Are you peeing enough? A wee tip for moms.

My first episode of One-Der Woman: The Single Mom's Guide to Happiness was about panties. The most recent one? It's about pee. We've all grown up a lot together in the past few months, haven't we, friends?

In overhauling my self-care in some big ways, from sleep to my budget to exercising more days than not, I was overlooking the basics. Here’s the wee change I had to make — and quick — so that I could really get on the road to bigger and better well-being.

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When people are like nails in the floor

I tore a hole in my favorite pair of socks today. It's not a big deal, really. Except that almost every pair of socks I own has an identical hole, ripped from the knit where the ball of my left foot rests. The culprit is a tiny nail that sneaks up from a hardwood floor board in our living room. 

I walk past that nail many times a day as I move from my desk to the kitchen to refill my coffee cup, as I pace the hallway while I put away clean laundry and collect dirty laundry and haul the vacuum cleaner in and out of rooms. In the morning rush, we sweep past that nail while pulling on boots and scrambling to find the lunch box, the permission slip, the Tae Kwon Do uniform. Before bed, we pad around it, hunting for the stuffed baby that has disappeared and retrieving the chapter book from the backpack. After the house is quiet, I skate past it to quietly pour a glass of wine, text the Not Boyfriend, run a bath.

We know where to step in all of that choreography around the nail. Most of the time. But all it takes is one lazy move and the nail yanks aggressively at a sock.

If E could curse, he would. Thankfully, he is an ardent rule-obeyer who instead yells out, "DAG NABBIT!" as he observes the hole in his tiny tube socks. 

"I HATE THAT NAIL!" usually comes next. 

He often warns visitors long before they step near the nail that it could get them, too.

"We have a nail over here that tears socks and can super-hurt your foot," he will say sternly, "so be careful when you're running or skipping or doing hi-yas."

Not everyone does hi=yas, but you know...just in case, the nail is a ninja sleuth, too.

I've tried to drive that dag nabbit nail back down into its hole. It goes, usually within an easy hit or two of the hammer. But it will not stay. A day or two later, it reemerges just in time for a misstep to grab hold of the softest angora socks or perfectly opaque tights.

I've tried to keep the nail burrowed with clear nail polish, wood putty, all kinds of glues. None of it can keep the nail from pushing its way up into our world (and feet).

Sometimes, the nail catches more than a sock. Both E and I have walked with bacon Band-Aids affixed to the soles of our feet because the nail was especially angry during a five-minute dance party break in housecleaning or when it is too hot to wear any socks at all.

The nasty little nail has an affinity for cheap flip-flops and slippers, too. It doesn't seem to rest.

I am afraid if I pull it out completely, the floor board will pop up or squeak or do something funky that I will have to explain to my landlord. I also know my attempts to keep it down are a futile exercise in frustration.  When my son complains or my sock sags or I feel a bare spot of skin stick to my running shoe or the insole of a boot because of a hole in my stockings, I often think, "I should do something about that blasted nail, once and for all."

But should I? There are a thousand metaphors for the nail that uproots itself in our path to nourishment, play, soothing baths, productive work, rest. But the one I think of most often in our home is that we all have nails that emerge persistently, pesky and present. And even though they are far smaller than anything else in the room, we can only hone in on that one thing that sticks at us and sticks at us and resists us and sticks at us. 

We can hammer and hammer away at those irritants, sweating and swearing (dag nabbit!ex) and feeling only temporarily triumphant, then repeat the process all over again a few days later. Or we can choose to turn that exercise into one of walking around the nail, ignoring its jabs as best as we can, acknowledging the holes it leaves, and then walking on. Focusing on on the sweetness of another cup of coffee, the satisfaction of turning all the lights out. Cursing the nail, but then dancing anyway.

There are people in my life, now and in the past, who are that nail to me -- resurfacing in frustrating and sometimes painful ways just when I think they are put back in place or at least, away. My ex-husband is one of those. He will not leave, nor should he. We share a son, after all. But there's no reason for all the prodding and hurt he brings up. I can't control him, just as I somehow have no real jurisdiction over that little nail. So it's on me to choose which exercise I will respond with, and for now, I choose as much as I can to walk around that half-inch obstacle and go on about my day.

The signs and scraps and scars are there, yes. But it's my house, my choice of how much power that nail has in the whole of my life. I choose for it to be something small. 

We can't and shouldn't ignore all of the pesky people in our lives. Sometimes, confrontation is necessary. Sometimes, we have to pull the damn thing out of the floor and deal with the consequences later. Sometimes, we need to put up orange cones of drastic warning, or even move to avoid it altogether. Sometimes, we choose to throw a rug over it. But when we can, there is peace in acknowledging that little sucker, saying, "I see you there, I feel you underfoot. But you won't stop me from going on." 

There is a calm under the breath muttering "dag nabbit!" and the warnings of its existence and the momentary sad face over favorite socks now marred. And I am working toward that calm with each step through the home I've made.

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Letter to my college-lady self

 

I went to a smallish college in the corner of Missouri. I joked with my friends that I was living in the State of Misery. But really, that school was exactly where I needed to be.

