coffee and hot dogs

In the words of Chappell Roan...."six months since April, and I'm doing better."

It's been a minute. I didn't intend for half a year to pass before I wrote here again. Here's some of what I've been up to in the last six months.

I'm not going to lie to you, it was a hard summer. That's part of my radio silence. In our nuclear family, we learned about Addison's EoE (eosinophilic esophagitis) and started treatment. In our larger family...it's been tough. We've had a front row seat to deep grief and loss, despair, pain, bereavement, bewilderment, and life-changing illness, accidents, and experiences with our loved ones.

Christopher and I are starting to kind of hate the summer. The last handful of summers have been the containers of a lot of loss and trauma, for whatever reason. We also feel trapped when the heat index is 110 degrees, and when it rains so much we have to cut the grass multiple times per week, and when it's so hot and humid I can feel the hardware in my skull from my jaw surgery half a decade ago.

The summer was not all bad, though. In June, during the weekend of the anniversary of our miscarriage and to commemorate the "death date" (June 11) from my spring death class, Christopher and I took ourselves to New York City on skymiles and adrenaline for one day to see Death Becomes Her and eat the best pizza I've ever had in my life. I can't wait to do that again sometime.

I enrolled in the Creative Writing Certificate Program with Emory University Continuing Education this summer and have completed two classes so far (and am currently enrolled in my third). This has been challenging and very rewarding. Work has also been demanding and fulfilling.

And since we last spoke, my son turned four, began therapy in June, and can say things to me now like "I love you mama" and "mama stop singing" and "mama no singing please."

In short, the last six months have truly been the Wheel of Fortune: life has had its fair share of ups and downs, and the cycles continue. The wheel turns. Joy and sorrow cohabitate and I feel grateful to be alive, despite the weight of living in this world these days.

Speaking of life cycles and destiny and fate and whatnot, this fall marks a decade of my being in the world of counseling and counselor education. Last weekend, I attended a large conference in Philadelphia hosted by one of the big important counselor education organizations. Being in this space with so many people I've encountered over the last ten years was overwhelming. It does feel like we've all lived in two separate timelines. At least a "before 2020" and "after."

Honestly, I'm a different person now. While the pandemic certainly was the backdrop, my descent from the known world to the unknown world began when I defended my dissertation and became Dr. Mize on March 8, 2021 and then delivered my son just six weeks later. One of the biggest anxieties I had when starting graduate school was figuring out what my path to parenthood would look like as a I paved the way for a career as a clinician and an academic. Throughout the late summer into the spring of 2021, my body grew a baby boy and my brain produced a paper that would grant me three more significant letters behind my name. As a first-generation college student, for six years, I thought those letters - PhD - would define and solidify my identity.

Then Addison, ever the elixir of my journey, joined this world and counseling and counselor education and my PhD seemed somehow entirely pointless and useless and deeply meaningful all at the same time. I distinctly remember holding my newborn son and realizing the meaning had to change: if I was going to give him the life he deserves to live, I'd have to stop abandoning myself to pursue whatever "it" was on the other side of a PhD. And there would be no title more precious to me than mama.

This is intentionally vague. I have a lot more to say. But I'm going to take my time untangling some of the threads of identity, work, friendships, relationships, motherhood, loss, grief, betrayal etc. wrapped up in the last ten years into something that doesn't so closely resemble knotted up headphones from the bottom of your backpack.

For now, I want to talk about the magic of coffee and hot dogs at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. This big counseling conference I went to last weekend in Philadelphia was right across the street from the Reading Terminal Market (which I realized entirely too late was a location for a scene in National Treasure, one of my comfort movies). The Reading Terminal Market is a very liminal space. Conferences are liminal. Hotels are liminal. But this market – it's all in-between. At this counselor education conference, I had coffee and hot dog pretzels (yes, together) twice with a dear friend I've known for 8 of the last 10 years, who lives hundreds of miles away. We laughed, we cried, and in the physical, mental, and emotional in-betweens of this weekend, with iced lattes and tray of smokey cheesers, she felt like an anchor dropped deep in my soul.

This is one of my favorite things about conferences: many of my nearest and dearest friends are people I've met along this ten year journey, who are spread out all over the country. We are connected in the in-between. I had a coffee in the market (hot coffee, no hot dogs) with another friend as we talked about faith and healing and death and resurrection and incarnation. This was a sacred space. The next morning, after a workout but before conference shenanigans began, I went back for another coffee (no hotdogs this time, but I did eat a savory pastry that I'm still thinking about) and ran into one of my dearest friends and her wife. I crashed their breakfast plans for a bit before I peeled off to get ready for the day, and it was a luxury to physically be in her presence. Another person I deeply admire and respect told me she enjoyed my writing (this writing, right here), and it meant more to me than I can say. I wish our lives had given us more proximity to each other in the last ten years.

The weekend ended on a very high note. Two of my colleagues/friends (who have both been in my orbit the last ten years) went to a haunted house as a fun conference side quest because they are cooler and braver than me. They saw a memento mori mug in the gift shop and thought it was perfect for me, and surprised me while I was catching up with more wonderful souls at the hotel bar on our last night together (reader, it is perfect for me).

I think motherhood has simultaneously sharpened and softened me to be able to catch and cherish these passing moments and conversations in ways I couldn't do in the conferences of Christmas past. Maybe, in my own little strange (and still not yet fully understood) way, crying over coffee and hotdogs and a new mug are indicators of the archetypal shift from maiden to mother.

I'm still very much on the journey, and I'm glad to have you here with me.