crossposted from BlogHer

I stared at the phone in my hand. My sister had texted me two words: MIDLIFE CRISIS. Because I sent her a pic of a convertible I saw while driving home with my seven-year-old daughter. But I bought one, anyway.

A Brief History of Responsible Automobiles

My parents always bought cars with cash. I don't know if they still do, but when we were growing up there were never debts like car payments floating around. Never. I was fortunate enough to drive not one but two used manual-shift Chevy Novas during high school, and when I went off to college, my parents surprised me with a used but still I thought white-hot burgandy Ford Probe. Its doors were tank-like, and it had those headlights that flip up and the seatbelts that move over you instead of you having to buckle them. (If you're under the age of 30, you probably have no idea such a thing used to exist. It did, and it was so awesomely Star Wars I can't even begin to describe it.)

I kept Peg the Probe from 1992 until 1998, when she sadly began a rapid deterioration into Things Were Falling Off Every Day. My father let me buy his car, Priscilla the Prizm, off him for $4,000. At the time, I had this sort of money in my savings account (the young, houseless and childless can be rich) and off I went to move to Kansas City in Priscilla.

In 2005, Priscilla and I were T-boned on a busy street by a SUV that was much bigger than we were. I was pretty distraught, because her axle was bent and JUST LIKE THAT I went from having no car payment to needing a car, stat. By this time, I was married and my husband and I had replaced his Ford Escort with a Ford Explorer, which we owned outright. We liked the Explorer so much we decided to get another one, because the one we had seemed like it would die soon, and then when that car died, we'd just replace it with something more Prizm-like. It made total and complete sense to us at the time -- gas was cheap, we had a baby and a ton of baby stuff and we made road trips up to Iowa at least once a month with all our junk in tow.

In 2008, gas prices did that thing. You remember that thing? When none of us could afford to go farther than two feet? And my husband and I owned two -- not one but TWO -- gas-sucking SUVs. We were spending $150 a week on gas. Ifreaked out and demanded we right our wrong immediately, but when we went to buy a Corolla, the used ones didn't exist. No one was letting go of a small, fuel-efficient car. So we ended up with another car payment and a very sensible, new, very basic Corolla.

Which then got hit by a tornado.

This is what it looks like when the universe is trying to tell you something.

My husband travels a lot for work and has a rental car. We still had the Explorer -- yes, the original one we thought would die. It has 190,000 miles on it, the front passenger door won't open from the outside, the air conditioning no longer works, it's rusting and the leather seats are stained and ripped. But it still runs, so we had lots of time to think about what to do.

Then, last weekend, my daughter and I were driving home when I passed a for-sale sign on a ramshackle midnight-blue Ford Mustang convertible. I stepped on the brakes and whipped the Explorer around. My daughter's eyes widened as I pulled over on the side of the road and called the number soaped across the windshield. Then we drove straight home, grabbed my husband out of the driveway and drove him to see it.

He was understandably flummoxed by my move. Me, who made him return the convertible he rented last year at BlogHer '11 because it was too impractical for all our luggage. Me, who made him give up his beloved, tricked-out Explorer for a teeny tiny Corolla. Me, who once pinned a Debt-o-Meter to the refrigerator to remind us daily of our credit card sins. What the hell was I thinking?

When Someone Almost Dies, You See Things Differently

I was thinking that we were lucky we only lost our car in that tornado. I was thinking I didn't want another car payment, and every sensible, responsible car he was showing me would mean another two- or three-year loan. I was thinking we made so many car-buying decisions in the past based on what the smart, right thing to do was in the case of any emergency, and then along came a tornado to blow up all our best-laid plans.

I was thinking about how we'd already gone through the carseat years.

I was thinking about how many years I have left to have adventures with my daughter.

I was thinking about how much time you end up spending in a car on the weekends getting your responsible adult errands done. And how much time you spend putting off little things that would be fun and not really hurt anyone even if they are a tish off the beaten path.

And I was thinking about my anxiety, and how I always try to plan for every single thing that could possibly happen, and how the older I get the more I realize I can't do anything but pray hard and row for shore. I told my husband all of this on Sunday night.

