun on my left foot so even if it wasn't in the sky I could still see it and think about what warmth and light means to me. 

Jimmy Buffett makes me go through my list of tastes and sensations that make me happy, things that are so easy to accomplish it's ridiculous. I love flowers. At Walmart right now, you can get a plant for less than a soda. I love the feeling of wind on the soles of my feet. All you need for that is a warm day. 

I needed old Jimmy so bad this weekend, and hearing all that old music pulled me out of my slump. He reminded me that as an adult, I have been true to my love of sunshine. I didn't wait for someday. I married my also-beach-loving husband in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Even as not-rich, family-in-the-Midwest people, we have managed to get air in our hair. We bought a bank foreclosure near water. We have Vicki, the 1997 Sebring convertible. We have a 1974 AMF Puffer sailboat we bought from my friend's dad for a dollar. We eat outside almost every night in the summertime.

I listened, Jimmy! I am reaching for the sunshine! Onward! (I'm barefoot.)

Today my co-worker Denise pointed out this post on the unimportance of stuff. This was my favorite line:

 I chose not to mourn stuff and save all my sorrow for people. 

My family has always been rather divided on the importance of stuff. There are some of us who hold items very near and dear and are devestated if anything happens to them because the stuff reminds them so much of a good memory or a lost beloved. And then there are others of us -- like me -- who delight in getting rid of stuff and actively work toward not forming attachments to it.

I wasn't always like this. I had very stong attachments to stuff as a child and young adult. A few months after my grandparents died, my roommate in Chicago threw away a blanket from their house. (He claims it was an accident; I claim it was part of his oversight issues.) I freaked out on him. FREAKED OUT. I remember spending hours searching through all sorts of apartments and houses when I would randomly remember a possession and didn't know where it was. Oh, how I cried when I couldn't find (insert possession here -- there were many). I was very, very, very upset a few years ago when I lost my wedding ring. I kept my grandmother's extensive shoe collection for years after she died, even though I never wore one pair. I used to carry a day planner around in Chicago filled with quotes and pictures and cards -- one of my friends actually expressed amazement that I would haul around so much with me every day. I couldn't imagine going anywhere without it.

Somewhere along the line, I became concerned about my attachments to stuff, especially my writing. I made back-ups of back-ups (and still do) and worried so much about what would happen if I lost all those poems and short stories and novels. Right now I have all my notes on my next novel in one notebook that I have ferreted away behind my printer. I haven't typed them up anywhere, and it would be pretty bad if I lost that notebook. 

But I'm actively working on not forming an attachment to it, or to those exact notes. I'm not ready to start that novel yet, not when the one I'm on is out with editors now.

I think it was my grandparents' blanket that got me. Before I left Chicago, I sold the antique three-quarters bed of my grandmother's that I'd been sleeping on to a friend. I realized the depth of my despair over the blanket was really my grief for the people I loved so much. Their stuff is just their stuff, even the stuff made by them. I love the stuff, I cherish the stuff, I place the stuff in positions of honor around my house and celebrate the stuff, but I actively work not to get too attached to the stuff, because something could happen. A tornado. A fire. Just an accident in which said stuff gets broken. A robbery. I just don't ever want to feel that hurt by the absence of a thing again. 

I understand this is just me working against my anxiety, and it's  perfectly fine for other people to feel a different way about stuff. My daughter is so attached to her stuffed animals that she mourned a bunny she gave away for months until I finally asked for it back from the neighbor and offered to replace it with something else. She's displaying a super-strong attachment to stuff, and who knows, maybe she will always feel that way. That's not wrong, and I won't discourage her from attaching to stuff. Especially when you're a kid, I think it's really helpful to have comfort objects.

I'm constantly reminding myself every time the sky turns green that the Corolla was just stuff, and now I have Vicki the convertible. If something happened to Vicki, something else would appear in her place. If my computer's hard drive gets wiped or I lose that notebook behind my printer, my writer mind will come up with a new story, maybe a story even better. I can't worry about losing things all the time. I have to trust I can create anew every lost story, I can replace every lost possession, I can grow and change to fit any new scenario. My people have to be the most important, and all my energy is going into them, because they cannot be replaced.

