Our apartment is now officially on the market. After a week-plus of Operation DDD (Declutter, Deep Clean, & Donate), our home is looking pretty slamming, so I’m cautiously optimistic that it will strike some unknown New Yorker’s fancy. I hope so because we are slated to move into our new place in two months or so. Right around the time of my book release. This isn’t a busy time or anything. Nah.

Anyway, yesterday was our first open house. After yet another speed-cleaning operation, Husband, the girls and I left our place in the capable hands of our wonderful broker and drove to New Jersey to visit our good friends and their new home. While we were tending to backseat vomit volcanoes and touring our new friends’ palatial abode, our broker welcomed scores of strangers into our home. Strangers who then trouped through our space. Seeing our pictures. Seeing our stories. Seeing those terrible stains on our beleaguered white chairs.

It was an exquisite winter/spring day. We couldn’t have ordered up a better one. And we had a good time in New Jersey catching up with our friends and their two kids, watching our girls soak in the suburban splendor and run free in the space they will never quite have. And my mind was there. It was. On the laughter, on the appetizers, on the kiddie mayhem.

But my mind was also elsewhere. Here. On this house. On this home. This place that has pillowed me through so much. My safe haven. I kept imagining the parade of people walking from room to room. Running fingertips along surfaces. Our surfaces. Peeking through windows. Our windows. Loving or hating a layout. Our layout.

Yes, I couldn’t stop thinking of all those who stopped by to glimpse a house. A home. A world.

Our house. Our home. Our world.

After the open house was over, our broker called with a report. She said there were twenty-four parties who signed in! That there was a lot of good interest, that many people would like to make an appointment to come back and see our place again. And this is good. This is very good.

So why doesn’t this feel so good then? Why does this feel more complicated than good?

Because it is.

When night fell, we secured sleepy girls in car seats and made our way home. The drive was quick. And while Husband was returning Sister I’s car (I – there is no aromatic or physical evidence of baby vomit – I promise!), the girls and I settled in at home. We walked in and I turned the lights on.

And our place seemed different. There were no precarious piles of mail. There were no dishes in the sink. There were no cat toys littering the hardwoods. There was no mess. There was no noise.

The place already felt a little less ours.

I took the girls up to bed. We picked pajamas. We read a book. We sang a song. And as we did these things last night, I looked around. I lingered on things I wouldn’t otherwise notice. The pale yellow stripes on the wall we will leave behind. The black and white pattern on the carpet that won’t be ours for long.

And then I kissed my girls goodnight.

And this morning, I realize as I write these words, that my surge of emotion about moving, about big change, is probably perfectly par for the course. That transitions, even the most exquisite transitions, can be both beautiful and difficult at once.

And I realize something else – right here, right now – as I type these words one after the other. I realize that it is open house every day here chez ILI. You come here, benevolent strangers, and poke around. Some of you sign in with comments and some of you just come and go. But all of you take it in – the stories, the pictures, the questions. Each of you glimpses me and my world through the crafty and clumsy evidence I leave for you – my words, my worries, my wants. Some of you like what you see and come back. Some of you shake your head no and never return.

And now my mind flits feverishly, going where the metaphor, this good metaphor, takes me…

Is this blogosphere a virtureal estate market of sorts? Are we bloggers selling ourselves and our stories? Are we opening ourselves up and inviting others in? Are we advertising the aspects of our worlds? The layouts of our lives? The fixtures and fittings of our fears? The rooms of our regret? Are we, in effect, saying, Stop by, walk around, take a look, see if you like what I have to offer? See if it’s worth the investment?

Do we bloggers declutter our hearts and our heads and our homes before showing them off? Do we wipe down the surfaces of soul and psyche before letting people in? Do we touch up the paint of our parenthood or our personhood? Do we make ourselves seem more ordered, more open, more generic so that others will like us?

Or do we bloggers do the opposite? Do we welcome legions of strangers and say, I do not have it all together. Look at this clutter in my mind, look at this dirty pile of longing, look at the cracks in my ceiling?

Who knew that a simple open house would be (for me) not-so-simple? Who knew that contemplating good change would send me into a metaphorical Monday madness? Who knew that hanging a price tag on my past and my place would create a thicket of mixed feelings about permanence and progress?

(I did.)

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How have you handled the moves in your life (between homes, relationships, jobs, etc)? Did you have mixed feelings too? Do you enjoy attending open houses? If so, why? Do you agree that blogging is – in some sense – like hosting a 24/7 Open House? Where do you think this metaphor breaks down?

ILI DAILY CHARMS

I am hard at work on Novel #2, so I am having a tough time staying on top of my favorite blogs, but I just read two posts from favorite cyber creatives. Both have been blogging for a year now and both write exquisitely and evocatively about the past year and the ways in which blogging has changed them (and not changed them). Check out these women and their words:

* Liz of the heartfelt and hilarious blog …But Then I Had Kids looks back over her last year in her post 365 Posts + 109 Posts = One Revised Me.

