‘THINGS HAVE TO FALL APART SO THAT BETTER THINGS CAN FALL TOGETHER” – Marilyn Monroe

So it turns out I am a pretty crap blogger. Things got a little hard and rendered me useless. To be clear, on a scale of “your shower is leaking and it takes a month to fix” to “you must flee your home because ISIS is coming” life was not that hard.

There was the shower saga. There was Lyme’s disease. (For me that equaled just over a month of feeling like death warmed up) Lots of travel (fun but disruptive) and a cockroach war (we seem to be winning, but they have not fully surrendered yet.)

But before all that was the winter of my discontent. The winter was cold and hard. It was clear our daughter was really unhappy. A miserable teenager is a dark force. Luckily our clever, self-aware girl came to us with a solution " Boarding School."

Not a solution I was initially in love with. I had to wrap my mind around it, and there was a lot of work involved. There was the steep learning curve. There was a lot traveling involved. As anyone who has ever applied to anything knows, there was also a lot of paperwork. As well making sure Paloma was prepared for her test and wrote all the personal essays. It become pretty clear pretty quickly that this would be a great thing for Paloma but coming to terms with my complex feelings about it took a little longer.

I felt overwhelmed and depleted. Doing the simplest thing felt like undertaking a herculean task.

I did the opposite of everything that you’re supposed to do in when you’re feeling like that. I stopped doing my yoga practice; I ate and drank lots of all the wrong things. I let the house and myself go. Things got messy, hairy and unproductive. I could only manage the things most important at that moment; taking care of children, the dog, writing that had deadlines (Um I missed a few, thank goodness for lovely patient producers)

There was something liberating about letting everything go. It was what I needed. I needed to get fat, unkempt, watch TV and plod through the day like a boated grumpy bear. Until I needed something else. Not that I knew it at the time. I made myself miserable thinking about what I should be doing. Oh, that special self-induced suffering of just not accepting what the f*ck is and forgetting the great universal law; Nothing is permanent, change is inevitable.

Paloma in her dorm on the 1st day of school.

Slowly things got a little easier. Paloma started school, and she loves it. I started exercising again and eating better. One day it felt like I just put down the bag of cinder blocks I had been carrying around. I fell back in love with my yoga practice and started doing strength work. I want to be strong like Hercules for the next bag of bricks. (oh you know it’s coming, because life) I had help deep cleaning the house and have started a decluttering project care of The Kondo Method. (Who knew I was treating my socks so badly by balling them in my draw) I went blonde and started a new spec script project.

Life feels easy and fun again. Not like the soul-crushing obligation it felt like a few months before. It really does feel like everything had to fall apart so that something better could fall together. Hopefully, that will also translate to this here blog.