It’s spring break. Which means that we weren’t prepared for childcare for the week while the kids are home, of course. We always figure we can wing it and then when things start unexpectedly snowballing even though it looked like a relatively manageable week in terms of work, we start tearing our hairs out. Nothing new. I’m sure all parents relate.

The other thing that is boggling me is that there are only 2 and a half months left before school’s out for summer. I mean, we’re talking summer vacation. How is this happening already?
 
I’m starting to think about plants. Not for outdoors yet, but for inside. Maybe start a little collection of succulents on the windowsill. We couldn’t have many plants in the house when our cat was alive because he would eat them all, but now that we are petless, I’m starting to collect a few houseplants. It’s those little things that still remind us that he’s no longer with us.

I’m going to be 42 in a week, you know. 42 (!!) Forty two. Forty + twooooooo. Basically your average middle aged mom.

 
And I laugh even when I write that because various friends and I have been debating on what middle aged actually is. What is that? 50? 45? 40? Are WE middle aged? What? But as a joke I’ve started calling myself “Middle Aged Mom” but more with this image of a super hero called Middle Aged Mom in mind, a character that is not really me. The joke, obviously, is that I may very well be a middle aged mom right now.
 
Turning 40 wasn’t a big deal. Every year after that has been a little bit harder. I can’t quite figure out exactly why, though I suppose some chronic health issues have something to do with it. Suddenly you just don’t feel as physically invincible anymore. Seems like everything that never made a difference before, counts. Stuff that you never cared about because you were young, matters. Sometimes I just can’t believe I’m already here, the 40s. It’s true about youth…all that stuff about feeling like you can conquer the world, mostly because you were cocky enough to believe it because you didn’t really think about the future and the consequences of your actions, and maybe you weren’t jaded about life just yet. At least I wasn’t. You just lived for the moment, whatever moment you found yourself in and nothing else mattered. Not a career, not saving up for retirement, not wondering if you’ll ever afford to remodel your kitchen one day. Nothing except what you were going to do that night with your friends or where you were going to sleep if you were traveling around the country in your car. I was thinking how glad I was to have had a few “irresponsible” years in my late teens and early 20s because right now, at age almost 42, so much of life is about being responsible.
 

So how do you know if you’re going through a mid life crises? I don’t think it’s entirely about running to get tattoos and flashy cars. It might be more subtle than that for most people. I’ve been getting super nostalgic which for me is nothing new, but thinking a lot about the past lately and watching tons of old and new concert videos on Youtube of bands and heroes from my youth who are still around and touring like The Cure, PJ Harvey, the Beastie Boys and especially watching the Pearl Jam 20 movie and thinking, wow…look…they’re all getting old now (except Chris Cornell, who pretty much looks the same), but then quickly coming to the realization that holy shit! That means I am too. Somehow you never think it’s you.
 
But it’s happening folks, it’s happening. Watching your parents grow old and in some instances, struggle with their health and even deteriorate physically is a reminder for us all. But before we get to all that, what a strange age to be right now. What was once considered old really isn’t anymore. What was once considered solidly middle aged is ambiguous. We seem to be constantly pushing the edges of those boundaries as my generation ages, delaying all that old people stuff because really, we’re not old. Am I RIGHT? It’s a bit more confusing these days, everything is blurred. There aren’t really any hard fast rules anymore on what we should or shouldn’t be doing at our age. With a little bit of common sense and some self editing, we can pretty much wear whatever we want regardless of how old we are, keep our hair long (and all my Asian friends out there know what I mean because I bet your mom’s been rocking the Kofro by the time they were in their 30s too), and generally keep doing what we’ve always been doing. But sometimes I do stop and look and think…what am I doing here? Do I look ridiculous? Am I wearing this outfit or these pants or styling my hair this way because I’m afraid of looking old? I’d be lying a little if I said no.
 
So what does it mean to age gracefully? I certainly have no regrets. I may be confused by all this, but I’m not fighting it, I’m not wanting to go back in time. When I think about my youth and the music and the people that are no longer in my life, I can look back fondly and say, damn…those were some of the best years of my life. I can’t deny that I miss those times; the 80s and 90s were the best. But then I look around at what I have now – my kids, my marriage (the relationship which did in fact start way back from my youth), the life we’ve built and the friends that we have and I think, well, this stuff is really good too. I can be all nostalgic about my 20s, but I don’t have to or need to relate to 20 years olds now. It has nothing to do with my life. I’m Middle Aged Mom. Yeah, maybe I need a t-shirt. I’d wear it with (no) irony.

