Erika Mitchell's Blog

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Holidays are dicey when you don’t have family in the area. They’re especially dicey after a divorce. When you don’t have family in the area AND you were particularly close with your ex’s family, with whom you’ve spent every major holiday for almost half your life?

Well, that turns the holidays into the emotional equivalent of a room carpeted with LEGOs that you have no choice but to cross with bare feet.

I have spent so much time crying about Thanksgiving. Missing the interactions I enjoy every year, the traditions, and the easy camaraderie of a family of people who’ve all known each other for ages. They’ve all cut me to pieces in different and painful ways. It’s important to grieve for these things because they are real and they mean something to me and now I have to let them go. It sucks.

I was fully prepared to wallow this Thanksgiving. My plan was to try to sleep through the whole damn thing. My ex will have the kids, because the kids have spent every major holiday with his family for their entire lives and it would be cruel to take that away from them. It never even occurred to me to have the kids for Thanksgiving, because what can I offer them? Nothing as fun as a day of the food they’ve grown up eating for this holiday and fun times running around with their cousins while their aunts and uncles and grandparents ask them how school is going. I figured I’d just stay in bed and see if I could induce a mild coma for the day.

My closest friends, who have become more or less my emotional watchdogs, deemed this an entirely depressing and unhealthy approach to the holiday and set about rectifying the situation with their trademark efficiency and kindness.

Instead of wallowing in sadness this Thanksgiving, I get to spend the day of with my best friend, Nicole, and her family. Nicole has carried me through this divorce with her tiny but very powerful hands, and she and her family are making me feel welcome and wanted and loved. I won’t be alone and probably hungry because I’m too depressed to feed myself. I’ll be laughing and holding babies and eating too much with people who watched me grow up.

And the day after Thanksgiving? My faithful and funny friends Jennifer and Aaron, both of whom have spent considerable time letting me cry while they patted my head and assured me my life wasn’t over, are hosting a Friendsgiving I can bring my kids to. Their kids and my kids have been friends since most of them were in diapers, so my kids will get to have a second Thanksgiving with their friends. Instead of feeling like I have nothing to offer my kids, I now have something awesome to offer them.

Suddenly, this bleak and lonesome holiday is full of people bending over backwards to make me feel loved and like I’m not alone. I never was unloved or alone, but that’s the peculiar and occasionally malicious magic of the holidays. They can screw with your head if you let them, and I did let them.

Thankfully, I have friends who are mighty and hardworking and have taken it upon themselves to make sure my life gets put back together in the most joyful way possible.

I still cry about Thanksgiving sometimes, but now it’s because I feel so humbled and taken care of. It’s an extraordinary thing to be loved precisely how you are amid the mess and pain of a divorce. You know who’s a lot of work to be friends with? People going through divorce.

This year, I’m thankful to be rich in my friendships. I get twice as many Thanksgivings now. How could I be anything but grateful? (And full {and a little fatter.})

Everything seems a little lighter now, the day after election day. It was comforting to see a little more balance return to the checks and balances system, and to watch history being made as LGBTQ candidates and women of color were elected in record numbers.

Perhaps most encouraging was seeing so many people engaged in the process and actually voting. I’ve voted in every single election since 2004, and I’m usually called an over-achiever for voting in local and mid-term elections. I guess it’s just nice to see so many other people over-achieving with me.

Seeing all the social media posts of strangers encouraging other strangers to vote regardless of party felt like unity. I hadn’t realized how long it’s been since the country felt united about anything and it felt so hopeful, even if just for a moment.

Good job, voters. You made a difference, especially those of you who stood in long, overcrowded lines while machines broke and facilities ran out of of ballots. As far as I’m concerned, that’s damn heroic.

The title of this post is an accurate description of how my life feels at the moment, as well as the title of one of my favorite Radiohead songs. Wins all around!

So being a working mom is a new experience for me. Stay at home parents work, especially the ones who stay at home with babies. Babies are a ton of work. They theoretically sleep a lot, but it does get time-consuming to lose hours making sacrifices to archaic gods of sleep and satisfying the ever-changing demands of a tiny being who needs to sleep but refuses to.

When kids get older, I think the amount of work a stay at home parent does becomes somewhat discretionary. If your kids are at school all day, you get to choose what to do with that time. Some parents choose to get really involved with volunteering in their kids’ school. Some parents kick it on the couch amid stacks of sweet-smelling laundry and have long lunches with friends. There’s a wide range of activities available to stay at home parents with older kids, and to a large extent I feel like whatever choice they make is valid because they’ve probably put the time in serving in the implacable baby trenches.

Before I started looking for a job, I was at something of a crossroads in my life. My kids were both about to be in school full time, and my inclination was to give novel writing my full focus. I had it all mapped out. I was an author with a plan (and a plot). Divorce derailed that plan thoroughly.

