Since then, the girls and I have gotten by with my little writing gigs here and there, unemployment insurance, government assistance and family help. The girls don’t remember my old office at the home decor company. They know my “office” as the corner of the dining-room table, or atop my bed, upstairs, during the cold months, when the downstairs is too chilly.

A while back, I put together my teaching CV. A friend works at a distance-learning university, and they were interested. So I’ve been learning something called Blackboard, a program tailored to online teachers and learners. I figured this would be an easy enough task to conquer.

Oh, poor brain.

I don’t know if it’s my (ahem) advanced age, or if the stress of the past decade has simply taking a toll on my synapses, but OWIE, the learning curve for Blackboard was steeper than I expected. I minced my way through the tutorial, with no less than a dozen tabs open in my browser at any time. I realized with a shock that my prior ability to multitask had abandoned me completely. Where was my old brain, the zippy one?

“How’s the training coming, Mom?” the girls kept asking.

“Oh, fine,” I kept saying.

“It’s sort of taking a long time, isn’t it?” inquired Firstborn.

“Um, sort of,” I replied.

Firstborn looked concerned. She patted my shoulder. “Well, if you need me to take a look, let me know. I’m good with computer stuff, new programs, you know.”

I looked around for my walker.

And considered taking her up on her offer.

I finally finished the training, without the help of my almost-11-year-old. But I am still left wondering why this old dog is having such a rough time learning just a few new tricks.

I really hate that damn word depression. A depression is a crater, a dip in the road, a surface bent out of shape. A depression is one spot, simple to point out. There, there it is.

I keep moving—years of moving on, how absurd can it get?—but my melancholy follows me. This is grief, yes? That’s my guess, anyway, and since I’m the last one standing here, I suppose I can call it what I like. Complicated grief is the official term for a loss so massive, the mind cannot work it out. Oddly enough, complicated grief has yet to make its way into the official manual of psych disorders. When it does, I expect the editors will take pains to make sure the definition refers only to the unshakable sadness that follows the death of a loved one—and only death. The big guns. They won’t let me get near that diagnosis, because there’s no death certificate.

Divorce, well, that’s something else. One is expected to recover, get over it. Was this always the case? At a certain point, one is expected to absorb the divorce into one’s being like anything else that identifies us: eye color, a scar, a middle name.

A comedian I like was talking about divorce. His point: no need to feel bad for a friend going through a divorce. After all, he argued, no one’s leaving a happy marriage.

I don’t agree. I think some of us do leave happy marriages—happy-enough, good-enough marriages. In my case, the happiness was profound, for years. At least, for me, it was. Then some Really Bad Stuff hit, and hit hard. I had a breakdown—the real deal, leave your watch and your electronics and your socks and your self-worth at the front desk—and my marriage did too.

It’s not clear which came first, which lost its way first: self or the marriage. Chicken, egg. You try having these conversations alone. This is why Sherlock kept Holmes around.

I made mistakes, trying hard to be heard, to be found, blah blah blah. We both did, I would say, but like I said, there is no one to chat up about this. It was all over before there could be any brave talk of this: shared failure. He’s still breathing, so he’s had his own journey, certainly. But these were two solo treks, happening on either side of an unscalable mountain. No guess as to whether he’s still on the other side, scratching his head, holding the other half of the cartoon map, swearing at its Comic Sans punchlines.

I don’t think there’s anyone on the other side of the mountain, anymore. I don’t hear a thing. I think he’s out of the valley. He got the better side of the map, likely.

I woke up, eventually, in an unrecognizable place in the shadow of that mountain. No one came for me (who does she think she is, expecting someone to come for her?). No one recognized me, except my children. Can you imagine? My children were still with me, are still themselves. But I didn’t know anyone else around me.

I’m still not sure who you are, if you give a shit at all. Why should you? I don’t say that meanly. I just really don’t know the answer.

My actual dreams—the nightmares that will not quit—are like this: I cannot find anyone who knows me, I cannot find anyone I know. I run and duck and scan the horizon for anything familiar. I get frantic. The kids are never there. If I recognize anyone, they’re running the other way, want nothing to do with me.

I wake up. I laugh at the unoriginality, the repetition of my dreamlife. And then I cry. And then, I start my day.

This is bullshit, I think sometimes, to no one in particular. I’m still the person who I’d been before. I am more, now. There are so many words, heaps upon messy heaps. They spill out of my closets, out from under my bed. I would give anything, I understand now, I want to tell you, I want to say I am sorry, I want you to know why, I want to know why.

