“Without Empathy, Nothing Works”

- Chef Jose Andre

On an oven-hot Albuquerque day in the summer of 2009, I picked up my four-year-old son Carlos from preschool. Every day after work, I would hold his tiny hand in mine, kiss his fat cheeks, and soak in that smile with the Grand Canyon gap between his two front teeth. He was a stocky little package with a giant head (99th percentile in head circumference, to be exact) filled to capacity with big emotions and even bigger thoughts. School pickup was an unexpected parenting surprise bonus. He saw me a mile away, lit up, slingshotted his whole body in my direction, and smothered me as if it had been an eternity since we last laid eyes on each other. We would walk hand in hand to the car, where he scrambled up and into his car seat, where I strapped him in snug and tight and smooched his little face one last time before taking my spot in the driver seat.

Parenting is 45% merciless torture, 45% an unimaginably beautiful and meaningful gift, and 10% anxiously wondering if the next moment will be either merciless torture or an unimaginably beautiful and meaningful gift. (That adds up to 100, right?) Listening to my children talk from the backseat while I drive was an unimaginably beautiful and meaningful gift. Something about being safe in the car with everyone facing forward turned on their little faucets, and they let flow all the stories and emotions that have been dammed up since you dropped them off with their little lunch bags and a hug and a kiss. The Shakespearean drama of playground battles and unjust timeouts, of who threw up and had to go home, and of who brought a better snack - all told with play-by-play sportscasting detail. A top-secret clubhouse on wheels. Magical.

“Mommy. Guess what happened today…” Always the start of a big announcement. (Even at four, the guy knew how to warm up the audience.)

“Me and Naomi,” (pause) “saw a man,” (pause) “with a robot leg!”

I closed my eyes and braced for impact. I could only imagine that a robot leg was a prosthetic leg. Oh dear. Did they point? Did they laugh? Did they drag the entire preschool class over to see? Did they inadvertently humiliate someone who was trying to go about their already difficult day and did not need a mob of four-year-olds staring at them like a caged animal? I had to take a moment.

The puzzle pieces of a gentle lecture snapped together in my head: People with disabilities and differences didn’t want to be pointed out as different. Disabilities and differences weren’t funny and often made the life of someone with them very lonely. All anyone ever wants is to fit in. Blah, blah, blah. I would be stern enough to make a point but tender enough not to leave him feeling ashamed. Even at his age, we’d had a gazillion conversations about differences, kindness, and acceptance. We have definitely discussed not staring (my name is Jenny Ramo, and I have a staring problem) and celebrating uniqueness. 

“What happened? Did you laugh or make fun of him?” Deep breath. His beautiful green-brown eyes widened, and looked right into my own through the rearview mirror.

“Oh no, mommy. We would never do that,” he nodded. Thank God. My shoulders softened. I exhaled. Good boy.

“We just went up to him and said, “Sorry about your robot leg!’” 

I die.

The sound of tires screeching pierced through my brain. It was the dissonant chord of horrifying and hilarious. “Hilarifying” is what we call it in our household. It’s something that requires the “cover your face and look away so your child does not see you laugh” move. (Some other time, I must tell you about how my other son got in trouble in first grade by playing a game that started as Venus Flytrap, then disintegrated into Penis Flytrap, which further devolved into who has the biggest Penis Flytrap and hit rock bottom at Punch Each Other’s Penis Flytrap. The principal who called to report the incident desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully tried not to laugh. It turns out it was the second to last iteration of the game that caused more damage than the punching phase. One of the boys was not happy to have the smallest Penis Flytrap. You don’t say? And by “some other time I must tell you,” I guess I mean I’ll tell you now because it did just tell you the whole story.)

After I winched my jaw off the ground, I realized that what Carlos was trying to do was important. He was trying to say, “I’m sorry that you have to deal with that thing. That must be hard.”

It was evidence of empathy.

***

The ingredients of my parenting recipe have been simmered down to a dense reduction. As any moderately neurotic and overthinking parent is wont to do, I intermittently remember to stir and taste - add a sprinkle of this and that along the way. I scrape down the legs on the inside of the pan and fold them back into the sauce. I shoo the flies away, keep the mixture from burning, and try not to leave it unattended for long enough for it to spoil. (Perhaps cooking analogies are not the best idea for me; my culinary skills have flung themselves from the edge of a rusty spatula into the decaying trash with three years past-due ketchup, shards of broken glass, and the crumbling carcasses of my homemade blueberry muffins sprinkled with tiny crystals of salt instead of sugar. You, Dr. Judgypants McBlessyourheart, can fuck right off. They look the same.)

