That's Life by Jenny Gardiner

We recently ran into friends whose daughter is now working a "real job" in Manhattan. They mentioned how tough it was for her to leave summer vacation and return to the grind — made all the harder because they never worked conventional 9-5 jobs while raising her, thus didn't model the way most of the country works. This is the same for our family: my husband runs his own business, which has given him the wonderful flexibility to devote extra time to family when needed, while also being able to earn enough to support us all. This thankfully afforded me the chance to stay home with our children, and eventually write.

We wondered how growing up in a world where work hours were more malleable and in which it was rare to see anyone wearing business attire might affect our kids' career choices. When I was a kid, men (and it was usually men back then) often remained with one company for their entire careers. I would struggle to have faith nowadays in a company being there for you the way they once were. I've seen far too many people blindsided by their company's laying them off with no advance notice, or worse still, left with no pension despite promises to the contrary.

There's something to be said for going it on your own if you can, and I think that appeals more and more to this generation of young adults who are weary of the conventional (and these days, lackluster) job market. Even more intriguing is the concept of eschewing the expected route, and making your way by hook or crook.

My daughter spent the past two months backpacking in Australia, and now hopes to move there: all it took was holding a koala bear to seal the deal. ("You had me at koala," as Jerry Maguire might say.) She said it was "the Bonnaroo of countries", referring to the famed music festival, at which people actively practice kindness. Her plan is to return as soon as her bank account will allow. I guess even glorious Central Virginia can't compete with a big-hearted country populated with adorable creatures with intoxicating menthol breath (eating nothing but eucalyptus will do that to you).

I struggle with the idea of "losing" my daughter to a land so far away, particularly when she was poised to enter the work force armed with enviable skills and potential. But I'd rather she be happy 10,000 miles from here waiting tables than be chained to a job that sucks the soul from her. To be young and commitment-free and able to carve your way in an unconventional way is enviable, and certainly brazen.

As Kendall traveled through Australia, I couldn't help but appreciate why she wanted to stay. Never have I seen such beautiful countryside as in her photographs. Plus, where else could you find unique animals carrying such cute babies in their pockets? And the Aussie accent? That alone is enough to keep you there. I'd have to take a pass on the Vegemite, though.

An American writer friend married to an Australian couldn't resist driving home the point on the glories of Oz, saying it was truly the best place to live for overall lifestyle. He said it's an egalitarian country with extremely friendly people, living wages, no guns, (no guns!), fantastic food, a month off annually for starting employees, six off (paid!) if you're with a company for a decade, and free medical care. He summed Aussie life up this way: sailing, drinking, surfing, cafes, drinking, and dodging sharks. Sounds like Shangri-La to me (minus the sharks).

It's like the anti-U.S., where there's a culture of some perverse pride in working non-stop till you drop dead. Or where a frightening majority of the population can't even afford to take vacation. And a frightening minority wield the Oz-banned guns like a badge of unearned entitlement. Yep, I can see the appeal to Australia. Besides, what a salve to the insane American academic arms race she just spent her childhood navigating. Who could blame her? Especially as she sees friends taking jobs in which they are so miserable they go home and cry at night.

I read an article recently about a Swedish study on "collective restoration", the idea that if everyone took vacation at the same time we'd all be happier and healthier. It referred to a woman who heads up a university's work/life balance center, who herself refused vacations for ten years. What at work is so important that you can't give yourself the gift of a little getaway?

I'd heard of young graduates being lured by consulting and Wall Street firms with huge vacation packages. Yet those "in the know" say such packages are really just a test: employees who actually use the vacation time would pay for it by not being promoted. I asked my brother, a high-level muckity-muck of lord knows what at some consulting firm, if this was true.

"I'm the wrong one to ask," he said from his office on a Sunday. "I worked on Christmas day. I hardly ever take vacation."