I will save my sorrow for them.

I was at a virtual group last night and met someone I wasn't sure whether I had met before. (That sentence is going to get my writer card revoked, but you know what I mean.) The first thing I said to her was, "Have we met before? Because I have an occupational hazard in that I can never remember anyone's name."

This is not my attempt to be a douchenozzle. I would love for the world to know that. I could have a three-hour conversation with you in the back of a limousine and depending on how many other people I had talked to that day and whether or not it was super loud and maybe dark and whether or not you might not look anything like your avatar on Twitter, I may or may not recognize you when you walk up to me at 8 am under bright lights. I've had people get really upset with me to my face for this sort of thing. I'm sure people have also said things behind my back. (Some probably deserved, I mean, hey, everyone screws up sometimes.) But I hope nobody ever gets seriously mad at me because I can't remember his or her name, because that problem is mine, not anyone else's. And all this existential angst over my cognition shortfalls kicked in totally last night.

I've read a ton of tricks for memory-jogging. And I've tried, really I've tried, to associate people's faces with a fruit or a color or anything that will help, and instead of remembering the person's name, I end up wondering if the character name "Walter White" on Breaking Bad is ironic or not, because he's a jerk.

Here's the thing: Remembering names and faces is an innate skill, kind of like being a fast runner. Some people are super fast without even trying, and others might train for years and still get their ass kicked by a fat dog. But nobody, NOBODY ever accuses the slow runner of being a snob for being a slow runner. So why do we do that with people who can't remember names?

I should say that nobody called me a snob recently or last night -- it's just horrifyingly embarrassing to have to start conversations with bloggers in this way because I am paranoid that I actually have met this new person three or four times before or emailed with them or commented on their blog or they commented on mine and they might have a real name and a blog name and a different Twitter handle and yet still I am embarrassed if I don't have instant name recognition.

Who are all these people who say they never forget a face? And can they help me? Please?

PS: I never expect anyone to remember meeting me, seriously. For this very reason. 

I'm up again to answer a BlogHer.com Life Well Lived question. This one is pretty great.

How do you put yourself first? How does taking time for yourself help make you happier? 

I don't know what the outside perception of me putting myself first is, but I think I do it a lot. I didn't used to -- I used to do whatever I was asked to do, and then a bunch of stuff I thought I was supposed to do and then maybe at the end something I actually wanted to do. 

About five years ago, I started really examining what I could do to better manage my anxiety. I realized that excercise really helped amp down the adrenaline I can get unexpectedly and for no good reason. Now that I work from home, it's not unusual for me to turn to the jump rope or a short workout DVD or even push-ups if I start to feel my emotions spinning and I need to focus. So after spending nearly twenty years exercising for weight management, suddenly I was exercising to access some good dopamine -- which totally changed my attitude about doing it. I stopped resenting it as something I had to do and started looking forward to the feeling I'd get after working out -- something I wanted to feel, so exericise became something I wanted to do. I now look at that time as me time and putting my good feelings first.

I put a lot of time into my writing, in all its formats. I write fiction, here, and on BlogHer.com. Part of it is my job, but there's such a fuzzy line between work and play when you have a job you really love.

I love to sleep. I sleep as long as I can, whenever I can. Other moms are shocked at how late I will sleep on weekend mornings when Beloved and the little angel let me, and they often do. I make no apologies for this sleeping. It helps me rejuvinate from throwing everything at my work week, and I'm a much more fun person when I'm not tired. We've all made peace with that.

I have one child on purpose. When we first made the decision to have a small family, a lot of people got all up in our grill about it, as though not having multiple offspring was somehow selfish or cruel to our daughter. I felt really insecure about it for a long time, but now I'm as unapologetic about having an only as I am about sleeping. Our family of three is extremely loving and extremely agile, and I relish taking off for the zoo spontaneously and without anything but a wallet. I don't like chaos, and it's easier to avoid chaos without lots of kids. There, I've said it. My daughter has voiced both her love of being an only and her regret that she doesn't have brothers or sisters. I'm sure she'll vascillate on her opinion of it from day to day for the rest of her life, but she'll always know we love her unconditionally. I can't do much more: I've tried brainwashing her that my every decision is perfect, and it's not taking very well.