Now I have a job I feel I’m slowly starting to become competent at doing. My life has gone from having lots of space to a tightly coordinated series of satisfying activities. There’s little space, but more growth. There’s less free time, but more mental stimulation. I’m on my phone less, and I don’t mind a bit.

As far as I can tell, being a working single mother is spinning plates. When one of them starts to wobble and tilt, I reach out and give it a spin. Just as that one recovers, another slows. Over and over, I’m monitoring and adjusting and fixing. All my plates are spinning nicely at the moment, thank goodness. I’m going to keep it that way. My policy for at least the next few months is to not add anything to any of these plates.

Maintenance is the key for now, I think. It’s easy to get addicted to the chaos of plates crashing everywhere, but I’m learning to appreciate the soft whir of fewer plates spinning steadily.

I’ve been thinking a lot about contentment lately. As a proud card-carrying member of the Type A Nutjobs club, the goal is often paramount for me and the process is usually more of an inconvenience. I always want to get to the meal, and the process of cooking it is the barrier to my enjoyment of my eventual goal.

The trouble is, I often get to the meal and immediately start thinking about everything that comes after it. The clean-up, the dessert, the clean-up from dessert. Instead of enjoying the goal I worked toward, my mind immediately flashes forward to whatever is happening next. The next goal. And on and on it goes in a never-ending cycle of toil and accomplishment.

You can get a lot done that way. What I’ve been thinking about, though, is the pause that should take place between the completion of one goal and the assumption of another. Not taking that pause robs you of something, and my new challenge is to enjoy the pause.

For example, I got a job! I’m hired! I started my new job last week! These are all happy things!

I worked so hard to find a job all summer. It was stressful and difficult and demoralizing. When the offer letter finally came, I burst into relieved tears. I was incredulous. The whole thing didn’t seem real. A full-time job with benefits and amazing commute (I work from home) and awesome pay? I couldn’t believe it.

When I was done texting my loved ones about the news, anxiety and worry set in. Would I be able to do the job? What should I expect? What if I sucked?

This lofty goal I’d worked so hard to attain was accomplished, but I only spent a scant few hours enjoying it before my mind moved on to new things to worry and plan for. Lack of a pause in this pivotal moment robbed me of some of the joy I could have felt, and I’d like to change this.

I’d like to enjoy the process more so that the goals, once attained, can be enjoyed more fully. (I listened to a podcast on growth mindsets today, and I’m going to give it a shot. I’m not bad at enjoying the pause, it’s just an area where I have a lot of opportunities to practice and improve my skills.)

If my overarching goal during this time in my life is to heal, rebuild, and cultivate peace, the best thing I can do is to start seeking out the pauses and stop fighting them so much. Stop trying to fill them with something else and learn to be comfortable just…being. To understand that I don’t always have to be striving toward something. That it’s okay, healthy even, to exist and maintain for a bit.

I’ve worked really hard to get to a stable place. The kids are stable, our apartment is stable, my job is stable. Life is stable. I worked hard for it. How about I enjoy that for a bit, instead of casting around for new projects/stresses/tasks to fill a perceived void? If there’s a path to contentment, I think it must start there.

If change is a wave that picks you up and carries you somewhere you’ve never been, divorce after a long marriage is a tsunami. It’s not so much a wave as it is suddenly, improbably, a completely different ocean. The water level rises and rises. You watch helplessly while familiar landmarks on the ground below shrink and become insignificant.

The tsunami holds its breath with you at the top. Terrified, you teeter amid the froth and confused sea animals on its crest.

And then the whole damn thing lets go all at once and rockets you far past what is comfortable, well beyond what is safe, at a speed so fast it makes your vision blur.

Not even a tsunami lasts forever, and eventually even that non-negotiable and unrelenting momentum will begin to exhaust itself. You start to slow down. By the time the water that’s gripping you is only a few feet deep, you start to see parts of the terrain below through all the muck and silt. It’s not where you were before, not by a long shot, but it’s not Mars, either, and that’s comforting.

This part, right here, is where I’m at right now. My ex-husband moved out in May, and then in June I moved my kids and myself to an apartment and began looking for a job. School let out the day after we moved, so this summer has felt simultaneously like the slowest and fastest of my life.

Once the stress and fatigue of moving was finished, the unstructured nature of summer grated on me. Our routine felt anchor-less. Normally summer is filled with trips and camps and plans, but I chose not to do that this year because we needed a little monotony. We needed healing. We needed to get used to our new normal. We needed space. The tsunami picked the kids up, too, and they needed time to come to terms with where it finally set us down.

