Life from Scratch

Well let’s start with something fluffy and sweet, shall we? 

For some very unique – and sadly, also not so unique – personal reasons, I have found myself recently wondering if I was depressed.  Or heading there.  Or if not depressed, then at least looking across the water at depressed and wondering if I should swim across.  I should not!

What I should do is put down the heavy stuff, find a free Kindle download (note, no longer available for free) of approximately 200 pages in length about a young, newly divorced New-Yorker who can’t boil an egg.  And watch her concurrently cook and find her voice.  Yeah, that’s what I consider fluffy and sweet.

So I downloaded Life from Scratch and set aside my war-torn reading list about human suffering.  Grabbed a glass of wine or three, and dove in.

This Rachel Goldman, I should not have trusted her from the beginning.  After sweating all day at the beach with the kids, and in my wine-induced haze, I started to believe her.  I thought she was sincere and honorable, I felt a little bit of a connection with her, and then *poof* she turned out to be a work of fiction.  Which I would have known if I had bothered to notice the author’s name is Melissa Ford.

Something Rachelthefictionalcharacter said struck a chord with me:  she is very good at getting excited about starting things and terrible at completing them.  Well.  There’s me in a nutshell.  Such a timely reminder of my single most frustrating quality, as I have only just yesterday withdrawn from my master’s program… after finishing 3 credit hours.  In reality, the program wasn’t aligned with my long-term goals, brought me no short-term satisfaction, and detracted from my ability to parent and work at my best.  It was like a little academic noose, squeezing slightly tighter as each lecture and deadline slipped.

Her observations on relationships were good and true, although not at all profound.  It was a familiar story of two people in love, failing to communicate, and then not understanding why their love fell apart.  It is what I pray doesn’t happen to my family, and what we work each day to prevent.  Children can make this so much easier or disturbingly more difficult.  It’s too easy to stop communicating about the things that brought you together and focus mainly on the things that are keeping you together – specifically, the kids.  And then one day you realize you are merely alone together.  You stop discovering yourself because you are completely devoted in service to the family.  Your life becomes a prison because you won’t stand for the freedom you deserve.  You lose your identity.  You become afraid.

We know these things already, but they always bears repeating.

The main character of this book, Rachelthefictionalcharacter, actually blogs.  She is stupefying popular, winning awards and getting hundreds of comments.  The blogs samples throughout the book weren’t particularly delightful if you ask me.  But look at the depressing shit I write… what do I know.  What I do know is that we bloggers love to hear the sound of our own voices.  We love our thoughts.  So much so that we must memorialize them in blog posts and then distribute to the far reaches of the internet.  We think we are clever, original, fascinating, funny, and miserable.  We are all the same.

I wonder if there is any coincidence between the fact that I finished this book on a Saturday, resigned my master’s program on a Sunday, and cranked up this blog on a Monday.  My favorite thing about this book, the thing that ties me to it and impels me onward:  the Longfellow quote.  “All things must change to something new, to something strange.”

And so it goes.