Coffee, college, children and the world

I started drinking bad cappuccino at 11, from the machine at the snack bar in the ice rink where I trained in Boxboro Massachusettes. It didn’t even occur to me until last week to be horrified that it was called, “Colonial Figure Skating Club.” I think they have since changed the name. I absolutely loved the taste of bad cappuccino, not knowing any different, that any better quality existed, but also thriving on the fact that it wasn’t health food. My friend Kristy worked at the snack bar and she was a light in my life. At a time I heard nothing but how horrible a person I was from my parents, Kristy always was pointing out my light. She wrote me little note cards telling me what a kind person I was and encouraging me. I’ve tried to find her numerous times with no luck. I know she struggled with her own self-esteem and had a pretty bad case of an eating disorder – far worse than the one I had, which was cut short by the honest words of another skater of good heart who told me one day, “Alicia what happened to you. You used to be perfect, now you just look lanky.” Her honest opinion saved by life, not because it helped me overcome my perfectionism but because it played to it, ironically enough. I used to hate my thunder thighs even when others admired them. But to be told literally, that I had achieved my goal and my weight loss strategy to avoid criticism was actually undercutting my goal – in fact to be criticized for my very strategy to avoid criticism – saved my life.

About a year later, when I began training in Simsbury, I got heavily into coffee in order to coax my body to leap into the air and spin at 6am. I didn’t even like the taste of that coffee, but I remember feeling somehow adult drinking it, living away from home part time. I drank way to much of it. It probably stunted my growth, which was never destined to lead me to be more than five 1, but the coffee, I feel, landed me just under 5 feet. If I stretch and so forth, I can get myself to five feet.

As a little girl I often experienced being called shortie. In high school a few people thought it was funny to call me an arm chair and use my shoulder as a prop. Not surprisingly, I started wearing heels in order to avoid the comments, the most benevolent of which were people who called me, “cute” but in a “oh look at the tiny puppy that fits in a purse” kind of way. 2 inches hushed the comments. I looked normal. Well, ish. 

I thought, when I attended public school for the first time since 4^th grade, that I was going to try out being normal. My idea of normal was spray painting my jean overalls and matching jean jacket in pastels, declining invitations to fool around with random boys alongside drugs and being nice to all the kids, regardless of their popularity level. Okay, when my mother first let me shop at the mall, I bought matching GAP stuff for about a year to really try to conform but I didn’t even like it. When it became too cold for my short sleeve pastel aerosol outfit, I decided to go with velour iridescent shirts and matching black pants. It wasn’t what everyone else was wearing, but I liked it. I wasn’t getting invited to any parties anyway, and from what I’d learned at my orientation from the girls who invited me to their blow job community, I wasn’t interested anyway. I ate Otis Spunkmeyer cookies for lunch that year, and nothing else. I wanted to junk but I didn’t want to gain weight. I wanted to be normal but I wasn’t ready to be healthy. I couldn’t help being different, but at least I could be different while rebelling from the kind of different I was raised with, and that suited me for the time being. It turned out one of my best friends actually decided to talk to me at lunch because she liked my style and found it original. I didn’t drink coffee that I can recall. I think I heard it could stunt your growth by then, and much like the vanity that solved my eating disorder, there went the coffee addiction, which I resumed at a lower level in college. I was more into the panini Sandwhiches with Salsa than the coffee to get me through my papers. I applied my perfectionism toward my GPA instead of my body. 

I (mostly) took a break from caffeinating when I was having kids, except for these tiny 2oz sample cups this awesome young woman used to give me for free with her own concoctions when we lived near a Borders and I’d go for half an hour to write.  In some ways she was my Kristy of my childbearing years. She was twenty and was always game for a deep conversation and she loved being creative with the tiny free drinks she gave me.

I couldn’t bear to go to the “MOPS” (mothers of preschoolers) or any other mommy events. Talking to mothers made me nauseous. The only ones I knew were either obsessed with their stroller brands or which diapers were on sale or obsessed with their motherhood to the exclusion of all other thoughts and interests. I hadn’t an ounce of interest in discussing stroller brands or diapers. I love seeing so many young moms on substack who are talking about their souls, their feelings, their real lives, opening their hearts and being on an empath journey. I gave birth to my children in the midst of the mommy wars. Mothers either talked about things I couldn’t find a bone in my body with which to feel resonance for or they were on the same page with each other in a whole hog kind of way that didn’t meet me. I felt I couldn’t be myself. Nothing about my real feelings was a fit.

Nothing the books had to offer helped me in my parenting journey. They simply didn’t work with the kids that chose me and vice versa. The people I would have shared this journey with, are only now having babies, or have young children. So my motherhood journey was very lonely and in many regards I was set up to fail. Yet this failure is the open path - it is the embrace of imperfection. This embrace is the path to unconditional love. And unconditional love is the grace of Perfection manifesting within our crazy, messed up journeys that lead us Home to ourselves in wholeness and to one another in compassion for all the ways we get broken open, to let more light into this world.

I don’t care whether you drink tea or coffee or both. I don’t care whether you juice everyday or you eat pizza and burgers. I know people of integrity and compassion who eat meat and people of integrity and compassion who don’t. I don’t care if you do Ayahuasca or you have never touched drugs in your life and never will. As for Aya, I’ve never been led to do it. My only “journeys” have been sober. Yet I know for many it has been an incredible path.

I long for a world where we find joy in supporting one another’s discoveries.

Yesterday my son composed a song called, “New Paradigms of Governance.” He is writing a song for each of the 8 (boiled down from 16) principles/pillars of his idea of what a flourishing, free society would like that honors freedom and yet is in harmony, with abundance for all. He came down as usual to prepare to feed his cat. I had the nudge to invite him to write a song. He was in for it. I gently asked if he wanted to take notes or play the main parts of it again, as I know he sometimes creates and forgets. He went the next step and even recorded it so he wouldn’t forget the amazing creation he just birthed.

What would a world look like to you in which everyone is supported to thrive without guilt or shame, yet with high levels of integrity, with enough structure to support expression, but not so much to suppress it; one imbued with compassion, curiosity, support, freedom and unconditional love?

My current relationship with coffee goes like this: I listen to my intuition and my body. My mind occasionally protests, but generally I enjoy coffee when I am led to have it and I have, since lived in Portland become far more selective than in my old school cappuccino from the machine days. There is a place down town that makes the best organic lattes. On the other hand, I would still enjoy one of those old school bad cappuccinos with Kristy if I ever had the chance to go back in time and tell her just how much she made a difference in my life.