They Just Want To Be Alone

The fact that most people are pretty clueless about how to run a relationship is not going to help the situation. Learning-by-doing is all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Incidentally, there should be a licensing bureau where testing is done to see if you are too stupid to marry or reproduce. When I am running the world, we will totally have that.  -Magnolia Ripkin 

I Just Want to Be Alone is to literature what your therapist, funny best friend, perfect mother, and high school English teacher who smoked and swore and wore cat-eye glasses are to you: all-encompassing, foundational, crucial. It All. Through a collection of some of today’s most powerful female voices, the book self-empowers, self-deprecates, and strikes an exquisite balance between humor and profundity, proving the theory that comedy is the finest source of catharsis. Both directly and with cunning stealth, these broads pass along invaluable advice makes the reader question, page after page after brilliant page, “Why hasn’t anyone told me this before?”

Bare: A Voyage

Today, I have lost nothing. My gratitude is boundless. 

xxx+o,

Jess

p.s. There's still time to donate! Help send childhood cancer back to the nasty little hole it crawled out of. Every penny counts. 

The Wall

So, this time I'm not talking about the one in Berlin. When we moved to Amsterdam, the mister and I split up the decorating/furnishing duties. We were moving from a completely furnished home to one with nothing, and the task was a bit daunting, given the short timeline. He took the wall over the living room couch, a bare, blank monster of a thing. The end result was F***ING TERRIFIC: a tattoo drawing by Lina Stigsson, a few vintage taxidermy mounts, a rearing horse bookend found at the crazy big Berlin flea market, a majestic gilded parrot plate from Beat Up Creations, a couple photos to remind the children how scary both of our neutral faces are, and a dreamy shot from Lithuania. All three photos were taken by my ever-talented bed partner (closeups on his site).

xxx+o,
Jess

Observations From Concourse E

On the way back home from Americuh in January, I had almost two hours of airport euphoria. Sitting in our airline's lounge in Chicago with one kid snoring and the other plopped empty-eyed and cherub-faced in front of a movie, I had nothing pressing to do. At all. Usually people complain about layovers but I couldn't have been more gleeful at the prospect of having no house to clean, no dogs to walk, no phone calls to make, nothing to schedule, no one to feed, no one to need me, nothing to do at all, save for making repeated trips between the free lattes and the magazine rack.

Dear You - My Valentine: The First Time I've Acknowledged This Day With Sincerity

In a world increasingly populated by personal opinion, it’s easy to forget the real meaning of blunt, that it’s actually the opposite of cutting and sharp. By definition, it means “uncompromisingly forthright.” Sometimes being blunt doesn’t mean swearing or drinking or saying your kids are annoying the shit out of you. Sometimes it means saying exactly what you feel. Sometimes it means being vulnerable. Especially for us unsentimental types, it’s way scarier being forthright about our warm, fuzzy feelings than it is to muse on less, ahem, acceptable topics. (Exhibit A: the Being Naughty tab of this site)

If we’re truly committed to uncompromising forthrightness about ourselves and our perspectives of the world, we must show all of it. In my case, it’s a letter I wrote to my husband shortly after the birth of our second child. We were on holiday in rural France, getting dirty and exploring the grounds of a magnificently aged chateau and basking in the luminescent sunlight. All of our everyday stressors suddenly were at the bottom of a deep stream, far away. I found myself glowing with love for the man I often take for granted. As anyone with a marriage license and any number of children knows, these moments become sparse when the babies begin to arrive. Especially in those first murky months of sleeplessness and chaos, and especially especially after kid number two rolls around. Quality alone time? Romance? They are things as fantastical as a unicorn laying golden eggs. After a near-magical night out at a fancy restaurant and a wild drive on country roads, I was compelled to capture the way I’d felt that night, that week, to bottle it up tightly, to record it. Little did I know how precious these words would be to me later on, how often I would revisit them, and how effective they’d be in extracting me from some of my darkest hours.

Dear You,

Someday we will look back at this time with longing, this breath-short period in which we are young and beautiful, our children younger and even more beautiful, and the future something intangible, bright. A few days ago I awoke on the arched back of a quiet morning and was filled with such gratitude I could hardly draw a breath. Normalcy for us is something exquisite.

Our chateau is the kind of place where only some of the locks to the outside function, where the loudest noise in the walled garden is bees trafficking pollen from the pear tree to the wall of honeysuckle, only occasionally rivaled by birdsong or the muffled cough of a tractor. I pick wild strawberries in the garden outside our bedroom while our children take their midday sleep, the unfiltered sun warming the spot between my shoulders. The berries, no bigger than marbles, lie hidden under the plants’ squat canopy, candy-sweet and lightly red. I leave no leaf unturned in the pursuit of sweetness. May we always remember to do the same.

Click to read the rest over on BLUNTmoms...