On Monday morning, he sent me a listing for a 1997 Chrysler Sebring with 71,000 miles on it that we could buy with the Corolla insurance payout, straight-up. No car payment. And the air conditioning works great.

We named her "Vicki."

I've been here in Austin at the first Dad 2.0 for two days now, and so far my take-away is how good my husband and I have it. Both our fathers are alive and active in our lives and our daughter's life. My husband is a world-class father and an amazing example of how to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. He has friends who are dads and indeed capable of talking about parenting with him, if he really wants to (I suspect they talk more about work and sports, but these guys are well-rounded awesome men married to powerful, well-rounded women). I don't know how Beloved feels about his support network, but I feel really good about it. My vision of modern fathers is one of an engaged, enlightened generation of guys who come home from work and talk to their kids about their homework or get on the floor with their babies. It's easy to forget it was just a generation or so ago that wasn't necessarily the case as a cultural norm.

What I'm learning from the men here is that they're as WTF about beer commercials as I am. They are tired of being portrayed in the media as inept cavemen incapable of diapering a baby or ignoring a hot twentysomething. 

They're trying to change the way they talk to their sons about being a man. Instead of squishing emotions, they are facing them and writing about them. They're -- along with moms, I believe -- open to recognizing just good parenting rather than good mothering or good fathering. Men and women do bring different elements to the table as we talk to our kids about puberty or heterosexual relationships, but the act of making dinner for your child or reading her a bedtime story or dropping her off at a friend's house -- no different. There's nothing gendered about most of parenting. 

Having these conversations with fathers who are also writers has been really fun for me. Writers tend to be a different breed just in general, more likely to talk about their feelings with total strangers. I'm accustomed to having these breakthrough conversations with women having been a very active member of the BlogHer community for the past six years, but prior to this conference I've only had those conversations with men outside my family and close friend group with two or three male bloggers, one of whom was in Sleep Is for the Weak. It's not lost on me the same guy who was one of the first guys to talk to me frankly, honestly, as a friend, with no weirdness, about parenting, is the same guy who co-founded Dad 2.0.

It's been a great conference, so far, and I'm excited to meet more of these guys today and tonight. I'm here with BlogHer.com editor-in-chief Stacy Morrison, as well as Polly Pagenhart and Shannon Carroll from the BlogHer conference team, and we're having a great experience. Way to go, Doug and John, and especially you, Doug, old friend and dad blogger extraordinaire. 

It's interesting -- David Wescott tweeted at me this:

@dwescott1 #dad2summit, great mombloggers are here, "rooting for" dads. would be the same if dads had a 5yr headstart?

I didn't say anything much on Twitter, but when I ran into David yesterday I said, "Well, look at Congress." And we stared at each other for a second, both sort of dismayed about that. I wasn't blaming him and he wasn't pitying me, we were both just sort of WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY is more than half the population so underrepresented in power positions in America? And WHY WHY WHY are we still acting like a penis disqualifies a man from being able to make a dentist appointment for his son?

I hope women and men as we go forward can look at parenting just as parenting and look at working just as working and recognize that all people bring something valuable to the table based on personality, not on gender. The world is changing, and I want to see it move toward true partnership between men and women instead of one-upsmanship and competition. Who's with me?

Today is Beloved's birthday. And today a crew of twenty or so men showed up at our house at seven in the morning to begin replacing our roof.

The roof is wood shake, which is the worst kind of roof ever. It's expensive, it's flammable and it rots. Ours is crumbling to bits and got slammed by the hail earlier this summer to the point that we were getting water stains on the ceilings. The first insurance inspector who came said it wasn't bad enough to replace. Beloved was livid, so was the roofer, a readjustment was arranged, and lo and behold, the second adjustor agreed: New roof! Paid for by the insurance company!