Some traditions evolve naturally over time. We first started spending Easter with Mark’s Russian side of the family 3 years ago when we came up to visit his dad who was gravely ill in the hospital at the time. We’ve been driving upstate every Easter since then, staying at Mark’s uncle’s house which is full of old family photos, good food, and lots of stories. This is now what our Easters look like.

And I needed that. 68 degrees. Brilliant sunshine. Trees in a haze of tiny green buds. Lunch with Nichole in Bryant Park (and hundreds of other New Yorkers and tourists, apparently) and coffee with Anna. Not a lick of work except a phone call and a few emails. Coming home and hanging out on the stoop with neighbors instead of sticking my head in a laptop for the rest of the afternoon.

A day off.
 
Clearing my head. My head sure needs it. It’s been full of crap.

Here’s how our batch of eggs turned out after leaving them in their natural dye baths overnight (see post and general recipes from part 1 here). I do think that’s key to getting some of the rich jewel tones, to leave them in overnight. Even though the eggs didn’t stay as saturated once dried as it did right after taking them out of their baths (particularly the red beet dye), I love the more subdued, mottled effect that it left.

After placing each egg back in the carton to dry off, I did buff them a bit to gently wipe off any excess coloring and powdered residue that was left on the egg, particularly the tumeric. The colors are such a nice alternative to the brights and pastels that we’ve been dyeing eggs with in past years (not to mention the glitter and the stickers!). We’ll see if we keep to it, but we want to do this every year and try other food sources to color eggs with.
 

This is something we’ve been wanting to do for years – dyeing Easter eggs using vegetables and spices. After seeing how beautiful my friend Jen Causey’s eggs turned out, we planned our yearly egg dyeing activity over the weekend. Here’s the basic method and recipe that we used for our four colors:

Blue: Simmer 4 cups of water with 1 small red cabbage (roughly chopped) for 15 minutes.
 
Red: Simmer 4 cups of water with 2 medium red beets (grated) for 15 minutes.
 
Yellow: Bring 4 cups of water to a boil and stir in 1/4 cup turmeric. Boil for 1 more minute.
 
Brown: Bring 4 cups of water to a boil with 1 cup ground coffee, and simmer for 10 minutes.
 

When each of the mixtures have cooled down, mix in 1/4 cup white vinegar and strain each of the colors into cups for dyeing. We left the eggs in the color baths overnight as per Jen’s suggestion. Stay tuned tomorrow to see how they turned out…

…is changing and we have more of it. Thank god. I am not a fan of darkness at 5pm. The weather around here has normalized though. We no longer have Spring on steroids and it’s back to more seasonable temps which really, isn’t bad at all. The cherry blossoms are blooming and there are green buds on trees, even if it is early for all this blooming action, but hey, even Easter is early this year. How nice of them to coordinate.

Sounds like it was a crappy week for a lot of people out there on the internets. I’m working through some stuff myself (or avoiding, take your pick). My birthday is coming up, so getting old and stuff has been on my mind a lot lately, you’ll see.

Some outtakes from Instagram of LA.
 
Sometimes I like these photos more than the ones my fancy expensive camera takes. Maybe because it captures the same spirit of those polaroids that I have from my own childhood. It certainly seems more spontaneous and inconspicuous than lugging a huge heavy camera around…

Some days I have to remember that a lot of things in life revolve in cycles. Women deal with cycles with their bodies (man, do we ever). The business is somewhat cyclical through seasons – there are definitely slow months and busy months and after 4 years we can sort of predict now where they fall (but it doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t worry when sales slow down). Freelance work, well, that is sort of the wildcard.

When you’re in it though, when you’re down at the bottom of that cycle and you can’t seem to catch any momentum or when things slow down and make you nervous, it’s hard to remember that there’s an upswing at the next turn. But usually there always is. Currently, however, I feel like I’m on that proverbial hamster wheel. Running, running, running to keep money flowing in so that it can flow out as necessary to run the household smoothly without any hiccups, to maintain that middle class status quo we find ourselves in. Running makes you tired, but you can’t stop because then everything will stop. So you keep running.
 
I feel lucky that freelance work has been very steady over the years. While there are still a few moments where I start to feel uneasy if things suddenly lighten up, for the most part I haven’t dealt with any real panic attacks or month-long depressions in a long time like in the early years of freelance whenever there was a dry spell. Those were scary, especially because I was also a new parent. I would say that for the first 5 years I would obsessively run mental calculations in my head every other day trying to figure out how long our money would last if I couldn’t find work for a few months. Knowing our situation down to the penny was comforting. But as I near my 10th year of working for myself, I understand now that freelance is a constant moving cycle too. It’s pretty ridiculous to believe that you’ll never work again even though you may have been lying face down in self defeat on your bed thinking it was truth. If anything 10 years is a convincing track record that there is always something around the corner.
 
