We did it.  In the nearly three months since my last blog I was able to GET AWAY from the craziness of our day-to-day lives.  And I did it TWICE.  And I feel human.  Connected.  With a baseline of peace that is a foundation for how I’m living today. WHEW.

We did it first as a family and took a vacation for a week.  Let me give some context. I have had the hardest and best job of my career for the last four years, so our time away as a family has been great, but there was always the necessary break away time to go get on the computer.  I can honestly say that on every day off I have taken in four years, I worked for at least two hours, if not more.  I know, I am grossing out on myself as I write this, but I want to be honest.

But for this trip two months ago, I was completely unplugged.  I left the laptop at home.  I got to focus 100% on my family.  And it took the form of things like jumping on a trampoline.  Playing games.  Reading books together.  Taking walks. Hanging out.  We stayed with my husband’s family in Minnesota.  I am blessed with exceptional in-laws.  My kids played with their cousins.  There was so, so much joy.  I was able to be present with everyone – and laugh and listen and not continually glance at my blackberry. 

When we came home there was a different dynamic.  It was like hitting a reset button.  I felt like I came back from the brink, got a chance to take stock, reshuffle myself and find a way back into the family groove.

That has manifested in small ways.  When I get home from work now, I don’t go straight into clean up mode. I wrestle.  I giggle. I draw pictures.  I roll around on the floor yelling “HiiiiiYahhhhh!” When it is time for the girls to go to bed, I race my oldest to the sink to brush our teeth.  I tease her, I tickle her. We play and play and play.

The second get-away was alone with my better half.  We splurged and stayed in a fabulous place north of LA in Ojai Valley.  It is the most money we have spent on ourselves since we had kids – nice dinners and I actually had a spa treatment.  We had a fireplace in our room.  We walked around holding hands.  We got to talk about more than our jobs, our kids and our home projects.  We cracked each other up. We reminisced; we thanked God for the paths of our lives – independently and together. 

Reconnecting with him has manifested in bigger ways.  In the last few weeks we have faced some challenges that have pushed us both to our mental and physical limits.  We have discharged on each other but that time reconnecting has helped us both come back from the brink and find ways to help each other. 

Our next time away is booked for August.  Same plan to take time away as a family and disconnect from everything else.  I can’t wait.

So here I am trying to get my shit together – as described in my last blog – and I’m kind of sucking at it.  Trying to find my way to a sunny place, and make a few inroads – baby steps, really – and then a storm comes crashing through.  So thought I would share a recent story about how my better half called me out.  Big Time.

 I lost it on Sunday with both kids melting down, a work deadline looming, and a limited night of sleep.  Here is how it manifested.   I said out loud in my best mean-ass-bitch-voice and right in his face “I didn’t sign up for this.”  Okay, I didn’t mean it. Well, I kind of did, but I will cop to the fact that I was tripped up in all kinds of emotional crap at the moment. And saying that to him is like taking a fistful of his hair and slamming his head against a wall. 

And to make it worse, I didn’t apologize.  Did I mention that I’m a total ASSHOLE?

So we are in the car a short time later driving away from neighbors who think we beat our children because their meltdowns were so loud, and he says “Q, you have to check yourself.” And then tells me that my increasing stress over the last few months has resulted in a few too many pot shots at my best friend and he’s just about done with keeping his cool.  And he’s totally right.  I’m taking a lot of this out on him and my job is to get my shit together and show up as the present and considerate partner that I should be showing up as…

And here is where all that work I’ve talked about pays off.  We have a reasonable conversation about this dynamic, about the things I’m doing to address said stress and how he is on board and available to support me.  This all could have gone to a pretty bad place, but I’m blessed to be in a marriage that keeps the communication straight and above-board instead of festering below the surface.  And we have learned a language that enables us to talk without getting all sideways and destructive at times like these when one of us is, put simply, batshit.

The clouds haven’t cleared, but I think a massive tornado was abated. It got me present and that night was actually a pretty fun night with friends and family, and I really enjoyed myself in a way that I hadn’t been able to in awhile.

I’ve fallen off the wagon on multiple fronts.  My blog is dying on the vine and I have about 10 of them written in my head but have yet to sit the hell down and write them out.  So before I get into the stories of the last few months – one of which will be entirely dedicated to kids and babies BARFING – I thought I would start with how I’ve stopped taking my own advice and found myself in a slump.

I’d like to blame it on work.  Sure, it has gotten a lot crazier in the last couple months and I’m in yet another hotel room, working from the road.  I’d like to blame it on lack of sleep – a solace which has alluded me for going on five years now and the bags under my eyes have become a permanent fixture of my face.  I’d like to blame it on just about every other thing I can think of but I really just can’t. I can only blame me.

I’ve stopped exercising.  I’ve stopped eating right.  I’ve had way too many cocktails. I’ve stayed awake and watched bad TV when I could be sleeping.  I’ve had gallons of coffee and too little water. My hands are swollen and my face is dry.  My body is getting beaten up and is screaming at me to MOVE and FEED IT WELL but I’m ignoring the message and digging myself deeper into a hazy place of body and mind where I pretty much feel like shit all the time.

