Why I Remember All Things Wonderful "When I'm with You"

One night, *cough* a decade or more ago, Amy and I sat at my kitchen table drinking frozen strawberry margaritas and throwing out song lyrics that tickled our brains. 

We sang. We told stories. We ran to the interwebs for help when we couldn't remember what lyrics went to some vaguely remembered video. 

Fast forward to one night when I was playing a version of Name That Tune on my Facebook page. For the life of me, I couldn't remember the name of this song, any lyrics, or the band. I knew the lead singer was in a couple of one hit wonder hair bands. 

That's all I had, so that's all I texted my friend with. 

Remarkably, in a matter of minutes, after a few faltering text, she had the band name. Then the song title. 

Relationship shorthand, it's a beautiful thing, am I right? 

So on one level, "When I'm With You" is a lovely power ballad that evokes heady days of my youth. 

In the grander scheme of things it reminds me of the beautifully random, decades long conversation I've been having with dear friend. 

Friendship + Music + Shared Memories = Everything Wonderful

My 3-Panel Picture of Friendship

Friendship. 

I've spent the better part of this week thinking about that word, and I've discovered that for me, it brings up 3 very distinct lines of thought. 

On Intimate Strangers

I used to say I was an extroverted introvert. A social butterfly who'd rather be, and sometimes is, a fly on the wall. 

In high school I ran with a number of different groups. I wasn't the popular girl, I just played up different sides of myself depending on what circle of friends I was with. It was exhausting. 

By the time I was in college I found it easier being a part of a large group, but as people we organize ourselves into smaller sets. 

Always, I found myself feeling rejected. Wishing I didn't give a shite what others thought. Then one day I was listening to music and I had an epiphany: ALL friends are just intimate strangers. 

I made that connection & realized the Indigo Girls were right, "I have no need for anger with intimate strangers." It may sound silly, but I was freed. My view on friendship is now always through this lens. 

Which is to say: if you are happy with yourself, proud of how you conduct yourself, then hang the rest. The people who value that way of being will stick.  

On Losing Friends

Doctor Who, 11th Doctor, Matt Smith

At the risk of sounding uppity or insanely geekazoid, I view myself rather like The Doctor. I've regenerated several times over the course of my life. I'm fairly certain I will again. But I've got all those other lives inside me. I honor them all because without them, I wouldn't be - I couldn't be - me. 

This quote from Doctor Who is such truth. We ALL change & grow, all throughout our lives. 

Sometimes our relationships are invigorated, sometimes they are unaffected. 

Often, however, such change means friendships end. Not in a blaze of glory or other drama. Then one day you remember someone who used to be there. Like Kevin Costner's character in Fandango, someone has just faded away.  

Sometimes I find I'm like The Doctor, and I'm the one who has left my companion, imagining I'd never come back. 

On Technology & Virtual Friendships

I reckon I'm not alone in saying in my day to day life I am connected to literally all my friends almost exclusively through social media. Some, like my SisterCat, I only see a few times a year. Some, sadly, I may never see again. 

Some of my closest friends I will never meet in person because this world of social media has given me extraordinary new friends. 

It has also helped me renew friendships with people I thought were lost forever. People who knew a different me. An earlier version. In my early days on Facebook I reconnected with a few of my best friends from 4th grade. Kids I met at about age 8 or 9, I guess. I found it remarkable that we are much the same as we were in grade school. Grown, different in ways I didn't anticipate, but still the same. 

We were a military family, which I credit with why I don't have friends from my early childhood. The year I started 4th grade was when we moved to Governors Island, a base here in NYC. I was twelve when my family left. Several of the friends I made during that time became "lifelong" friends. 

Did those bond stick because we were all military brats who knew the drill, or because we tried harder because of our semi-nomadic lifestyle? Or is it like Stand By Me - we never have friends again like we did when we were twelve?

#FriendshipRevolution

What I have learned is this:

The most important part of friendship is being true to ourselves & honest with our companions. 

Friendship, like Life, is Dynamic.

The friendships that end aren't any less important than the ones that last. 

Each person we take as our companion has the potential to alter our perspective. This is to be valued regardless of how the friendship started, how long it lasts, or how often you get to share space. 

How I Found MY Prince in a Pile of Frogs

Every now and again I’ll be chatting with people who have older kids and they will ask “How old were you when you started dating?”  

This question always stumps me, because I was never really one to “date” at any point. Sure, long before I was “allowed” to go out with anyone, I had boyfriends. Or I didn’t, which was fine too. But even after I was out of my parents’ house, I wasn’t really a “go out on a date” kind of person. As a singleton in my 20s, living in NYC, I tried dating websites, but all I found was a plague of frogs waiting to be unleashed.  