My high school had more than 5,000 students, and even with good grades, graduating in the top 10% of my class took a lot in an environment where the valedictorian and salutatorian battled it out over hundredths of a grade-point. I made my way through the crowd, earning a school paper byline and parts in the senior plays. But I still felt lost, and needed my own space.

I sensed it immediately at this “Harvard of the Midwest” school my parents and I picked out of a book called How to Get an Ivy-League Education at a State School. There were just about the same number of students as my high school, but somehow it felt manageable, comfortable, calling to me. I wouldn’t have to bristle at the lecture halls filled to capacity with 800 freshmen, work for three years just to get an interview to possibly write for the school paper, or cross my fingers I’d get a spot in any dorm. There was a room waiting, a roommate chosen, and opportunities in the campus newsroom as soon as I said yes.

I packed up my parents’ van and cried all of the eight hours from Chicago to Kirksville, Missouri. I was shell-shocked when I arrived to realize all I hadn’t seen on my visits and in my research, things you cannot know when you are filling out applications, thumbing through books, and talking to teenaged tour guides. There were very few students of color. My ripped Guess jeans shorts and all-black clothing were mocked for being “too fancy.” No one had heard of Depeche Mode. Hours in, I felt very, very far away from everything I’d been.

Still, I was equally close to becoming who I was. It would take years to see. More to fully understand. Thankfully, that scared girl in the granny boots kept going, far out of her comfort zone, in for a bumpy ride, and sometimes in the center of a state of real misery.  In the noise of southern accents and wild fraternity parties in barns and Algebra for Social Science Majors and raucous roommates and newsroom mayhem, she still heard the whisper of a call that said, “This is where you are supposed to be. For now.” 

To that girl becoming a woman, I have much to say. Now 40, back in Chicago, and running a virtual newsroom from the comfort of my own living room, here it is:

Dear college-lady Jessica,

Own your uniform. Your goth-girl clothes, depressing club music, and city-kid ways may not be at home where you are, but they are reminders of where you grew up. Use them as a shield against the pressure to wrap your hair in scrunchies, pull on Greek-lettered t-shirts, and scream silly chants at a sorority rush event. Wear them as a badge of street smarts on dance floors sticky with beer and tracking down hidden periodicals in the library. Wrap them around you as protection when your TV professor calls you a stupid bitch even though you have 100% in his class, and your journalism advisor laughs and calls you silly because you want to write for a men’s magazine, not be boxed in writing only to women. 

And when it is time to try on other outfits, to see how it feels to look and be some other way, remember that no clothing can hide the brazen, shivering, fiery, shivering girl inside.

Second, save yourself first. You will not be able to rescue the roommates with bulimia, the friends beaten down in parking lots by their boyfriends, the tender-hearted boys on the newspaper whose crushes you do not return. You will not convince the lazy, redshirted boyfriend to go to class, to finish a final paper, to save his football scholarship. You won’t keep all of your high school friends, or even remember all of their names. You will have to release many relationships with men with bad timing, poor manners, overwhelming needs, sad stories, propensity for badness and rebellion and awful lite beer. It’s okay to tend to them, for a time. But get yourself to dry land, and be willing to give their boats one big shove away from the safe island of you.

Third, you are enough. Your good grades will be a fine entry to where you need to go next. That sociology prof is wrong. One C won’t ruin your chances of getting into grad school. Your consecutive jobs as the campus TV producer, yearbook editor, radio DJ and news reporter do count. Those many all-nighters will serve you well and teach you how far you can push a deadline. Don’t give yourself a hard time that all of that work didn’t pay -- what you learned there came back to you with riches better than a stipend or scholarship. Your dreams are enough. Your plan is enough. Your fear is enough. And even when your roommate stops talking to you or that beautiful boy from Ireland breaks your heart or you put yourself in a precarious situation or you make some big mistakes, hold tight to this: You know enough, feel enough, find enough, have enough and are enough to make it through. 

Fourth, it will be glorious in ways you never see coming. You know those nerds hoarding the PCs in the computer lounge for an eyerolling thing called “email” and “list-servs”? Yeah, you will be one of them in a decade. And how insistent you were that you didn’t want to write for a women’s publication? Yup, you will write for many. That you would marry someone fascinating and fabulous? He didn’t turn out to be. And have many kids running wild in your home? Just one. What you inhale sharply, feel fearful to say aloud that you dream? Some of that will explode into thousands more fire-lit moments than you could know. You will make a movie on your own. See your byline on screens every single day. Hold a baby boy who makes all the world fall into place. Find a high school love you secretly hoped you’d meet up with again. Be stronger and more daring and quieter and more reverent than you can see today. Love the surprise of it all. 

Finally, there is much more to come. A book? A bigger job? A trip to remote corners of the world you studied wide-eyed in Anthropology 314? We go on studying, taking note of beautiful passages, making notes in the margins. We keep embracing and ignoring roommates. We are always graduating, continually raising our hands hoping to be called on, ever putting in an application for new opportunities. We move in and out of states of bliss and misery. We don’t stop crying in the car on the way to some magnificent adventure. Keep on going. 

Lace up those granny boots and keep stepping closer to you.

 This post is part of BlogHer's Success Tips For My Younger Self editorial series, made possible by Kaplan.

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