This past weekend I was grouchy. I'm at the hardest part of my half-marathon training, so I'm tired physically a lot. We just had a week solid of sultry, sweaty days and thick summer nights. Labor Day means the neighborhood pools closed, it means the end of summer, it means looking ahead and jam-packed schedules and my husband's weekday travel and early-morning choir runs. It means it will get cold again, and I hate being cold more than any other weather scenario. Freezing drizzle. I hate freezing drizzle.

Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama.

I know every parent has this recording running in the background of their lives, and usually my patience is good. Decent, at least. But coming off two weeks of solid husband-traveling-back-to-schooling-work-is-crazying chaos, my patience: She is so depleted. My patience packed her bags on Friday and walked out the damn door for a long Vegas weekend.

So I snapped when my girl waited until I was out of earshot (not hard, my hearing is getting worse and worse) and then asked some question that I didn't answer over and over and over. I didn't want to underdog on the swing eighty times. I didn't feel like going over to look at the shiny thing she found at the street fest.

I. Just. Wanted. To. Be. Alone.

Then I remembered the article she just turned in for her junior reporter role at a local magazine. It was a list of guidelines for trick-or-treaters. All the things I've been drilling into her head for the past eleven years were there, and when I emailed the piece to her editor, I felt the shock of "she's so grown up" reverberate down my spine.

But she does still need me. Or at least, she still wants me, and what am I doing? Swatting her away like the sweat running down my cheeks on the summer days I'll mourn the first time I have to wear socks.

Why can't I appreciate what I have when I have it?

Just a reminder, Rita. You're still her mama.

MAMA. MAMA. MAMA.

"Did I used to put my head here?" she asked, even though she knew the answer, that this is a dance we do.

"Yes, right here on my shoulder. And then, finally, you would sleep from 5-7 am."

I remember those days, dragging myself to work to pay for diapers and formula and daycare. It was a dark time.

She rests her tween head on my shoulder now. I vow to stay for five counts of one hundred.

I feel her body grow heavy, begin to twitch.

I remember those days when her body was only two feet long, cradled against me. The relief I felt in her sleep, which meant my sleep.

I told her she used to shove her nose into my neck. A few days ago she tried, her head bigger than my neck. I'm no giraffe.

"Not enough room," she said.

My girl is too big to bury her face in my neck. I understand this truth more than she does.

I am glad it still occurs to her to try.

It will be hard to show her I'm only human.

"You are the party," she said.

We were in college. I'm sure I was crying over what the kids now call FOMO. It was easy to do at a party school when I was trying so hard to balance perfectionism and grades and social acceptance and my bad habit of seeing my self-worth reflected (or not) in boys' eyes.

It was a reassuring thought, then and now, when even at forty-one I occasionally feel left out of this get-together or that trip. When I think about places I can't get time away from work to visit or haven't had the money to see yet.

I am the party.

Repeat after me, and see if you smile.

Try moving through life expecting people to embrace you with open arms, knowing you will bring interesting stories and intriguing conversation. Pretend until it is.

Something about this little lie I've told myself since that night when I repeated her in Iowa City, most likely feeling rejected, then feeling better, buoys me even now.

Who cares what they think?
You care what you think.
We all die alone.
So believe, even for a minute, that you are the party.
Let yourself believe.

(This post originally appeared on BlogHer.com. And look, I made a Pinterest-y thing!)

Because I'm not like a professional blogger or anything, I forgot to take rock-solid "before" pictures, so some parts of the deck are already removed here.

In recent years, we realized the deck was getting seriously squishy. As in, someone might actually fall through soon.

We started scheming for affordable ways to replace the deck, because our taste is never in line with our budget reality. Then my father pointed out he had a pile of wood from what used to be a corncrib. He is unusual in that he also has a huge shed and a planer. Handy and unusual.

Last fall, we traveled to Iowa and spent a day planing down the wood. It is cedar and even though the boards were over sixty years old, they planed down really nicely.

After the old, gray, weather-beaten wood goes through the planer, a layer of wood is removed to reveal the beautiful wood underneath. Just like exfoliating! Magic!

Around early May this year, we rented a trailer, drove back to Iowa, and picked them up. We stuck them all in our garage and started ripping off the old deck. I highly recommend investing in one of these should you try to destroy anything as large as a deck, ever.

We rented a dumpster for one weekend, which meant it all had to come up, even though it was raining. Fun!