My parenting recipe began before they were born with salty-sweet visions of CEOs and doctors and lawyers. My imaginary children would expertly bushwhack through the academic jungle, held up only by breaks to do microsurgery on neighborhood squirrels. Perhaps there would be a mean boss or two on the way, but the teaching kind of mean boss that builds character. Not the cruel version that leaves them in tears, wondering if they are capable of doing anything right.

I dreamed of easy vacations on the beach, being endlessly delighted by our clever, camera-ready children with their knife-sharp sartorial instincts. My kids would do their homework without fussing and then beat me at Scrabble before turning in for the night. They would be as fluent in Michelin star ten-course meals with dishes such as smoked duck eggs and light aïoli foam or a caviar sorbet palette cleanser as they would eat Frito Pie from the bag. Down to earth, yet sophisticated.

Turns out, I am not that person, and mine are not those kids. Just like their mom, my children are complicated and messy, mercurial and exuberant. They are impatient and bossy and creative and clever. They did not come with a manual, and despite all the many bad decisions I’ve made as a parent, they know they are loved. I think they know. I hope they know. They must know, right? They know, my husband assures me. They know.

My children polish up nicely, but on the daily, they are sartorial shit shows of tie-dye and Crocs with socks and thrifted T-shirts that say things like, “World’s Best Grandpa!” They are by-the-seats-of-their-pants students. They have each had to learn that you get a zero on the homework you don’t turn in. Their ability to lighten up is often buried somewhere in their rooms underneath piles of filthy clothes and a Styrofoam container of wings from God knows when. Nobody in our house is easy.

They are slow-growing orchids that will find their time and place to bloom. They make friends like people drink water. They are deeply funny and fundamentally kind. They worry about their friends and ask questions about the world. They love music and summer camp. They love each other even though they are strikingly different. They kiss the dogs goodbye in the morning and try every activity there is to be tried without fear of failure.  

I have missed parent-teacher conferences, forgotten about sports games, and have no strategic plan to get them into the Ivies. Instead of being at the zoo talking about how the snake was molting, I was trying to hustle them to the nacho stand before it closed for the day. (“Mommy needs nachos, hurry up!”) I have yelled and cursed at them and stood my ground on the wrong things. But I decorate the house in the middle of the night for every birthday. I give them hugs and tell them I love them 100 times daily. I make them laugh and feel better about whatever they’ve done wrong. My whole heart is wrapped up in these two bodies, and they know that. I’ve done so much wrong, but I hope I’ve also done so much right.

We used to joke when they were little that if they excelled in their lives, we would attribute it to our great parenting. And if they were fuck ups, we would just say, “They sure do come with their own wiring, don’t they?” Either they will be Nobel Prize winners or the funniest guys in prison. Fifty-fifty odds on any given day.

My recipe for parenting is a dog-eared document wrinkled and stained with mistakes and regret and love. I want my children to be happy and have enough money to be safe and have choices. I want them to be kind but not pushovers, empathetic but not enablers. I want them to have goals, but I don’t want them to be their goals. I want them to have enough. Enough love. Enough money. Enough joy. Enough resilience. Enough patience. Enough faith. Enough hope. Enough courage. Enough of everything.

What I thought I cared about is no longer what I actually care about. My children becoming people with impressive titles and great wealth but devoid of compassion or substance is far scarier than the reverse. Impressive titles and great wealth are not substitutes for being a good human who has crafted a layered and textured life. Give me the bus driver who helps strangers off and on the bus any day over the mega-wealthy CEO who has completely forgotten that he used to ride the bus. Rendered fat is fine for flavor, but it’s not what you eat to get strong.

I have tried to find my own compass amid all the conflicting measurements of parenting. I know that empathy doesn’t directly pay the bills. I would still argue that it is the North Star around which everything else organizes. I believe empathy is intellectually honest and fundamentally necessary to be successful, however one defines it. My children have noticed that when there is a tragedy in the news, such as a school shooting, I also feel sad for the shooter. When they tell me tales of children getting in trouble at school and acting out, they know they will hear an empathetic “aww” from me because nobody feels happy when they are misbehaving. What kind of life did that child have that led them to this moment? What kind of life did any of us have that led us to do what we do? There is a difference between empathy and excuses. Salt and sugar. (I know; only one of them goes on a blueberry muffin. Duly noted.)

There is no final report card or Yelp review of my parenting recipe. Some days, I get one star and a “Lousy service!” comment. Other days, I nailed it. At the end of the day, the only ingredient I really care about is empathy. I want to make sure that they are genuinely sorry that someone has a robot leg.

