Nothing Much Yuba City and the unreachable Buttes

Between the constant moments of panic that have continued to accompany my waking and sleeping hours despite the blessed conclusion of my Master’s program, I found myself, last weekend, bound and determined to go adventuring. I didn’t want to go hog wild because, let’s face it, too much freedom these days tends to send me into a panicked state of "There-Must-Be-Something-I-Am-Forgetting-To-Get-Done-Lurking-Back-At-Home." Also, the laundry basket in my bedroom was becoming dangerously near to bursting forth in a sudden fit of Disney-esque personification and smothering me in my sleep. Sometimes, I could feel it glaring at me through the darkness. But having obligingly visited“Sudz Your Dudz," and my fresh clean laundry tossed artistically on my bed for folding another time, I decided it was time to hit the road, picking back up my quest for that secret plot of perfect land I know is waiting patiently for me somewhere around this ol’ world.

            

I decided to go to Yuba City because I needed to see somewhere new without staying out the rest of the night, and also for curiosity of what lay north on the 99 since, until I just recently began thinking about it, I had the impression ended near my house at the 80. On the road map in my car, 99, north of 80, turns from a prominent blue highway to an undemonstrative green line and this was enough to convince me that it must hold a whole lot more charm going north. (I was right, by the way. It does.) Chico was too far and also – in my mind, which is based on nothing concrete (but only in this instance) – the kind of place best explored with a fellow adventurer. I was on my own, so Yuba City it was, which was compounded by the fact that people in the Sacramento area – if they speak of Yuba City at all – always seem to accompany the words with an apologetic eye roll, as though they aren’t entirely sure they should be acknowledging its existence at all. I’ve learned from experience that that is usually the type of place I like best.

            

“What the hell’s in Yuba City?” their looks seem to say.

            

And they’re pretty right. For the most part, nothing much IS going on in Yuba City, I guess. But in my opinion, the best towns usually are a whole lot of little Nothings Much: nothings much on a map; on a Google search; in travel magazines and local newspapers. When people generally have nothing much to say about a place, it seems to hold on better to its own sweet charms, without becoming increasingly over-priced, commercialized, crime-ridden, tourist-trappy, irreverently copied, or crassly built-up. Good people live in Nothing Much towns, minding their own business and adding their own particular specialness to the universe. (Of course, it’s also true that some Nothing Much towns really are nothing much, or worse, Muchly Awful, and the reason they get no recognition in any way from the civilized world is because they would much better be abandoned entirely by the civilized world and left to become a nothing much part of the natural world again instead. But in my experience, these types of Nothing Much towns usually do become infamous in some way or another, acquiring names like Stockton, or Compton, or San Francisco.)

            

See what it boils down to is that people tend to believe that something is Nothing Much if it:

1. lacks bars, restaurants, hipster coffee shops, or street lights, or
2.  lacks the striking, unsurpassable beauty of natural wonders like Mount Everest or the Redwood Forests.

All those wonderful, undemonstrative, mysterious places in between become Nothing Much and are spoken about with subtlety by people who have grown up in or around their nothing much reputations. Yuba City is one of those places. And when I tell you about some of the things I saw in Yuba City, you may persist in believing it is a Nothing Much town. But you’d be crazy if you didn’t develop some small amount of appreciation for the Buttes.

            

(If only I had a picture of the septic tank bull!)

Here are some things that will forever stick in my mind about Yuba City: brown and white cows in their fluffy molting-out-of-winter coats, including the ABSOLUTE LARGEST BULL I HAVE EVER SEEN (which I initially believed to be a septic tank); Hock’s Farm, what has to be one of the dumbest historical sites in the state; this old broken-down house with a wrap-around porch that my heart yearns to take up and make my own; chickens, crowing roosters, and their fuzzy, multi-colored chicks pecking in the grass along the side of Route 99; an Indian man with a long white beard and a turban riding down the 99 on a bicycle with an American flag waving proudly between his handle bars; what I can only describe as ugly, stucco mansions tucked in randomly amidst otherwise older, middle class farm houses; fields aflame with golden California poppies and brilliant purple lupines, so easy to miss unless some perfect, divine calculation of temperature and rainfall leaves them bursting in blooming clumps amidst the poppies; two cowboys, but no great country radio channels; the unreachable Sutter Buttes.