The worst words are the ones I wake up in bed with each morning. Each morning, yes. You think I’m exaggerating. That’s funny. People assume hyperbole when they’re uncomfortable, I get it. I’m not mad at you for that.

But listen: The worst words, I sweat them out through my skin, where they bleed into the morning sheets: Please, let all the good I’ve ever been matter, now. Please, let all the good I’ve ever done matter, now. Let this all be over, let the new life begin.

These words do damage when they have no audience, nowhere to go. They wreak havoc inside: how can it be, that I can come to be so much nothing to someone I loved with all my heart? To be so much nothing.

These are needy thoughts. No one likes needy thoughts. I’m not an idiot. I get my oil changed regularly. I know better than to say needy things to your face, you and you and you. Because I’m not needy. If I were needy, you wouldn’t be able to unpeel me from your leg. And I haven’t been anywhere near your leg.

If my rough stuff makes you feel helpless, if these thoughts of mine make you feel annoyed or irritated or bothered, hey, relax. Take a load off. I am also saying I am angry. If I have not said it before, I am angry. I AM ANGRY. I think it must be a good sign, that I am angry. If I’m angry, it’s because I believe in myself again, somewhat. That I see goodness and beauty here, again. I am saying I know, now, how to love better, how to love stronger, than I did 10, 15, 20 years ago.

I could have less-good, less-true. There’s plenty of less-good, less-true out there. Some of it is cruel; some of it is just clueless. But all of the less-good, less-true hurts. It cuts deeper than you might expect. I know to keep walking, but the temptation to stop for a little while is strong. We’re like that, you know.

Here’s something else I know better now: we humans cannot put on a price on this thing called forgiveness. When I see it now, in action in this great big world, I weep. Because I can see how stunning it is, how wonderful and rare. But this is what it is to be human, I have learned: believing something can be fixed and made beautiful again does not make it so. No amount of wishing can make it so.

This is the new “here.” The “moving on” from the loss of my marriage, my family, my circle of friends, has been coming to grips with this: I will not wake from this particular dream. There is no going back, nothing to go back to, nothing to wake from. This is my waking life, as bizarre and surreal as it continues to feel.

So I work. I recreate. I re-create. I do Stuff That’s Good to Do. I Go About My Business, like anyone else. Each word is a little prayer. Some words, you see. Some, you don’t.

I still can’t smile at divorce humor. I can’t. I can’t comprehend it. It’s a language I just never learned to speak.

Around me, people divorce, seem to heal, find new love, move in or remarry, have children with their new loves. It looks awfully nice, I have to say. I have tried, I have hoped, dared to hope, even publicly. I’ve felt the keen humiliation of new collections of mistakes, new boxed sets of failure. It’s been an unpleasant journey, despite some gorgeous views. I see now why people choose to travel alone. I don’t understand the massive numbers of human beings who have managed to find partners, the people who make the decision simply and powerfully to choose, to stay. To choose to stay. How does this work? In this no-longer-new dreamworld, I can’t fathom it. I would like to fathom it.

It’s not a question of not being hopeful enough, of living in the past by choice. I resent that narrative the most, I think. For me, this is simply a question of what the heart knows to be true—or to be truer, perhaps, when it comes to authentic connection. We don’t have to call it love. Call it what you want, but there is no undoing this sort of knowing. Or I might choose to undo, to un-know.

In my case, for whatever reason, this is a knot that was broken, torn, not untied. That’s what this heart says, and there’s no one left to argue the case. Why wouldn’t my heart assume it had gotten the last word?

a) Yeah, I could have told you that. The child is AWESOME.
b) She did what?!? I know, right?!? The child is AWESOME.
c) A 2? No way, she was robbed. The child is AWESOME.
d) This child must have a terrific mother. The child is AWESOME.

The girls and I make a date out of it. We snuggle up in one or the other’s bed, and we read our favorite parts aloud. This time around, for instance, H’s teacher declared that H’s “gentle and quiet leadership” was an asset to the class.

“GENTLE AND QUIET?” yelled S. We all fell over laughing, especially H, who toppled off the bed, cackling. “Gentle” and “quiet” are not words that accurately reflect her at-home personality, but it makes for good reading, for sure.

This is funny stuff, after all: the difference between public and private persona. The report cards, every few months, are a good reason to discuss this. We chat about why we might behave differently at school. We have great discussions about how complex we human beings are, what we like in ourselves, what we are surprised others see in us, what we’d prefer they didn’t see.

