The Kiddie Cocktail

2011 - My Year In Review

I don't often do things like this, but I rather like this questionnaire, which I swiped from Sundry and Hilarity in Shoes. I barely remember what I did an hour ago, so it's kind of nice to look back at my year and dig up the stuff that deserves to be remembered.

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?

I was away from my daughter for an entire week for the first time in our lives. My mother in law generously offered, and I happily accepted. I had the most amazing week, which included the perfect weekend in NYC with one of my best friends, and two days of celebrating my husband's birthday.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I've mentioned before that I'm not much for resolutions. However, I did say I wanted to be a better wife. I tried. You'd have to ask my husband if I succeeded. Will I make more? Eh. Probably not really.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

No one close. Far-flung friends and friends from the interwebs only.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No. Whew.

5. What countries did you visit?

The many countries of my mind. International travel is just not in the cards right now. I'll dust off my passport again someday.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?

Another baby. Oh, wait, did I say that out loud? More patience. Especially for my daughter.

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

-A day in late winter when one of my best friends called, told me she wanted a divorce from her husband (another close friend), and asked if I could help her find an attorney. It was the second marriage of a close friend that I watched fall apart in the span of a few months. I'm still in shock about it, because they, as a couple, were such a huge part of my life and my support system. It's sure as hell made me examine my own marriage under a microscope.

-The magnificent, perfect late June weekend that I spent in New York with one of my best friends, Maya. It could not have been more amazing.

-Three nights alone with my husband for his birthday. We ate well, pretended to be hip and cool, slept late, walked down the street holding hands, and sat on a roof deck watching the sun set over Capitol Hill, giddy, finding our old selves there, under the veneer of parenthood.

-A perfect long July afternoon at our community pool. We'd gotten home from vacation, and found our AC broken. We redeemed the disaster by spending as much of the next day at the pool as possible. It makes me wish the summer were still going on, and that every day was like that day.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Just keeping it all afloat without being institutionalized. This working-parenting-living gig is not for the faint of heart.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Every time that I yelled or lost my temper at my daughter or husband for no good reason.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

A weird bone splinter thing on my big toe early in the year. Pain solved by not wearing heels for a month. A stomach bug in March that felled everyone in the house, one by one, and that took me too long to recover from, thanks to some weird drug side effects. I also had two of the most horrific colds I've ever had this year. One was over the summer, and involved a sore throat so bad that I was positive it had to be strep, and it wasn't. The second cold I got right after Thanksgiving, and made me realize just how very much snot a human head can produce (a fuckton, if you must know, in technical terms). Nothing crazy, but I used to get sick maybe once a year. And then I birthed a petri dish of ebola child.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Two fabulous, unique, well-made dresses from Emmett McCarthy's boutique in New York. I didn't know who the heck he was, and stumbled into his shop, finding myself in this lovely, tailored oasis from the summer style hell that is the maxi dress.

12. Where did most of your money go?

Probably (1) childcare and (2) wine. These things are related.

13. What did you get really excited about?

My new Kindle. It was a gift from my husband for Mothers' Day, and it's made me really embrace reading again. Not that I ever stopped, but damn, I treat that thing like a slot machine at Vegas, except it spits out words instead of quarters. I'm just so happy that the 3,000 books I can have on there don't take up any room in my space-limited urban rowhouse.

14. What song will always remind you of 2011?

Anything from The National's "High Violet" album.

15. Compared to this time last year, are you:

Happier or sadder?  Happier. A major factor is that my daughter is older, and just so much less needy of me. And that she sleeps. SLEEP.
Thinner or fatter? Thinner. I think.
Richer or poorer? Richer, in all ways.

16. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Sleeping. Time alone with my husband.

17. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Stressing out over stupid, insignificant things. When I'm tired or busy, it's just too easy for me to get overly wound up over all the wrong things.