Up here, you can tell a lot about a town from its welcome signs. Small town slogans sprinkled along the 99 reveal the cities’ greatest prides and the words give them an identity, an importance, which they do not possess on a road map. The welcome signs in Solida inform you that you are passing through the Raisin Capitol of the world; Lodi reminds you that Napa is not the only place to find good wine; Galt’s proud of its wildlife preserve where you can find elephants amidst the almond orchards; Sacramento is the City of Trees; and, well, Davis has bikes. 

            

There is nothing written on the one welcome sign leading you into Yuba City from the 99, except for the words: YUBA CITY WELCOME and the silhouettes of waterfowl flying above a sparkling river. (I’m assuming this is a reference to a bird hunting area nearby called Dingville, which from what I can understand is not actually a place so much as a state of mind. If you can’t appreciate a name like Dingville, even if it is only a state of mine, you have greater problems than than this blog can address.) What I got from the welcome sign is that Yuba City doesn’t feel the need to be famous for anything. My kinda town, I thought, as I drove past, finding solidarity with the sign. Neither do I.

            

The City of Commerce in Yuba City, where you are supposed to be able to find visitor information, is a charming old Victorianesque house located on a corner in a parking lot with a Foods Co and a Starbucks. It was Sunday, and closed. Still, I walked up to peek in the windows and, mostly, to see if there happened to be any signs around it pointing to a yellow brick road that might lead me to the Buttes. Because somewhere along the drive up the 99, I realized I wasn’t really going to Yuba City anymore. I was heading for the Sutter Buttes. And it was those Buttes, for me, that were the real magic of Yuba City (although the patriotic Indian man on a bike was a close second). 

(I did not take this picture. I got if off of Google images. But this is the sign I saw.)

I first heard mention of the Buttes from a friend of mine at UCD, a native Davisite and lover of our Nor. Cal. natural world. Knowing how endeared my heart is to my own sweet Seal Beach, he is constantly trying to prove to me that Davis is a better place. One day, he was harping about the sky. (Okay, I’ll admit it, but only because he will never read this. He wasn’t actually harping and he was absolutely right. The Davis sky on that particular day…and many days before and since…was breathtakingly splendid.)

            

“Look at that sky,” he told me (or something of the sort). 

The sky was stretching all around us, intermingled with white and pink wisps of clouds across the vast, kind blueness, as though the entire earth was merely a crumb at its doorstep and I tried to hide the appreciative sigh that caught in my throat as I looked at it. I didn’t need to look up at that sky. It was all around me, like a curtain of sun-kissed air, and it was wildly beautiful. And I remember thinking – though I would never admit it – that it even rivaled those eternal, million-shades-of-blue, stretching-on-forever, kneeling-at-the-foot-of-God skies against the Pacific horizons of Home.

            

“And sometimes,” he continued, jerking me out of my reverie as only someone hell-bent on pushing your buttons can do, “if you look out to the north, you can even see all the way to the Buttes.” 

My heavenly meditations were really over when he got to the word buttes. See, I had heard the word before, but much like fjords and badlands, it was a word that had created its own, foggy and not quite graspable image in my mind, developed solely by an overactive and romantic imagination, as opposed to any personal experience.

         
“I have heard that word,” I told him. “But I don’t know what you mean.”

            

He tried to explain, but for things like buttes and fjords and badlands, explanation will never do. To know what a badland is, you must see a badland. And though pictures on Google images may give you some idea of what to look for, they are as abstract as a word on a page in this regard. You do not know what a fjord is until you have touched a fjord. And that was the first time I knew that I must touch the Buttes.