Report card chats here are the beginning of the girls’ understanding of a Walt Whitman quote I love so much: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

We ARE large. We DO contain multitudes, every one of us. I think it’s a beautiful and freeing thing for kids to learn, early on. I also encourage them to tell me what they agree with in their progress reports, and what they don’t, and why. I remember doing the same thing with my parents. I liked the open dialogue.

But I found this very interesting: H asked her fellow second-graders if they’d received their report cards, and most of the kids, she said, knew nothing about them, let alone what the feedback was. I wondered if this could be true, if there’s been a shift in thinking about discussing report cards with children, for fear of making learning too much about graded progress.

So I’ve been dying to ask you: What’s the report card ritual at your home? How much discussion about grades or progress reports feels right to you and your family?

I can see this is going to become an annual tradition. She’s already got the hotel (with fitness center and hot tub) booked for us.

Originally, we’d planned to do this as a “Just Us” event. But then we realized there was no way our four girls would want to miss out on their mothers sloshing through mud and climbing cargo nets in running shoes and tutus.

Yes, tutus. We know how to live, people.

So this time around, for our first-ever race together, the families will be in tow, including my mom, who can’t wait to be the photojournalist for the day.

The girls, who know that I’m far more of a hiker and dog-trotter than a runner, think the whole idea is hilarious. I don’t think they believe I’m going to go through with it. After all, this is their mother, the one chasing them around the house with wipes and sponges and Purell. Mud pits?

“I’d kind of like to go with you,” S said the other day, as I was lacing my shoes to go for a run-lurch. “To see this for myself.”

“Right now?” I said, thrilled for the company.

“Um, not now,” she said, looking at me like I was a raving lunatic. “It’s COLD.”

I did manage to drag my mom out for a short run. Well, she walked while I did little sprinty things, forward and back, forward and back, always returning to her, as I have my whole life. Mothers and daughters, well…that’s what we do, if we are lucky. The entire time we were outside, she alternated between worrying aloud that we might die of pneumonia before getting back to her apartment, and humming the theme from “Rocky.”

My mother is certain that my asthma will kill me, if pneumonia doesn’t get me first. My lungs are a little wheezy, it’s true, but I’ve got my inhaler. I’m thinking of painting a racing stripe on it, with a Sharpie.

I am not fast. Stamina is not my strong point, either. I will never be one of those darling perky gazelle creatures, taking their pulses as they sprint down the local country roads. But I press on. Basically, I have a sports bra, a decent pair of running shoes, and a friend I believe in and who believes in me.

I don’t mind being the underdog. If we pull this off, Jackie and I, in May, it will set a great example for our girls (and our mamas). I didn’t see this New Year’s resolution coming. It sort of slipped in, under the wire. But I like it. I like it very much indeed.

Has an unexpected New Year’s resolution found its way to you this year? How are you surprising yourself so far in 2012?

So I wonder why it won’t leave me alone, this week. I keep hearing it in the loose threads of conversation around me at the supermarket. I find fifteen minutes, exactly, left on the parking meter. Fifteen cents, exactly, in my purse. I stop the microwave when the cheese bubbles over inside. I pay no attention to time. I see later that I’ve stopped it with fifteen seconds left on the clock.

Today, I trip outside the post office. I catch myself, regain my balance. At my feet: the number 15, stenciled in an empty parking space.

Fifteen. The only question I can think to ask myself, “What was I doing fifteen years ago?”

January 1997. Do you know where you were, what you were doing?

The moment I ask myself this innocuous question, I realize the answer lies right there: in the fact that I don’t want to answer it. January 1997. No. I don’t like the answer, for a variety of reasons. My chest tightens, considering that time.

I was finishing graduate school, an MFA in Theatre. I was getting over a breakup so enormous, so sad, that I shake my head just thinking about it, even now. Was it preventable? Possibly.

This leads, of course, to the inevitable bigger question: Could any of it have been prevented—any of the sadnesses since, or to come?

Or is this just the way? Is this just the landscape of any life?

I don’t like thinking about that time. It rattles me. I don’t know why the heart still hurts like it does. I would prefer not to remember.

I met someone, not long after, of course. The way of the young: to think that there will always be someone, just around the corner, someone just right.

I got married in 1999, had a child in 2001, had another in 2003, almost had the book deal in 2005. Those athletic odd years: busy, busy. The last fifteen years have encompassed so many of the ordinary-extraordinary milestones, the ones we tick off in polite conversation with strangers. Yes, marriage. Yes, two children. Yes, a writing career, still promising.

