The cost of a long-distance relationship

Next week, the Not Boyfriend begin his drive across the country. After he camps in a few state parks, fills up the gas tank a bunch of times and slowly winds his way through the Badlands, some steep passes, long stretches of cornfields and rush-hour traffic, he will end up in my city. Once the moving truck arrives, my city will become his home, too.

In the nearly three years we’ve been dating, we’ve spent a handful of weeks together. Most of our quality time has been packed into 48-hour visits, Skype calls and texts. The number of hours we’ve held hands, lingered over dinner, been each other’s plus-one, hiked and laughed and lazed around in bed has been rivaled by the number of hours we’ve spent on airplanes, waiting through flight delays and in security lines.  Cab drivers and TSA agents have been on our relationship scene more than many of our friends and family members.

Next week, that will all change. This week, we are both a bundle of nerves and excitement. We talk a lot about being open to what this last bit of transportation will bring along with it. How will we be, dating in the same city? How will we handle seeing each other almost every day? How much space do each of us really need?

And, of course: How much money will we save?

See the tally on Sassafrass Says So. IT IS A WHOPPER.

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Back to You: How to claim your own quiet space in a crazy house

I was broke. I lived in a cramped and cluttered apartment with a living room covered in gross carpeting. I didn't have access to a car during the week. OH! And I was a new mom.

Sounds like a parenting fairy tale, right? Now before you get all judgy about "no wonder your marriage ended" and whatnot, know that I was exahausted and overwhelmed and desperately in need of a professional organizer, but I was also happy. My newborn months were a blurry haze just like yours, except I felt relieved to be so tired I couldn't see the piles of unpaid bills and dirty laundry. 

The ahhh-moment in my life was a Mommy & Me Yoga class. Another was a new motherhood support group at the same studio. I met mothers who I connected with -- from an Ayruvedic practitioner to user research specialist -- and we met on mats, rubbed our babies' bellies until they were happy, stretched our weary arms and legs, and talked about how to bring that same peace home.

I opted for meditation. Or at least to try meditation. For five minutes at a time, I took apart the layers of baby schedule, grocery lists and other stresses from my brain. I closed out the crying, the television, the blaring TV, the sound of something sizzling into a thick burnt spot on a pan in the kitchen. I waved off my irresistable and demanding baby. I stepped away from the husband I saw far too little. I didn't answer the phone. 

I'd like to tell you that it worked and was heavenly. But it didn't. At first. I couldn't last thirty seconds in my first few meditation attempts because I felt like the walls (and baby monitor buzzing and cardboard boxes from when we moved three years earlier) were closing in on me rather than feeling like my mind was expanding. There was no open, solitary space in my brain because my whole home and life was jam-packed with stuff.

I got frustrated. But I didn't give up. Instead, I centered on where I felt most centered. And that place was the bathroom.

It was tiny in there. Part of the tile was peach, the other part pale blue. The paint on the walls was scratching off to reveal 1970s wallpaper with large ugly-yellow mums. The sink cabinet was deteriorating. The fan clanked. The light was too dim. It could have been the most depressing spot in the place, but to me it was an escape. I'd made it cheery with a fancy shower curtain, organized and reorganized shelves of baskets of make-up and toiletries. I'd already decided it would be a sunny spot no matter how much renovation it needed.

So I took my meditation to the bathroom, and specifically, sat myself right down in the tub. No water, no bubbles, no lavendar salt scrub or candles. Just me in the cold, hard porcelain, meditating.

It worked. Five minutes became ten. Then fifteen. I think I got to twenty once and that was plenty. The regular practice of meditating didn't last more than a few months, but the retreat into my tub did. Sometimes, I added water. Other times, I just took a time out to read People magazine or breathe through my son's wailing while I was sleep training him. 