            

It wasn’t until I was having another discussion with some other friends that I really got butte fever. From them I learned that the Sutter Buttes are surrounded by private property and try as it might, the state can’t seem to wrench any of the land from the families who own it in order to create a public, protected passage to the Buttes. The occasional charity event or school fieldtrip or environmental effort will allow people passage up the Buttes from time to time so they aren’t impossible, but a mere slip of a person without any search warrant or land ownership really has no business – according to everyone but herself – going to the Buttes at all. (As a matter of fact, this is not true. I have learned since my almost-visit to the buttes that you can drive up through the Buttes, but if you are bound and determined to do things the legal way, you cannot stop in the Buttes.  Because in this regard, I am by no means bound or determined to do things the legal way, this new knowledge gives me great confidence that I will find myself satisfyingly in the center of the Buttes next time I try. But I did not have any of this insight at the time and the Buttes seemed as out of reach as Knee-Knock Rise.) Of course, the seclusion and inaccessibility of the Buttes only served to fascinate and frustrate me further. Besides which, despite the inconvenience, I was, and continue to feel, delighted that private citizens still have the power to do as they please with their own damn land, and that every single place of worth and mystery in the world does not have to be thrown to the public to become fussed-over and picnic-tabled and desintation-ey. My love for the Buttes grew stronger and my determination remained. Private or not, I needed to touch those Buttes.

            

So it shouldn’t have been of any great surprise that I found my enthusiasm over Yuba City replaced by a more reverent and eager excitement over visiting the Buttes. Except that the realization came together for me gradually, as I drove up the 99, piecing together where I was heading and what lay ahead. Up here, where I cannot see or smell the ocean, I very rarely know which direction I am going, so I suppose it is expectable that I didn’t realize I was aiming for the Buttes until I created a mental image of myself driving toward Davis on the Causeway, complete with self-fabricated compass rose which indicated that the direction to my right – the direction in which I knew the Buttes to lie – also happened to be North, the direction in which I was heading that day on the 99 toward Yuba City. You have heard that timeless, sagacious saying by John Muir: “The mountains are calling and I must go.” That day, the Buttes were calling, softly, at first, without my even knowing, but then, finally, loudly enough that I knew where I was going and that I felt in my chest, when they suddenly met me around a bend, rising up into the plain sky, a sight for sore eyes, a trumpeting feeling of admiration and awe.

The ultimate end to this story may seem anticlimactic. I did not, in fact, manage to touch the Buttes that day. I learned later that, as it turns out, I was about ten miles south of being where I should have been to get on the road that would have led me there. The Buttes remain an enigma to me, for the time being. But the navigating I went through in my attempts to reach them was exhilarating nevertheless. Weaving in and around the small land plots and miniature farms of Yuba City, through all the flat, mellow terrain, I would constantly and suddenly move around a building and see the Buttes again, silhouetted against the California sky, strong and old, and wise, giving dignity and adventure to this small chunk of nothing-much earth. Having neither the craggy elegance of the deep desert buttes, nor the demonstrative personality of a mountain range, these Sutter Buttes are merely, magnificently, the placid buttes of home, alive with all the moving, pulsing natural world which we know so little about, wholeheartedly “fulfilling,” as Dickenson says, “absolute decree / in casual simplicity.” And I felt, driving out of Yuba City – a failure, perhaps, by some standards – my heart patiently pulsing with them.

(I did not take this picture either...obviously.)

-R.E.A.

Doing things the normal way

Yesterday, driving home from work, I saw a car with some kind of company name (I wish I could remember what) on the side scooting down the highway. And on its back was one of those big stickers that said in bold letters: “CAUTION: CAR MAKES FREQUENT STOPS.” Now, besides the fact that the car looked like a goober, I was pretty irritated by the sign. It seems that, much like political commentators on Fox and CNN, cars who wish to drive without following basic traffic precautions no longer need any relevant credentials.

I can understand those signs on big rigs that say, “IF YOU CAN’T SEE YOURSELF IN MY SIDE MIRRORS, I CAN’T SEE YOU EITHER” (or whatever it is, exactly, that they say) because those actually help keep the rest of us from being rammed by a semi- (unless you’re me – but that’s another story) and because truck drivers and their trucks are part of the heartbeat of America. I can even understand those signs on the backs of buses that say, “STOPS AT ALL RAILROAD XINGS” because that’s the law and it helps keep the rest of us from ramming into them. (Don’t get me started on the role of buses in America).