Meaning: you want to get ahead, don't take care of yourself. Be a cog in the wheel and turn and grind and don't poop out. There's a term for it: the work martyr complex. Granted, this was coined by the US Travel Association, in an attempt to encourage more travel, less work. But it is indeed a condition plaguing too many in our country. Of course the irony is the ones who need vacation most, those working two and three minimum wage jobs just to get by, well, they aren't going to get vacation any time soon, sadly.

I heard Daimler has instituted an email-free vacation rule: life will go on at Daimler while employees decompress and restore themselves. What a novel idea whose time has come.

As a mom, I'll hate to have my daughter about as far away as possible from me, especially knowing there's a good chance she'll end up settling there. But I'll also take solace that she's chosen a place that speaks to her soul, where she's likely to find a healthy life balance. And what parent wouldn't be happy to see her child have the wisdom to follow that bliss?

Jenny Gardiner will be saving her pennies to visit her girl some day Down Unduh. Find her at www.jennygardiner.net

Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
find me on twitter here
find me on my website

When Hook-Ups Go Bad...Sorta ;-) by Jenny Gardiner

            A few weeks ago my son lost his phone. Which is not such an unusual thing; people lose phones all the time. But one minute he had it at work, the next, it seemingly evaporated.

            Now, normally, we'd have left it at that and not bothered to intervene in attempts to unearth the missing device — Kyle's a grown man, he could figure it out himself. But soon after the thing went AWOL, we realized this meant we were incommunicado with our son at a time in which we needed to figure out complicated scheduling details. With three kids returning from school and moving out of dorms and apartments, we had a lot of logistics to map out in a short period of time. Which meant many calls and texts between all kids to reach consensus. Orchestrating five people to settle on mutually agreed-upon dates is hard enough without one basically being cut out of all means of communications.

            Worse still, the battery hadn't been holding a charge on the phone, so its findability was dwindling with the passing hours. Oh, and that Find My iPhone app, designed to, uh, find your iPhone when it disappears? He hadn't remembered to download it. Oops.

            About a day or so after its mysterious disappearance, one of Kyle's friends came up with the clever idea to try to see if "he" showed up on the Tinder app. [Tinder, for the uninitiated, is a widely-used dating app that uses Facebook profiles to match compatible participants based on geographic location, mutual friends and shared interests. The app allows users to anonymously "like" or skip others, and if two users "like" each other, Tinder introduces enables to "chat", or, if things really go your way, hook up.]

             So his friend decided to check Tinder to see if my son's phone was beaming out its location, and sure enough, it emitted weak signals indicating it was within two miles of where they were.

            The problem was Kyle was in the midst of finals, with no time to embark on a wild goose chase hunting this thing down.

            But then I had what seemed like a brilliant idea: if indeed the phone was within two miles, that meant it was likely somewhere still at work, downtown. Which meant if someone closer to downtown logged onto Tinder and tried to locate my son's profile, it might confirm the phone's general location, greatly narrowing down the hunt. A no-brainer, if you ask me. And as the life-span of the dying battery was withering away, I knew we had to act fast.

            So I called my husband, who was, conveniently enough, downtown.

            "You've got to join Tinder, fast!" I urged him. And yeah, he had no idea what it was either, so I gave him a two-minute primer and pressed him to download the app and get to work.

            Five minutes later I got a phone call.

            "Man. My friends and I were single in the wrong century," he lamented, noting that Tinder seemed like a veritable free-for-all that would have meant nary a night alone back in the day. "But forget about that. Right now I'm having a big problem."

            Seems as soon as he entered his information and linked it to Facebook, he started being bombarded with "likes" from women nearby interested in "chatting" with him. It was like the slot machine bells pinging when you get three cherries on the jackpot, coins spilling out onto the floor. Which meant that in small-town-everyone-knows-everyone Charlottesville, soon someone would start wondering why my husband was seeking dates online. Bad enough. But worse still because he soon realized that he'd never find our son while looking for women on Tinder, so he had to change his preference. Which would have been even more provocative for the cognoscenti in this town, wondering why my husband was suddenly in search of men. Not only men, but substantially younger ones, because he had to narrow it down to Kyle's age in order to connect (never mind that little detail that Kyle would have had to stipulate that he was interested in not just men but those more than twice his age, so it was all a moot point, we realized too late). Names and pictures were popping up all over the place and it was all tied to my spouse's Facebook account, which was no doubt a rather amusing place to watch as this unfolded.

