heal my neuroses (dot) com

Okay here's my million dollar marketing idea.

This is for the neurotic parent, the kind of mom (or dad) who's sure she (or he) didn't get the memo or the proper genetic code, the one who is frequently convinced that she (or he) is the shittiest mom (or dad) ever.

Say you're a mom who's finally made an appointment to take her four year-old daughter to get her hair trimmed, because you just can't take the jaw-clenching insanity anymore. Every day you look at your daughter's hair, a snaggled, tangled mess, your whole face tightens into a stressy mask of agony. You don't know how to tame her hair or your anxiety over her hair.

the judge

My friend Danielle came to visit us this weekend. Danielle is a creative type much like myself who I met in a writing workshop a decade ago. We discovered over the weekend that we fuck ourselves over in life by wanting to impress an entity we christened “The Cocktail Party Judge,” or CPJ. Do you know her? You might not ever drink cocktails or go to cocktail parties, but you don't need to. She lives in your head and she thinks very little of that blog of yours. She wonders why you're not writing something real, something marketable, something that would impress her. She wonders what's taking you so long, and by the way she thinks your yoga is silly and your spiritual quest a waste of time because you’re just using it as a cover for not being more successful at pursuits that would impress her, like being a bestselling novelist. You want to show her that you're worth something even without her seal of approval but really you want to show her how little she means to you in order to impress her since her validation means you get to keep on existing. Whether you meet her at the front door or in the backyard, she’s going to make sure you feel like shit.

head nut

I woke up around 7:30, happy as a born-again Christian. Sipped my coffee, wrote in my journal, gazed around the room approvingly, even pored over a thick interiors book with Stella cozied on my lap, and somehow didn’t think to look at the clock to wake Hamish until 8:39, six minutes before I usually start schlepping everyone out of the house (at least my goal every morning is to leave by 8:45.) With only six minutes to get ready, there was no time for breakfast at the table, so I got them out with the promise of Pop-Tarts in the car. They’re fortified, people.