18. How did you spend Christmas/Hanukkah?

We celebrated Christmas at our house on the 24th, and had a lovely relaxing day full of presents, a fire (in the fireplace!), wine and good food. I really think I want to do it that way every year because the stores are open, so you can run out and get that extra bottle of wine or stick of butter. December 25 was spent (1) driving to New Jersey for my husband's family's annual Hanukkah party; (2) ditching the kid with her grandparents and seeing a movie; and (3) eating tasty Chinese food with the family like a good Jew. The 26th was an all-day family Hanukkah fest full of bagels, latkes, lox, laughter, wine, presents, fire, more wine, desserts, wine, more presents, happy kids running around with their cousins. It was all awesome, and I wish I could do it every day.

19. What was your favorite TV program?

Game of Thrones, hands down. I am a giant nerd.

20. What were your favorite books of the year?

Ohhh, so many to choose from. I loved The Help, and read it for what it is - a great story, set in a certain time and place, with extraordinary characters. So glad I read it before all the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan when the movie came out. A Discovery of Witches also stands out, and I can't wait for the next books in the series. Finally, I went on a YA dystopian fiction tear, and my favorites were The Hunger Games series, The Uglies series and Divergent (eagerly awaiting the next books). There wasn't fiction quite like that when I was a YA, and some of it is really good. I am also a nerdy 16-year old girl at heart.

21. What was your favorite music from this year?

I listened to "High Violet" and "Boxer" by the National kind of nonstop. I also loved everything from the Treme soundtrack - it makes me so homesick/nostalgic for New Orleans.

22. What were your favorite films of the year?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha, ohhhh. Um, see, I never go to the movies. I didn't go all that much even before having a kid, and now we only go when we have parent babysitting, because it's hard to justify $15 per hour for a $10 movie. I saw exactly two movies this year in a theatre: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 and Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. By default, they were my favorites.

23. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I was thirty-goddamn-eight, damn it. Old. Sigh. I always try to stretch the celebration out to several days. My in laws were visiting, so I got to go out for two consecutive nights (crazy, right?) with friends for great food and beverages. I had to work on my actual birthday, and was getting my kid's cold, but tried to rally for dinner out with the guy and the girl anyhow.

24. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Winning the lottery. Duh.

25. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?

I've been trying to spruce up my quality basics with some color and print and different non-solid, non-boring fabrics- hello, Anthropologie! I covet all of you. I also bought and wore and liked two pairs of skinny jeans, which I swore I would never wear again since I lived through the '80's.

26. What kept you sane?

(1) Wine. (2) My husband. (3) Running outside. Not necessarily in that order.

27. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.

This sounds so cliched, but don't take the great things in your life for granted. Stop and appreciate them. Thank your husband for everything he does. Screw making dinner - order takeout or make grilled cheese -  and sit down on the floor and play with your kid. Hug everyone. Tell your mother in law what an awesome, generous, creative babysitter she is. Call your friends and send them unexpected presents. I just saw friends' lives crumble around them this year as their marriages dissolved, as they mourned lost loved ones, and as they tried to pick up the pieces. I was scared and humbled by their losses, and it makes me want to appreciate the living daylights out of everything I hold dear.

Decade

I can't believe it has been ten years since we woke up to the incomprehensible sight of a plane hitting one of the World Trade Centers in New York. It is both just yesterday, and an age ago.

My mother said today that she hoped we would be out of town, out of DC all this weekend. I couldn't figure out why, at first. I thought, there's no hurricane coming. Then I realized she was talking about this tenth anniversary of 9/11. No, Mom, sorry. We are not leaving. I refuse to be paranoid, refuse to be afraid. This is my home, and we have things to do.

I don't have anything profound to say, no story to retell. I already said my piece earlier this year, as it happens. I will spend this 9/11 as I have all the others since 2001: quietly remembering.

An eye for an eye

Seth told me as soon as I woke up this morning. He knew I would want to know.

"Osama bin Laden is dead. They killed him. Obama had a press conference around 11 last night."

"Holy shit. Where was he?"

"In Pakistan."

"I've been waiting almost ten years to hear that."

The reason I've been waiting for such news is that all the evidence shows that Osama bin Laden orchestrated the murder of my friend, Peter Morgan Goodrich, almost ten years ago on September 11, 2001. Peter was killed on United Flight 175, the second highjacked plane to hit the World Trade Center.