Once the deck boards were up and the railings and pergola was down, we realized the joists had not been supported with joist hangers and really we could use about twice as many. The boards had been attached with nails, not screws, so all those nails had to be pulled out or cut off, as well.

Pulling up, cutting off or pounding down thousands of nails was one of my least favorite parts of this project. Oddly, I found drilling holes and hanging joists very satisfying.

We added new joists in between all the old joists and added new joist hangers everywhere.

Then it was time to put the old corncrib deck boards back on top. We combined them with a few new boards, but luckily we had enough to make the floor almost completely upcycled.

Next, we installed the posts and built the pergola. It was hard.

Then we stained everything.

Finally, we added some of the more fun touches -- a vintage washtub we converted into a cooler, a Tiki Toss game, our shells from Florida, some new pillows, fake copper post caps with solar LED lights.

This project turned out to be far from free -- deck hardware and pergola boards are expensive -- but because my husband and I did all the work ourselves, we saved thousands of dollars in labor costs. And we both lost weight. So there's that. But we gained it all back by grilling and throwing back cocktails on our new deck!

To see more of our home improvement projects, see The Transformation of Chateau Travolta on Surrender, Dorothy.

Well, a year and a half after I wrote Help, My Cat Can't Pee on BlogHer, my sweet little black cat, Kizzy, almost died again from a total urinary blockage. Thankfully, before he blocked completely, we'd already decided to take the rather dramatic step of perineal urethrostomy surgery.

Cats become candidates for this crazy surgery after they've been blocked three or more times, according to my vet. A year ago, we thought we'd never do it. The surgery is drastic: The vet cuts off the cat's penis and tacks the sides of the urethra open wider with sutures. After those sutures dissolve, your cat has a nice wide urine highway right underneath his anus. (He's still a "he," technically, albeit a "he" with no penis.) (Genitals don't equal gender, anyway. Kizzy would like you all to know he is indeed, still a mancat.)

Kizzy went in for his third catheterization several weeks ago, and I talked to my husband before I took him about the threshold for surgery. Primarily we wanted to weigh how likely Kizzy was to face problems later in life, like incontinence or pain. Secondarily, we wanted to know how much the surgery would cost. We were already shelling out hundreds of dollars every time he was hospitalized for a blockage, so our tolerance for vet bills is high, but we weren't going to bankrupt my daughter's college fund or anything. Finally, we wanted to know if it would actually work.

I, of course, asked Dr. Google, and that's why I decided to write this post. I did see a lot of message boards, but I didn't find many blog posts that detailed someone's personal experience from beginning to end, and that's really what I wished for when I went looking.

After we agreed to the surgery (which in the Kansas City area cost around $1,200), Kizzy was scheduled for the next day. (He was already catheterized and they needed to let that flush out and make sure he was okay before they proceeded.)

The surgery itself was done by a vet who had done them before and had no real complications from any of her patients. She told me after the surgery that Kizzy had developed scar tissue again immediately after his catheter was removed for surgery prep, and she actually had to amputate the tip of his penis in order to insert the surgery catheter. So, in other words, he was 100% blocked and would've definitely died if we hadn't had the surgery. This removed any doubt I had about whether or not the risk was too great in retrospect.

Read the rest over at BlogHer!

Kizzy has had an extremely tough week. I'm going to write about the whole thing on BlogHer and will add a link here when I do. The good news is he is recuperating and so far hasn't had complications and can take the cone off hopefully Monday.

Note: I wrote this on the plane on the way to #BlogHer15, so this post is already ten days old. After consulting some friends, I decided to publish it anyway. I don't really care if it doesn't win me any popularity contests. This post was springing from my fingers as I was still reading Coates' book, and that hasn't happened to me in a long time.

I didn't know President Obama planned to speak today. I flipped to NPR out of boredom during the hour-long ride to the airport.

Obama talked about a deal America had forged with our "allies and partners" -- I assume "partner" in this sense is less romantic than what some of my friends call their lovers -- in order to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.

I gripped the wheel tighter as my default inner voice asked, "Why shouldn't they have one when we do?"

Because, removing all nationalism from the equation, this hardly seems fair.

Stay with me a moment.

The more I learn about our brains from scientists and our souls from writers and artists, the more I realize what I grew up accepting to be true is a rationalization to benefit whoever is telling the story. They weren't evil in telling it, either -- it's what they were taught or came to believe.

In sitting with my own feelings, I now believe there are no universal truths or common histories, there are only the stories we tell ourselves. Which, in and of themselves, are so divergent no two people witnessing an event ever agree on all the details.