Now that I'm thinking about this, my mom actually encouraged me to go on more dates. Sometimes this was rejected by me in favor of fun with friends. But more often, time and again really, I ended up diving right into long term relationships.  I imagine the restless nights mom had, worried I was going to run off to get my MRS degree before I finished college. 

She need not have worried. Maturity, they say, is what comes with age. Wisdom is said to come from experience. I considered the lack of these qualities in most of my boyfriends as a strong reason for not getting married young. 

Naturally, I watched many friends walk down the aisle in their twenties. Some of those unions were successful, others were very much not. To my observation, however, age plays no role in the divorce rate. 

Growing up I just had an understanding (reinforced by my mother) that when it came to getting married, it was better to wait. Both my parents were married/divorced prior to marrying each other. As it happens, my husband’s father was also divorced prior to his marrying my mother-in-law. 

It’s therefore interesting, I think, that Hubs was married for close to a decade & in the process of divorcing before we ever met. While I wasn’t married before, I too had been in a long term live-in relationship. If you want to get technical, it was a domestic partnership. 

I suppose it is worth noting that at the time in NYC a domestic partnership was actually intended for same-sex couples to have a "separate but equal" alternative to marriage. It was also a way hetero couples could legally co-mingle without actually taking the plunged. In my head, I saw it as a step toward marriage. Looking back, I’m pretty sure my partner saw it as a sidestep.

This was the relationship I was in when mom died. I’ve said before that after her death I ran from responsibility and kept running until I found someone who made me want to be a grown up again. So it should come as no real shock that after her death my “Legally Not Married” status suited me just fine. True, I’d have protested this at the time, but I was very clouded in those days. Frankly I made poor decisions with fierce abandon. 

Spoiler Alert: The “someone” I was referring to? The guy I now refer to as Hubs. 

"The problems of your past are your business. 

The problems of your future are my privilege. 

That's all I have to say, that's all I need to know."

~John Watson, to his wife Mary, in Sherlock ~

Obviously when our paths joined, my husband and I each had a past. There is always the tricky bit when you first meet, right? How to paint yourself in the best light? 

I was 34, and after nine years in The Big Apple I was finally living life the way I imagined it would be.  I no longer felt a need to try and hide part of myself to please a significant other. Honestly, that shite is exhausting. Suddenly I found myself chatting up someone who seemed even less interested in all that silly preening than I was. 

Better still, in the same way I knew we could have a fight without blowing the whole damn relationship up, we both came in with a "take me as I am" outlook. Maybe that doesn't sound romantic, but my eyes saw the perfect prince to my princess in a tarnished tiara.

We spoke of things in our early months together that I'd never felt safe to talk about with any significant other. You know, the sort of things you in trust to your best friends and swear them to never tell anyone ever? That stuff. Without ever saying it in so many words it was clear: he was asking about my past to know and understand me, not to judge me and someday use my mistakes as leverage in our relationship. 

Not that there aren't still things to learn, of course. One of the best parts of marriage is you can spend a lifetime getting to know someone, especially someone who had 3 or 4 decades of life lived before you got them. I can't speak for Hubs, but every day I gain a little more knowledge. Sometimes it makes me love him more. Sometimes I shake my head & decide I still love him anyway. 

Occasionally on my Facebook page I will post examples of obscure ways I realize my husband is my perfect match. I call these moments #ReasonsWhyWeWork. Romantic, right? Whatever, we may balance the high level of sarcasm with our tender moments, but this is way more accurate than something all lovey-dovey. 

Mostly we are just wryly embracing the beautiful mess we have made of our lives - Together.  

This piece was inspired by, and written as part of the #MarchMarriageChallenge, co-hosted by 

The Eyes of a Boy & Huppie Mama. 

You can find all of the amazing marriage focused posts here. 

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Revisiting Conscious Coupling

I originally published this piece about a year ago, not long after Gwyneth Paltrow & her husband Chris Martin had just announced their separation. Only they were calling it a Conscious Uncoupling. This got an awful lot of press for being a very unusual and new-agey sounding way to say "we are divorcing". 

Today would have been my parents' 42nd wedding anniversary. So much of what I learned about love and marriage came from watching them. I wanted to honor them by revisiting this piece for The March Marriage Challenge. 

Paltrow & Martin's split happened just before we were to celebrate our 3rd wedding anniversary. And while all the talk was about what it meant for a marriage to break up, it got me thinking about the very idea of marriage. More to the point, why my path had led me down the aisle when I could just as easily have skipped it.

Sheesh! Lots of talk on the interwebs today about consciously uncoupling. Who's doing it & what the hell does that even mean?

Eh, no one here in Toddlerville has a clue about that stuff. 'Round these parts we are all about the coupling that was solidified 3 years ago today. That would be Hubs & lil ol' me - Serendipity.