            "Help!" he said, stymied by the app. "I can't seem to stop all these people from connecting with me!"

            Of course by then I had tears streaming down my face, laughing as I was. "Call one of the kids to find out what to do. Meantime, I have to call my friend, who is going to love this story."

            Alas, said friend wasn't available, so I relayed the story to her husband. Who then decided to play a trick on my spouse and contacted him.

            "What in the world is going on?" he texted. "I'm getting calls from women asking if I know you because they saw your picture on some dating thing on Facebook and want to go on a date."

            My husband was mortified. All he was trying to do was locate the darned phone before the battery died forever. And now he was going to be seen as a serial creeper. He hemmed and hawed, tried to explain what was going on, when our friend burst out laughing. In the background was his wife, cracking up loudly over his quandary.

            At last my husband figured out how to delete his existence on the app, my dubious idea having backfired, albeit not without a large dose of entertainment. And a short while later, a co-worker found Kyle's phone, which had slipped behind a drink cooler, none the worse for its wear and tear. Giving us just enough time to figure out our kids' collective moves, while making sure no strange women would be making their own unwanted moves on my unwitting spouse.

  Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website

When the Parent Becomes the Student by Jenny Gardiner

I find that as a parent it’s easy to get caught up in being the teacher. While raising children for such an extended period of time, we have long been the ones in charge, the ones to impart lessons learned from our own hard-fought experiences (lessons our kids usually want nothing to do with learning). Moms and dads become habituated into being right, which isn't actually the best of habits, when it comes down to it.

But now that my kids are grown, more and more I'm finding that they've become the teachers, and I their student (sometimes willing, sometimes not so much). It's an interesting twist on the relationship but in many ways things seem to come full circle, which is nice role reversal.

Take for instance my son, who watched his peers signing on for big bucks jobs during the end of his senior year of college, and opted against that himself. Back when I was in college, that was pretty much what you did. (Well, except for those of us with degrees in Liberal Arts, who watched all of our peers making gobs of cash while we practically lived in cardboard boxes beneath bridge spans and begged for our supper). But nowadays I think our kids are learning that there's more to being happy than making lots of money. You're likely to be far more content when following your passion than filling your wallet.

My son did just that, instead choosing to travel for a while after working hard in college. And in so doing, was able to grow so much as a human being, immerse himself in vastly different cultures, learn a new language, and find inner peace under fairy Spartan living conditions. He reveled in being able to go with the flow, to be happy in the moment, and really grew to understand the importance of hard work. Such essential lessons to learn at such a young age, and I envy him that he was able to do that before becoming entrenched in the have-to's of life.

But not only did he do that, he also did it with a great level of fearlessness. So much of what holds us back in life is our fears: we need to arm our teachers for fear of random shooters, we practically strip naked (and remove our shoes) for fear of terrorists on planes, we need to live a life of fear in order to have a false sense of security. It's really a rather twisted way of living, when you think of it. At the end of the day, none of us has much control over our lives, and to spend so much of our waking hours trying to control things so that they don't go badly can end up being very self-defeating. You lose the true zest for life that way.

And speaking of fears, my older daughter teaches me often how important it is to not let worries win the day. Despite overwhelming fear of the unknown in going off to live in another country for a semester, she sucked it up and did it. And then proceeded to jump out of an airplane over the Swiss Alps, travel alone, staying in sketchy hostels at times, and even camp in the Sahara desert in Morocco despite not speaking a word of the language, which made travel there challenging. She shunned her anxieties and allowed herself the gift of going off to quite literally explore the world. It's not an easy thing to do; it's far simpler to be paralyzed with fear, which is what so many people opt for.

In addition, she has taught me so much about facing down adversity. In dealing with various medical problems over which she had no control, she has powered through hard times and kept a brave face going. It's more than many adults could do.

