Whew. Long time, eh? My mental hinges are creaking. I haven’t sat down to write in so long that reluctance to begin has now kept me from it longer than lack of inspiration which perpetuates the problem. Seven months or so since I drained my brain for public consumption. I have missed the release and the interaction but, mostly, I have been intentionally focusing my thoughts and efforts outside of myself. It seems antithetical but not focusing on myself has actually helped me heal, or at least move forward. As reflection over the decades has taught me, moving forward doesn’t necessarily imply healthy, happy or resolved but, in this present, I am mentally healthy. Physically less so but that’s what a year or so of eating and drinking your feelings will do to a body. As for resolution? The jury is hung.
Last November, I found myself with such an obscene amount of use-or-lose leave in the busiest time of my work year that I had mere days to decide how to use it. One thing was certain though, I sure as heckfire was not going to lose it. So I took an entire month off from Veterans’ Day Weekend through mid-December, just in time to take more vacation days over the holidays to spend with family. I left all of my work for my insufferably incompetent boss to shoulder and, I shit you not, within hours, I was jet-setting to Europe and didn’t even peek at work email for 30 days. Am I still a workaholic? Oh yes. Like addiction of all forms, it’s never not there. For a month and some change though, I got to experience life without financial stress while also without any commitments to anyone but myself.
On Super Tuesday in November, my friend and I were texting back and forth as election results were rolling in and, by the time the stench of the voting cesspools that are Texas & Florida reached us, we decided we just didn’t really want to be in DC (or America) for the next week. Thursday was going to be my last day of work for a month anyway so, Wednesday night, I bought a plane ticket on a budget airline. Thursday at lunch, I left work early (without telling a soul) and hopped on a flight to London.
I spent a whirlwind four days there with a great friend and, aside from a panic-attack on the Tube from my lingering post-COVID respiratory complications one night, it was magical!!! We packed in so much in those four days, barely slept, and made memories for a lifetime. I fell in love with Churchill, my kindred spirit, explored so many quaint neighborhoods, historic places, green spaces, great pubs, and I could have spent a month in London, say nothing of the rest of Europe.
And so I did. Sure I spent a week just putzing around DC doing nothing in particular but reading, streaming, and touristing, a week in Pennsylvania with my folks, and a week in Rhode Island with my brother over Thanksgiving, but I spent the final nine days of my month in Sicily. I experienced every crack and crevice, climbed mountains, saw Etna erupt (from a safe distance), reveled in ancient Greek and Roman ruins, met incredible people, danced with strangers, walked through magical Christmas-decorated streets, marveled at truly unbelievable ancient cathedrals decorated in tens of thousands of tiny mosaic tiles, had wine at a 12th century abbey in the countryside, explored a cave that Caravaggio walked through in 1600 AD and dubbed “The Ear of Dionysius,” and ate more tomatoes, pizza, and aperitivos than you could ever imagine. I also had more Sicilian wine in nine days than the total wine I’ve probably consumed in my life. Every part of Sicily is incredible: Palermo, Cefalu, Syracusa, Savoca, Noto, Ortygia, Monreale, Catania, Castelmola and of course, Taormina. I fell in love with the Mediterranean Sea and every day was my favorite one.
I also forked over €300 on a ceramic head, and spent at least six of those nine incredible days searching for the perfect one. And now I have basil growing in abundance from the morbidly beautiful ceramic skull of a Moor, which sits in my bedroom window. It brings me symbolic but vengeful joy every single day. Do you know the story of the Moor’s head?
