“…the border between the Inside and the Outside wasn’t as impermeable as she liked to believe,

and he knew that sooner or later, the Outside would want in.”

~from If I Fall, If I Die by Michael Christie

Today I planted tulips and pansies Outside, yanking out the weeds and cutting back debris I’d left since August. It was wet and grey and the grass came out in clumps, snuff-colored soil and worms clinging to the roots. This is optimistic, I think, planning for the spring. Thinking someday it will be pink and purple and white and alive. It’s green and lush right now, but nothing is really growing. It’s a ruse, a fake, it’s just a cover crop.

Sirens pierce through the bird song. I quickly inventory, wondering if you’re Outside. Are they screaming in your direction? They cannot be, they will not be, they are NOT coming for you.

Do you know I check on you every morning, first thing as the coffee brews? Usually your shoulders need covering, and sometimes as I pull the striped duvet over your shoulder, you smile. In that moment, in that smile I see the real you, the child I know will be ready for Outside soon. I pick up a damp towel and a dirty juice glass and click the door shut behind me. Exhale.  You’re Inside, it’s quiet, and we’re safe.

I walk in her room, too. I’m not sure why I do – she’s never there. It’s cold and white and full of a starkness that only happens when someone doesn’t live there anymore. I pull the shades open, sigh and run my hand along her dresser, my fingertips making faint lines in the dust. She’s Outside now, out of my control, where I want her to be and where I want her to leave. But the years are minutes, I scream to the silence.

You tell me you want more independence, you want me to trust you. You want to go Outside until after dark. You want to pick up your skateboard and throw your house key in your pocket and skate away with the homemade wax you made in my best stainless steel pan…and I’m supposed to be OK with that. I’m supposed to say yes, go meet your new friends and your new girl and just be careful, I whisper to you as you leave. Be careful, Outside.

This won’t last forever, I remind myself, these moments when life pushes along and I sometimes chase after it. These years that are really moments, these moments that hold my breath and make me pause midway through and wonder if this is the last time…

It’s getting late and I need to think of something to teach tomorrow – Steinbeck, The Pearl, and Kino who thinks all his dreams will come true now that he’s found the Pearl of the World and then the baby dies. He thought he had it all – for a moment. Yes, years are minutes, Kino. Stay Inside.

She calls to tell me she loves her Avalanche class, mentions she’ll be skiing out of bounds this weekend. But don’t worry, Mom, she says. I’m with my group. She’ll click on her skis just like Bryce and Ronnie and please don’t go Outside, I silently scream, please don’t slide down, buried with a smile on your face like they did…

I shower and  slip into my new fleece jammies, soft and fresh from the dryer, and walk down the stairs. You laugh when you see me and tell me that’s a whole lot of leopard. That you read somewhere that women my age shouldn’t be seen Outside in leopard – certainly not head to toe.

But I’m Inside, I reply. I’m safe. No one can see me Inside here.

I hear your key in the door. It’s dusk now, and you’re Inside. Your cheeks are glowing and your eyes sparkle as you explain all about your new tricks, how you’re learning and persistent and you’re better than you were before you broke your leg, better than that August morning I texted you to be safe Outside and you said you would.

But you weren’t.

This post was inspired by the novel If I Fall, If I Die by Michael Christie,about a boy who’s never been outside, thanks to his mother’s agoraphobia, but ventures outside in order to solve a mystery. Join From Left to Write on January 22nd as we discuss If I Fall, If I Die. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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Aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

Betty Friedan

It’s a winter Saturday morning, dreary and grey and bare. Outside my window I look down on my garden; the trees bare, branches arcing and cascading with delicate, raw beauty. The rose bushes are pruned, the soft flesh of the grapefruits fall with an ugly crash to the grass below. Verdant reen grass, green shrubs, green moss landscape my view, with little other color to brighten my spirits. The bones of the garden are exposed in all their raw and graceful and startling vulnerability, green but not growing. We both are waiting to bloom.