Jenny Ramo is a mom of two boys, wife, social justice advocate, lawyer, & questionable decision-maker. Her family lives between NOLA & Santa Fe. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, NYLON, Parents Magazine, & BUST. Jenny's social justice work has been covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, BBC, and many other international and national media outlets.

One of the things I love about making my own house beautiful is that I can shop from what I already have. I dig through the storage closet. I move things around that are already out. And then, I just redecorated my house... for free.

My poems are my before and after, except with thoughts and words. I'm trying to organize the hoard in my brain.

If you like it, please share and subscribe. I'd like to think they might help someone have a better day—or at least a more thoughtful one.

When I told my mother about my diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease at age 49, I half expected her to cheer.

“Excellent news!” she might say. “You and your incredible luck! Time to buy a lottery ticket.”

Of course, my milk and honey of a mama would neither say nor think anything of the sort. She would be devastated, but I would never know that. She would take me by the arm to skip through the splashy streets of Singing in the Rain, hugging slippery light poles and tap dancing in puddles while we tour the magical land of Parkinsonia - Where Tremors Just Make for Better Jazz Hands.

Forty-nine years into a relationship with my mom, I knew there was no news bad enough that she couldn’t find some way to forge a happy ending; She listens, she consoles, she sends cookies next-day air, but to her there is no such thing as defeat.

If mom had Leprosy, she would immediately declare in the most chipper of tones that the diagnosis was just the opportunity she had been waiting for to buy some fancy new gloves! Her first internet search would not be “How long do I have until my arms fall off?”, but “Does Bergdorf's carry gloves?” She would learn the difference between goatskin gloves and calfskin gloves and know which gloves to use for what occasions. She would learn that the French word for someone who makes gloves is a gantier and fly (first class, of course) under cover of darkness to the most famous gantier in all of France.

And, most importantly, she would tell no one. My mom would quietly buzz about wearing her gloves as if she had always worn them around all day every day. To her law firm, to the taco place around the corner from our house, to the grocery store, and to the opera.

“Who doesn't wear gloves to the opera?”

Nothing to see here. Keep moving.

My mother is a make breakfast, coffee-to-go, bazooka the glass ceiling before lunch kind of gal. A put on some lipstick, spritz on some perfume, and get back out there tough. The world depends on you, don't let them down.

I’ve asked my inhumanly resilient mom many times before when I knew she wasn’t feeling well, “don’t you want to complain just a little bit?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to spend at least a day or two stomping around and swearing at the sky?”

Again, no. Her loss.

Unlike my mom, I need a minute, a day or even maybe a year. I tend to soak in a luxuriously familiar tub of discomfort until my hands prune and I can watch the milky bubbles pop around the silver drain. And there I will sit in an empty vessel with tears streaming down my face until I am ready to get up and begin again.

There is no sleight-of-hand “look over there!” trick to dissolve the molten gruesomeness of a Parkinson’s Disease decline. This is no temporary financial hiccup she could solve with a quick bank transfer or some other mess of mine that she could untangle with a call or two. This is a well-described scientifically studied disease with a predictable pattern of descent.

On January 27, 2020, at my youngest son’s 10^th birthday dinner, I hid my face behind the menu and whispered quietly to my mother sitting next to me, “I have Parkinson’s disease.” I had just learned of it that morning and didn’t want to ruin my sweet boy’s special moment, but I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Tears poured out of my eyes and down my cheeks.

Even a grown woman still needs her mom sometimes. For my whole life, every single failure I have ever had, my mom has wiped my tears, brushed off my knees and pushed me to keep moving. This time would have to be different. This was unfixable.

Everyone breaks. Some of us heal quickly and some of us never heal at all. This was my first glimpse of never at all.

In some upside down way, telling my mother I had an incurable brain disease felt like a victory of sorts. I had her backed into a corner. She had to declare defeat and admit, for the first time ever, that I was indeed doomed.

Over the next few months, my mom and I had the same conversation on repeat.

“You will be okay,” she said.

“Mom, I have an incurable neurological disease. I will not be okay. Please stop saying it will be okay when it won’t. It literally, by definition, will not be okay.”

“Science is remarkable. This will not be as bad as you think.”

We were side-by-side in the same movie theater watching completely different movies.

When I lay hiding in my closet on a pile of dirty clothes sobbing into the phone to her, some part of me wanted to hear from her that yes, my life would not be what I thought it was going to be. That was what I saw on the screen, and I wanted her to see it too. I needed her to see it. What about the word “incurable” did my mom not understand? I wanted to hear that she was sorry that I was going to die a slow and miserable death. I wanted to hear that she knew that it wasn’t fair and that I didn’t deserve this fate. How could we even begin the conversation about a topic when one of us was pretending to not exist?