That day is crystal clear in my memory. A perfect, blue sky September day. My then-boyfriend's mother calling me, telling me to turn on the TV. I was unemployed, still in bed. Her panicked, garbled words about planes crashing into the World Trade Center made no sense. I gasped and shivered with horror as I watched the black smoke pour out of the Twin Towers, as that second plane crashed. I went over to my boyfriend's parents' house, unable to be alone. An e-mail that morning from my friend Janine, thankful that her friends and family were all safe. Only a couple of hours later, she had to retract it in sickening grief, as she learned her brother-in-law had been on that second plane. There are no words for how numb and stunned and sick I felt. I could not watch the television anymore, not those plane crash images, because it was Peter dying, over and over and over again, in full, sharp technicolor. Then there was confusing television footage of planes bombing something in the Middle Eastern night- Baghdad? Afghanistan? My boyfriend's sister cheered, punching the air, "Yeah! Ooh! Get 'em!"

I crumpled, my energy gone, full of nothing but aching sadness. "No more death," I thought. Please, no more death. That can't be the answer. I went home, huddled indoors with the dog, escaping the eerily silent, empty, perfect crystal-blue skies above Washington, DC.

I flew with friends to Peter's memorial a week or so later, crying as airport security made me take off my shoes in the deserted BWI airport, because I knew I had to take off my shoes because Peter (along with hundreds of others) was dead. Murdered.

We huddled in the box pews of the Old First Church in Bennington, where we'd watched Janine marry Peter's brother, Foster, just exactly three years before. It was their third anniversary that day. We should have been toasting them, but we were listening to the unbearable sound of Foster's voice cracking with grief as he eulogized his only brother, as we wrapped our arms around each other, and ran out of tissues.

Some essential piece of all of our innocence died with Peter on that September day. So many things fell apart after that day, like it was the final blow. We were all so broken. Janine and Foster were absolutely overcome and drowning in their grief. Janine, Foster, Becki, her new husband Chris and I were all struggling with employment and unemployment, all trying to find our footing in this tilted "new normal." I had been knocked breathless by a bitter breakup with that boyfriend, and I fled to my friends in Vermont, who were struggling just as much as me. But we couldn't fix ourselves, or each other. We were all too sad and raw and struggling. That time was so bad; I don't have adequate words. It resulted in Becki and I not speaking to each other for seven years, in all of us feeling nothing but sick and sad and helpless. There was no comfort. I think now that it was the beginning of the long, slow, end of Janine and Foster's marriage.

I am not an advocate of the death penalty. The way it has been done in this country is barbaric, uncivilized and arbitrary. However, anytime after 9/11, if I had seen Osama bin Laden, I would have tried to kill him with my bare hands.

I never thought the U.S. would find bin Laden. Central Command for Afghanistan was, at that time, run out of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. A friend was an Air Force colonel there, and he told me that they had technology and real-time information that I would not believe at MacDill, all focused on finding bin Laden. He used to hassle some of the guys working the bin Laden search: "Come on, with all this, you can't find just one guy?" But it was a needle in a haystack; a pebble in the rough Afghan mountains.

Peter's brother and parents felt very connected to the World Trade Center site as Peter's final resting place. Visiting there gave them some measure of comfort. Months and months and months after 9/11, some of Peter's remains were identified, from DNA extracted from his hairbrush or toothbrush. A femur. They had a goddamn femur. All Foster could say, his voice breaking with tears, was, "Where's the rest of him?" Wounds newly raw, opened up by that bone, Peter's wife and family tried to plan yet another service.

I have hated the image of bin Laden every time I saw it on TV, as he looked smug and alive in those videos that would surface from time to time.

I can't believe the U.S. actually found him, that he is actually, finally dead and gone. It is closure, I suppose. I am not one of those people who feels like celebrating, like waving the American flag and cheering like we just won the Superbowl. It is some measure of justice of the oldest fashioned kind - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It feels somber to me. I am not cheering. I am quietly remembering Peter, one of the most thoughtful, generous and intellectually curious people I have ever met. I am remembering his own copy of the Koran, well thumbed, intensively bookmarked, that he had read and studied on his own, out of sheer curiosity and interest, a book whose text he likely knew better than his murderers who invoked it.