But I can’t just plaster a sticker on my car that says, “CAUTION, THIS CAR SWERVES RANDOMLY INTO OTHER LANES” or, “BEWARE…IDIOT DRIVER ONLY USES TURN SIGNALS EVERY OTHER TUESDAY” and expect that it’s someone else’s fault when we crash because, after all, I gave them fair, authoritative warning in the form of a peel-off sticker. If anybody would actually read the driver’s handbook, they would know that using your own caution while driving is actually part of the law. Common sense will also remind you it’s your responsibility, but I understand that’s asking an awful lot.

What the random, credential-less car should have written on its rear, if it must be perpetually stopping at inconvenient times is something like: “INNUMERABLE APOLOGIES FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, BUT THIS HUMBLE CAR MAKES FREQUENT STOPS, SO IF YOU HOPE TO MAINTAIN YOUR SANITY, YOU MAY WISH TO AVOID DRIVING BEHIND ME. p.s. I’LL TRY TO STAY OUT OF YOUR WAY!”

Being informative is no substitute for being responsible. And if you are the type of person who insists on doing things your own way, you should also learn to be the type of person who doesn’t get in the way of other people doing things the normal way.

  -R.E.A.

What's the difference between a doctor and a teacher? As it turns out, nothing, really.

Jason and I are constantly amazed – as we share horror stories and emotional traumas from our current lives – at how many parallels there are between becoming a doctor and becoming a teacher, between working in medicine and working in education. (That being said, the rest of what is revealed here is entirely thoughts and opinions through my perseonal lens and has been neither endorsed nor confirmed by the aforementioned Jason at the time of this writing.) Even putting the exhausting supply of liberals aside, a day in the life of a new teacher is pretty much the exact same thing as a day in the life of a new doctor, except with less blood, pus, and poo and more drama, hormones, and post-its. I would be willing to bet that approximately the exact same amount of hand sanitizer is consumed, and there really should be a word for the school equivalent of a nosocomial infection…I swear we have them!

            

On the most basic level, I guess it makes a lot of sense. They’re both “helping” professions, although without a doubt, as a first year teacher, I am giving less help and needing more help than any of us is comfortable with. People (patients…students) come in with a need, a deficiency, perhaps, and it’s up to us to fill the need, to satisfy the deficiency. And here’s the first obvious and amazing parallel. It is exhausting and terrifying and stressful to take on that responsibility. If you don’t crack under the pressure, you must be superhuman. Which leads to the next amazing parallel we have discovered – we most certainly are not!

            

Then there’s the perpetual, unyielding, overwhelming feeling of complete incompetence. But worse than that is the realization that no one in your immediate professional surroundings is likely to try to make you feel better about it. Oh, sure, there’s the off-handed general comment of the most insightful of the experienced class who will tell you things like, “Yeah, I remember my first year of teaching. It’s rough.” or “Just remember, everyone is trying to kill your patient,” but somehow all these people just expect you to “get through it,” much like they did, no doubt, with your head halfway up your ass half the time because you’re too exhausted to figure out how to get it out, but too committed to your cause to stop trying. And you look around at all the other people who are in the same boat, as you rush past them in the halls (hospital…school halls) and remember, later, thinking momentarily to yourself, “they must feel as messed up as I do,” and “I wish I had time to be friends with people again,” and then let all of those thoughts (and any sense of comfort or solidarity they might have invoked in you) fall to the wayside as you stumble into bed in preparation for the same splendid showing of incompetence the next day.

            

Ah, bed! Without fail, the first thing we think as we stumble out from under our sheets in the atrocity of semi-darkness and winter weather is, “I can’t wait for tonight when I can go to bed again!” It’s true; we’ve actually talked about this. And it’s not even that life’s so unbearable (although sometimes it is); it’s simply that bed is so thoroughly wonderful. At no other time during the day do we feel as put together as when we climb into our beds. Here’s why: We’re physically comfortable: we don’t have cold, shoe-pinched, tired-from-standing feet; suffocating ties; or tucked in shirts. There’s no one watching: no attendings or administrators arching their eyebrows in apprehension of our next moves; no patients or students making our flaws so painfully clear to us. For a few, life-saving hours (assuming we can turn our thoughts off long enough to fall asleep) we are not over-thinking EVERY, SINGLE, TEENY, TINY thing we do. It is the opposite of getting up in the morning, which we know with startling certainty sucks horribly. We briefly regain that fool-hardy overarching philosophy of hope that whispers in our tired brains, “tomorrow’s another day,” and, briefly, we revel in the idea of another chance.