Shortly after my ex-husband moved out, I had an hour-long panic attack while the kids were at school. I hyperventilated so much I almost passed out when it was time to stand up and go pick up my daughter. I somehow made it to her school, where a friend noticed I was woozy and sat with me for an hour until I’d calmed down enough to drive.

The enormity of the decision I’d made and trying to wrap my head around all the repercussions of it had been threatening to swamp me for weeks. The panic attack happened because I finally let them.

I had taken my stable life and upended it like a silverware drawer onto a counter top, and I needed to have just the slightest bit of a breakdown before I started reorganizing the drawer. This long, boring summer is a respite from all that work, because I’m at the long tail of the cleanup now. The drawer is back in the kitchen island, most of the cutlery has been rearranged, and now all that’s left is to vacuum up the crumbs from the floor and wipe off the counter.

In the last three months I’ve moved twice, mutually decided to end my marriage, and sent out over seventy-five job applications. I’ve done over twenty phone screens, a handful of in-person interviews, and requested no fewer than a million pep talks from my friends.

I’m being super picky about which jobs I pursue, because they’ll need to suit me and accommodate the realities of being a single mom. I think my job search is going well, as well as they ever go at least, and something tells me I’m nearing the end of it.

All at once, my long, anchor-less summer doesn’t seem so annoying. Getting a job is the last item to go in dealing with the aftermath of the tsunami. I’m almost certain getting used to a full-time job and commuting and after-school pickups and all that jazz is going to take a lot of time to get used to, but getting a job is the last crucial element. For some reason, I feel like it’s going to happen soon.

The water is flowing around our ankles as it recedes back to the ocean. The kids and I made it. We aren’t where we were before, but there will be joy here, too. In fact, there already is. A lot of it. We’re healing and rebuilding during this long, unprecedented summer, and it’s going well. Every day for the last three months I’ve told myself, “Everything is going to be fine,” but I’m beginning to doubt this. From where I sit, I don’t think everything is going to be fine. I think it’s going to be great.

I haven’t worked on anything book related in over two months. Other than the long break I took in 2016, this is the longest I’ve gone without writing something for fun since I started. The plan for this summer had been to finish my female-led story and pitch it at ThrillerFest, where I would hopefully connect with an agent who thought the story was awesome.

Instead, I got divorced. Life came to a complete stop, and I found that even in the rare quiet moments I had to myself between crying jags and moving, I couldn’t write. I’d look at the substantial stack of edits on my work-in-progress and feel nothing. No inspiration, no interest, just static.

Oh, I also held a baby alligator. No big deal. (Yes, it was. It was a big deal.)

It was okay, though, because I personally can’t create something from nothing and I had a whole lot of nothing to give. I was exhausted in every possible way, but I knew it wouldn’t last forever. Every storm eventually passes, and I knew that if I was patient with myself this one would blow over as well.

So I bided my time. I read books, I took naps, I had fun with friends, I watched TV. I didn’t think about my writing much, if at all, and I tried not to feel too jealous when my writer friends posted amazing pictures of ThrillerFest online.

And then it happened: I felt the tiniest little niggling urge to write. It started with talking to my friend about the tiny northeastern Washington town I based my character’s hometown on. My friend suggested we go visit it in person, and just like that I wanted to write again. I wanted to explore tiny far-flung places and mine them for inspiration. I wanted to revisit my characters and fix my structural issues.

More than my apartment (which I love) and rediscovered ability to smile and laugh easily, I think my renewed desire to write is the best indicator that this storm is well and truly clearing out. I’m so glad. So grateful for my friends who pulled me through it, so glad my ex and I are making this as easy on each other as we can, and so relieved that I want to write again.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It turns out that if you have the right friends, you can get through just about anything.

Look at me, I’m divorced so now I’m all moody and mysterious…

Kidding.

I’ve been ruminating on a concept for awhile and have decided I like it so I’m going to share.

You ever have a deep fear that stems from vulnerability? Even the most self-sufficient of people have vulnerabilities. You can be swimming in cash with the brightest future ahead of you, but everyone has an Achille’s Heel and it’s usually this vulnerability that keeps us up at night or stops us from doing things we might otherwise want to.

For me, my Achille’s Heel was my lifestyle. I was a stay at home mother writing books and freelancing, living in an affluent area with plenty of spare time and very few limits on what I could or could not do. I wasn’t happy because my marriage was over and I knew it but hadn’t called it yet, but I was comfortable.

I knew I was miserable, and I knew what I had to do if I was ever going to find a way out of my dysfunctional situation, but I was scared. Scared of what I would lose if I voluntarily abdicated the safety and predictability of what I had. Anxious about what my life would be because I had no idea what it would look like. Worried and lonely and hesitant to take that final step.

That final step was a form of death. It was the death of the life I knew, and I had no idea what would happen after I died.