Are we even? No, we never will be. The ripples of only Peter's death immeasurably, irreparably changed the courses of dozens of lives. i can't even imagine what the deaths of all the 9/11 victims has collectively changed forever. Death never makes it even. Never. At most, it closes one loop, an eye for an eye. A femur for a femur. At the end, all we can do is remember, and try to move forward, our boats beating against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.*

 
Peter Morgan Goodrich

*Borrowed from The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Over with

This is a 30 Days of Truth post: Day 08 → Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit.

This post has conspired against me and mired me down. It has been terrible to write, terrible to revisit this time. It was almost done, and with an errant keystroke, gone. I have to end it this time, fast, succint, better than I did it in life.

"Are you or have you ever been afraid of your current sexual partner?" asked the form at the Tulane University health clinic. My pen hovered for much too long over the "yes" and "no" check boxes. I wanted to check yes. I wanted to check yes so someone would ask me, so maybe someone could free me. I wanted to check yes, but instead, I checked no. I checked no, and remained captured. 

What would have happened if I had checked "yes," that day; if I had broken up with him the year before or sooner; if I had not followed him to law school? What if, what if, what if.

He was my college boyfriend. I was his "first"; he was not mine. We became quickly exclusive sometime sophomore year. I didn't always see how he was cutting me off, isolating me. Even when I did things for him that I didn't want to do, like skipping Winter Carnival senior year to go to Boston with him, ostensibly to comfort his best friend through a bad breakup. What I didn't see is what I was enabling: his neuroses, his fears, and his control over me. I thought I was being supportive, faithful, loyal. Rather, that's what I was told. I was told that if I did not do certain things, that I was unfaithful, unloyal, betraying. 

I was told that I thought things wrong, had the wrong opinions, did things wrong. I was belittled, controlled, demeaned, and made to believe he only did these things because he loved me. He isolated me from the friends that were supposed to be "our" friends. I saw him change over three years of college, saw him be very cruel to people that I loved, that were close friends, that he professed to love. But when I tried to do something, I was accused of disloyalty, unfaithfulness, un-love. And I loved him. I did. Blindly, passionately, optimistically. It got worse over three years of college, and worse yet when I succumbed to going to the same law school as him, which was not the school I really wanted to go to. Somehow, he convinced me to leave my car at his parents' house during our first year of law school, somehow he convinced me that we only needed his car, only had room for one car. It was really so he could control where I went.

The wall punches next to my head started senior year of college. I don't remember how much I got charged extra for dorm damage, for those holes in the plaster in my dorm room. Those holes that I covered with wall hangings and posters. The raising of his hand, then stopping just short of hitting me...that started during our first year of law school. I started to beg him to hit me, told him to just do it, because I thought it would set me free. Then there would be a strike, a bruise, a mark, something concrete, and not just the horrible, daily, hourly crushing of my spirit that happened.

He started to cheat on me with someone else in law school, claiming it was benign, that they just had things in common. I believed it even as he spent nights at her apartment. Wanted to believe it, because that's how bullied, cowed, captured I was. I still believed he was the sweet, somewhat naive, so-smart boy that I had met my freshman year of college. He went out drinking with his new friends, while I stayed home. I wasn't invited, and I had no friends of my own, because I'd been so isolated by him. We'd also only brought his car to New Orleans. He'd convinced me we only should have one, because we only had one parking space. It was really so he could control me. I tried to leave one day, to jump in that car and drive off, to a coffeehouse, to anywhere, anywhere at all, and somehow, before I could even get out of the apartment parking lot, he was there in the car, pulling me out, taking the keys, saying "where do you think you're going?" in a coldly amused voice, leading me back up to the apartment like a bad child, as I hung my head, broken, trapped, again.

Of course, he broke up with me. I slid into a dark well of depression, hanging a black sheet over the bedroom window because I never wanted to wake up. He ripped it down when he came home from his new girlfriend's house the next day. He badgered me to get over it, didn't understand why I was so upset when he was fine, because he didn't want to have to inconveniently feel guilt.