I don't have a dog. The little angel desperately wants a dog. But even if my mother weren't deathly terrified of all dogs, I still would not have a dog. I don't like barking or licking. Aren't I painting an awesome picture of myself? I adore other people's dogs, but like those who don't want children, I really don't want a dog that will need to be walked and have his poop picked up by me on a daily or weekly basis. It interferes with that agility I so treasure in our little family. Thus we have Petunia the cat, who cuddles and then wanders off to reorganize the library without remark when we leave town for a weekend. 

In the past, when I've thought about taking time for myself or putting myself first, I thought about things like getting a pedicure or going to the library alone. Those things are awesome, awesome, awesome, but anything can be putting yourself first if you're thinking about it that way. Every little thing you do to make your environment more comfortable for your particular needs is putting yourself first. I also think to some extent making your family more comfortable is putting yourself first, because the happier they are, probably the happier you are. Nothing makes me happier than my daughter's joy, so I really like having adventures and introducing her to new things. It might look like I'm doing something for her, but in the end, it's for me, too. I get to see the smile.

What do you do for yourself? Dr. Aymee has some tips over at Live Well Lived on BlogHer.com. Or you can skip straight to commenting to win a Kindle Fire, because I will not rest until everyone has an ereader.

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The folks at Lego reached out to tell me about their new Build Together site. It has instructions for how to build different things with standard lego sets organized by how much time you have and how much skill you have. I thought that was pretty smart, so I'm sharing it with you. I wasn't compensated for that little ditty, I just like legos.

Over the past week, I engaged in a two-state, five-store quest for a pair of jeans that fit. I tried on more than fifty pairs of jeans. In front of my seven-year-old daughter, who assured me over the course of two stores that I really didn't look right in skinny jeans. Because I'm not necessarily skinny. She wasn't being mean, she was being honest, and she was actually right. I wear the fact I didn't burst out crying when she said this as a badge of honor and body acceptance. Also the fact I didn't burst out crying when subjected to high-mounted fluorescents and knees that have fallen two inches from where they were on my body in 2009.

I'm cheap and I don't like to pay more than $30 for a pair of jeans, but my booty desires a fit I've found only in more high-end brands. Hence, I do all my jeans shopping in discount stores like Gordman's, T.J. Maxx, Marshall's and the like. My body refuses to conform to the standard jeans model, whom I'm convinced now is seven feet tall and has no gradual curve between the top of her hip and the bottom. I used to think the basketball hoop formed by thirty yards of excess material directly above my ass was due to the high-waisted jeans of the late eighties and early nineties. Now with jeans more low-rise all the time, I'm flummoxed. Surely I'm not the only woman on earth in possession of a bowling ball ass? That is what weighted lunges to you! And weighted lunges are all the rage, right? Am I practicing outdated exercise? Have we moved on to ballet football?

In every store, I would select between 8-12 pairs of jeans and sit the little angel on the little stool. She would begin to critique the fit before I got them on, in most cases. To her credit, she wasn't critiquing my body -- just the fit. "Those pockets don't sit flat, Mommy," she'd say. Or maybe "I can see your underwear."

She actually is an astute shopper. It's all about the fit, ladies. Anyone can look good if the fit is right.

I left the state of Nebraska on Monday empty-handed. Last night, I challenged Missouri and its larger T.J. Maxx to the test.

The little angel and I walked into the dressing room with eight pairs of jeans. I'd since abandoned skinny and was horrified by "flare" (Little Angel: That is like a foot and a half of material across, Mommy") so basically all that was left for a 38-year-old woman is boot-cut. I got three pairs to lay flat over my unusual butt and not cause a muffin-top. However, two out of the three pairs are about five inches too long.

