Short Stop: Questions
L.C. Hill When I was little, I asked my mom a lot of questions: “Why do you wash the dishes in hot water?” “Do you have to use the turn signal when no one else is around?” “Can I lick the bowl?” I remember going…
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Short Stop: The Cleanest Air on Earth
L.C. Hill He hands me a glass vial of the cleanest air on earth. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says so. The data is right there on the label. “There’s really air in here?” I look through the glass at nothing. “Yes. Don’t open…
Almost But Not Yet
L.C. Hill
I hate being forty-five years old, and I’m not even forty-five years old. Almost but not yet. I’ve never stopped doing that thing that kids do. If you ask a kid how old they are, they’ll tell you they’re almost ten. Or they’re eleven and a half. I’ve done it my whole life.
I’ve never lamented getting older. I couldn’t wait to be thirty. When I was twenty-nine, I started telling people I was thirty. Almost but not yet, I’d say. I didn’t mind turning forty, either. I was even fresh out of the end of a long marriage. I was single at forty. Well, except for the post-marriage-buffer-all-the-pain guy. But, basically, I was single at forty and it didn’t bother me at all. I’ve never cared about my age.
But not at forty-five. I hate it. But you’ve heard that already. It’s not news to you.
If you haven’t reached this age, you are in for a treat. I’m not menopausal. I’m perimenopausal. I’m not old. But I’m not young. I have the occasional hot flash, but I still have cramps. I get wrinkles. I get pimples. I’m happy-go-lucky because I’m not worried about the trivial shit I was worried about all through my twenties and thirties, but every couple of months I’m full of—and I mean exploding with—rage. I’ve never been full of rage before. Not ever. Not even at the lowest points of my life when I had every right to be full of rage.
But I don’t have any reason to be full of rage now. My life is good. I have a good life with good friends, a roof over my head, food in my chubby forty-five-year-old belly, and a dog that brings me more joy than all of the human population on earth. But here I am boiling with rage.
Forty-five is a limbo really. A mid-point. Literally. Well, not literally necessarily. I could be halfway through. Or, I could be two-thirds of the way through. Or, I could be five years from death. That’s another fun part about being forty-five. You don’t know. People my age drop dead. A little ache could be a sore muscle from pulling on that sock earlier in the day—in the middle of July—because your feet are cold even though it’s ninety degrees outside. You could turn down the air conditioning but then you’d probably die from overheating because your ovaries are shriveling.
Or that ache could be cancer. There’s no telling what it is until it’s too late because you could go to the doctor for every little thing, but you’d be there three times a week and after awhile they’d just think you were the crazy hypochondriac and they wouldn’t test for cancer anymore because you’re just crazy, and then you’d die of cancer.
Wow, that was a long sentence and I’m winded. Because I’m forty-five. Almost but not yet.
Weeping for Gloria
L.C. Hill Gloria Vanderbilt died yesterday. Just over a month ago, I visited my dear friends in California. I go see them a few times a year usually. We’ve fallen into this wonderful habit of watching a movie or catching up on some mutually liked…
The Death of the Nice Guy
L.C. Hill “Whatcha doin’ this weekend?” I hit send on the text to the perfectly nice guy I’d had a great date with last weekend. His text came back a few minutes later: “Building a wall.” I waited a moment to see if he’d follow…
To My Niece on Her 17th Birthday
L.C. Hill
It is unbelievable to me that you are already seventeen. You’ve grown into such a beautiful young woman. And while you are truly beautiful on the outside, it is who you are inside that radiates your true beauty into this world.
I remember you so clearly when you were just this little girl with fire in her very soul. You were so strong willed even then. I told your mom that I was so happy you were so unfailingly sure of yourself because it would serve you well in life. I was so grateful because you were going to grow up to be the woman who wouldn’t take crap from anyone. No one will be able to break you. Your heart may break and you may have moments your whole self feels broken. But nothing will ever break you at your core. You came into this world one of the strongest people I have ever met and that has never changed.
I wish for you so many things. I wish for you that life will treat you well. I wish for you that love will treat you well. But the thing I hope most for you is that you are as lucky as I am in this life to have known you and your family. You already have such a leg up to have your mother. I know it’s the one thing I’ve had that has always carried me through for the last thirty-four years. You are strong enough to stand on your own, but you will never have to and that is the best thing you will ever know in this life.
We aren’t bound by blood but I have never thought of you as anything but family. I am your mother’s sister. DNA could not bind us more than we are bound by choice. I look at you and your brothers and I see what a beautiful thing your mother has created. No matter what I accomplish in this lifetime, I will never accomplish more than she has in bringing all of you into this world and gifting it with truly good human beings. It is something to behold.
You are something to behold. Do not ever forget that or let anyone tell you differently. People will try to. It is an unfortunate fact of life, and I doubt there’s a person on this planet who hasn’t experienced it. But you have the strength to ignore the naysayers. You will be successful at anything you do, whatever that is, and I have no doubts at all about that.
And please do whatever it is you want to do. Follow your passions, however many of them you have or how they change through the years. Do the things that make you happy and pursue the dreams that make your soul sing. When you find something you love, do it regardless of how much money or sense it makes. Life doesn’t make sense so do not waste time trying to make sense of it by doing things the world expects you to do. Make waves. Make tsunamis with things you are passionate about, no matter the outcome. We get this one life. We make it count by doing.