My younger daughter has shown me what strength and determination and hard work will get you. She worked hard enough to gain admission to an Ivy League school, no small feat. But then she had the maturity to decide the massive debt accrued by enrolling in such a school made little sense, and instead knew she would be perfectly happy at a highly-respected but more affordable school.

And she regularly proves to me that if you keep chipping away at a problem, a solution will be found. She has shown me time and again that if you fight through it, you will succeed.

Unfortunately, sometimes reflected off my children are my own vast shortcomings -- those things I desperately need to improve upon. It's my kids who will call me to task for being intolerant or critical or shrill. They're the ones who will remind me to not be impatient, or nosy, or annoying. And they'll gladly wince while telling me my jokes are painfully bad. They're sometimes too quick to find my faults but that's okay, because it's honest. I may not like what I see in the mirror they're holding up to me, but what better way to know what to prove upon? I don't know, maybe I'm just inherently quite flawed and they're wise to it. But I'd like to think this is just how the world works, and I'm at the tipping point now. It's their turn to get even, in a good way.

I've spent more than 20 years imparting my dubious wisdom on my kids, but it's abundantly clear they have much more to teach me: to follow your dreams, to do what makes you happy and happiness will follow, to struggle through adversity, to prove them all wrong.

I have become the Grasshopper to their Master Po (Forgive my bad Kung Fu reference), and I'm honored to be learning at their feet now.

Jenny Gardiner is mulling whether she has the courage to skydive too. Until then, you can find her at www.jennygardiner.net


Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website

Stuff It! by Jenny Gardiner

After a long discussion with friends over wine, I've concluded that the dilemma about what to do with one's "stuff" falls into two camps: one, the people who want to unload it all, ASAP, and the other, those who simply can't part with it. Ever. For clarity, I mean not just the belongings that you've accrued over the years, but also your home, where you're theoretically rooted. I get this, on a deep psychological (some might argue even neurotic) level. My parents engaged in a bitter divorce after I graduated from college, and in the battle that ensued between them, our mementos were held hostage by enemy combatants in a vitriolic emotional war. Over those tumultuous years, I lost all connection with my past: our things were either purged by a parent or hidden so that the other wouldn't get hold of it. The family home was gone, there was no place to return to recharge, no comfort zone that children often expect to exist forever. My husband on the other hand, has always been able to return at will to his childhood home, where his parents have lived since he was a small boy. There must be an element of comfort in being able to return home and quasi- flash back to a time when you were cared for, when your troubles aren't yours, they're still your parents. Obviously this can't last forever, but still. So for me, the idea of selling a home that is too big and involves too much maintenance, despite the logic in so doing, is anathema, even though our kids have grown and are embarking on their adult lives now. Yet I feel the need to always provide for my kids what my parents failed to do for me: a home, forever. But the logical me (yeah, believe it or not there is one, somewhere) knows this is crazy: You can't freeze your life in amber like a prehistoric insect for the infrequent visits from your adult children who have carved their own lives elsewhere in the world. Which brings me to that darned stuff. When my friends and I were talking, it became clear that we are of an age in which downsizing makes abundant sense. And I fully realize that 80 percent of the things taking up space in my home are imminently get rid-able: I have boxes in the basement from when I moved 15 years ago I've still not unpacked, so clearly I wouldn't miss them if they disappeared tomorrow. I think for me its more like I want to purge but I don't want to do the purging. I just want it to be gone. Another friend, took the opposite tack. She's even hanging on to very old sheets in case they ever buy a beach house. Only reason I save my threadbare linens is in case the basement floods (been there, done that). When it comes to what to do with our children's things, wow, do we diverge. One friend hardly waited till her daughter left for college before she took to her room in a maniacal cleaning binge, pitching half of what was there, convinced her daughter wouldn't notice. Which she apparently hasn't, so I guess she was right. But in my childhood household, all of my things just disappeared, leaving me no relic, no touchpoint of my upbringing, and I've always hated that. So you can safely assume I'm not ditching their stuff without their consent. It's tough to decide what to do with the kids' old toys. I wrestled with this for a while, but then I realize that half of them are made of plastic and will likely be revealed to be toxic by the time they have kids of an age to play with them. A handful of treasured toys is worth keeping, but most, not so much. The books are harder, as the memories of reading and re-reading, and re-reading some more are more embedded in my memory, thus inextricably linked to the books themselves. But I think I'm ready to bid farewell to all forty (or more) Magic School Bus books. They've served their purpose, and now it's time for another child to enjoy them. Nevertheless, part of me wants to just go wild on eBay with all of our junk. We have some tchotchkes from when a relative passed, things that showed up in a few boxes from UPS one day years ago that clearly no one in the very extended family wanted. The high point of this stash was a pair of the world's ugliest textured china poodles. To begin with, I have no fondness for poodles. But I really detest super ugly china poodles, and would actually enjoy winding up and smashing them against a wall, just for fun. But we can't do anything with them because they're Staffordshire, and hey, Staffordshire, for the uninitiated, is very high-end china. Never mind that these are the most hideous-looking fine china canines ever to grace the face of the planet. Someone out there might want to pony up a couple of hundred bucks for the things. Leaving your stuff for your kids to deal with is sort of a cop-out, because you leave them with the guilt of keeping or tossing. My sister-in-law finally reconciled herself that her grandmother's stuff isn't part of her life, and holding on to it won't mean her grandmother remains with her. It's merely an anchor to someone else's past. I've long joked that in the end all of our garbazh (read that with lower jaw jutted out with a pronounced French accent) is just that: crap that will end up in a flea market in Front Royal for strangers to pick through some day. I might as well collect my money for it now before it's too late! And the great thing is now I feel the same thrill in getting rid of this stuff I might have once felt in acquiring it. I say this, but as I watched the devastation unfold from Demon Storm Sandy, I appreciated even more the need for things, and the attachment to it. The ties that bind us can as easily ensnare us in their web as well as cocoon us in their security. To suddenly be without any of them? Unfathomable devastation. Because we naturally seek out the comfort of what we have when we're in the most need, and to not have it then is to remove the basest of security blankets. So I will temper my need to purge with my children's (and my) need to maintain a sense of home, no matter where they are. Jenny Gardiner is likely to be appearing at a yard sale near you, along with a whole lot of things she hopes you want. You can also find her at www.jennygardiner.net



  Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Where the Heart Is

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes by Jenny Gardiner

I've been thinking a lot about transitions lately, mostly because my own life has been riddled with transitions, the biggest being my recently becoming an empty-nester. Now, I long dreaded this particular transition; I had no idea how I could morph from living a life that has been all about my kids to releasing control for the most part and letting them take over the reins and having no one for whom to be accountable on a daily basis. But it's a part of life and we all have to go through it, like it or not. I've tried to tell myself this will result in plenty of freedom in my life, though I guess with that comes the potential to simply become unmoored, adrift while you try to figure out how to redefine your life.

Perhaps it was a little more dramatic how this unfolded, because not only did we send our youngest off to college a few weeks ago, but a week before that we sent our middle one off to study abroad in Europe, and then just last week bade farewell to my oldest (who graduated from college in May), who left for a year-long adventure in which he'll be off-the-grid, incommunicado, in remote stretches of the world. So not only are my kids gone, but two of them are essentially unreachable, and sadly I can't just pick up the phone and call, or text or email just to touch base with them. I've sort of gone from immersion in my kids' lives to extrication, in one fell swoop.