I've been in a half stage of shock since Beloved told me we were getting a new roof. We've been through a lot of money and broken house issues in our ten years of home ownership, and really, I've stopped expecting insurance companies to replace anything. I'm all GET OFF MY LAWN about it in a way I never thought I'd grow -- so jaded, just like my father when he talks about parking in Omaha. I'd accepted when the sweating man huffed his way up my stairs and examined the water stains located right above my winter sweaters (is there anything so vulnerability producing as having a stranger perspiring all over your wardrobe?) that we were screwed, there would be no insurance money and we'd probably have to take out some sort of horrific loan we don't qualify for or have buckets in every bedroom to catch the water when it rained. This is my best talent: catastrophizing. I don't even stop for the mid-level crises; I go straight to the bone splitters.

The longer we've been together, the more I've ostriched about money and house-related problems. After a while, I -- feminist still -- relinqueshed the checkbook and all the balancing and math that goes with it -- to Beloved. Every time I see him sit down with a stack of bills I half-heartedly offer to help and pray he says no, which he always does, whether he wants to or not (I'll never know). When I see those numbers fluctuate, I am suddenly incapable of seeing the big picture and become positive we will be living in a van down by the river in forty days. I don't know why. I just do.

Beloved taking over the checkbook and bill balancing put a roof over my head, a layer between me and the harsh outside world. I'm fine with shouldering all things parenting, with scheduling haircuts and dentist appointments for my daughter, with knowing her shoe size at all times and exactly how many minutes it takes to pick her up from wherever, where all her friends live and with whom she's allowed to go past the end of the cul-de-sac. I can be a big girl about my career and my health and my extended family. But that one thing for which I really do need a roof is money.

I'm sitting here listening to those twenty men ripping the house apart -- literally -- and trying not to think of them punching a hole in something or falling off and landing on the cement or dying of heatstroke or smashing my tomato plants. Beloved told me to go work at Panera or the library today because it would be so loud. I'm sure he understood that I wouldn't leave because I have a sick need to think it'll all be all right as long as I'm here while it's happening. But the truth is I wouldn't know what to do if something went wrong.

There are things in life that I know how to handle and things he knows how to handle, and I hope that I am his roof sometimes. My family always told me to marry someone I secretly think is better than I am, and I did.

Happy birthday, Beloved. Thank you for being my roof.

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From my BlogHer Book Club review of The Kid: Read, then, so we will make better choices than the characters in The Kid. That we will pause and consider what a person might have been through before we judge. That we, at least, will not see the world in black and white, because it is never, ever black and white -- which is the message I took away from The Kid, a story in which the main character never really even knew his name, never knew if he was crazy or sane, never knew who his father was, never knew who was related to him, never knew anything for sure except that pancakes tasted good and dancing was a release and that he could teach himself to do the splits with practice and discipline. Read the rest.

"We're taking the truck."

"Why?"

"Because we're going to the Habitat for Humanity Restore. Why on earth would we not take the truck?"

Example #8,499 of Me Being Right

Beloved had a Groupon for the Habitat for Humanity Restore. That sentence alone is some crazy shit. Charities are on Groupon now? The premise is pretty much like Goodwill -- people donate stuff and they sell it and give all the proceeds to Habitat for Humanity. It's a giant junkyard -- nothing has been shined up unless it arrived that way -- and I am so totally going back to get some wood blinds as soon as I measure my windows.

While I was waiting for a huge cart (not a cart, more of what in Iowa we would call a lowboy), I spotted one of the workers putting a price tag on a sink.

A stainless steel sink.

With all of its hardware attached.

I let it sit on the ground for approximately FIVE SECONDS, because it was $40 and my old cast iron sink looks like this:

It's chipped. It's beige. It defies cleaning products. And it stinks.

I was wheeling this baby over when I heard my name being called. I looked around to see Beloved standing protectively over a Bosch dishwasher with stainless steel innards. It's beige, not white like I wish, but the old one threw ground-up bits of disgusting all over my dishes and looked like this:

New dishwasher  = $35.

So then Beloved walked over to the TV section and grabbed himself a huge TV for the garage for $15. We walked to the checkout. I pulled out the Groupon.

A woman approached me with something like rage in her eyes.

"Are you sure you want those?" she asked, eyeing my dishwasher and sink.

"Yes."

"Are you sure you're sure?"

"Yes."

Man, people.