And so the cycle must be broken and it’s not anyone else’s job to do it.  But man, being in this funk is like trying to run in water.  I’m weighted down and caught up in this thornbush of self-pity and angst.  Seriously – I’m angst-ridden.  I can prove it. A couple weeks ago, I watched one of those stupid Twilight movies in another hotel in another city and actually sympathized with that winy chick who has a couple really hot, nice guys loving on her. WHO AM I???

So this is my official kicking myself in my own ass to get back on the wagon.  I started with planning a weekend away with my much better half and no kids.  That is a nice little light at the end of a very dark tunnel.  I even got my slow, saggy ass back to bootcamp a couple days ago and it felt good in a can’t-breathe-holy-shit kind of way.  I ate a cookie today but f-it, I’m in San Francisco and if you ever have a cookie from Specialty’s it’s like you have died and gone to heaven.

Cheer me on, fellow Modern Moms, I’m on the road back to someplace sunny.

I’ve talked before in my blog that I believe in a higher power, that, just when you think you can’t take another minute of bullshit, puts in your path an angel (or two) to remind you to stay present.  It just happened to me recently and I wanted to share it.

I was feeling pretty sorry for myself and went back to my office to get my shit together.  I berated myself for being so emotional, and for taking it so personally.  I looked at the pictures of my family and tried to focus on how much they love me, and the fact that they are proud of me.  I thought about the nearly 20 years that I have worked and all the mistakes and all the successes and tried to remind myself that I’m good at what I do.  And even with all that, I sat at my desk and cried.

I swear I had great plans for being a mom.  When I was pregnant for the first time, we lived in the hip, progressive Castro neighborhood of San Francisco.  Babies wore organic cotton clothes and played with handmade toys.  Families were like a Todd Parr book – all different colors and shapes and orientations.  In this cocoon of alternative lifestyle acceptance, I created a platform that, as a mom, I vowed that my kids would not be force-fed the commercialization of conservative, rigid values.  I vowed that I would never let my daughter engage in media that perpetuated male domination of women, or force-fed the unrealistic expectations of a society that had no room for exceptions to bygone rules.

Yeah, right.

Cut to my daughter’s fourth birthday - I’m standing 6 parents-deep jockeying for a great photo and jumping up and down yelling “Look at Sleeping Beauty!!! Look!!! It’s SNOW WHITE, OH MY GOD,” from our seats at Disneyland’s Holiday Parade.  And that night I am actually brought to tears by seeing my precious little monkey girl absolutely stoked beyond words when actresses dressed up like Disney princesses make their way to our table (at the famed Ariel’s Grotto), introducing themselves in character.  Her little face is enraptured.  It’s a joy that transcends every intention I have ever had, every vow I had ever made to myself.   

Somewhere in these four years I’m wondering if I’ve sold out. 

Let me begin with saying that I have serious issues with the fantasy that Disney* perpetuates.  As an independent women with family and friends who are all different colors and sexual orientation, I watch the princess movies now and want to cringe.  So I tried to keep her away from its influence for as long as I could.  I’m actually not really sure where and when she was first introduced to the Disney Princess phenomenon…but it was about a year ago and it was ALL Snow White ALL the time.  My best friend, her godmother, was right there to pile on the costumes and my mom followed suit with the videos - it was like the flood gates opened.  I fought it at first, tried to hide some of it, forced my kid to wear her androgynous Lucky Brand outfits that she now hated, and then realized that I was being really, really, LAME.

She loves princesses.  They make her happy. So I can build a wall in between me and her or I can get down on my knees and play with her deep in her world.  I realized that the lesson here is that she is going to dig on stuff that I will not really know, understand or agree with to become the person that she is going to become whether I like it or not.  And while I specifically hate the politics Disney represents, that is really my agenda.  They don’t have anything to do with the joy it brings to my kid.  I think that maybe my job as her mom is to learn it or try to understand whatever it is that fires her up – because if I don’t, I am only going to alienate her. 

So I sold out and I’m kind of loving it. That’s right.  I even dressed up like Sleeping Beauty for Halloween – which I didn’t love at first because I looked ridiculous – until she saw me and was so happy that I forgot about how dorky I looked.  We read all the princess stories (with Todd Parr still sprinkled in!), sing the princess songs (with a little Lady GaGa sprinkled in), and make up all kinds of princess stories (including ones where princesses grow up and fall in love with other princesses).  And there is a lot more harmony in our home. 

I know that she will move on to the next thing.  Bugs.  Chemistry.  Reaganomics.  Some I will be comfortable with and some I won’t.  Some will make me angry, I’m sure.  But what I know is that I will try very, very hard to overcome my own agenda, perceptions and emotions, to make room for myself to get educated on whatever it is that fires her up.  And play in her world.