Outside my window I set up a new bird feeder this winter, right next to the birdbath. I carefully filled it with seed, positioned it next to the safe haven of a Lavatera bush, under the bare bones of the pistache tree. I’ve followed all the steps, but still the birds flit and fly around it. Not one is perching this winter. They won’t stop where I want them to. They refuse to land. What do they have to fear? Maybe they know something I don’t.

This winter, I’m in my 50th year of this life, fifty years of aging gracefully. I can feel it in my bones, in the sinew of my shoulder, in the crick in my back when I bend down to clip the fragrant narcissus blooming in my backyard bed. It’s hard, this aging. It’s hard when Facebook flashes images of my youth; class photos from elementary school, sixteen-year-old sojourns to Stinson Beach, the goth days that stilled my soul. I click and eagerly ingest the memory, scan the photos for others I recognize in their youth. Sometimes I see them aging gracefully, too.

People see my photos and say I haven’t changed. But it stuns me, really. Physically, maybe not so much- a few pounds heavier, my face a bit fuller, my breasts a bit lower and my body baring the glorious work of motherhood. But inside, sometimes I don’t even recognize myself. I feel the stripping down happening this year, the leaves falling to the ground and in place, my bark, my branches growing and reaching and sometimes fracturing and not caring who sees.

I see my daughter’s face, clean and fresh and smiling. Her friends look just like her, really. Their eyes shine with the wisdom of college freshmen, off and eager and full of the energy that youth and growth offers. Her second decade, her time when the world is brimming with experiences, her mind teetering with the excitement of a new home, a new school, a new love.

My son towers over me, long and lanky and grinning with the kind of smile that makes me wonder. His eyes gaze with an old wisdom yet his body pulsates with the youthful need to move, to skate, to ski. His time when dreams deferred have altered his course, his world changing and he is riding it out, gracefully.

I tell my middle school students that well behaved women rarely make history. I write and read and teach and share my stories, feeling bits of raw bone shining through. I prune and rake and weed and dig, waiting to bloom, to wake up, to uncover the beauty, to expose the substance, to pull off the overgrowth. To strip down to my core, to discover the beauty of aging gracefully.

Fifty years, an indicator of a number of breaths and beats and moments my body as been growing, aging, learning. Can you see the grey and the lines and the wisdom that comes with half a century of work?

I won’t stop. I have nothing to fear.

I have everything to learn.

Can you see ME?

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

~ from Beloved

by Toni Morrison

Life changes when one of your children moves out of the house. Yes, the obvious things sting at first: an empty seat at the table, a bedroom that looks more like a hotel room, and a serious reduction in the laundry load. Over time, I’m finding, it’s the little things that get under my skin, that erupt when I least expect it and I find myself grasping for anything to hold onto – anything to feel safe and ‘normal’ again.

The holidays felt like that – a fleeting, ephemeral run of moments in which my heart would palpitate with the idea that things might be different this year, that our traditions and joys and moments we look forward to might be vanishing into distant memories.

I’m not ready for that quite yet.

It was an exercise in holding on and letting go, an endeavor of wills to choose from what was, what is, and what the ‘new normal’ will be. I struggled to figure out how to find a moment when the four of us could be together to decorate the Christmas tree. I waited to make the treats we love until she was back under our roof. We never did find time to hang the outside lights, drive around at night to view the neighborhood decorations, or do a full fledged day of Christmas shopping.

Thanks to my talented sister, though, we managed to get a Christmas card photo. That’s something that in normal circumstances is challenging at best, but when one child is 650 miles away, it becomes nearly impossible. In all the turmoil, excitement and confusion of the holidays, this photo is my greatest gift. My children. Bigger? Yes, definitely. But grown? Not really. Not yet.

I’ve got one more day with my girl before she leaves to her new home. She’s grown, moved away, and is creating her own version “normal”, but that doesn’t really mean a thing to me. In my heart, she’ll always be my first baby, my girl, the one who introduced me to motherhood. He’ll always be the little one. Moments strung together, like a tangled mess of discarded Christmas tree lights, cement their place in my heart. Flashes of what was, what is, and what will be light my way through the darkness.