Yet he still wanted all the control. I was forbidden to tell anyone we had broken up. I was forbidden to move out, and it would have been nearly impossible to find an apartment mid-spring semester anyhow. We were visiting his parents for spring break, and he didn't want to tell them either, forcing me to play out a horrible charade that whole week. I couldn't talk to my best friends, because they were also his friends, and according to him, it would be wrong of me to talk to them about him, a betrayal of our privacy, of our relationship. I was so cowed, so broken. I couldn't win an argument with him; he just told me I was dumb, that I thought wrong, that I was wrong, or he raised his hand as if to strike me, making me duck and tremble. I obeyed.

It gets worse, so entangled a web it was. My summer position was with a law firm in Providence where his uncle was a partner. I had arranged ages ago to stay in his parents' large and lovely waterfront house near Providence, in southern Massachusetts, rent-free. They weren't there much of the time, as they worked and had other appointments and engagements in Boston, and were often at their apartment there. I should have sublet a summer apartment from a Brown student. But my wings were so clipped, I was so mired, so depressed, so paralyzed, so still under his control, that I didn't know what to do, could barely function.

He finally told his parents, before summer arrived. They were (and still are, I am sure) some of the kindest, most generous people I will ever know, and I hope I can be as kind to someone someday as they were to me that summer, and after. Their generosity made it all better and worse. I saw the life I had so long imagined in that magnificent house, with its seven fireplaces, rambling lawns, sunset views, in ruins before me. I still stupidly thought that if I said the right thing, looked the right way, had sex with him one more time, that he would come back. I still so stupidly wanted him back, Stockholm girl that I was. I was so sad, still crying all the time, pounds melting off of my body from all of the weight of the sadness and manipulation that I carried that summer. Sometimes, I thought about driving my car off the road, into a ditch, a tree, because it all hurt so much.

I toyed with transferring schools, and perhaps I should have. What would have happened? But I stayed, determined to finish what I had started. We went back to school that fall, and it still didn't get better. I still wasn't free, because somehow, I had given him a set of keys to my new apartment in New Orleans. He insisted, so he could help me, take care of me, control me, keep tabs. I was too tired, too depressed, so I allowed it. I still cried an awful lot, but I called up some classmates, tried to make new friends. Even as every glimpse I saw of him and his new girlfriend crushed me anew, squandered the self-worth I had tried to save up.

Then his parents came for a visit, part business for his father, part pleasure. I had dinner with them one night, because I still had a friendship with them, which they generously reciprocated, because they knew I needed it, and knew, as I did, that it would end in time. The next night, he burst into my apartment, uninvited, yelling at me, accusing me of making his mother cry, refusing to leave. Something in me finally snapped, and steeled. I asked for my keys, threw open my apartment door, and I asked him to leave my apartment. He refused. I raised my voice, put my hand on the phone, and asked him to leave, or I was calling the police. I also knew that my apartment had thin walls, and that my burly male med student neighbor was home, and that he wouldn't stand for any shenanigans. I picked up the phone and started to dial. He finally gave me the keys and backed out of the apartment, snarling. He left for the same reason he never actually hit me: he didn't want anything to stand in the way of his aspirations to money and power at a white shoe Boston law firm. I locked the door behind him. I should have changed the locks.

He had the gall to call me in the spring, just as our second year was almost over, ask me out for a drink. I met him, alert and wary. We sat on the tilting balcony of one of Uptown's storied and divey bars. There was small talk, and then he got to it. He accused me of cutting him off from all of our mutual friends from college, of turning them all against him, because I'd told them all such horrible things about him. I was dumbfounded. I laughed in astonishment, because I knew the truth. He hadn't talked to any of those friends in over a year, had never attempted to contact them, hadn't called them, written, e-mailed, nothing. I talked to them often. I had also told them that it was their choice; that I wouldn't tell them anything they didn't want to hear about him, and that I knew he was their friend as well. They could handle it as they liked. If he had ever bothered to even ask any of those friends, to reach out to any of them, he would have known that. I stood up. I don't think I threw my drink on him, but I probably should have. I told him to never, ever contact me again. I walked out of that bar, onto a humid, oak-shaded street of New Orleans, got in my old pickup truck, and drove away.

"You have no power over me."