My inner monologue upon discovering this:

1. I'm 5'6" and wear a size 8. I've always thought I was pretty average. Size 8s sell out really fast. Are size 8 women really seven feet tall now? Or are all the kids wearing five-inch heels to school with their jeans? 
2. Did I miss a chapter? Why am I needing to have jeans hemmed now like when I was nine years old?

HOWEVER. I was so excited the jeans fit my hips and thighs I resolved to find a tailor ASAP so I can donate the four pairs of jeans I bought in 2007 and have worn every week since then in rotation that now are so stretched-out, faded and unflattering I feel like I'm setting a new standard for mom-who-has-given-up every time I wear them.

When I was checking out last night at T.J. Maxx, the teenager who rang me up mentioned her mom wears a size 8, too. Thanks, kid. Is she seven feet tall?

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Read my review of Kim Purcell's young adult novel Trafficked on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

I've read so much research on stress and optimism and half full and half empty. And I've written about it, too. 

Me on happy in 2009!

Focusing on what would make me feel better and not what is making me feel bad is helpful and obvious, and I wish I could get back all those years I didn't know how to do it. But if I hadn't had them, I wouldn't appreciate the difference now.

Me FOUR DAYS LATER in 2009!

And then some other annoying stuff happened at work, and then as I was hurrying home and stuck in traffic I remembered OH, YEAH, MY CAT DIED and we have to take the little angel in to have a 3.5-year-old tube yanked from her eardrum with no anesthesia in two weeks, so soon after she had her five-year shots in both arms and both legs and I had to hold her while she screamed, "No, Mommy, don't let her hurt me!" and then my head exploded and I called my parents.

One of my most humbling experiences as a writer is when people remember what I said before when I'm totally and completely contradicting myself, oh, say, less than a week later. Especially when I'm all "I am going to change for the better!" and then I totally don't, sometimes after a shockingly short period of trying.

But that was 2009. I've been really trying since 2009 to reframe things when I start feeling anxious. Note: This works better when I'm not either a) hungry b) tired or c) well, menstruating (it must be said). Like a toddler, I'm prone to hysteria when I'm tired, especially tired. People have been telling me my whole life the world looks better after a nap, and THEY ARE SO RIGHT!

Lately we've had a lot of unexpected costs pop up. And when I say "unexpected," I mean "of course things had to be fixed or replaced because we don't live in a vacuum or say on the moon, but I never want to have to pay to fix or replace it." I mean "I didn't expect to have to deal with both cars needing new brakes and the furnace motor burning out, like NOW." I understood intellectually that car brakes wear down the way I understand that light bulbs need to be changed, but when either thing conks out, my reaction is usually WTF HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO MEEEEEE?

I know, I know.

This weekend, I was at Petsmart with Simon the New Betta Fish's tank. The motor unexpectely went out just about a month after we bought it. And here, when I say "unexpectedly," I actually mean it. Grousing to myself, I took it back with no receipt and the guy ... just ... exchanged it. Just like that!

Then, when I was leaving, the Corolla wouldn't start. Then it started and it died. I finally got it going again and drove it home and told Beloved because he drives that thing all over the state of Missouri, and I could just picture that happening to him late at night on the side of I-70 or something. He took it in immediately, and my brain was thinking OH HELL WE STILL HAVEN'T REPLACED THE BRAKES ON THE TRUCK HOW MUCH IS THIS SHIT GOING TO COST?

And then Beloved came home and told me that the Corolla had been recalled for that very reason, and we just hadn't received the notice yet. And they ... just ... exchanged the parts.

Now! There have been lots and lots of unbudgeted (which is a better frame than unexpected, really) costs since November. But then, in two days, two problems got fixed for free. The aquarium was $20. The car -- oh, hell, who knows? Doesn't every part in a car start at $600?

This is a very long and rambly way of saying if I have not succeeded in turning my Debbie Downer inner child into Suzie Sunshine, at least I am still trying. See? Look at me go! Take that, anxiety disorder! Take that, adrenaline and cortisol!