All we can do is take the information, go forward, and try to be a good human.

I got to the airport and started reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME. It's an extended letter to his son about living in America as a black man, but maybe more importantly, it's about how we came to the concept of "black" in the first place.

This book is perhaps one of the best explanations of white privilege I've seen, but Coates doesn't call it that. He calls it "The Dream."

To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.

The Dream tells white people that when black boys are killed by the police, they must have done something to deserve it, because otherwise holy shit, what kind of police academies are we funding here to pull people over or frisk them or God forbid shoot them for something as antiquated as skin color?

The Dream tells white people that the default of beauty is blonde and blue-eyed and there must be something not good about an all-black school.

The Dream ignores Howard University, where Coates found his Mecca.

I understood The Dream. I've equated the scales falling from my eyes to the moment when the red pill is swallowed in The Matrix. I don't want the world to be stupid or ugly. The Dream can hide that for me, for my white family.

The Dream is tempting for those who can afford to believe in it. As Coates points out, believing you should be able to take without regard has nonracial applications. 

The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

Coates admits he himself imagines a world where he has The Dream, then realizes he has unintentionally also marginalized others. That helps me believe other white people ensconced in The Dream might be able to let Coates in. We have this thing in common, you see: the human desire to dominate those around us. Having that desire in our bodies doesn't make us bad.

Acting on it makes us bad.

Acting on it brought whites to decimate Native Americans, colonize Africa, sell black bodies as property.

How did we do it? By convincing our white selves that our fellow people were not human. How can we do that? Maybe if they had some identifying characteristic ...

Perhaps being named "black" had nothing to do with any of this, perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.

What is "race"? It used to matter what kind of European you were ...

But a great number of "black" people are already beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead races (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose -- the organization of people beneath and beyond the umbrella of rights.

Separating the concept of black and white from American, my mind wandered back to Obama's press conference.

Ignore Obama's race. He's the Commander-in-Chief right now. He's 'Merica. And he's forged an agreement with our allies and partners that say we, America, and they, have the right to make decisions about who should and shouldn't have nuclear weapons.

I'm not going to debate whether Iran is a problem or even whether America is a problem. We're all problems to people who don't agree with us.

The question is how do we make our decisions, which ultimately are made with emotion more often than reason?

We make ourselves, Americans, freedom fighters and protectors of the world when we need to in order to justify our own decisions.

We make ourselves white when we want to live The Dream.

In everything when we find ourselves falling back on a default explanation for the way things are -- we should question that.

I do believe Obama and co. questioned the Iran situation and decided the goal is to prevent Iran from getting nuclear bombs, the end. Who cares if it's fair, really? Because, holy shit. Right? Um.

I do not claim to know the answer to this question. I'm just asking it.

I do believe that many white Americans still live in The Dream and believe it's justified and are honestly befuddled with people like Coates.

To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this.

But, Coates points out, we are also befuddled at earthquakes, and so we insist they are the same, race relations and natural disasters -- impossible to control, hard to blame, something that's always been there and that we are helpless to change.

And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgement of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed.

But people are not earthquakes, though we can be disasters. We can wreak havoc. But we also have free will.

People have the capacity to plan for the future and to reflect on the past and to change the present.

In my lifetime, I've watched the majority of American attitudes on LGBT people make, if not a 180, then at least a 120.

Frankly, I'm shocked. Shocked that it happened so fast and shocked that the black/white chasm has yawned in that time, or at least it has yawned more publicly.

I asked myself how the LGBT shift happened. In my summation, it happened through art, literature, movies and television. Storylines emerged on TV shows and in movies. People I knew came out. Commercials showed same-sex couples. YA novels featured LGBT romances and relationships.

We are not at a loss for black art, literature, television and movies.

Why is this so hard for white America?

The Dream.

To move on, we have to be prepared to see the matrix, to wake up, to stop looking the other way.

To shed light.

To not worry what our employers will think if they read our blogs.

To realize that handy identifying characteristic our white ancestors used to dominate others holds no place in modern society. Seeing black skin as anything but black skin kicks back to a dead time, a time we must acknowledge existed and consciously move to work past. We must look slavery in its face and spit.

We must promise to move forward and do no more harm.

We must interrupt the signal consciously, and it must be a constant and conscious override or The Dream will continue to inflict pain on all of us.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an atheist and would not want to be blessed, so I'll call this a salute. His gift for organizing thoughts and studies and history into a slim book so easy to understand should not be underestimated. He could've used that gift to tell any story, but he used it to tell the story of us.