Everything: promising enough.

January 2012. I turn up the heat, feeling guilty the second my fingers touch the thermostat—I’m the only one home, after all. I sip coffee. I learn a program that will allow me to teach writing online. I research different careers: today, a CNA (certified nursing assistant). My children, they are still with their father, until tomorrow morning. Their father is no longer my husband. You know this. I should be used to this, by now. I worry that I don’t use the words “hope” and “dream” enough with my daughters. I try to remember that they should have these words, as long as they want. I’ve grown to distrust both words, but it doesn’t mean my daughters need to do the same.

I have reached a funny place. I don’t want to look back, to a time before the marriage, the girls, the career hopes. I don’t want to look forward, either. Fifteen years from now? I feel trepidation and weariness, contemplating that time. The dogs who lie on the floor at my feet will be gone. The cats, too, likely. The floor—this floor—will likely belong to someone else, if it survives that long. My daughters—hopefully they will be living and loving and laughing, somewhere, somewhere I have access to, somewhere I’m welcome.

That’s as far as I can get, in my brand of hoping. I’ve lost the knack, somehow, in the last fifteen years. I find myself quite here, stolidly here. I am in the moment—something one is supposed to want (funny!), a state of mind deemed worth achieving, in theory.

Do you know where you were, fifteen years ago? What’s changed more—you, or your life around you?

I remember the pride I felt, being the one to escort home the shy girl with the long yarn-ribboned, honey-gold ponytails. I finally had a friend. This was good stuff.

Thirty-five years later, we live five hours apart instead of a block. The minute I hear her voice on the phone, though, she is right *here*. She is never far, not really.

We dispense with formalities, as usual, and dive into our urgent discussion.

“OH MY GOD,” she hisses over the phone. “I AM ALREADY PEEING MYSELF. DID YOU LOOK AT THE OBSTACLES? DID YOU LOOK? WE HAVE TO CLIMB A WALL!”

“It’s perfect for us,” I say. “There’s so much mud, no one will be able to tell we’re peeing ourselves during the entire course.”

“Go look at the obstacles. I’m getting off the phone. I can’t be on the phone listening to you look at the obstacles or I will pee my office chair.”

She hangs up, and I adore her even more, if that is possible. I can’t imagine how much I will love this woman by the time we are 80, 90. This is the best New Year’s Resolution ever. We are going to get dirty. Really, really dirty.

We are going to get moving, and we’re going to do it together, apart. We are going to forget about the kids and the men and the bills and the owies and do this together, for ourselves, to celebrate who we’ve been, who we are now, and who we want to be.

Our goal: The Dirty Girl Mud Run in Scranton, PA, on May 5, 2012. What’s a Dirty Girl Mud Run, you say? So glad you asked. We stumbled upon it online, looking for a 5K somewhere in between us, a training goal to keep us motivated. The Dirty Girl Mud Run site explains it this way:

“Dirty Girl is unlike anything you’ve ever done. This female-only, 5K mud run is designed for women of all fitness levels. The 11 military-inspired obstacles are fun and unique but with just enough hell to keep your palms a bit sweaty. And the entire event is designed to be organic and eco-friendly. In fact, many of the obstacles will be recycled back into the earth. Think you’re a Dirty Girl? Well, here’s your chance to prove it.

If that’s not reason enough, get dirty for a good cause. A portion of all proceeds goes to support breast cancer research, awareness & education.”

It all began with my BFF posting two weeks ago on Facebook that she was starting a running program. I asked her what kind of shoes she was wearing, because I was thinking about starting running again too, she didn’t answer. When I asked again about the shoes, she cracked up. “I thought you were being sarcastic!” she said. “I can’t believe we’re both doing this! Now!”

I used to run a little back in the days pre-kiddies—before I fell off a curb and rolled my left ankle when hugely pregnant, nearly snapping a tendon. The ankle never healed properly, so power-walking and hiking with the dogs and swimming at the Y have been my sporadic exercise choices. But it’s not enough for this pokey metabolism now. I need to do more.

So we’re following the Couch-to-5K Running Plan, which is a simple approach to taking up running (or getting back to it after a long hiatus), building stamina and muscle to tackle three miles comfortably in two months of training.

If I am huffing and puffing here in Massachusetts, sweating and lurching my way down a freezing New England road, knowing that she’s doing the same damn thing five hours away makes me feel like she’s right by my side.