This week I celebrated my 7^th wedding anniversary.  And what I mean by “celebrated” is this – my partner and I spent the night together at Target buying holiday dresses for our girls for an upcoming family photo shoot.   

So while it wasn’t the most romantic of anniversaries, here’s why it rocked – I got to walk around Target holding hands with the greatest person I have ever known who I have hands-down been in hard-core love with for SEVEN YEARS.  WOOHOO!!!!  This is the guy that, in the middle of the insanity that is our lives as executives and parents, he will look at me and smile and my stomach still does the same crazy somersaults it did when we were first dating.  Seriously. 

Here’s why.  In the simplest of terms, I married up.  He is a fundamentally better person than me, and in committing to love him for the rest of my life, I also committed to always striving to be the best person I can be, because that is what he does too.   This ongoing dynamic has been the easiest thing and the hardest thing I have ever done.   

And when you are doing this, you have to really look at yourself and what drives you.  So loving someone so deeply can be really, really scary because it brings up the “emotional baggage” that we all have.  Falling in love with him was easy.  Stepping up and being the best partner I could be to him wasn’t. 

Not to get too psycho-babble, but I have abandonment issues.  I have this deep-seated belief that whatever you love goes away.  It took me a lot of years of counseling to be able to write that.  When I was 8 years old, the love of my life, my daddy, was crippled with cancer and died after a heart-breaking battle with the disease.  What’s amazing is that our family got through it and my mom remarried a few years later to a man who became a father to me in the most loving and compassionate way I could ever imagine.  So while my abandonment stuff runs deep, it has been buttressed by the love and support of my family overall.  I think this is why I was able to grow up and be the functioning, successful person I was when I met my future husband.

A few years into our time together I started to see patterns in my behavior that were pretty unsavory.  It was me at my worst – cold, distant and sad.  So I did what I call “doing the work.” I got back into counseling, and recognized that the fears triggered by loving someone so much weren’t actually real, but emotional memories.  That helped me to separate myself from them and get present with the life I had in the moment, freeing me to love without barriers. Do the emotional memories ever go away? Nope.  Does it get easier to manage them? Yep. 

We all have our shit – to put it not-so-politely.  And I really believe that if you figure it out and learn to manage it, you can love and be loved in the way that we all want to love and be loved.  I think I am blessed that I met someone who I wanted so bad that I was willing to go down into the well of my own crap so I could figure it out and build a life with him.    That’s what I celebrated this week.  And I hope I get to celebrate it for many more years ahead.

I realized when I wrote this blog title that I may be leading you to think this one is about sex.  Nope.  I mean the C-word that has rocked millions and millions of lives:  Cancer.  I would imagine that just about everyone knows that October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  And I can’t let this month end without writing about it.

Here’s the deal.  Bladder cancer took my dad when I was eight years old.  And about 11 years ago, breast cancer tried to take my mom.  Tried and lost, thank you very much.  So this past weekend I got to watch her stand up in front of hundreds of people dressed in pink t-shirts, surrounded by thousands of pink balloons and kick off a walk to raise money for women fighting breast cancer – because October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  It was awesome.

A great way to give you an idea of how my mom lives as a cancer survivor is to tell you a real story.  She has a black-tie event coming up next month and we are talking about what she is going to wear.  We are in her house surrounded by lots and lots of framed pictures and I see one that has her in a glimmering red gown.  I say, hey, how about wearing that dress?  And she laughs and says, oh can’t wear that one because that was back when I had two boobs.  No sadness, just badass matter-of-factness.  Over a decade ago she called her tumor Saddam and made the doctors play “I Believe I Can Fly” in the operating room. 

When she was giving her speech at the walk last weekend, my mom told the crowd that she asked God to let her live long enough to meet her grandchildren, and she has.  During her speech, I walked through the crowd taking pictures.  And then I looked closer at the faces of the people in the crowd.  All of them touched by the C-word.  There were faces of empowerment; of survival and of pride.  There were also faces of loss and of heartbreak – women like me, but whose moms didn’t live long enough to meet their children.  Families like ours, but their daughters didn’t live to have children.  Women who asked God for more time, but didn’t get it. 

The tragedy and unfairness of the C-word is overwhelming.  Which I think is one of the biggest reasons why the people affected by it fight back, and fight back HARD.  Cancer victims and the people who love them are like little armies all over the world who are fighting multiple battles.   They fight for more than just staying alive.  We fight for fair access to treatment; for raising awareness and money for a cure.  We fight for education and early testing.  We fight, and fight and fight. 

There are signs of hope.  According to the National Cancer Institute, rates of survival after being diagnosed with breast cancer are up to 78% for patients between the ages of 20 and 49. New forms of detection and new treatments are becoming available.  And walks like the one we did raised money specifically to help cover the treatment costs for hundreds of women who don’t have access to proper care (www.desertcancerfoundation.org).  Our small armies are making a massive imprint as together we FIGHT.