   
We spend hours, days even, planning every single detail of something that will take up about ten minutes of the next day (a presentation to the surgical team…a lesson on theme) and we still never feel prepared. And when the ten minutes is actually upon us, our well-rehearsed plans inevitably go awry, or tumble apart in one way or another. And we always come to the conclusion afterward that we were probably too prepared; that we need to be driven more by our instincts and less by our obsessiveness because we are both (we assure each other) intelligent and passionate people who are, despite all evidence to the contrary, not guaranteed failures. And then we always over-plan again for the next day. And then, when we are in a really good mood, a Friday night perhaps, we smile at each other and comfort ourselves by saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.” It feels good to accept yourself for who you are. Because, whether you’re an aspiring doctor or an aspiring teacher, you never really feel like anyone else does.

            

The difference between patients and students – particularly ninth graders –  is that patients want your help and students really do not. Jason should take comfort in this knowledge, except that the difference between attendings* and administrators is that administrators generally try to help you succeed and attendings* generally try to help you fail. Besides, at the end of a long day, we both want to cry for the exact same reasons: we care too much and have experienced too little; we know we’re in the right place and it feels all wrong; we’re used to trying hard and succeeding and now we’re trying harder than ever before and – for all we can see – failing anyway; we keep waiting to hit rock bottom so that we have nowhere to go but up, but somehow we just keep treading water, staying bumpily afloat like we’re stuck in the underwater level of Super Mario Bros.

(*to be fair, the noun "attendings" here could, on any given day, be replaced by the nouns "interns" or "residents." The attending is not always the least helpful part of the day.)

            

This is the first time in a long time that I do not feel utterly sleep deprived (although I usually am actually not). Yesterday was the first day that I could faintly smell Spring in the air. It was 65 degrees today. Thursday, I did an entire ten minutes of Pilates. Last night, though a Friday, was not a “good mood” night and I dissolved into tears when Jason and I went out to dinner. But like any true good cry, it left me rejuvenated. So if you think I’m dark and cynical now, you should have heard me on Wednesday. Taking a minute to write – however depressing the result – is proof enough that I’m doing fine. When I’m not, writing sounds too exhausting, too time-consuming, too hopeless or useless, too unrelated to the worries eating away at my brain to even attempt. Jason’s doing fine too, I’ll tell you, because I’m sure you’re worried. His internal and external strength is far greater than mine and he is more patient with the world. The suggestion of delayed gratification does not send him into fits of panic and rage as it does me. He enjoys a good beer, a quick workout, an occasional ball game. This morning he let himself play an entire Halo match with Jonathan before he sent himself off to work on the distinct ass-print he’s committed to making in the coffee shop chair. There are good parallels, too, I’m sure, between the things we do. We just haven’t waded through enough of the (shit or post-its) to discover them quite yet. Except for one we know is out there, though we haven’t experienced it yet: that moment when you KNOW, not that you’ve just tried, but that you’ve actually succeeded at doing your job: a patient healthier, a student smarter. Since it’s almost bedtime (yes, 7:36 on a Saturday night is almost bedtime) I will tell you that we both have renewed hope that it will happen someday. Because bedtime reminds us, “tomorrow’s another day.”

-R.E.A.

One more shot

It’s 2013 and I wonder how many people are staring at their computer screens right now, determined to log their resolutions for the year. As for me, all I did was change my dilapidated, touch-tone cell phone’s ringtone to an old Alabama song. “Give me one more shot,” he sings, “I’ll give it all I’ve got. I’m satisfied just being alive; give me one more day.” The words resonate with me more now than ever before. These days I feel like I need a new shot every single day. To start over. To be who I actually want to be. A better teacher. A better daughter. A better sister. A better girlfriend. A better friend. A better individual. Some days I start out strong and then exhaustion overtakes me. Some days I start out a train wreck and somehow manage to salvage the day. Some days I crash and burn and those are the days when all I hang on to are half-hearted prayers that by no means do my Maker and all my blessings justice. And some days – like the last several of 2012, I sit in the grateful happiness of all I’ve been blessed with and realize that I’m not a complete failure, that I’m doing an okay job, that, to paraphrase a poster I read recently, if I am entirely made of flaws, I am at least held together by good intentions. 2013 is going to be a year of grace for me. One in which I become a better version of what I am. A year in which I turn just a few of the ways-I-rather-wouldn’t-be into qualities-I-admire-most-in-others. It’s another shot.