* Sarah, one half of the delightful Momalom sister duo, celebrates the fact that it’s Spring Again.

When I am at a loss for words (like now), I think of moments.

Like that moment when Toddler wrestled her little sister in the bold sunshine and I realized: These are my girls and they will always be sisters.

Like that moment when we took Toddler to the petting zoo right before her sister was born and she let the goats gobble from her tiny hands and I realized: One day she will be fearful, but not yet.

Like that moment when Toddler zipped through the playground on our corner and I realized: She is her own person.

Like that moment when we girls huddled happily on the hardwood floor amidst lovely chaos and I realized: I am a mother of two.

Like that moment my girls took a bath together and I realized: They are in it together. This bath. This life.

Like that moment I gave Baby her first Starbucks cup and I realized: One day, she will sip from this cup and not kick it around.

Like that moment when Toddler paced that big old porch clutching that tiny toy rod and I realized: She will fish one day. For trout. For happiness.

Like that moment when Husband led Toddler down to the dock and I realized: That was once Dad and me. At this very same pond. Some things change. Some things stay the same.

Like that moment I lifted my big girl over my shoulders to see the expanse of nature and I realized: This is my job. My biggest job. To lift her up. To let her see.

Like that moment on Independence Day when Toddler skipped through candy green grass clutching a big pink ball and I realized: One day I will not be able to catch her.

Like that moment when Baby first played with grass and tasted a few blades and I realized: There is so much for her to discover. And I must let her.

Like that moment when they wore matching pajamas and played together, really played together, and I realized: They will always play. They will always have each other.

Like that moment when Toddler pranced through the sand and studied her footprints and shadows and I realized: Life is full of prints and shadows, simple evidence of existence and presence.

Like that early morning moment in South Carolina when the girls and Daddy gazed out the window at a new day and I realized: The world is full of wide windows and new beginnings.

Like that moment when my big girl studied the rainbow of flowers and I realized: Life is full of color and it’s our job to see it.

Like that moment when Baby ran away and onto that bridge and I realized: Life is full of bridges between There and Here, Then and Now.

Like that moment on Christmas morning when my girls waited patiently to open their gifts and I realized: This is life. Waiting patiently to open the gifts that await us.

Like that moment when we hailed a yellow taxi after Toddler’s birthday celebration at Preschool and I realized: Time is passing. There won’t always be purple crowns.

Like that moment when I grabbed Baby and kissed her tiny ear and I realized, The love I feel for these creatures is impossible.

Like that moment when Daddy plopped two giggling girls into environmentally-friendly grocery bags and toted them through our kitchen and I realized: This is fun. This is silly. This is life. This is it.

These are my moments. These are my girls.

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Do you agree that happiness is about moments – enjoying them while they happen and sifting through them after the fact? In times of existential quiet, do you also think of moments? Do you think modern existence makes it hard to appreciate the moments of our days? Do you think this is why so many of us blog – to memorialize the moments that might otherwise evaporate?

Last night, as part of Project Blonde Again, Husband and I snuggled up on the couch to watch the DVRed season finale of The Bachelor.

(I will give you a moment to judge me.)

Okay, onwards. You either watch this show and know how it everything turned out or you don’t watch this show and therefore don’t really care. The point is that I am not spoiling anything for anyone here. Phew.

A smidge of background: Jake, a handsome and wholesome pilot decides to try his luck on the “Wings of Love” and see if he can land himself a wife. ABC producers corral a bevy of young women – some shockingly normal-seeming and some not so much – and off they go, gallivanting in and out of ubiquitous hot tubs, subsisting on a diet of booze and roses and test-run “kisses.” Now, I am not one to judge this format for finding true love. Seriously. I met my man in a bar at one in the morning. It’s all good.

Anyway. The weeks fly by (love these aviation puns) and I miss several episodes of the show because I’m too busy flailing like a drama queen in the deep end of my ocean. But I tune in here and there. Just enough to understand the trajectory of this season’s story. It becomes immediately clear that there is one girl who is universally detested by the others. Her name is Vienna. And there is one girl who allegedly “fell out of a Disney movie” and “dreams in cartoons” – Tenley – a creature who is cute and giggly and oozing with suspicious amounts of joy. Interestingly, both of these women were been married before The Bachelor. But that is neither here nor there. Just interesting to moi.

In the end, Jake narrows it down to these two women: the blonde and caustic Vienna and the brunettish and bubbly Tenley. When deliberating about his decision for the cameras, puppy-eyed Jake declares that it is so hard because he is in love with both women and that he can see both as his wife. But then he clues us into something and something critical: that he is more physically attracted to Vienna.