I won't bore anyone will all the delightful wedding details. (5 hour open bar!) I will admit, however, to being outshone at my own wedding by the cutest attendant EVER - the darling Boy, then 10 months old.

Now, some folks would say we did things a bit backwards. Some would probably say we eventually did the "right thing."  I can say with certainty lots of people didn't understand why we were doing it at all. Frankly I would imagine that whatever most folks thought, they reckoned we got married to "legalize" our family.

Of course, there's truth in that. But as beautiful and amazing as my Boy is (or any kid, for that matter), he's no reason to take the plunge into wedded bliss.

In case you're not a regular (of the blog or the bar), Hubs and I met in our local Irish pub in Queens. At the time I was one half of another couple. So we were friendly, but not friends. I can recall three honest-to-goodness conversations over the first year or so I knew him.
1st: about the tandoori chicken he was making on BBQ Sunday.
2nd: about trivia night & my possibly joining his team (never happened).
3rd: a heated discussion about baseball. He is a naturalized Mets fan & I'm a life-long Yanks fan. Yeah... As I recall we rarely chatted for a long time after that one.

Eventually I uncoupled, moved a bit further away & didn't frequent the pub as often. Then yada yada yada... I got a new iPhone and we started spending time together.

Yep, I just yada yada yada'd right over that.

Yes, the iPhone is important. As it happened, he was one of perhaps 4 people I knew with an iPhone. Two of the others were other friends at the pub. They all hung out in their spot at the bar, playing on their phones and talking about apps. Now I would maybe be put off, but 5 years ago it was kinda endearing. Particularly because they were all Irish & weren't gadgety type guys.

So when I got an iPhone I realized I had a reason to chat him up. And the rest, as they say, is history. Without speaking for Hubs, I knew pretty quickly I never again wanted to wake up without him.

For her part, my mother always told me to marry someone who I enjoyed even when we were mad at each other. She would tell me the truest test of a relationship is if you can argue & make up & truly move on.

Which reminds me of a fight we had early on. Hubs was literally grabbing up a bunch of movies he had scattered at my place - basically taking his toys and going home. I remember telling him that he was being silly. We were arguing, not ending. He could leave, but we weren't done by a long shot. I have no idea if that moment stayed with him - but that was it - I knew. Ya know?

The fact is marriage should be a conscious coupling. We had options & marriage wasn't the only, or easiest, one. As the vows often say, it's not something to be entered into lightly. Hubs & I married because we wanted to stand up, in front of all the friends & loved ones we could gather, and declare that we were on this path Together. 

Marriage is a union, a joining of lives and families. So while it was strange to lots of my friends, it made sense to me to take his family name. Frankly, I hardly considered NOT taking his name. 

Did it all make some things easier, legally? You bet. 

But what mattered is just this: I am able to say we are married, he is my husband. These words carry a whole different weight in our society than to say he is my partner. Or my lover. Or the father of my children. Or my best friend. 

He is all of those things. And So. Much. More. And THAT is why we got married. 

I don't know, maybe it's me, but I think that's kind of why anyone wants to get married. Am I wrong? 

*Any reading of this post as either a social or political statement about marriage equality would be solely based on the reader's bias & not the author's attempt to draw such parallels. 

**Not to deny I'm 100% in favor of marriage equality & sincerely don't get why anyone would be against it. But this post is just a little riff on my own choices on the occasion of my 3rd Wedding Anniversary. 

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The Shy Poet & Unexpected Treasures

What follows is the twisted tale of how my photographs came to be published in a best selling poetry book. If you find this to be far-fetched and completely random, well, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. It is, nonetheless, entirely true.

Like all good stories, we must begin with a prologue:

Not so long ago, but in a part of my life seems so very far away, I designed the album artwork for a band. (Like for real, it's on iTunes and everything.) 

You see, my significant other was a friend of the guitarist, & we'd seen them perform countless times. They weren't a "hair band", though oddly all had fantastical hair. Each performance I'd think “I have to bring a camera and capture all of this.” So, naturally, I did just that; taking photos during bar gigs, playing at being Annie Liebowitz or something. 

Maybe they just liked my chutzpah, or probably because they wanted me to knock it off during shows, I found myself invited to shoot during their rehearsals. 

Yada yada yada... my proximity to the band led to me doing not only some photography, but all the graphic design for the band's EP. 

As it happens when artists work well together on one project, the guitarist and I became collaborators on any number of things. Some, like the band’s EP, were brought to fruition. Others, well, not so much. You know how it goes with “artistes” and their artistic endeavors: personalities clash, passions and tempers flare, relationships explode... Finally the project, no matter how utterly brilliant or beautiful, is abandoned. 