I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t better to have the same new year’s resolution for each year of your life. It’s all those painfully specific goals that’ll really bring you down. And who needs that? Maybe we all just need to think more generally: I want to work harder; be healthier; connect more significantly to my God; be more informed; I want to be the person my dog thinks I am. These are achievable resolutions. And they don’t run out. They can always be pruned and nurtured and refined (I mean, let’s face it, it would be impossible to ever fully achieve the last one anyway.) Maybe instead of being a mere year’s resolution, it could be an entire life’s goal, so that at the end of the year, I mean, the very last end of the very last year, you could look back and think, “some years were better than others, but yes, I upheld my resolution.” It would be a lot more inspiring than looking back every December 31st and realizing that, no, you in fact did not lose 47 pounds on your new home treadmill, go on a four week, juiced-only core-cleansing diet, or pilot a private jet owned by Donald Trump. (Of course, if your resolution is to unjustly over-tax your rich neighbors so that you don’t have to worry about your negligently acquired house being foreclosed upon, then scrap everything I just said and go right on resolving yearly, because apparently, despite our founding fathers’ resolutions, you’re working).

To be honest, 2012, for me, meandered away like a seaside, dirt path. No backward glance, no last hurrah, not even the gentle a-whooshing sigh of a closing gate. And it was not tragic for me to let it go. The year was a humbling one for me. I fought many a demon, related to work and home and family and self, not all, or even most, of which have been conquered. I got blessedly through what was, hands down, the worst experience of my life. I acquired a set of grown-up worries that I'm not sure a person can ever truly shake, no matter how much resolution she has. I survived a birthday that pushed me closer to 30 than 20, and managed to be grateful about it. But 2012 was by no means a bad year. On the contrary, it showed me a hundred, million times over how wonderfully blessed I am. I got to see my sister, my best friend, marry the man she loves. I got to sit in the warmth of my parent’s home and watch some of their dreams take shape. I fell further in love. I met Dahlia, the beta fish. I saw the ocean. I got a job, complete with a salary and a handful of beautiful, relentless students who have no idea how clueless I am. I picked on the banjo. I ate lots of sushi. 2012 ended on a high, and, really, it was kind to leave so gently, to leave so much room for the potential of an amazing 2013. I am not the type of person who thinks new year’s resolutions are lame and useless. In fact, I have the annoying tendency to make new year’s resolutions on a semi-monthly basis, so that not only do I not accomplish all of them, I also forget many of them ever existed. But I am also the type of person who borrows worry, unwittingly, but perseveringly and I’m of the opinion that it simply doesn’t do to add guilt onto the ever-growing grown-up list of things-that-nag-at-you-in-the-night’s-witching-hours. So my conclusion is that it’s not so much the end-result that matters. Not that last look on December 31st, not the purchase of the super sexy skinny jeans that – in your triumph - no longer make your ass look like the swamp-emerging snoot of a hippopotamus. It’s not even the resolution itself that’s most important. What’s important is the resolve. What’s important is the ability to dream and the conviction to think that a mere dream is important enough to aspire to. What’s important is the intrinsic motivation, the valiant effort. What’s important is to not make yourself sick over your inadequacies or the inadequacies of your life, not to build yourself up for perfect failure. But rather to somehow, through all that resolving and hoping and aspiring to take on the new year with a conglomeration of humor and confidence, contentment, inspiration, and healthy restlessness, certain in your uncertainty that what you do know can get you through what you don’t, what you can’t do can be built into what you can, like the feeling of standing, ankle-deep in cool sand looking out across the wind-buffeted sea, stomach-, heart-, head- full, rigging in hand, certain you could quite easily fail: crash and burn, extravagantly, or quietly, uninterestingly find your sails in irons, whichever you least prefer. But certain, also, that it is quite possible that you won’t. And that that’s what makes it all so maddeningly, wonderfully worthwhile.