Cut to the chase. He picks Vienna. He proposes to her. She squeals yes.

Okay, fine. We’ll see how this turns out. The show’s track record isn’t so stellar. But I’m not that concerned with how Jake and Vienna fare in the big, bad real world. I’m more interested in some questions this flufffest raised for me. And the show might be a bit shallow, but I don’t think these questions are. Let’s see if you agree.

Is there anything wrong with being a “looks person”? With picking a life partner based on physical chemistry?

I don’t think so. Hey, we are biological creatures. There is something very Darwinian about all this. If I am being honest, I fell for Husband at first because he was such a gorgeous specimen. Fortunately, it turned out that he was exceedingly intelligent and funny and kind as well. But in the beginning? He was just an old school hottie.

Is it really possible to be in love with two people at once?

This is where I get confused. Lust is one thing. We can be attracted to many people at once, I imagine. But romantic love? Can it really be felt, truly be felt, for two people at once? And is it really possible to fall in love in six weeks while on camera?

Does the very format of this show render it almost impossible that the ultimate union will thrive?

It doesn’t really shock me that the couples that emerge after “the final rose” do not usually survive once the cameras stop rolling. Can a relationship predicated on scripted encounters and a game which pits several (often celebrity-hungry) creatures against each other really stand the test of time? Maybe so. Maybe I am judging from my little plot of real-world existential earth?

Who knows? Who cares?

Thank you for indulging me as I dip my toe in the shallow end once more. In doing so, I am all smiles because I realize something, something so many of you mentioned in your thoughtful comments yesterday: Deep and shallow are not mutually exclusive. These two sides can and do collide and commingle. In moments. In minds.

In blog posts.

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• Do you think a relationship or marriage rooted in physical attraction can flourish and last over time?
• Do you believe that you can find love anywhere, even on a television show?
• Do you watch The Bachelor? Did you watch this season?
  
• Do you think it is possible to be in love with two people at the very same time?
• Do you agree that meaning and deeper questions can be found almost anywhere as long as we squint and look?

ILI DAILY CHARMS

* Click and read this insightful Huffington Post piece on contemporary shifts in publishing industry roles by my incomparable literary agent Jean Naggar.

* Are we humans shaping our own evolution? Read this fascinating NYT article that identifies human culture as an evolutionary force.

* It seems I am not the only perfectionista who battles the Not Good Enoughs. Check out Tanya Geisler’s piece In Support of Settling.

* Do we really have to play with our kids? Is there a benefit to parental preoccupation and teaching our kids skills of self-reliance? Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids ponders these and other provocative questions in her recent post Up With Boredom!

First order of business. Thank you. For holding my virtual hand through my soggy Sunday moment and its precarious aftermath. For leaving a trail of words. For your existential echoes. It dawned on me after publishing yesterday’s post that one surefire way to feel not good enough is to set insane expectations for myself that only a robot could meet. Like, say, vowing to respond to every single comment left on this blog. Like promising to have a blog post up by 6am each morning. In an ideal world, these things would happen. But I am beginning to suspect that this world, this wonderful world, is not ideal. No, it’s real.

*

A few weeks ago, Husband and I went swimming with the girls in South Carolina and Toddler said something that I can’t stop thinking about. She wore both a water ring and water wings and she said to me, her little voice stuffed with panic, “Mommy! Help! I keep floating to the deep, deep part!” And like a good mom, I threw my arms around her and hugged her and assured her that she was okay and that we were in fact in the shallow end.

The shallow end.

Lately, my pool is lacking a shallow end. And this is odd. Because I used to be plenty shallow. Embarrassingly shallow. I used to subsist on shopping trips to trendy stores and celebrity gossip. I used to obsessively sample fad diets in an effort to be skinny and hot. I used to camp out at the gym for hours a day, spinning away, going nowhere. I used to panic when I was late to get my highlights touched up.

But somewhere along the way, life got delightfully deeper. Maybe it was becoming a wife or a parent or a fatherless girl? Maybe it was becoming a writer or a blogger or a Professor of Insecurities? Maybe it was flirting with the often harsh and humorless realities of adulthood, of aging, of lingering mortality? I would wager that it was all of these things.

But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I think I’ve swung too far in the other direction. What matters is that I miss my shallow end. I miss the superficial things I used to enjoy. I miss watching mindless reality television and searching for the most flattering jeans. I miss talking about celebrities.

I miss my goofy, silly, blondeness.

And so. I am reclaiming it. Consider yourself warned.

I came to this conclusion yesterday afternoon. We all know that I’m epiphany-prone and yesterday was no exception. I was talking with my friend (and superstar nutritionist) Lauren Slayton. I asked Lauren to meet me because I want to up the ante health-wise in my life. I want to focus on my body, on my nutrition, on the health of my young family. I want to feel more energetic and do what I can to prevent cancer and to raise good eaters. At the end of our meeting, I said to Lauren, “It’s so funny because for so many years I watched what I ate and worked out because I wanted to look hot, but now my priority is to be healthy.” And as I said this, I realized something.