A few years later, when I was telling one of my best friends the excrutiating story of why I was suddenly leaving my husband, I took the call into the tub. It became more than a place I could crawl when I needed time to think. Or stop thinking. It became a safe spot in a house whose clutter became chaos. When I moved into a new place with my son, I felt a lovely kismet when I saw the phenomenal whirlpool tub, just waiting patiently for me to crawl in wearing jeans, boots and a giant sweater.

I don't think a mother has to teeter on the line of hoarder or be a horrible housekeeper or even leave her husband in order to find a woobie in her own home. In fact, I think having a retreat can keep a mother from being or doing all those things. 

Most of us don't have the privilege of getting a weekly massage or adding on a mom-cave or cleaning out a guest bedroom to turn it into a Zen retreat. But that's the glory of the unfilled bathtub -- it proves our quiet hideaways can be unexpected and kind of uncomfortable.

My Back to You challenge this week is to claim your own quiet space in your home.

The rules:

Don't go knocking down walls. Don't buy anything. Remember anything worthy of a DIY reality show won't count. And running to the bar around the corner is considered cheating.

The task:

Find a space that soothes you, where you can lock away, close out or ignore the rest of the world, or at least bodies with whom you share genetic makeup. Find a place to sit. Stay there for at least five minutes. Then set your cell phone alarm or a calendar reminder and go back tomorrow.

Go ahead and steal the bathtub idea. Or sit on your washer in the laundry room, hide behind the bikes in the garage, snuggle up in the glider, crawl into a corner of the pantry. If you have a comfy bed where you won't be bothered or a sun porch where there is silence, for the love of all of us in small apartments, go there!

The reminder:

I won't be monitoring you. I won't judge you. If the space doesn't work twice, switch it up! If you need a cushion, get one! If you have to yell and slam a door to get that five minutes, so be it! You just have to commit to five minutes. No excuses.

The reward:

Five minutes (at least) to yourself. To read. To attempt to paint your nails in some impossible Pinterest motif. To read a trashy magazine. Tuck a book of affirmations or love letters near the space so you can read a few pages each visit. Listen to music that soothes your soul.

Although I recommend leaving your phone on the other side of the chaos, I know it would make me twitchy and un-do all the meditative good of the escape. So if you do bring it with you, use it for good, not evil. Visit a quote site, download some kind of nature sounds app, blast the white noise, play with the Zippo lighter until you've forgotten that someone's science project is due in twelve hours. 

OH! And one more reward: A giveaway.

Because I believe in stealing away to small, unepected spaces and how it can seed peace, sanity and centeredness for moms in just a few minutes a day, I want to give one of you a little gift of encouragement.

As a token of "keep crawling in your tub/closet/under the desk, girlfriend" encouragement, I will send you a box of favorite drugstore bath stuffs chosen by Meagan and me just for you. It won't be too fancy, just to show that good moments can come from simple and inexpensive inspiration, but it will feel good. I promise. 

I have purchased these lovely items myself as a way to connect -- lady to lady, mama to mama, waterless bather to waterless bather. 

To enter:

Memorize this post and recite it to a friend. I kid. Leave a comment telling us which space you've claimed in your home and why. I'll randomly choose a winner on Friday and send a box of bath goodies to you. Sound good?

Back to You is a month-long project designed by Meagan Francis of The Happiest Mom and me to help moms remember to take care of ourselves during the busy back-to-school season. We will have great tips, giveaways, challenges and accessible activities to help you feel healthier, happier, gorgeous and even more fabulous.

More Back to You goodness:

Clear 1,000 emails (or more) in ten minutes

How to do the humble push-up

Get rid of something you think you need (but really don't)

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It should be hard: Why I support the Chicago Teachers Strike

For the first time in a quarter-century, Chicago Public Schools teachers are walking the picket line, striking over an unfair contract and devaluing procedures and expectations ushered in with this year's extended day program. I am watching the politics, press and negotiations carefully. I am not only a parent of a child in CPS, I graduated from the school system and am the daughter of CPS teacher. 