-R.E.A.

Wobbly

The goal of so many passionate fitness gurus is to strengthen the core. The core – that intricately designed conglomeration of essential anatomy, so taken for granted, so necessary to life-as-most-of-us-know-it. Strengthen your core and the rest will come: balance, muscle, endurance, posture, speed, even grace. Joseph Pilates, my favorite-in-particular fitness guru once said, “A man is as young as his spinal cord.” And while fitness pop culture, dietary fads, those eighteen billion best-butt-busting workouts published in every chick magazine known to woman, and all else (including pinterest pins) short of mountain climbing, usually make my cynical (do not read fat) self scoff with arrogant boredom, there is something about this core idea into which I am completely sold. Somehow it makes sense in a way that surpasses me, that feels ancient and honest. I’ve also seen it work – on myself in particular, which helps with the buy in. But this is not my testimonial to the Pilates method or the practice of working out your core – at least note in the anatomical sense. What I’ve been contemplating lately is my figurative core, which resides, I believe, in roughly the same region as my literal core, but plays a different, if related role in my life. And while both my cores have been sorely neglected of late, it is this other core – less definable, less distinguishable, that has really been troubling my soul.

As I watch my ninth graders stumble through the pitfalls of being – well – themselves, I often think about, and in all honesty, pass judgment on, their parents. There are a handful of students with parents who I know care because I have interacted with them myself, even if they sometimes care in ways that confuse me. There’s an even greater handful whose parents I know not the least bit about and so all the evidence I have is the student himself. (Do not ask me about the small, but infuriating, minority of parents who I have interacted with and know do not care; that is for another blog post that is likely to someday get me in a lot of trouble). Though, of course, I know it’s unfair to assume that the child is the mirror image of his parents’ parenting abilities, what I do know is that the child is a close reflection. This is not the first time I will admit that my own upbringing has left me very little room to fail and that any credit I take for any successes, great or small, in my own life, should be given back tenfold to my parents and my sister, without whom I would be a wretched semblance of myself or nothing at all.

Which is why I have been thinking lately about my core. You may already know that I was 22 when I had my first midlife crisis. But what I am only coming to find out this year is that I had this crisis some four years premature of actually growing up, which is quote phenomenal, but has led to no end of trouble. 

Because this year, the great, wide world, through the key hole of little Sacramento, has come knocking on my door – which has only very recently become only very partially my own actual door – and informed me that I have been welcomed (to use the term loosely) into the land of the adult, where employment (and unemployment), responsibility (particularly financially speaking), bills, and taking care of my own damn self are now very much my personal concern. I read a sign on Pinterest that said, “My friend told me I was delusional. I almost fell right off my unicorn.” My core, this past two years, but particularly these past few months, has been severely shaken, and I can tell you – as an avid unicorn rider -  that it certainly does feel like falling off.

Now, if I’m being really honest, I blame my parents. You could say for giving me the unicorn to begin with. There’s a line in an Alabama song that goes, “leaving home was the hardest thing we ever faced.” That has certainly been my experience. Because as I sit, even here, even now, in this dear apartment, surrounded by things I cherish, given to or instilled in me by people I cherish still more, I still find, amidst all this bounty and blessing, that I am struggling horribly with extricating my own core from the beautiful, sustaining, joyful tapestry of family and home that I have left behind. And lately, as my core finally begins to acknowledge that I am here and not there, and all that here and there implies, it finds itself (I find myself) bare and fragile and a little (and sometimes a lot) wobbly. Very, very wobbly.

So I’m working on strengthening my core. (Lord knows one of them needs some attention!) On figuring out how to reweave myself into the tapestry in a way that fits right now, today, here. So that I feel warm again, without feeling as though I am constantly grieving for the past. So that I feel me again, even when I can’t be surrounded by all the things that fit me best.

-R.E.A.