So I hand the cashier the Groupon. It's $19 for $50 worth of stuff. Our grand total is $90.

Beloved piped up, ever the negotiator. He's like William Shatner, that boy.

"Can you cut us a deal?"

She eyed our stuff, eyed the Groupon.

"$27.50."

My mouth fell open. So we already paid $19 for the Groupon and another $27.50 is, um, $46.50 for a perfectly fine and functioning stainless steel sink, dishwasher and television?

As we were pushing our lowboy out to the truck -- YES, THE TRUCK! WE SHOULD TAKE THE TRUCK! -- two different people stopped me and congratulated me on my find. It may have been the shit-eating grin on my face.

It only took poor Beloved three trips to the hardware store and six hours to install them both. There was that moment where I had to borrow a large pipe wrench from a neighbor whom I've met once, but don't worry, I gave him two Summer Shandys for his trouble. Oh, and it might have been 110 degrees outside.

He loves me. He hates me. He loves me. He's handy!

But it's in, it's done, and it's so pretty.

Only countertops, cabinets, floor, dining room table and window treatments to go!

Thank you, baby.

This week, some stuff happened that caused me great anxiety. As the stress washed over me, I tried to ride it out like a wave. I tried to put it in perspective. And actually, for one of the first times, it worked. Not to say I haven't gone back and forth a bit, but life is like that, and human beings aren't static -- nothing about us is static.

I talked to a few friends and family members about my reaction, which I have learned in the grand scheme of things is actually more important than the event -- the repercussions of my reactions last far longer than the crises. The general consensus seems to be that 2011 Rita is really handling things far better than 1992 Rita or even 2007 Rita. Wow, 2011 Rita, they said. You get down with your bad self.

I thought this morning as I was driving home from dropping off my girl at summer camp that great friends are like that: They are our mirrors. My friends reflect back to me not a glamorized version of myself flawlessly executing under any degree of pressure, but the real version, the version who sometimes wins and sometimes loses but is always someone they regard with love.

Because they accept me with all my flaws, it means even more when they tell me they are proud of me. Because they have seen every iteration -- in one case, every iteration since I was three years old -- they are even better judges than I am of my progress or lack thereof.

Having these people in my life -- my husband, my family and friends -- brings forth the best me, better behavior than I would exhibit left to my own devices in the depths of my psyche (which would far prefer a bag of Doritos and a stack of John Hughes movies or perhaps a baseball bat and some windows). I recognize all the time that wanting to show these people I love that I can do it keeps me moving forward most of the time.

It's weird that I was thinking all this before this latest series of events occurred when I wrote my review of Terry McMillan's Getting to Happy (it's the sequel to Waiting to Exhale) for BlogHer Book Club. Even then, I wrote:

And that's what I found with the women of Getting to Happy. You get to happy, then you get to sad, then you fight your way back to happy again. The triumphs don't last any longer than the falls, but the reverse can also be true.

Normally I would've tried to find some witty way to tie back this post to a review that I wanted to tell you all about anyway, but today it's so organic as to be shocking even to me. We are all trying to get to happy. And it, by definition, is elusive, because it, by definition, is relative.

Dear Beloved,

I had this great plan. Well, my first plan was that we would go back to the beach where we got married and, you know, renew vows and eat cake and drink champagne. Only that sort of didn't happen.

Then I told all my girlfriends I was going to have someone take a picture of me in my wedding dress, you know, sort of arty snapshot thing, that I could give you, only I would look okay in it, not totally thrown together. I had it lined up and planned for the day you were going to be working, but then you didn't work. Oops.

So then I started trying to think of back-up ideas, and the pressure of the ten-year anniversary gift started to freak me out every time I thought about it. You know how much I like ritual. I wanted something kind of formal and fantastic.

Then, just now, as I was getting out of the shower at 3, which I know is an extremely endearing quality about me, much like my inability to get out of bed and the fact that my feet stink, I decided to just take it. I didn't even wait for my hair to dry.