Flash forward about 6 years. Which is also a rewind to just a few months ago. But that’s confusing, so never mind. 

So my friend Chasity (aka The Shy Poet) announces she has a deal to publish a book of her original poetry. In our little corner of the Internet this is a very big deal. Her poetry is universal, approachable, often heartbreaking & lovely. 

Not terribly long into her work on the book, she publicly declares a need for images that are not previously published or copyrighted. 

I was sure I’d have a photo or two that she could use & if it would help her, why not? So I threw my hat in the ring & offered up my photography. As did about 90 other people. I mean that literally. And I am being totally honest when I say I NEVER imagined she’d want to use any of my work. Well, maybe one or something, to be nice. I offered because I wanted to help my friend. The fact that this was for print publication was so far out of my thoughts it barely registered.  

So you can understand my total fecking shock when she tells me she’s not only hoping to use some of my photos, she’d really like to use only my photos.

Oh, and can we do this in a matter of days?! Deadlines… 

My first thought (after OMG, yes!!!) was “Whoa... she wants 12??? That means she needs to see a collection to choose from. No, no, no… Oh dammit, I can’t pull together a portfolio of photos for her to pick from in a matter of hours!” Yes, friends and neighbors, full on panic was the emotion. Elation? Yes. But massive panic. 

Then it hit me: The abandoned project.

The guitarist & I had been working on an audio-visual piece under the working title of “Pure.” Had it been destined for gallery installation or YouTube? We weren't sure, but both of us had been pumped. For my part this meant all my spare time was spent editing photos and video montages. With the project shelved, hundreds of photographs went into cold storage on my hard drive. I was too disheartened to do anything with them. 

In that abandoned computer file was the answer to my anxiety attack. I had an archive of photos that were unused, unseen, and easily sorted in a matter of hours. I was able to present Chasity with a portfolio of photos I loved but hadn’t had a reason to work with for years. Finally some of these pieces would get to be a part of something extraordinary: a collaboration with a friend & an artist that I could trust with my work. As intended. 

Problems resolved, I hurried to get things sorted out so Chas could make her deadline. It was days after she'd seen all the photos & maybe not even until the whole project was wrapped that I realized how remarkable the situation was.

Truly the stars had to align for these photos to finally find a proper home. 

Serendipity. Queen of Silver Linings. These are my monikers because I know I have stumbled my way into some fairly remarkable things. I've always come out of the darkness of yesterday into a brighter tomorrow. I continue to be honestly surprised (and humbled) by the path my life has taken. 

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How "River" Brought Me a Sister

A few days ago I posted Robert Downey Jr.’s version of River as my #SundaySong on my Facebook page. While the song is very important to me, I focused more on how his version is gut-wrenchingly beautiful, & the video I picked is fantastic eye-candy. 

I want to expand on the significance River holds for me, but first, a bit of background. 


If you know me at all, you know I have serious love of RDJ. Most of which can be traced to his joining the cast of of Ally McBeal. If you never watched the show, know it had it’s highs an lows, but his character's love story with Ally is the one she was meant to have. His performance is fantastic, but on top of that, he sang. And he sang River on the show, and later it was on the Very Ally Christmas album. Anyway Robert Downey Jr has a voice I adore, so this is by far my favorite version of the song. 

But that’s not really why it’s important to me. 

Long ago & far away I was a photography student in small college in West Virginia. For lots of reasons I was a bit older than most of my peers, yet tended to have a bit less confidence. 

One day I was working in the dark room & noticed a page of notebook paper posted on the bulletin board. On it was written few lines from the song River, by Joni Mitchell. Now, I will admit I only really knew the song because the Indigo Girls covered it. Never the less, I knew the next lines & wrote them underneath what was posted. 

As it turns out, it was SisterCat who had written the lyrics out & she was curious who'd replied. Although we'd known each other before, and frankly I don’t think either of us gave a hoot either way about the other. So our real friendship can be traced to those lyrics tacked up in the darkroom - a totally random urge by her, and by me in replying. 


It is hard to imagine what my life would be, were it not for the wonderful woman that is SisterCat. For one thing, she's hella fun & we've had amazing adventures & equally amazing chats in her kitchen. But she has saved me in ways large & small more times than I can even recount, and certainly more than she even knows. Moreover, she's stood by me, held my hand, rubbed my feet, and given me an alternate perspective, even a good talking to.  All without ever judging me or loving me any less. 


And whenever I have need to skate away, my river leads right to her door.


On Friday I will pack a small bag and make the 6 hour trek down to her house on what has become my annual holiday retreat. At some point in my drive this song will play & I’ll again ponder what I ever did to bring such a friend into my life? I wrote a few bits of a song on a sheet of paper. 

Serendipity indeed.