This is the best New Year’s Resolution I’ve made in a long, long time. Training apart but together in spirit with my best friend keeps us closer than ever…and eagerly anticipating the hilarity of the Dirty Girl Mud Run. We’ve registered. There’s no going back. But who would want to?

She has two daughters too, almost the same age as mine. “We are going to be the COOLEST MOMS EVER,” I say. “Can you imagine them, cheering us through the mud pit and the tires and the cargo net?”

“I think this is going to be a yearly event,” says my BFF.

“I think you’re onto something there,” I say.

What’s your New Year’s Resolution? Still not sure? Feel free to adopt ours and come play in the mud with us! Come join us at the Dirty Girl Mud Run on May 5, 2012!

]]> http://workitmom.com/bloggers/singlemomatwork/2011/12/31/my-dirty-dirty-resolution-for-2012/feed/ http://workitmom.com/bloggers/singlemomatwork/2011/12/23/december-23-2011/ http://workitmom.com/bloggers/singlemomatwork/2011/12/23/december-23-2011/#comments Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:28:50 +0000 Jenn http://workitmom.com/bloggers/singlemomatwork/?p=340 I wake up to Today, December 23, 2011:

Bed: A folded red-striped shirt, under my pillow. Mounds of blankets. The quiet. The calm. A swollen, painful right foot. What happened to the foot, I cannot tell you.

Downstairs: Keurig coffee maker—single servings. More quiet. Dogs waiting patiently to go out. Boxes piled high, waiting to be wrapped. Wrapping paper and gift tags. The tree, decorated for two weeks already, shining. Two cats, no kids—not until tomorrow. More laundry. Emails to answer. Training to complete, online. Shrink-wrapped windows, undone by teenage cat claws.

Outside: Gray, damp. Carpet of wet leaves. Dark bare branches overhead. Some wind, but still, the quiet surprises me.

I wrap gifts. I email. I elevate and ice my foot while I look at photographs and send greetings on Facebook. Do I think about yesterday, the day before, the day before that? I do, of course. But I have become accustomed this house, myself in this house, without the girls, without company. I do fine, now. I try, sometimes, to imagine it’s always been like this, just like this.I would have told you three years ago that I would not get this far, that it would never feel fine, or well, or good—living here alone, half the time. Somehow, I grew into the place, into my own bones and skin. I remember early Christmases in this home, my older daughter toddling through a maze of crumpled wrapping paper, the noise, the visitors. I remember that I loved the house because of its staircase. I pictured little girls, perched on the stairs, peering into the living room on Christmas morning. I wanted to live here because I wanted that moment, every year. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated. A simple wish.

I get my Christmas wish—at least, something in the ballpark of that wish—every year. Two daughters, happy despite all of the sadness they’ve seen, despite their parents’ difficulties.

No other desires have proven to be that simple, that uncomplicated.

I don’t wish for very much, anymore. I don’t trust hope. Hope is an unpredictable animal, a starving companion. It’s too difficult to feed. Best to let it find someone else, let it dog someone else’s heels.

If any wish has been granted, that is enough, I think. I remember, and I say thanks. I am lucky enough, no more or less special than anyone else. I am blessed enough to know the line where I stop and my daughters begin. This is plenty, plenty for one Christmas.

I have no idea where I’d be, if it weren’t for the other single mothers/divorcees (that word! so musty! so archaic!) out there—friends and acquaintances and blog readers. They save this heart and soul of mine.

As my dear darling friend K put it last night: “Divorce runs you through a cheese grater.” All I could do was nod. Yes. That. Exactly that.

You may have wanted things to be different. Your divorce may even have been the right decision. Even so, a divorce will shred you in such a way that there’s no going back to who you were before. Because you—she—is not there anymore. Old friends fade in the wake of divorce, because you are no longer who you were, no longer someone they understand. You will never be who you were, then, for better and for worse. Your children have no choice but to accept the changes in you. Friends, extended family—another story.

K is visiting this week from the other side of the country. A longtime blog friend, we’d finally met in person a year ago in California, and clicked. She gets it. I don’t know what I would do, without her.When she arrives, I realize I want to gobble her up, I am so greedy and starving for her input, for her stories. She makes me feel so much less alone in this unwanted passage.