Only I forgot I got sunscreen on the lens of the phone camera at Worlds of Fun and didn't realize how heinously blurry these were until I emailed them to myself and opened them up, and dammit, I have a conference call in a half hour and then I have to go get the little angel, and you know this is how it is, this life thing that keeps happening while I'm planning the fabulous things I'm going to do for you.

But the carpet almost looks like the sand we stood on.

And the little beads still remind me of stars.

I couldn't get the whole dress no matter how I stretched and thus gave myself double chins. Another endearing quality: I have really freakishly short arms.

Maybe if I leaned over? Nope. Not going to happen.

Baby, I love you. I really wanted to get you something amazing, something heartfelt, but I realized I do have this blog, and maybe telling the Internet how lucky I am, how amazing you are, how astonished I am that our lives turned out so perfectly after these ten years, how much more comfortable I am in that dress than I was that day when I was so worried about the details and the sand and our relatives and friends, that today when I put on that dress all I thought about was us, and you, and how there's no one I'd rather see at the end of every day and when I first wake up and when something bad happens and when something good happens and when nothing happens at all.

I love you. Happy anniversary.

My friend AV blogs about sex. She's a sex blogger. SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX

It doesn't seem like a job for the faint of heart, and fortunately, she isn't. She mentioned to me once that her family had asked her to adopt a pseudonym for writing because her writing embarrassed them. This week, AV wrote about it on BlogHer.

She wrote:

And if one thing I write makes one person feel less isolated, then my mission is complete.

Know, too, that I don't write about these things because I think it's safe or because I live with my head in the clouds and think it's perfectly acceptable to do so, but because I know it's not safe and it's not acceptable in this or any other society. This isn't a popularity contest -- it's a call to arms. This is the resistance.

In telling my stories I am liberating others to do the same, whether privately with me in my inbox, or in their own lives.

She wrote this and a lot more on her Facebook wall, in response to family members telling her they were embarrassed by her actions, telling her they felt sorry for her parents.

Then her mom responded:

Having said all this -- what do we think about our daughter? Allow me to express with pride that my husband and I find ourselves extremely satisfied in how she shares her own experiences and thoughts. You think we should feel ashamed but we fail to find reason to do so. We raised a daughter who stands firmly on her beliefs and values despite strong opposition. There is no shame in that.

Writing and family -- it's always a tightrope that every writer walks, and maybe more so every blogger. In telling our own stories, it's very difficult to not share someone else's. But AV is only writing stories of her own experiences -- if anyone should be upset, it should be the other individuals who were in the room, not her family.

I've had disagreements with my family over whose stories were whose, over whether or not I curse too much or have unpopular politics. I've often wondered if I embarrass my family on a regular basis with my words.

I think -- at least in American culture -- someone who writes about sex, not pornography, not erotica, but the actual act of sex as a physical, emotional, spiritual or not experience -- is literally and figuratively getting naked in a way few other writers do. Parenting bloggers write about guilt and walls streaked with poop. Food writers describe burning things, falling souffles, embarrassing mistakes. The ability to feel and express sexual desire is almost caricatured in modern society -- it often feels like there is only porn or tantric soul rocking -- nothing in between, but it is in the between that the rest of us live. Are we loved? Do we love properly? Is there a properly? If we don't have sex often enough, are we undesirable? Is sex as important as we thought it was? Is it more important than we thought it was? What is sex past twenty, past thirty, past when you look hot doing it? What is sexiness after the body starts to decay? What is sexiness when you're young and not yet comfortable with yourself?

I don't write about sex, other than the How to Get a Happier Marriage posts I did for BlogHer last year. It's not something I'm comfortable blogging about. But I did write about it a little in my novel, and in doing so, I started asking myself all those questions above. Sex is more and less than what we think it is. Perhaps it's the most vulnerable we can be.

I think as a people we're afraid to talk about actual sex for all of these reasons. We're comfortable with hinting at it, commoditizing it, using it to sell beer, acting as though we get it all the time, pretending we don't need it or we live for it, but heaven forbid we ever talk about it as the inherent part of the human experience it actually is.

The little angel wanted us to tape the royal wedding. So we did. When I came downstairs this morning, she was already dressed and glued to the set.