In 1100 AD, in Palermo, there was a beautiful girl who loved to take care of flowers on her balcony. One day, while she was watering the flowers, a young Moor, who was walking in the street, saw her and fell in love at first sight. She didn’t disdain his attentions, despite she didn’t know he was married and he would leave Palermo in a few days. When she discovered the painful truth, in a rage, she cut off his head and used it as ornamental vase for her balcony. Day by day the girl filled the vase with her tears until a basil plant grew.
https://www.visitsicily.info/en/the-legend-of-sicilian-moors-heads/
There’s also a version of this where her fellow townspeople actually killed the Moor and brought the skull to her because they were outraged on her behalf. Personally, I like that story even better. All over Sicily, not just in Palermo, these ceramic heads are used as planters on balconies. It is impossible to go there and not hear this tale. It seemed serendipitous to me that my journey throughout that year had seemingly randomly led me to this island that hadn’t even been on my radar of places to visit, beyond Italy in general. I am so grateful that fate led me there though and, because seemingly every single person who heard that I went to Sicily asked if I had seen Season 2 of White Lotus, I did eventually watch it after I came home. Although the show captured the beauty of Taormina well, it certainly didn’t scratch the surface of Sicily. I did very much enjoy all of the ceramic heads in the sets though!
So that was the end of 2022. It was an auspicious beginning to 2023.
Last summer sometime, I did a very adult thing and got myself a financial planner. I highly recommend this to anyone and strongly encourage you to start early! I mostly wanted to consolidate all of my investments, IRAs, mutual funds, and retirement accounts from previous employers in different school systems and states into one place. I hated receiving all those different statements and tax docs every year and, since investing might as well be Japanese to me (but I have no patience to devote to really doing it intentionally and well on my own), I wanted an expert. The problem was, most financial folks seem smarmy at best but I found an angel of a human through a friend and after an hour of talking with him, it felt like a second therapist! At the end of two sessions, I had a concrete plan to buy a row house on Swann St eventually, donate excess stocks to charity each year, potentially leave my eternal wealth to a few organizations I’ve been supporting in little monthly bits for years, and then hopefully, one day, retire on The Med … and this was before I even dreamed of traveling at the end of the year, let alone to Sicily!
Getting a financial planner in itself isn’t terribly interesting, I realize, but it allowed me to start thinking about the future in a practical way. While sobering in many ways, it was also kind of exhilarating. I could own the fact that I’ve done really well for myself as a single woman, especially as one who has worked as a public servant for nearly 20 years now. Although still pretty painful if I am honest, I was also able to begin to recognize that the college savings plan I had for future child(ren) that I will very likely never have could and should be used now to change my life in a tangible way. So I liquidated some stocks and went to Europe on a whim. Then I came home and started to spend more than a casual few minutes here and there doing research into tackling my loneliness in a way that had nothing to do with human men.
I got a puppy.
I am not a pet person, and I never have been despite having grown up on a farm. I love animals but I never had one in the house and, in my family, that’s just considered gross. When I used to do online dating, if a man had a picture with a dog (especially on the bed or licking his face), that was a non-starter. Even after nearly four months with my wee puffy dog, I would still argue that I am not a pet person – at least not other people’s pets. But, to this day, the decision to get a dog has been the only thing in my personal life for which I have ever planned so far ahead. I overthink too much about everything so, outside of work, I am NOT a planner. I fly to Europe 18 hours after buying the ticket, I’ve gone to Club Med in Turks & Caicos four times by myself, always with only a few days’ notice, and I don’t even like making happy hour plans with people I love more than a day in advance (if I must). I just never know if I’ll still feel like it the next day. Or the next hour. But I read and consumed and researched and analyzed, for more than a month, every aspect of getting a dog and how it would/could blow up my life. I spent at least two therapy sessions almost solely focused on this choice I was making to change my life, one way or the other, for better or for worse.
I love control and yet, for the past several years, between my boss, the demoralizing quest to land a new job, and the catastrophic betrayal in my personal life, I had felt completely stuck while simultaneously out of control. This decision though? It felt like I was giving myself agency. To choose to get unstuck in some major way that I could control.