Like me, she has two daughters, almost the same age as mine. We’ve spent hours dissecting what went wrong, the mistakes we made, the mistakes we continue to make. We’ve talked about motherhood pre-divorce, about who we were, then—more important, who we thought we were, then. We’ve talked about the exhaustion of going it alone (even when the fathers are active participants in the kids’ lives). We agreed: when the father of your own children wants nothing to do with you, no longer sees you, something in you…withers. On the really dark days, it’s too easy to think, if he with the most reason to stay could leave and not look back, what would ever keep anyone else from leaving?

We’re better mothers now, both of us, we agree on that. But years after the fact, we find we’re still shaken, even though we know, now, on the very good days, just how strong we are. I see such beauty in her, and she in me. It’s just so damn hard to wake up and see that in the mirror, to remember it on our own.

Fertility was not a problem for us, and for that, I was grateful. So many friends, I found, were having difficulty conceiving. Even on the very worst days of parenting, I know how lucky I am. I’m not as graceful a mother as either my mother or my grandmother. I lurch, I yell, I am a lousy cook. But the girls know how much they are loved, and they have a good sense of who they are, and who they want to be.

I envy them this, their clear sense of themselves. I envy their wide-open future—the array of options that lies before them.

Ten years from now, they will be off to (or, in Sophie’s case, in) college. Where will I be? What will I be doing?

They know me as a writer. I know myself as a writer, and yet, I want something else. I have struggled for years, to find a foothold as a writer, to find work that allows me to be creative. I keep feeling that I am supposed to be doing something else—but what?

“I want to be an actress, a dancer and a singer,” says Hattie B. She has no doubt she can be all of those things. I think, It is my job to tell you that you can be whatever you want to be. But I do not tell her this, because I do not believe it myself. I do not believe that we can be whatever we want to be, if only we put in enough time, work, energy. You can’t have it all, not without sacrificing something else. I chose motherhood over a career in the theatre. I had a taste of it, working in NYC for a time, but I wanted children—I wanted to raise good people well, and send them out into this messy world. The world needs good people, with good hearts. That was my vocation, my calling. But they will become their own keepers and make their own choices.

So it is time again for me to start planning ahead. What do I want to be, when I grow up? I don’t know. I am drawn to the oddest assortment of things: genealogy, gemology, gerontology, linguistics, animal care, nursing. I don’t know how to make sense of it. I google for more information, and the more information I get, the more confused I am. I need to create a better future for the girls and for myself, but I have no idea which way to go. I can’t find my compass.

I didn’t expect to find myself here, again.

2011: Not the best year of my life, but not the worst either. The fact that I’m divorced is no longer the first thing that comes to mind upon waking. I like to think a time will come when weeks will pass without my remembering this label, without my remembering that there was another time, a time of twos and teams and we’ll and ours.

The house purge continues, slowly but surely. I am getting better at letting go, at detachment. It will never be my strong suit, but I’m improving.

One area of my life that I still struggle massively with is cooking. Cooking for one, or cooking for three: I suck. Why do I suck? Why is this such a mental block for me? I can’t figure out why my usual creative approach to life doesn’t extend to the kitchen.

Even cooking with a recipe, I manage to ruin meals. WTF?!?

This week, however, I HAD A CULINARY SUCCESS, PEOPLE! I did! I got it in, just under the wire, before 2012. I am awfully excited to share it with you. Yes, Readers, I am going to share a recipe with you, because I am so darn excited and proud of myself. These are not just ORDINARY fries. These are DOWNRIGHT TRIUMPHANT TURNIP FRIES, a dish for any strong single mama and her brood!

Yes! Baked Spicy Turnip Fries! I KNOW, RIGHT?

Okay! Be strong! Eat better! If I could make these, than you definitely can. My goal in 2012 is to come up with a few more quick easy happy dishes to share with you lovely readers. But for now, spice it up with these vitamin-packed yummies. And feel all smart and healthy and AWESOME and stuff. Yeah. You.

Happy almost 2012. We’re doing fine, just fine, and so are you.

BAKED SPICY TURNIP FRIES

• 2 medium turnips, cut into equal-sized sticks
• 3 Tbsp oil of your choice
• Seasonings (cayenne pepper, chili powder, sea salt)

1. Preheat the oven to 400F.
2. Toss the turnip sticks with the oil and seasonings.
3. Lay the turnip sticks evenly spaced on a cookie sheet.
4. Bake for 20-30 minutes, checking after 15 minutes.

You can even add a little sugar, to counteract the spicy. You get to decide how much spice you want to add, because You Are Queen, Yo. I don’t want to get all presumptuous, just because I figured out how to make turnips yummy.

Cook on, sistas.