How will we act on it?

Last year, I had the honor of picking up the BlogHer Voices of the Year mantle from my predecessors late in the season. I remember standing backstage and holding my breath as each person read, feeling their excitement and nerves bubbling as they rushed breathlessly on and off, some breaking into tears as they stepped backstage into a line of hugs from a group of recently former strangers.

This year, I went through the entire process soup to nuts. Voices of the Year is so multi-dimensional with so many moving pieces, but it's still magical.

It's magical.

This year was my tenth BlogHer conference and my sixth as a full-time BlogHer (now SheKnows Media) employee. This year we rolled out the video production talent of my colleague Melissa Haggerty and her team. This year we captured not only performance of the written word, but also the many other ways we're expressing ourselves, from Liv's dual-faced make-up GIF of the face of suicide to Samantha's shocking and heartfelt Twinsters video to Feminista's #NMOS14 social impact, as well as the show-stopping readings we expect from VOTY.

The day and night went by in a blur of image checks and confirmations, and afterward I cried for a minute in the restroom because I have so much respect for, well, the office of VOTY that I'd been terrified I would somehow screw it up.

One of the things we learned this year from #BlogHer15 is to own your body of work. I am adding this year's VOTY production to my body of work with a large measure of satisfaction and so much respect for Elisa, Melissa, Jamie, Joy, Lori and all of my other partners in awesome. Thanks for sharing this with me. And congratulations to our 84 2015 Voices of the Year: http://m.blogher.com/introducing-work-2015-voices-year-featured-honorees

(from my phone and my heart)

I'm traveling this week to #BlogHer15 in New York City. Packing always reminds me of the combined apprehension and freedom I feel taking off on my own. Knowing there will be no one to watch your bags while you use the facilities changes your suitcase strategy.

When I was a senior in high school, I'd sometimes drive the four hours from my hometown to The University of Iowa to visit friends. The closer I got to exit 242, the more nervous I'd get. I'd be lying if I didn't admit on every solo trip I've ever taken, starting then, there's a moment I consider chucking it all and turning around.

After college at Iowa, I moved to Chicago to sublease a room from a friend in an apartment I'd never seen. I thought the slowdown in traffic coming into Chicago proper was caused by an accident. I'd only previously driven into the suburbs by myself when I moved there.

I developed a taste for airplanes after embarking on a series of solo weeklong business trips for my Chicago PR agency job to exciting locales like Cincinnati and Duluth. I starting visiting friends everywhere I could and spent all my money on United Airlines, hoarding the ticket stubs as proof to myself of my ability to deliver on promises I made. Yes, I said. I'll come visit.

The scariest of these trips took me from Omaha to Chicago to LA to Sydney in one heady, 24-hour journey. There was a monitor on the plane that showed the plane relative to land. It was comforting until we passed Hawaii and I learned how big the Pacific Ocean is.

On the day after I returned from Australia, I boarded a plane alone to head to Florida to train for my new job in Kansas City. Jetlagged, I passed out on my backpack in the airport. My new co-workers found me at our agreed-upon meeting spot. Hi! I'm Rita!

I almost missed a flight doing that on one of the legs of my SLEEP IS FOR THE WEEK book tour. I visited most of the cities by myself, hooking up with my contributors at some point. In New York I Pricelined a room in what I thought was a convenient hotel off the east Brooklyn subway. When a cabbie refused to drive me back from a trip to meet a friend at MoMA, I realized once again how naive I am even after wandering so many cities alone. That same trip I also discovered gypsy cabs and had to talk myself down the whole way from my sketchy hotel to the signing while trying to ignore the driver's lack of credentials. In the end, I made him promise to drive me back, remembering the Manhattan cabbie. That night I slept in my ground-floor room with a chair in front of the door.

It was fine.

The most annoying travel hang up happened the night before the little angel's fourth birthday party. My Friday night flight out of Boston for a business trip got cancelled, and I rerouted through St. Louis, certain I could make it. Standing outside waiting for the rental car shuttle at 3 am, I reconsidered my plan and slept four hours at the cheapest airport hotel I could find before speeding four hours home.

I still missed the party. Sometimes my emotions override my reason, especially while traveling.

Now in my forties I understand the world a little better and my iPhone means I no longer carry a compass on my keychain or beg strangers for directions. Still, preparing to get myself halfway across the country on my own brings back that mix of nerves and adrenaline.

What adventures will I have this time?