As an avowed extrovert, I have been wholly unprepared for this screeching halt to my world of a perpetual buzz of activity. As a mom first, writer second, I learned long ago to pick up and go with my laptop and write when I could, be it soccer practice or pick-up line at school or roadtrips to soccer matches in different cities. At home I worked at my desk in the middle of all the activity, with homework and friends of the kids dropping by and the television blaring. I became used to operating in "putting out fires" mode, jumping from one urgent, pressing situation with the kids to another, squeezing my writing in when I could. On top of that, I never quite realized how much of my social life centered around being at school-related functions, where you're around parents of kids your kids' ages. When all of a sudden you don't have that outlet, you realize you have no one with whom to hang. My close friends either have school-aged kids so are still very involved with their kids at home, or have already departed for the post-empty nest world and aren't even around. Or else they're now stuck in jobs and are completely unavailable. I'm thinking I might soon have to chat up the mailman just to have companionship by day. I was thrilled to have had all the kids (and their respective girlfriends/boyfriends) around much of the summer, so this meant we had much going on, with little free time for writing. Truth be told my life hasn't allowed for much writing at all since last winter, what with my youngest child's travel sports schedule and trekking all over the east coast while deciding colleges for her, and in between that road-tripping to my other kids' schools for various awards and events.

So all of a sudden this week I was faced with the deafening silence of being virtually alone. Now, I'm not completely alone because I have this menagerie of demanding pets (two dogs, a parrot, a bunny and a cat). So it's not silent like a normal person's house, but rather silent with a lot of barking, squawking, and still a huge mess even though no one is leaving a trail of dirty dishes and laundry about the place. Instead it's mounds of feather, fur and animal poo, thanks. To top it off my husband went out of town. And I was left to be alone with myself. And I hated it. It's sad because I vividly recall times when my children were young when I probably would have paid to be alone at a Greyhound bus station for a few hours, I craved solitude so much. But now that I've found solitude, I don't particularly like it, and I am anxious to be around people. Which doesn't happen as easily when your office is the desk in your kitchen and the only ones around with whom to converse have fur or feathers. I fear I'll turn into a cat lady.The unfortunate hallmark of my weekend alone were bouts with unbidden eruptions of tears and a half-hearted pity party thrown in for good measure. I guess it's a good thing I didn't resort to watching home videos of my children as babies. I blubbered enough without that, thanks.
As if this week during which loneliness seemed to be defining my life wasn't bad enough, with my husband away I decided to have the dogs sleep with me in the bedroom. Nothing worse than being home alone with a dog barking in the middle of the night downstairs to unnerve you. So I figured I'd keep them nearby to avoid that. So instead, at 3 a.m. Saturday night, I was awoken abruptly by the unmistakable sound of a dog throwing up. I hastened the dog into the bathroom to keep the mess at bay, but she followed me back to the room only for me to realize she was about to have a seizure. Knowing what that would entail, I scooped up my nearly 80-pound dog and lugged her, completely deadweight but for the onset of her seizure starting to overtake her, and laid her on the bathroom floor, trying to settle her in as best I could. Carrying her resulted in my being accidentally scraped up by her claws, and yeah, covered in dog wee wee, which I'd been trying to avoid by sticking her in the bathroom in the first place. Just as her seizure finally ended, I heard my other dog start to throw up. Seriously. So while I have tried to tell myself "Hey, the upside of the empty nest is no kids to wake me in the middle of the night!", the reality is I have animals who somehow can't help but do so. I was up cleaning the dogs and their mess till after 5 a.m. and couldn't fall asleep till 7 a.m. Yep, my first week as an empty-nester left me too tired to even do the one thing I now have all sorts of time to do: write.

I'm hoping week two of my transition will result in a much more productive week. The stress of the past month of preparing my kids for their various departures left me in a state of inertia, just sort of treading water as I clear my head and try to get a grip on my new life.

I know at some point I will relish this newfound "freedom" (bound though I am with these crazy pets, one of whom is a talking parrot who has repeated "Goodnight, I love you" ten times in the past fifteen minutes). I'll be happy to be able to settle down and focus on my writing again, once I actually learn how to focus with no distractions (wish me luck). In the meantime, I guess I just have to ride this wave, see where it takes me, expect to feel sad and at odds with myself and allow myself to be unmoored, adrift in a new world I don't quite know how to navigate. This happens when life is in transition.



  Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Where the Heart Is

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website