This is me writing from the afterlife, I suppose, because the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this painful experience has been that yes, there is an afterlife. It’s scary as hell to take that final leap into the unknown, and there will be challenges here, too, but here’s the liberating thing:

You can die lots of times in your life.

This is something survivors know, and it’s important because it’s the key to not letting fear dictate your actions. If something scares you because it’s legitimately scary, like a man-sized spider or being caught in an elevator with Harvey Weinstein, that’s wise. But if something scares you because you want it but you’re afraid of what will happen if you go for it?

Take the frigging leap. Seriously. If it ends badly? Dust yourself off and congratulate yourself for having attempted the pursuit. But if you go for it, if you ask for what you want or take steps to advocate for what you really need but haven’t been getting, and it ends well? Imagine that. Imagine what could be, and go for it.

There’s life after death, it turns out, and you can make it what you want if you’re willing to work for it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called “Honest” about wanting to be more transparent and vulnerable online. Then my life imploded and I turtled up again faster than you can say, “But wait, I thought you said –”

Long story short? I moved us into a new house single-handedly, which threw my back out and wore me down to the bone, and then my husband and I made the difficult but mutual decision to end our twelve and a half-year marriage.

There is no simple explanation for what happened, nor will I attempt to offer a complicated one. The unfortunate truth about relationships is that they change over time, and what our relationship changed into was better suited to something between friends. So that’s what we are. We’re friends who are raising our two awesome kids together.

What this means for me personally is that I’m looking for a job. A publishing career is great, but I’m not Stephen King-level and, as such, need to transition to something that will reliably pay for super fun things such as rent, groceries, clothing, etc.

I’m heartbroken, but I’m alive. I’m grieving, but I’m healthy. As a survivor, I know what it is to put myself back together after something’s ripped me apart. I have the most supportive friends on the planet, delightful kids, and a caring ex-husband with whom to raise them.

I’m eager to jump back into the workforce and contribute to a team again. I’m looking forward to inside jokes and team building activities, for avid conversations about the latest episodes of Westworld and coffee breaks.

Change is difficult and painful. My comfort zone was vast and I hadn’t shifted from it in a long time, but now that I’m venturing out I find I’m less scared than I thought I would be.

So how’s that for vulnerable and honest? When spots teams have lost some players and the new teammates haven’t found a good groove yet, they say the team is in a rebuilding year. I think that’s a good way to describe my life right now. I’m in a rebuilding year. Wish me luck.

Last week, my husband and I took our kids to Mexico for a week. A friend of Wesley’s owns a vacation home there, and he had no sooner informed us that we could stay there any time we liked than I had booked tickets and begun arranging for passports.

This house was a revelation. Being entrenched Pacific Northwesterners, we are used to our buildings and houses being self-contained against the weather. Screens cover windows against insects, hallways are indoors so you don’t freeze to death whenever you leave a room, and outdoor pools spend most of the year covered by insulating bubbles so they don’t freeze over.

I didn’t realize how oppressive it is to live this way all the time without a break until we got to Mexico. The outdoor hallways, one of which is pictured above, threw us all for a loop at first but by the end of the second day they felt perfectly natural. Fresh breezes, vibrant flowers everywhere, and a view of the ocean from the terrace and pool.

Believe me when I say, it was as close to perfect as a real place can be.

After seven straight months of surgery and childcare, it was a balm. There was one afternoon where I spent four hours reading a book, drinking cocktails, and eating tortilla chips in a shaded cabana and I tell you this now with absolute honesty: I have watched with wonder while my kids were born, I have celebrated the publication of three of my books, and I have seen Carmen (the opera) live, but that was the absolute best four hours of my life.

You know what’s funny, though? Is how much work it took to relax those first few days. You’d think relaxing would be effortless, but the more tightly wound you are, the more intentional you have to be about unwinding.

After a massage at a swanky nearby spa, I selected a chaise surrounded by waterfalls on the spa’s private patio. A fellow American occupied the seat beside me, and when I sat down she sighed deeply and said, “I’ve been out here for an hour already. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

When I agreed, she collected her things and stood. “It’s our last day,” she said with regret. “I had probably better spend some more time looking at the ocean before we go.”

We parted ways, but what she said stuck with me. It’s interesting the pressures we put on ourselves to savor and really experience our vacations. For good reason, because who wants to spend their vacation in paradise glued to their phones inside their room? But still, I just don’t remember needing to try so hard to relax when I was a kid. When you’re a kid, vacation starts as soon as you leave your house.

Adults need a bit more discipline to truly savor their vacations, which seems like a contradiction but isn’t. It’s difficult to sit in silence on a patio. One’s fingers itch for the stimulation of a phone screen. But if you deny that impulse, and force yourself to stop and breathe and be, the reward is worth it.