I made a conscious choice to send my child to Chicago Public Schools because I believe that, despite there being many broken joints in the system, there are gifted and committed teachers, principals, support services and programming there as well. I feel called to help make the system better by contributing to my son's school and community with my time, talents, dollars and care. It is not all nostalgic and pretty. There are broken stairs to step over. There are gaping holes in the budget to work around. There are some inadequate teachers and there is too much violence, poor nutrition and cuts in enriching classes. 

Those fissures do not detract from what happens in the classroom. Last year, I watched my son, then in first grade, reeling with excitement about researching the macaroni penguin as a part of a wider-class Antartica project. It was one moment of thousands that fired synapsis in his developing brain, grew his heart, sparked his curiosity, pulled him into new friendships and working relationships with other kids in the class. He's a kid who loves to learn. But that? That project, that inspiration, that guidance to invest in the written word, the group dynamic, science, and the earth? That was all his teacher.

I cannot participate in a conversation where teachers like this one are demonized. I cannot support a city or board who thinks it is OK to ask workers like her to extend their hours while stripping away professional development, time for staff meetings and parent conferences and lesson planning, and promised pay increases, all while adding more kids to their roster and standardized test scores as an evaluative tool. I cannot ask teachers to do what they do every day in the classroom for my child and others and ignore the terms of the proposed contract, just as I would never advise a friend to abstain from negotiating pay, workload, job responsibilities and professional development. 

I want my son to be in second grade today. I want him to be settling in to independent reading time, to be running the track in PE, to be sketching shapes in perspective in art, to be doing character studies in drama, to be learning lyrics and tapping out rhythms in music, to be starting a new research project that will light him up as much as the macaroni penguins did last year. I want him to be with his friends. I want him to be sitting at his desk. I want him to be learning from his teachers. 

I have spoken to his teachers, and I know they want the same thing. They are called, too. And they want to be in the classroom teaching our kids.

But I support pressing pause on that for the greater good of fair working conditions and expectations for the teachers. What serves them, serves my son. And your kids. And our community. And us.

 

Until this is all worked out, and I hope that is soon, my boy will be learning from a different teacher -- my mom. Instead of grammar school, he will be in Grandma School (he thinks this is hilarious). Some days, he will be in Mommy Camp. There will be liberal recess but there will also be assignments. One of them is to talk about why protesting and strikes are a privilege of freedom. Another is to walk alongside teachers on the picket line and to honk for them as we drive by schools where they are gathered. 

My signs are held high. I don't expect all of the parents on the playground or friends or readers to agree with me. That's OK. But we have to have the conversation about what we each hold. We have to write out our own signs and we have to sit in this discomfort on the other side of locked school doors because standing up for ourselves is a more important life lesson than what my own child would be learning in math this week.

Especially since this contract and this treatment of teachers is a fraction of what it needs to be.

One last thing; Here's what I posted on Facebook on the first day of the strike. Not everyone who commented agreed with me. But this is how I am centering and where I am beginning.

Strikes are hard. They are hard for the kids. They are hard for parents. And they are hard for teachers. Many teachers are parents, too, compounding the crisis. And that's what this is -- a crisis. 

I am thinking of Christmases my parents had to tell us we wouldn't have much and years the budget was very tight because my mom was on strike with CPS. It was stressful. And necessary. 

I am also thinking of the freedom to protest. The importance of standing up to those in power who are unjust in how they treat their employees. The lesson of how labor does work and can work in this country. 

Of course, a strike is not ideal or easy. But I am not worse off because my mother and teachers went on strike during my school years. I am a better person for being a part of it.

I also loved these links:

An open letter to Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Jean-Claude Brizard: "No one goes into teaching for the money."

Gloria Steinem immediately stands up in support of the strike. Here's why she got involved. 

And The Onion, for some levity: "It’s hard to feel sorry for these teachers when you see them driving around in their lavish Toyota Corollas, eating out of their fancy sack lunches."

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