There is no bright line marking the territory between resilience and toxic positivity. There are no file folders in the office supply store marked, “Mind-Blowingly Out of Touch With What is Actually Happening” and “This Sucks and I’m Sorry” to choose between.

In my 54 years of life, I have spent a lot of time trying to discern why my mom’s invisible force field seems so impenetrable to the bad things that happen and mine is so vulnerable to them. I used to joke about the reality of life saying that “someone is going to punch me in the face today, I just don’t know who will do it and when.” What a terrible message to be repeating to myself over and over. Even in jest.

And then, it finally clicked for me.

My mom isn’t ignoring the facts. She is accepting them. Instantaneously. She isn’t fighting anything; she has already decided how she will respond to a particular set of facts before they’ve even materialized. Every second she spends pouting or stomping around is a lost second of life. Seconds add up to minutes that add up to days that add up to years.

What my mom is trying to tell me when she’s refusing to entertain the conversation about my potential deterioration is that she’s refusing to let me miss even one second of this beautiful life that is in front of me right now. Ruminating on my impending doom and being present are mutually exclusive. I have a choice I can make. How do I want to spend those seconds, days, and years?

What I’ve finally come to understand is the choice I have with the facts I am given.

How we respond doesn’t change the facts. Being optimistic in the face of bad news is not toxic positivity. It’s resilience.

Now, where do I order hot pink calfskin gloves?

“Without Empathy, Nothing Works”

- Chef Jose Andre

On an oven-hot Albuquerque day in the summer of 2009, I picked up my four-year-old son Carlos from preschool. Every day after work, I would hold his tiny hand in mine, kiss his fat cheeks, and soak in that smile with the Grand Canyon gap between his two front teeth. He was a stocky little package with a giant head (99th percentile in head circumference, to be exact) filled to capacity with big emotions and even bigger thoughts. School pickup was an unexpected parenting surprise bonus. He saw me a mile away, lit up, slingshotted his whole body in my direction, and smothered me as if it had been an eternity since we last laid eyes on each other. We would walk hand in hand to the car, where he scrambled up and into his car seat, where I strapped him in snug and tight and smooched his little face one last time before taking my spot in the driver seat.

Parenting is 45% merciless torture, 45% an unimaginably beautiful and meaningful gift, and 10% anxiously wondering if the next moment will be either merciless torture or an unimaginably beautiful and meaningful gift. (That adds up to 100, right?) Listening to my children talk from the backseat while I drive was an unimaginably beautiful and meaningful gift. Something about being safe in the car with everyone facing forward turned on their little faucets and they let flow all the stories and emotions that have been dammed up since you dropped them off with their little lunch bags and a hug and a kiss. The Shakespearean drama of playground battles and unjust timeouts, of who threw up and had to go home and of who brought a better snack - all told with play-by-play sportscasting detail. A top-secret clubhouse. Magical.

“Mommy. Guess what happened today…” Always the start of a big announcement. (Even at four, the guy knew how to warm up the audience.)

“Me and Naomi,” (pause) “saw a man,” (pause) “with a robot leg!”

I closed my eyes and braced for impact. I could only imagine that a robot leg was a prosthetic leg. Oh dear. Did they point? Did they laugh? Did they drag the entire preschool class over to see? Did they inadvertently humiliate someone who was trying to go about their already difficult day and did not need a mob of four-year-olds staring at them like a caged animal? I had to take a moment.

The puzzle pieces of a gentle lecture snapped together in my head: People with disabilities and differences didn’t want to be pointed out as different. Disabilities and differences weren’t funny and often made the life of someone with them very lonely. All anyone ever wants is to fit in. Blah, blah, blah. I would be stern enough to make a point but tender enough not to leave him feeling ashamed. Even at his age, we’d had a gazillion conversations about differences, kindness, and acceptance. We have definitely discussed not staring (my name is Jenny Ramo, and I have a staring problem) and celebrating uniqueness. 

“What happened? Did you laugh or make fun of him?” Deep breath. His beautiful green-brown eyes widened, and looked right into my own through the rearview mirror.

“Oh no, mommy. We would never do that,” he nodded. Thank God. My shoulders softened. I exhaled. Good boy.

“We just went up to him and said, “Sorry about your robot leg!’” 

I die.