I want both. I want to be healthy and hot.

“I want to be hot for my book party!” I said to her and she smiled. Truth be told, it’s not about losing weight. But it is about looking my best. Far more importantly though, I would like to feel my best. And then Lauren and I talked about this, whether it is shallow to want to maximize our attractiveness. Whether it is shallow or selfish to want to feel amazing. And we didn’t come to any ready conclusion. Maybe it is a bit shallow to want to be hot. But I think that’s okay. I think that’s more than okay.

We all need a shallow end.

At least I do. I love the deep end. I do. I love writing about the complex and shifting depths of human existence. I love scrutinizing the universal insecurities that shake our days. But I cannot do this all the time. It affects me. Maybe this is foolish, but it just occurred to me that I might not have control over most things in life, but I do have control over what I write about. And this is an important awakening for me. Because what I write about affects what I think about and what I think about affects how I feel and how I see the world.

This is all a long-winded and clumsy way of saying what Toddler said so succinctly,

I keep slipping to the deep end.

But there is a shallow end. A silly end. There still is. And writing about its mere existence makes me smile big. And so I will write about it from time to time. Not all the time because I love the deep end too much. But some of the time. And maybe by writing about the more superficial aspects of my existence, I will find my way to my shallow end once more. And if and when I get there, I will celebrate the fact that I can touch the bottom. And I will splash around a bit.

The blonde is back, kids. Get ready.

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• Is your pool of life more shallow or more deep?
• Do you think it is selfish or shallow to want to look good?
  
• Do you think there is something about adulthood that encourages us to drown out our shallow end (pun very much intended and amazing)?
• Are you more or less shallow than you used to be?
• Do you think that there is something important about cultivating a bit of shallowness or superficiality in life?
• Does the content of your writing affect the content of your life, how you feel and see the world?
• Could you stand to be healthier?
• Could you stand to be hotter?

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Husband and I had a really intense and good conversation while stranded in our South Carolina suite on Tuesday night. And we did. We talked about big things, hard things, things that are difficult to articulate. Don’t worry. It wasn’t a fight. In the event you are new here, Husband and I don’t fight. We discuss. We debate. We dance.

But maybe not enough.

As we lay there, side by side, heads on hotel pillows, hearts pried open, talking and talking to the point of exquisite exhaustion and understanding, it occurred to me, to both of us actually, that life has gotten in the way of these meaty and meaningful exchanges. It’s not that we don’t communicate. We do. All the time. We talk on the phone several times a day and every evening after the girls are in bed. It’s not as if we don’t have big, layered things to talk about. We do. It’s not as if our conversations are lacking. They are rich and wonderful and complicated and real.

That is, when we have them.

But something has gotten in the way. Or maybe it’s that everything has gotten in the way. The kids. The careers. The renovation of home and life. The utter lack of time to pause and ponder together. The exhaustion that rises like steam from a good and busy life. The clutter of happy hearts and happy heads.

On Tuesday, we talked about this. This not-talking-enough-really-talking-enough thing. This current scarcity of Heart to Hearts. And Head to Heads. And Husband said it well. He said that we should do this more, talk like this more, but that talking like this, discussing so deeply, all the time would be exhausting and no fun. He is right. It would be draining to pick apart our thoughts and hopes and judgments too frequently.

But how much of this is enough?

What is the right amount of time spent with the person you love talking about the difficult and the divine, the big things that transcend the details of our days? How many moments should we cordon off to excavate existential soil side by side? And do these moments lose their magic if they are forced, plotted or planned?

I don’t know.

But I do know that this man and I don’t just make beautiful babies (I’m bragging. Sue me. They are.) We make compelling conversation. Conversation that has shaped me and has sustained me. Conversation that has buoyed us along with attraction and laughter and old school love all of these years. Conversation that is an essential, if jagged, piece of the puzzle that is us. And so, for me, this question matters and hugely.

How do we sustain real currents of conversation amid the reality of life?

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How often do you enjoy deep conversations with the people you love? Do you agree that these conversations are often crowded out by the stuff of real life? If these conversations aren’t happening with tremendous regularity, is that evidence of faulty priorities? Do we humans have limited conversational capacities? If, say, someone is spending large chunks of her day conversing with virtureal strangers, is she possibly depleting conversational energy that should be expended elsewhere? Does the Screen to Screen interfere with the Heart to Heart and Head to Head or enhance it?

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*Please click over and read this post by my friend Lindsey of A Design So Vast. In this exquisite piece on her torturous experience with Postpartum Depression after the birth of her first child, Lindsey bravely spills head and heart onto the screen.