No, grown don’t mean a thing.

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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“All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.”

~ Brian Tracy

It’s the beginning of the year, and everywhere we turn are stories of resolution – it’s impossible to escape people’s heartfelt testimonies to how they want their lives to change, to grow, to improve. People are imagining the life they want to live.

I’m not a New Year’s Resolution kind of person – to me, resolutions are just a trendy way to acknowledge all the things people might think they’re not doing ‘right’ in their life – and most often, resolutions don’t resolve into anything but added stress and disappointment.

I think most of us have an inkling of the life we’d like to live, but often we don’t know how to get there. We think if we resolve to  check off this list of 10 or 20 or 100 things, we’ll be there. Life will be….perfect? In my experience, though, by the time we get everything – or nearly everything – checked off, life has changed, added more complications, and we wake up and realize in the quest for ‘perfect’ we’ve lost the present, and are likely in a similar place to where we began.

I’m an intention kind of girl. I like to think small to think big – and think about what I intend to do in any period of time. I do love to-do lists, but I also love the quiet and stillness required to imagine, to create, to inspire myself to live the life I dream of – and to muster the courage to do so.

This is one of the reasons I was drawn to Peg Conley’s new book, Imagine The Life You’d Love To Live, Then Live It: 52 Inspired habits and playful prompts.  Peg is an artist-turned-corporate-worker-turned-writer-back-to-artist kind of woman. According to her publishing website, mid-life, she listened to “ a nagging feeling that life might hold something else in the midst of it all. Then came a big breakthrough—(she)  founded a successful, art-centered company based on the advice of her inner voice: “

Peg’s journey inspired her book, which is divided up into 52 weekly chapters full of an idea, application, quotes and advice about how to intentionally create the life that we’ve been wanting. Starting with Chapter One, Peg shares her personal story of change and then asks the reader to ‘imagine’ their ideal life – either by writing, drawing, collaging or dreaming it. Designed to be read one chapter per week, Peg offers ideas as varied as “Write With Your Nondominant Hand”, to “Look For Magic and Miracles”, to “Act ‘As If’”, “Get A Massage”, and “Look for ‘Meant To Be’s”.

One of my favorite chapters, “Give Thanks”, reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives. She shares statistical information as well as anecdotal, expounding her idea that showing gratitude should be more than just something we do on Thanksgiving – it should be a regular practice. I also enjoyed her chapter, “It’s the Little Things”, which assert our shared belief that we should remember to celebrate the small moments in life, the times which might be neglected on our push towards our goals.

I challenge you – make 2015 the year you set an intention to dream about the life you want to live. Think big, dream daily, and pick up a copy of Peg Conley’s book, Imagine the Life You’d Love to Live, Then Live It: 52 Inspired Habits and Playful Prompts for an extra nudge. 

I’m offering a free giveaway of one copy of Imagine the Life You’d Love to Live, Then Live It: 52 Inspired Habits and Playful Prompts – if you’d like to win, reply in the comments with your dreams for 2015! One winner will be chosen at random on Wednesday, Jan. 14!

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions – one only has to visit a health club in February to see my point. Resolutions don’t work – but intentions do.

In 2015, I intend to practice courage – turning hopes and dreams into action, changing possibilities into probabilities. Choosing love over fear, presence over absence, to push forward over holding back.

As I move forward into 2015, I’m inspired by the words of one of my heroes, Maya Angelou. She says: “One isn’t born with courage. One develops it by doing small courageous things—in the way that if one sets out to pick up a 100-pound bag of rice, one would be advised to start with a five-pound bag, then 10 pounds, then 20 pounds, and so forth, until one builds up enough muscle to lift the 100-pound bag. It’s the same way with courage. You do small courageous things that require some mental and spiritual exertion.”

Yes, Maya, I am ready to work hard, to build muscle, to exert myself mentally and spiritually. 2014 was a year of change, a year of possibilities, a year of setbacks, and a year of possibilities.

2015 will be a year of courage.

What is your intention for 2015? I’d love to share your energy – leave a comment on what you’re looking for 2015.

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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