The sound of tires screeching pierced through my brain. It was the dissonant chord of horrifying and hilarious. “Hilarifying” is what we call it in our household. It’s something that requires the “cover your face and look away so your child does not see you laugh” move. (Some other time, I must tell you about how my other son got in trouble in first grade by playing a game that started as Venus Flytrap, then disintegrated into Penis Flytrap, which further devolved into who has the biggest Penis Flytrap and hit rock bottom at Punch Each Other’s Penis Flytrap. The principal who called to report the incident desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully tried not to laugh. It turns out it was the second to last iteration of the game that caused more damage than the punching phase. One of the boys was not happy to have the smallest Penis Flytrap. You don’t say? And by “some other time I must tell you,” I guess I mean I’ll tell you now because it did just tell you the whole story.)

After I winched my jaw off the ground, I realized that what Carlos was trying to do was important. He was trying to say, “I’m sorry that you have to deal with that thing. That must be hard.”

It was evidence of empathy.

***

The ingredients of my parenting recipe have been simmered down to a dense reduction. As any moderately neurotic and overthinking parent is wont to do, I intermittently remember to stir and taste - add a sprinkle of this and that along the way. I scrape down the legs on the inside of the pan and fold them back into the sauce. I shoo the flies away, keep the mixture from burning, and try not to leave it unattended for long enough for it to spoil. (Perhaps cooking analogies are not the best idea for me; my culinary skills have flung themselves from the edge of a rusty spatula into the decaying trash with three years past-due ketchup, shards of broken glass, and the crumbling carcasses of my homemade blueberry muffins sprinkled with tiny crystals of salt instead of sugar. You, Dr. Judgypants McBlessyourheart, can fuck right off. They look the same.)

My parenting recipe began before they were born with salty-sweet visions of CEOs and doctors and lawyers. My imaginary children would expertly bushwhack through the academic jungle, held up only by breaks to do microsurgery on neighborhood squirrels. Perhaps there would be a mean boss or two on the way, but the teaching kind of mean boss that builds character. Not the cruel version that leaves them in tears, wondering if they are capable of doing anything right.

I dreamed of easy vacations on the beach, being endlessly delighted by our clever, camera-ready children with their knife-sharp sartorial instincts. My kids would do their homework without fussing and then beat me at Scrabble before turning in for the night. They would be as fluent in Michelin star ten-course meals with dishes such as smoked duck eggs and light aïoli foam or a caviar sorbet palette cleanser as they would eat Frito Pie from the bag. Down to earth, yet sophisticated.

Turns out, I am not that person, and mine are not those kids. Just like their mom, my children are complicated and messy, mercurial and exuberant. They are impatient and bossy and creative and clever. They did not come with a manual, and despite all the many bad decisions I’ve made as a parent, they know they are loved. I think they know. I hope they know. They must know, right? They know, my husband assures me. They know.

My children polish up nicely, but on the daily, they are sartorial shit shows of tie-dye and Crocs with socks and thrifted T-shirts that say things like, “World’s Best Grandpa!” They are by-the-seats-of-their-pants students. They have each had to learn that you get a zero on the homework you don’t turn in. Their ability to lighten up is often buried somewhere in their rooms underneath piles of filthy clothes and a Styrofoam container of wings from God knows when. Nobody in our house is easy.

They are slow-growing orchids that will find their time and place to bloom. They make friends like people drink water. They are deeply funny and fundamentally kind. They worry about their friends and ask questions about the world. They love music and summer camp. They love each other even though they are strikingly different. They kiss the dogs goodbye in the morning and try every activity there is to be tried without fear of failure.  

I have missed parent-teacher conferences, forgotten about sports games, and have no strategic plan to get them into the Ivies. Instead of being at the zoo talking about how the snake was molting, I was trying to hustle them to the nacho stand before it closed for the day. (“Mommy needs nachos, hurry up!”) I have yelled and cursed at them and stood my ground on the wrong things. But I decorate the house in the middle of the night for every birthday. I give them hugs and tell them I love them 100 times daily. I make them laugh and feel better about whatever they’ve done wrong. My whole heart is wrapped up in these two bodies, and they know that. I’ve done so much wrong, but I hope I’ve also done so much right.

We used to joke when they were little that if they excelled in their lives, we would attribute it to our great parenting. And if they were fuck ups, we would just say, “They sure do come with their own wiring, don’t they?” Either they will be Nobel Prize winners or the funniest guys in prison. Fifty-fifty odds on any given day.

My recipe for parenting is a dog-eared document wrinkled and stained with mistakes and regret and love. I want my children to be happy and have enough money to be safe and have choices. I want them to be kind but not pushovers, empathetic but not enablers. I want them to have goals, but I don’t want them to be their goals. I want them to have enough. Enough love. Enough money. Enough joy. Enough resilience. Enough patience. Enough faith. Enough hope. Enough courage. Enough of everything.