"Did you watch Princess Diana's wedding?" she asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Well, it was on at like four in the morning. And I really didn't care."

She narrowed her eyes, trying to gauge if I was joking.

Just then, Meredith Viera (wearing a ridiculous hat that appeared to be free-climbing the side of her head), mentioned "Princess Katherine."

So now she's gone from Kate to Katherine?

Just like Katie Holmes went from Katie to Kate when she married Tom Cruise?

As though maybe they weren't good enough the way they were?

It's one thing when you change your own name. It's a completely different thing when someone else changes your name for you.

Good luck, Princess Kate. You're going to need it.

So this weekend I was talking about the book and blogging at the Kansas City Literary Festival. The festival had a great turnout. It was a beautiful day. 

My panel was at five.

Many people had gone home.

Still, Mike Lundgren and I had about 15-20 people under our white tent, and they asked a lot of great questions.  The main question that always comes up for mommybloggers, it seems, is privacy.  I pointed out that putting your name on your blog is not so different from putting your name on your memoir, or maybe your Sunday op-ed column, and really, putting your name on something you wrote is what writers do. I initially bought into the privacy fear, but the more I wrote, the more I realized I never used to worry when I put my name on the articles I wrote for KC Weddings or Greater Kansas City Business.  I never worried about putting my name on the poems I published or the things I wrote for any of my jobs. Yes, I want to protect my daughter's privacy and my husband's privacy, and by privacy I mean "freedom from having nutjobs break into our house or kidnap my child," but really, if I totally respected their privacy, I would not write about them on my blog.

I think that's an unfortunate side effect of being in the family of a writer.  Anything you say or do could become material. Not that we are walking around trying to expose people's foibles, but even fictional characters are composites - how else could you write what you know?  How else could you capture the life-like details that make a complex character jump off the page?  I definitely have more boundaries than people probably realize -- there are some subjects that are completely off-limits, and things happen all the time that I wish I could write out to figure out my feelings about them, but to do so here would be so totally inappropriate I can't fathom doing it. 

I also talked a little bit about the narrative nonfiction form, which is really what we do when we blog.  We're telling a story, and usually it's a true story.  I read a post last week from Kyran talking about the blog-to-book phenomenon and what it means to blogging.  Dutch made a point that we'll really see how bloggers hold up when they produce successful fiction. I love Dutch's writing, but I disagreed in the comments with his point.

Here was my comment:

Traditional publishers are not yet sure if bloggers can sell books. Iwill tell you that. I had 11 pages of links to mainstream mediacoverage of the bloggers in my anthology, and many of the largerpublishers still weren't sure they wanted to take a chance on it.

Ido think that the blogosphere is going to have to show they want to buyprint versions of the favorite bloggers' writing in order to createmore demand for bloggers' books. I know my book wasn't the first bloganthology, but I'm hoping it will be one that is delivered with aproper marketing campaign, and that campaign is coming from outside thepublisher as well as inside it. It has to. There isn't enough money inpublishers' publicity budgets to help a new author succeed unless he orshe takes it on. The success of a first book (for those of us withouttwo-book deals) will determine whether or not we move forward withanother.

I disagree that fiction is the ultimate stronghold. Iwent to school for fiction writing and have placed a few things, but Ifind the narrative nonfiction form to be just as relevant and one thatmy readers better relate to. David Sedaris and Anne Lamott have donejust fine with it, and they are two of my favorite writers. Why wouldyou change a formula that is working for you? Just a question. I knowLamott has written novels, too, but my favorite books of hers are hernonfiction offerings.

Is this the beginning of a new trend,blogs to books? No. But it may be the first time the mainstream willbecome aware that it's happening. At least I hope the mainstreambecomes aware, because if it doesn't, there may not be many moreblogger books. Publishing is a fickle beast.

But - back to my husband?  When we went to dinner after the panel, he admitted he'd thought because of the time, I'd end up with like four people.  He was actually impressed we got the amount of people we did. 

But then he said if I REALLY wanted to impress him, I'd start spouting sports scores.  So there you have it.

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Talking about how childless people really feel about your pregnancy on BlogHer today.