I liked the idea of adopting a senior dog but, I hate goodbyes more than anything, already have attachment issues and, again, I really like control. I worried that if I adopted a dog that already had behavioral issues, it would kind of be like inheriting my current idiot of a boss who has made my work life hell for more than three years. If I got a puppy though, a small, new, impressionable blank canvas, I would be responsible for teaching it all the things. And if I failed, it was my own fault and entirely within my control. I was making a choice to maybe blow up a content but decidedly stagnant life but also, regardless of good or bad, it was a choice that would definitely result in change. For the first time in a long time, I really liked the idea of change. So I researched breeds and all the other possible infinite combinations of considerations. Jed Bartlet, the Portuguese Water Dog puppy (@presidentportie), came home at the end of February.
And I hated it. Not him. He was very cute. I hated my decision to get him.
The night before I was set to drive out to the middle of Virginia to pick him up, my ever-unreliable friend bailed as expected and although I had a back up plan for that very real and frustrating eventuality, my back up plan had an unavoidable emergency. Plans C & D on the fly also wouldn’t work so I had to suck it up and accept that I would go myself. The morning of, I walked out to find the back window of my car had been smashed. Not having a shop vac, I had no choice but to leave the glass, get out the duct tape and trash bags — which blew open on I-66 less than 2 miles outside the city — and freeze in the snow and sleet all the way out and back from Virginia. Because of all the glass, I had to hold his tiny little self on my lap the whole drive home. Being alone, I didn’t have a video of first meeting him or anyone to drive while I snuggled with him as I had imagined in my head. I took pictures as I could though and we managed not to freeze. He cried and squealed and squirmed the whole way home. As soon as we got off the highway in DC, he puked all over me at the first red light, less than a mile from home! Then I had to figure out how to get him into the house, then leave him alone in there while I went out to clean up the vomit in the car and retape the busted window.
It was an inauspicious beginning, for sure. I cried for him. It wasn’t the homecoming I had been dreaming about for him and I felt so bad.
I was prepared for the lack of sleep and the potty training and the nipping and all the things the books and websites had told me. None of that bothered me. I was prepared and never minded waking up with him every hour or so, cleaning up accidents, or the scratches and scars. It was all the other stuff I had no idea to expect that nearly killed me (literally).
I had taken two weeks off work to spend with him which, in hindsight, I still don’t know if that was smart or awful. I never felt so isolated, alone, hopeless, helpless, frustrated, scared, and sad. And of all those emotions, what I felt more often than all of them was embarrassment. I was so embarrassed that I hated my choice so much, that it had the exact opposite effect in my life that I had hoped it would. I spent three weeks of therapy just crying – so relieved to have another human to talk to that I just couldn’t. I simply cried about what a failure I was. I didn’t know the “puppy blues” were a thing but the r/Puppy101 sub-reddit got me through some very, very dark moments of panic and rage. Talk about feeling like I didn’t have control! After the first week, I spent much of that weekend texting everyone I could think of to ask if they would like a very expensive puppy, for free!
But you know what happened from that desperation? My village started regularly checking in, catching up, calling more frequently than I had talked to most of them in years – maybe ever? Old friends and acquaintances, cousins and distant family members, old coworkers, etc. If I had thought I could manage more than 2 minutes at a time while he was awake, I would have probably written about this time period. And then when his little, fluffy self was sleeping, I didn’t dare want to wake him. Plus, I learned very quickly to sleep when he slept, even if that was 20 minutes here and there!
Now, he’s almost six months old and we’ve been together nearly four. He’s not perfect but he’s about 95%! He’s ridiculously smart which is both endlessly entertaining and, at times, challenging. He picked up potty training in about 18 hours once I finally accepted that taking him outside before full vaccination was worth the risk! He will do anything for a blueberry or a green pepper and has never met another living thing that he doesn’t assume is his very best friend.