What I thought I cared about is no longer what I actually care about. My children becoming people with impressive titles and great wealth but devoid of compassion or substance is far scarier than the reverse. Impressive titles and great wealth are not substitutes for being a good human who has crafted a layered and textured life. Give me the bus driver who helps strangers off and on the bus any day over the mega-wealthy CEO who has completely forgotten that he used to ride the bus. Rendered fat is fine for flavor, but it’s not what you eat to get strong.

I have tried to find my own compass amid all the conflicting measurements of parenting. I know that empathy doesn’t directly pay the bills. I would still argue that it is the North Star around which everything else organizes. I believe empathy is intellectually honest and fundamentally necessary to be successful, however one defines it. My children have noticed that when there is a tragedy in the news, such as a school shooting, I also feel sad for the shooter. When they tell me tales of children getting in trouble at school and acting out, they know they will hear an empathetic “aww” from me because nobody feels happy when they are misbehaving. What kind of life did that child have that led them to this moment? What kind of life did any of us have that leads us to do what we do? There is a difference between empathy and excuses. Salt and sugar. (I know; only one of them goes on a blueberry muffin. Duly noted.)

There is no final report card or Yelp review of my parenting recipe. Some days, I get one star and a “Lousy service!” comment. Other days, I nailed it. At the end of the day, the only ingredient I really care about is empathy. I want to make sure that they are genuinely sorry that someone has a robot leg.

Jenny Ramo is a mom of two boys, wife, social justice advocate, lawyer, & questionable decision-maker. Her family lives between NOLA & Santa Fe. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, NYLON, Parents Magazine, & BUST. Jenny's social justice work has been covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, BBC, and many other international and national media outlets.

“You have to go to the real world. You can go back to your regular life, and forget any of this ever happened. Or you can know the truth about the universe.”

~ Weird Barbie

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Introducing “Barbie vs. the End of Days,” the disturbing – yet delightful – new immersive roller coaster running around the clock in my very own brain. And, lucky me, there’s not even a line to get on it. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure theme where I can go to either the bright and shiny Barbie movie wearing all pink with my best friends or fend for myself as I visit the climate apocalypse wearing clothes and sandals made of cardboard and garbage bags. I can mix M&Ms in with my medium-sized theater popcorn or fight to the death over the last can of tuna on earth. (Extra points to Team Armageddon for the dramatic savings on Botox, because it’s perfectly reasonable to frown when I’m about to be burned alive walking to the mailbox.)

It is usually a waterfall log ride, but since we are in a drought, there is no cool water splash on my face that tempers the baking heat. It's just a searing carnival in a microwave oven. Just as I’m cruising through the tunnel showing the “Best of Seal/Dog Friendship” videos, in comes the b-roll of famine in the Horn of Africa. GIFs of cute babies from Instagram intersperse with GIFs of emaciated polar bears floating out to sea on a mint white chicklet of ice where there were once giant glaciers.

I really don't feel well. Unsettled, scared, and nauseous.

From the tippy top of the roller coaster, I can make out two starkly different universes below. One is the colorful and complex landscape of the human experience as I have always known it. It’s rugged and beautiful and challenging, dappled with the color-shifting opals of sparkling joy and crushing pain. I have had a beautiful life, and much of my pain has been of my own creation - an embarrassing reality as I careen down the cliff in the tracks into the other darker universe. 

The other universe is a doomsday of un-survivable heat and the broken pipes of democracy spewing rusty toxic fascism everywhere while washing basic human rights and notions of common decency into the gutters. Everything feels heavier here as if there is a stronger gravitational pull. The truth is that an entire lush green island in the middle of the ocean just burned down and a hurricane is headed toward California. The war in Ukraine is at a tipping point. The territory of equity and inclusion gained through decades of civil rights battles is now being ceded to the cynical gospel of us versus them. (I won’t even begin to discuss Britney Spears’ 500th divorce. I used to have recurring dreams that we were best friends, and the point of every dream was how lucky she was to have me as a friend. True story, but that’s a whole other essay.) 

The air here is not infused with oxygen, but a peppery vapor making breathing a painful chore. I’m struggling to trust the strength of my seatbelt and safety bar holding me tight as the car turns upside down and the change falls out of my pockets. My brain hurts from the jerky ride between the heaven and hell planes of existence, intensified by the daily 100-degree temperatures. The roller coaster’s tracks cut uncomfortably close to what feels like the world’s final days. The scaffolding keeping the structural integrity of a well-lived life appears rickety and rotted, possibly beyond repair.