Fail often because it will make you better at anything you do and inevitably lead to success. Do not stop when failure steps in your way. Life is not a straight line so step around failure in your path and keep going. Leave it behind you and hold onto the lessons it teaches you. Be grateful for it. We all believe failure is bad but it can be the best thing that ever happens to you. When you succeed, and you will, it will be sweeter for the failure.
Do not waste time on anything or anyone that makes you unhappy. Spend this life with people who love you fiercely just as you are. I cannot stress this enough. You will never have anything more important than people who won’t stop loving you. The number of people has no bearing at all. You only need a few people to love you like that to live your best life.
Tell people you love them when you do, and do not let someone’s inability to love you make you think that you are somehow not loveable. Do not let it stop you from loving with all your heart again. What we gain from going all in is far more than what we lose if it doesn’t work out. Love really does make the world go ‘round.
Love yourself fiercely, too. Love yourself just as much as you would love other people. Actually, love yourself more than you love other people and do not for one moment believe that makes you selfish. How much we love ourselves is everything. It will carry you through anything no matter how much you are hurting. In the end, it is what saves us—more even than the love of other people.
Do not get too caught up in the constructs of time but do live with the urgency that time is finite. Live your best life every day even if your best doesn’t feel like it’s what the world expects from you. Chase every minute of the day with as much as you can give it, even if that means sitting quietly with a hot beverage and doing nothing but being with yourself.
Celebrate every birthday with as much enthusiasm as you will celebrate this one. As you grow older, you may be inclined to stop looking forward to them because it means you are a year older. Do not waste birthdays being sad about them. You have made it another year and that is something to celebrate no matter how old you are.
And last, but not least, eat cake. Birthday cake is the best tasting cake. It is not the time for counting calories. It’s the time to count accomplishments, the time to count memories, the time to look around at faces you love. But it is never the time to worry about calories.
Have the happiest of birthdays, dear Emma. I love you.
Hope in the Time of Online Dating
L.C. Hill I ventured back into the world of online dating approximately twenty-four hours ago. So far, I’ve received messages from forty-seven men. Of those forty-seven, I’ve already had to block two from being able to ever message me again. One of those men is…
Ohh, burning question…
L.C. Hill The distinctive chime of my best friend’s text came in while I was letting the dog out. A friend once asked, “Whose fairy godmother just landed?” when he heard it. I’ll get it in a sec, I thought to myself. My phone was…
Building websites and other personal issues
L.C. Hill
“This isn’t just building a website,” I exclaimed over our lunch break. We’d spent the morning writing like we do every Saturday at the library. We had crossed our fingers entering our favorite restaurant nearby that there would be a table. It’s always busy and we were running a few minutes late. “It’s a whole lot of personal issues, too,” I admitted over the noisy room.
They laughed, of course. Who wouldn’t laugh?
But, it was true. I hadn’t done anything so frustrating in years. It isn’t that it’s particularly hard to build a website these days. Well, for someone in their thirties. Or, even better yet, for someone in their twenties as I once was. Back then I was writing HTML code to design websites. Now, in my mid-forties, I couldn’t even figure out how to manipulate a template in WordPress. And that was frustrating.
I’m the type of person who is happy only when she knows everything about something. I would rather get a degree in WordPress—I really need someone to create that—than take a learning journey for a couple of weeks, bumbling along as I go and celebrating every little victory. Normal people do that. Normal people are okay not knowing some things and then conquering them anyway, no matter how long it takes.
It does not help that my ability to learn has diminished as I’ve gotten older. I hate to admit it. I hate that it’s a thing, but it’s definitely a thing. I noticed it for the first time when I went back to school for my bachelor’s degree in my late thirties. My first class was College Algebra. For as many years as I had spent in school taking endless classes—because of this endless need to know everything—I had somehow avoided the general education math credit. But it would be no problem, I thought. I was a whiz at algebra in high school. I remembered very clearly my fellow students struggling whereas I understood everything. Homework was almost fun. I would even wait until the last minute to pump it out because why spend precious after-school time on something so easy? As a thirty-eight year old, however, I cried every single day. I not only couldn’t grasp the concepts I once didn’t have to spend any brain cells on, I was mostly upset because I remembered how easy it once was. I was convinced my brain had turned to mush in my ripe old age.
Apparently, it had. I was faced with memories of easily designing websites with code almost twenty years ago. There were no drag-and-drop options. If I wanted a color change, there were no drop-down menus. I had to find the RGB on that baby. And I did. But not this time. I couldn’t figure out the drop-down options on one of the templates I tried, so I abandoned it completely. It kept reminding me that I was now stupid where I had once been almost bored because it was so easy.
I eventually found a template that I managed to wrangle into a website and, I’m happy to say, it’s better than the one I abandoned. My girlfriends laughed—as they very well should have since I was being ridiculous—but this isn’t just a website. It’s a triumph over deep-seated personal issues of perfectionism. And just like I abandoned that template and its stupid drop-down menu issues, I am embracing this forum as a place to abandon my issues with perfectionism.
So, I offer this space to you as a place to view vulnerability, imperfection, and my mushy old lady brain.
Enjoy!