       -Sarah, Labyrinth

I have never seen him since that day, except at a distance. I have occasionally had a vague awareness of where he might be, through friends and classmates. I never look him up online. I don't want to know.

They don't make 'em like they used to

They really don't. 

 

This old Fisher Price Little People boat is the best goddamn toy. It really is. And not just because of the deep nostalgia that this toy brings welling up in me.

 

Seth remembers having one as a kid. It was lost to the sands of time and yard sales. Seth's mom bought another one (now considered "vintage") on e-Bay last year, for all the visiting children to play with at her house. The Olive loved it, just loved it the first time she played with it, which was nearly a year ago. She opened and closed the blue top of the boat, dragged it around and around and around by its cord (it has wheels, and makes a satisfying "clickety-click" as it rolls along), put things in and out of it. I didn't let her play with the Little People last year, because they did seem awfully, swallow-ably small. 

But now, she is bigger. She plays with the Little People, and puts them in the chairs, has them jump off the diving board, and sit in the captain's chair. They walk around the edge of the table and the edge of the bathtub. She finds it especially hilarious when the dog jumps off the diving board.

 

We have some of the 21st century Little People toys - a school bus and a house. But they seem dumbed-down. The people are bigger. Not as many things move. Those moving parts have been replaced by electronic sounds. The details are fewer. Nothing is metal. They don't seem built to last.  

This boat floats like a cork in the tub, doesn't get waterlogged, and only capsizes in the most wild of splashing. The wheel turns, the diving board extends and retracts, the top opens, smooth on its hinges. There are so many tiny details - an anchor area rug inside the boat cabin, a lobster on a dish on the tiny table. It has been played with, no question. One leg is partly broken off on the barbeque grill, there are little scrapes and nicks in all of the plastic. A red Tiddly Wink remains lodged neatly in the seat of one of the chairs, but makes a seated Little Person only slightly off-kilter. None of it matters. This toy endures. It's her favorite toy of the moment. I wonder what she's imagining as she moves all of the people around. It looks like a nice life, Little People. I'm glad you're still around.

 

Party like it's 2009

I'm feeling suddenly overwhelmingly melancholy about the changing of the year. And it must be the sleep deprivation, because it rather escaped me that it's the changing of a decade, too. All of a sudden, the media is full of songs, books, meals, events of the decade. Shit. How did I miss that? It's bigger than I think, and I guess it's making me sort of panic over the relentless passage of time.

Oh my god, ten years. Ten years ago, I had just visited my parents in Santa Fe for a week, for my last Christmas in Santa Fe ever, because my parents were planning to move to Idaho in the summer. I was devastated, because they were moving away from my home, the place I had always (will always) come back to, the place that was my bones and soul, entwined in me and who I am as only your true home can be. I had so many plans for food to eat, friends to see, farolitos to marvel in, snow to play in, revelry to be had, sunsets to watch.

It was awful. Despite having gotten a flu shot, I got the most godawful flu ever, passed on from my mother's little germ-monger second graders to her to me. I laid in bed or dragged myself to the sofa the entire week. I tried to go out and see friends, only to bail at the last minute, because I got woozy and had to put my head between my knees every time I got off the couch. It was nothing like I had planned.

Then I got on a plane to New Orleans for Act II of my winter vacation. I was meeting my boyfriend John and my close friends Steve and Paula to say farewell to the millenium as only the City That Care Forgot can do. I was sure I was going to marry John, that we would live in Bethesda, that I would have a baby before age 30, that I would stay at home and be a pampered suburban mom, while he followed the footsteps of his father and became partner at the same law firm. John and I had met in New Orleans, at Mardi Gras. I was in law school at Tulane, and one of my classmates had a twin brother who was John's good friend from Vanderbilt Law. The brother and his Vandy friends were doing their annual decampment from NYC to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I'd met John briefly the year before, but he didn't really register, and I'd hooked up with the twin brother instead, leaving a trail of shed clothing and beads and plastic krewe go-cups across the floor of my Garden District apartment.