There is no end to my questions, and I have no good answers. Are this heat and global instability the “new normal?” Can we fix what we’ve done to the environment? Why time after time do people choose conflict over peace? Can we have just one moment where everyone in the entire world is ok?

The world is so beautiful, but also so broken. It always has been both, that much I do know.

Accepting the cruel asymmetry of the world from the comfort of my home requires squinting at the preposterous unfairness of the instructions on the Monopoly box that explain the rules of who has what and why. In my own life, I’ve done my best to account for my own privilege and lean into the values that drove me to work in the field of child poverty, but I still squint—a lot. I travel, I have nice things, and my children will have the advantages of tutors and college counselors. Even if I were to give all that up, I alone cannot completely dismantle a system that benefits me at the expense of so many others. I can tell you that I’ve tried and will continue to try, but it's not a one-woman job.

So where does that leave someone like me in moments like this? Am I allowed to be happy when everything is crumbling around me? If I throw myself into the deep end of the pool of cruelty and unfairness, will I help save someone or will I just drown? 

(Let me pause for a moment. If you are reading this and having intrusive thoughts such as, “Lighten the fuck up, Lady” or “What poor schmuck married this woman?” you aren’t entirely wrong.  I’m just having a moment. Did I mention it’s frighteningly hot outside? This might be a good time to go to the bathroom, get a cold drink, take your dogs on a walk, and then sit back down and see if you can work through all of this with me. I could use the help.)

Being able to sort and compartmentalize the good and evil of the world is a survival skill. It has to be morally acceptable to experience pleasure in spite of other people’s pain. Still, there is no hard and fast rule that discerns what constitutes healthy blinders for problems we can’t control from hypocritical excuses for looking away. I can’t stop for every homeless person I see, but I can’t drive by them all, either. There is no graph or PowerPoint deck that pins down precisely what counts as sanity preservation and what is a weak tea justification for protecting the socioeconomic machine that works just fine for me.

I sit in my air-conditioned home surrounded by construction workers renovating houses in the neighborhood that are up on the roof in the hundred-degree weather while I am mixing my second iced latte of the day. Why me? Why don’t I have to be up on the roof while one of those guys sits in the air conditioning? 

The question of “Why me?” has always been a tuning fork for me to calibrate the fairness of a situation. It was one of the first questions I asked when I got diagnosed with Parkinson’s. What did I do to deserve this? Of course, the answer was nothing. But I think the same question and answer apply to my privilege. What did I do to deserve this? Also, nothing.

Cognitive dissonance is the realization that your values and behavior are incongruent.  It’s the pit in my stomach that demands intellectual honesty and sees right through hypocrisy. Perhaps the discomfort can also be a diagnostic tool to see where we humans have broken the link between our deepest values with our actions.  Where we can lean into the truth of our shared world and take better care of it and each other.

For me, the answer is action through human connection. Bringing cold drinks to the workers is a simple gesture but makes a human connection and, hopefully, starts to mend the broken link between my own values and my actions. It's not as system-changing as my work on child hunger, but I don't think that's a requirement. The more I am able to see the humanity in someone else, the more compassion I'm able to generate for them. The more compassion I generate, the more motivated I am to work toward an authentically equitable system.

I’m getting off the ride. It’s too upsetting, too depressing, and too chaotic.  I can pretend I never got on it in the first place, or search beneath the ride to find the coins that fell from my pocket from being upside down and use them to invest in a better ride – an honest ride. Also, I'm going to make a cocktail, because who can think in this heat, anyway? Weird Barbie, are you free for dinner?

Jenny Ramo is a mom of two boys, wife, social justice advocate, lawyer, & questionable decision-maker. Her family lives between NOLA & Santa Fe. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, NYLON, Parents Magazine, & BUST. Jenny's social justice work has been covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, BBC, and many other international and national media outlets.

Have you ever read the poem “Warning” by Jenny Joseph? I have always loved it. If you are a fellow troublemaker, you will love it too.

Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

-Jenny Joseph, 1961

Jenny Joseph, even at the young age of twenty-eight, was carving an “over my dead body” moat in the sand around the mischievous sparkle in her eye - that innate joie de vivre in all of us that is far too precious to ever extinguish. Everything that makes life worth living emanates from that sparkle. It's that dance like no one's watching, sing too loud and laugh too hard, rebellious glimmer that means we aren't entirely fit for every dinner party or customer service job that comes up.

I see you, Jenny Joseph, and I think she would see me, too - always scheming to tiptoe out the back of the classroom so we can go hide out in the janitor’s closet. Skimming our hands over the walls and under the tabletops, feeling for the top-secret button that triggers a trapdoor out of our beigy-blah adulthood and drops us - gently enough not to spill our cocktails (obviously) - onto the emergency slide to glide down to the universe where we can finally loosen our belt buckles, cuss, drink and, of course, wear purple. No need to wait for the canes and the toothless grins of old age. We can start practicing right this very second.