In the whole “Best in Show” of it all, like me, he started out as an extreme introvert (has since gone the opposite way after starting daycare), gets incredibly car sick, is as stubborn as the day is long, likes what he likes, vocalizes his emotions in a variety of comical octaves, likes kids far more than adults, and really just wants to be loved. He started sleeping through the night by four months, stopped using a crate at five, and now has complete free reign of my tiny home. But he also constantly eats pebbles, bark chips, and napkins, which is profoundly annoying. He poops only once a day but must do so in three different piles in a triangle of varying sizes, depending on his mood. Seemingly everyone loves him which is amazing, but it also takes us about 20 minutes longer to get anywhere because he must stop to be pet and snuggled or sniffed by virtually everyone, human and canine. It’s also forcing me to be more social – and in the small-talk-with-strangers way that I loathe. But we have a whole gaggle of neighborhood besties. Well, he does 🙂 Even the drug dealers on our block love him! In other news, I never noticed how many different dealers there were on my block until I started walking Jed many times a day.
In addition to forcing myself to reach out and lean on people for emotional support in those early weeks, there were some unexpected really bright spots. I talked to my parents and brother and sister-in-law almost daily for a while. Even now, my parents watch Jed on the daycare cameras and love to report little things they see to me throughout the day, whether I also saw it or not. And they both created an Instagram account just so they can follow his antics – unlike me, he is an obnoxiously regular poster 😉
In the first weeks of our regular trips to the front yard of my building, we met a lot of neighbors that I’d never even noticed before, let alone spoken to. And we met two individuals who had just moved to DC — and offered to watch him for me when I had to go back to work — I’m sorry, what?! You’re just willingly going to watch a stranger’s brand new, untrained puppy during the workday? YES!!! I vacillated back and forth a million times, talked it through in therapy, and because Jed hated being confined to his crate other than to sleep, and because I have been so sensitive to the noise made by various iterations of inconsiderate ceiling and wall-sharing neighbors over the years, I hated leaving him for even five minutes at a time to wail and cry and fuss.
I tried two versions of “pens” for him in my living room where he could have space beyond the crate to play. He broke out from behind the first one, a lovely white-picket-fence-style gate, just pushing really hard and wiggling himself out by pushing the records and books on my shelf back far enough to escape around the side! Then within 12 hours of erecting a fully enclosed playpen that was twice as high all around, he jumped out through a small gap and was left dangling a foot off the ground by a back foot (with a heart-wrenching yelp) until he thrashed himself free. Clearly he was willing to sacrifice literal life & limb to escape so I gave in and took down the pen 24 hours after it arrived on my doorstep. It now lives under the couch and serves as a very expensive but effective toy-blocker.
So I installed a punch key deadbolt on my door and gave the code to these two brand new stranger-neighbors, went back to work, and the two of them took care of my puppy three days a week for a few weeks until he was fully vaccinated and could go to day care. I will never understand the supreme generosity and selflessness of these people. I consider myself a pretty kind and generous human but there is no way in hell I’d do that for a stranger in a new town when I wasn’t even unpacked yet! They have both become good friends and two of Jed’s favorite people and they couldn’t be more different physically; a fresh-faced, diminutive, white girl from Tex-ass and a very manly, massive, teddy bear of a black man from Vegas. I think it’s so comical though that Jed had such a blended nuclear family for his first weeks on this planet.
We have gone on roads trips together to PA and RI, have become regulars at Bark Social in Bethesda, and have slowly but surely increased our walks from the end of our block to a few blocks and even a few neighborhoods! We are still working our way up to walking the 2miles to the White House where Jed Bartlet can make an IG-worthy return to his West Wing. We could get there but I would have to carry him home and he’s become a pretty big sack of potatoes at this point. Still an adorably fluffy muppet though.
I cannot say that I’m perfectly content in work or in life but I finally have some career opportunities on the immediate horizon, still absolutely love my work, and have very little desire to entertain the idea of dating. Trust is still essentially nonexistent and I’m not sure when or if I might ever be ready again. I still experience grief (and anger) but the life I imagined was real was never mine to begin with. I am still working on accepting that difference of reality versus what I seem to have adopted in my life as “the ideal,” and something I maybe mistakenly think I deserve. I suspect the challenge of accepting that difference may last beyond my final breath.
I know that Jed isn’t what will fill up all the gaps and spaces but, for now, after the initial adjustment (which I wouldn’t do again to save my soul), he’s been a welcome addition to my life.
Tiger Lily Vegas 