But back to that hamster wheel. Sometimes I want to get off. I’m grateful that the work keeps coming (for now) and it keeps the engine going, but sometimes I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere or that the business is going anywhere. We’re just running to maintain orders and deadlines, to pay bills, to pay for dance classes and soccer and summer camp. I think it’s good to stop once in awhile and reassess things because it’s all too easy to just keep going and then when you look back, a whole year has passed. What have you accomplished in a year that was different and new than the year before?
 
Sometimes I think, well, if you could do anything right now, what would it be? I’ve struggled with the question before, but I think I know now. I think I would like a year to just try things out and work on all these ideas I have and see where it could take us. This is a fantasy, so in this fantasy there are no money issues, no pressures to make the numbers every month, no risk of losing freelance contacts when the year is over. When you’re working, there is an expectation and pressure to make clients happy. There is no room for failure. You don’t go into a project expecting to fail. Neither does the client. So you churn out the work and hold your breath at each design review and repeat with the next. I’d like to just work on something without all that pressure to succeed. To be free to fail without affecting someone else’s budget or deadline. To fail so that I can confirm what I’m good at and what I’m not and to discover if there are any surprises. To have the time to create something so bad and ugly and awful and not have it matter. A year to fail. I suppose you could call that a sabbatical, but those don’t exist for most people.
 
I think my nightly ritual of staying up till 2am is an attempt at trying to carve out this time. It doesn’t really work all the time though. The logic is there, but I often just end up working more and if I’m not, I want nothing to do except zone out on the internet because I have no brain capacity left.
 
So, there really is no point to this post or a moral to this story except I can attest that getting 5-6 hours of sleep every night is stupid (don’t try this at home, kids!). Being 40 year old adults with school age children doesn’t automatically mean that you have everything figured out in your life, despite what your 20 year old self once thought. I know we all make our choices. To have children, to not have children; to live in an expensive city, to live in a rural town; to save money or to blow it all on a trip of a lifetime; to keep saying yes to keep everything running while you keep thinking no. Though sometimes it seems hard to imagine, I’d like to think that those choices that got you on the wheel in the first place don’t mean that you’re locked into your current way of life. I’d like to think that there is some way off this hamster wheel…

Here’s an experiment with lentil patties that I did a few weeks ago that turned out quite well. It makes a great alternative to falafels if you’re a bit tired of the chickpea version. I must insist that you make the garlic sauce to eat along with it because it is delicious. We ate the patties with vegetables one night, but rolled them with hummus and a little garlic sauce in tortillas the next day for an easy lunch.
 

Lentil Patties (serves 4-6)

1/2 pound lentils

4 carrots, peeled

1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese

2 Tablespoons nutritional yeast

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 egg

2 Tablespoons flour

Japanese breadcrumbs for coating

Canola oil for frying

Bring about 4 cups of water to a boil.  Add the lentils and  whole carrots.  Simmer until the carrots are cooked.  Remove the carrots and set them aside, while continuing to cook the lentils.  When the lentils are cooked, which should take about 25 minutes in all, pour them through a strain and transfer to a mixing bowl.  Mash the cooked carrots and add to the lentils along with the parmesan, nutritional yeast, salt, pepper, egg and flour.  Mix thoroughly, then allow to cook completely in the refrigerator.  When1 it has cooled, form it into patties of the desired size, and coat the patties as well as you can with the Japanese breadcrumbs.  Heat about 1/4-inch of oil in a large skillet.  Fry the patties until golden brown and crispy on each side, about 2-3 minutes per side.  Drain of the excess oil on paper towels and serve immediately.

Creamy Garlic Sauce

1 medium onion

5 cloves garlic, peeled

1 to 1-1/2 cups canola oil

juice of 1 lemon

1 Tablespoon mayonnaise

Salt and white pepper, to taste

Peel the onion, cut it in half and cook it in boiling water for about 4 minutes, until it has softened a bit.  Drain and set aside to cool.

Now, place the cooled onion and garlic in a blender.  Turn it on medium speed and let it process until the onion and garlic are pureed.  Increase the blender speed and continue to blend while you slowly drizzle the canola oil through the top of the blender.  Keep adding oil until it reaches the desired consistency.  Less oil will make it thicker, more will make it thinner. Add the lemon juice, mayonnaise, salt and pepper, and process for another few seconds.  Transfer to a container and chill until ready to use.