But somehow, John and I were destined to meet again, and we did, successfully dating over long-distance as I took the Massachusetts bar, and then a judicial clerkship in Florida. His mother loved me because I loved New Orleans, and she was a Crescent City native. His father loved me because I was smart, and also a lawyer, and because his father was the best of southern gentlemen.

So, New Orleans was our city. I forsook a millenial New Year's night under a cape of stars by a bonfire with my oldest friends in Glorieta for the man I thought I loved forever, and a debaucherous, gluttonous, glorious weekend in New Orleans. We Bacchanaliaed at Bacchus, at Galatoire's, sucked down oysters by the dozen, wandered the streets of music, took refuge at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, dallied with the Hand Grenade, had the best martinis in town at the Bombay Club, and toasted the New Year with a bottle of Dom Perignon on the banks of the Mississipi River. We went highbrow and lowbrow, and had ourselves a grand old fais do do. We waited to see if the power grids and ATMs would go down, because of all the binary code and its inability to process four digits in a year. It didn't. Nothing at all happened. Even if it had, New Orleans would have gone on like always, lighting hurricane lamps, and opening another bottle.

I look back over ten years and see how my path branched, and forked and wound and branched again, leading me to somewhere else than I thought I would be, but better than before, righter than before. I did go to Washington. I discovered that John didn't love me, might be incapable of love, that the southern belle mother was actually crazy and selfish and controlling, and that the southern gentleman father just muddled on being pleasant because he did love his family and didn't know what else to do. I was unemployed, gutted and horrified and grieved beyond comprehension by 9/11 and the death of a friend on one of the hijacked planes, battered by a bad economy, temporarily homeless, taken in by friends who became like my family. I found a new home, a new self on Capitol Hill, as I obsessively played Ultimate, looked for a job, tried to be strong, tried internet dating, real life dating, and gave them all up out of dissatisfaction and decided to set the goal of buying a house and getting a dog. I made friends, lots of friends, great friends, went out, and had a great time. I stumbled onto a great government job, and started a real career. I made true friends, good friends, at my new job, and the path wound its way around to meeting my husband. We met in a time-honored way - in a divey intern-laden bar on Capitol Hill.

We hit it off. We dated. He decided to marry me. We bought a house, one of the Capitol Hill rowhouses that I had craved, coveted every since I first laid eyes on them over ten years ago. Our first week there, we sat amongst boxes drinking wine, and I said I couldn't be happier. And then, to my shock and surprise, there was a dazzling ring, a family heirloom, and I was happier.

We ate and drank and traveled and explored. We survived injuries, illnesses, deaths, including the sudden death of my father two weeks before our wedding. We carried on, we married, we spend two magic weeks in Hawaii, drifting in our honeymoon bubble, in a safe and stunningly beautiful place where I could enjoy my new husband and remember my father and be both joyful and grieving.

A wonderful life is what we managed to build, full of love, family, travel, good wine, amazing friends, exotic places, food, and adventure. We had fun, so much fun. We decided to (finally) have a baby, before my advanced maternal age advanced any more. She was probably conceived on a Leap Year day, and I realized she existed after a weekend of carousing, friends, Brie, sushi and wine.

The long months of pregnancy, heaviness, and heartburn were only lightened by the feathery kicking inside that gave way to outright rebellious pokes and punches. Nothing could prepare me for how much I would love my daughter.

The last year of this decade has been blurred by sleeplessness, but colored by delight, and I can't believe that I wake up in the morning and that I am a mother to this tiny person with so many new thoughts and skills and preferences every day. It is the relentless march of time that makes me melancholy today, at losing all of the things I loved yesterday and now, that they are lovely and beloved and fleeting and gone.

It won't be Dom Perignon and debauchery at midnight to mark this new decade. It will be takeout and champagne with friends at home, and bedtimes at a baby-friendly hour. I hope that all of us will be fast asleep at midnight, dreaming the dreams of the past, but not lingering there too long. The future beats on, rolling at us in the soft light of new dawn. It's a little scary, that future, because I don't know what it will bring, and I love the now. But that's just it: I don't know what the future will bring, and the now is so much better than I ever imagined in the past, so much bigger, and brighter and fuller and lovelier, that I have to embrace that new dawn light, meet it head-on and run with it.

Happy, happy New Year.