Amen, sister.

Does any of that ring a bell for you? I can't possibly be alone in having had those experiences or relationships or jobs that nearly smothered the life-affirming sparkle to death. One wrong step, and we were neck-deep in the quicksand of the banal. I suggest staying on high alert because those joy killers are everywhere. Grown-Up-Landia is a veritable minefield of them.

“Fitting in,” for me, is my soul-crushing kryptonite. Things like talking to the fancy mommies with white jeans and perfect nails about why little Billy and Sally are nationally ranked in tennis at age 18 months, any conversation that involves proving my worthiness to belong to their club (Yes, that is amazing that you “went to school in Boston.” No, I’m not going to ask you where. I went to a college that required a pulse, thank you very much.), and any group that requires "ice breakers" make me want to light myself on fire.

When we lived in Santa Fe a few years ago, we were invited to a New Year’s party. Having the New Orleans soul that I do, my first thought was, “Costume!” So, I went on a treasure hunt only to find these ridiculous(ly awesome) black glittery My Little Pony leggings from the Target girls’ section, and then I made a My Little Pony fascinator to match. The fascinator was magical. I created a whole scene of different ponies jumping over grass and bridges. There were trees, and every My Little Pony character that I could find was on there. My husband wore a vintage tuxedo. We walked into the party to a sea of expensive cocktail dresses, high heels, and champagne in flutes served off silver trays. Time stood still. I think if the hosts could have picked us up with salad tongs and thrown us into the garbage, they would have. We were at the right party and also at the wrong party. Instead of being mortified, I was kind of delighted.

When I went to rush a sorority in the late 80s, I was surrounded by dozens of freshmen sitting on floral couches engaged in mindless chit-chat, trying to be accepted to however you might describe “the opposite of a think tank.” When one of the fungible blonde girls asked me what I had done that summer, I think they expected something like lifeguard or retail or, more likely, nothing at all. “I dug latrines in Mexico” was not on their list of things that sounded fun and interesting or made them want me as their sister.  

The more I sense discomfort, the more I lean in. My sparkle is bright and colorful and loving and has a heavy sprinkle of fuck you. Being well-behaved and excelling at fitting in are not virtues. They are flashing arrow evidence pointing toward a low IQ, a dearth of original thoughts, and an early demise from boring yourself to death. There must be hard data somewhere about the extended longevity of people more interesting and slightly more rotten than their flavorless porridge counterparts. Which would you rather be? (I love putting questions in the text where I can't actually hear anyone answer. It's like the Dora the Explorer cartoon where she asks a question, then pauses and blinks while she waits for the child watching to answer. "Have you seen the Map?" Pause, blink, blink, blink.)

So, can we take a moment to raise a glass to the rascally scofflaws, the rapscallion rabble-rousers, the scrappy band of minor league scoundrels? How about a toast to those of us who miss the world of crank calling and dingdong ditching, who desperately scan stale business conferences for any sign of fellow troublemakers sounding the barely perceptible dog whistle of, “Get me out of here!” How about a round of applause for those of us who laugh when we aren’t supposed to laugh about things we aren’t supposed to laugh at?

That’s my specialty - finding everything funny that is 100% for sure not supposed to be funny. Why is there no award for Funniest Person at a Funeral? Or, Most Likely to Get Kicked Out of Yoga for Laughing When Someone Farts? And why is the designation of "Class Clown” not up there with valedictorian?  

---

Almost immediately after I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the age of forty-nine, Jenny Joseph's poem surfaced in my consciousness. (Thank you, science, I think I will be ok.) It’s funny how that works. How whatever you need miraculously rises to the top just when you need it. Some shrewd cell in my body took over the steering wheel and gently drove me toward the “Exit Here for the World of Not Taking Everything So God-Damned Seriously” offramp. The cells in our bodies have wisdom that our logical brains do not. The cacophony of daily life drowns out their whispers. But in that moment of shock that came between the sound of the Parkinson’s face slap and the sting of its impact, there was silence. That’s when I could finally hear my cells whisper to me, “Run! Run towards Purple!”

There was no more casual stroll to the finish line. There were no more quaint notions of a tipsy grandma on her porch with mismatched clothes and a bottle of brandy. It had to happen now. Yesterday. Ten years ago. If I had limited time left as a healthy human being, I would get straight to business Marie Kondo-ing all of the things (and people) in my life that did not bring me joy. I needed one of those flashing magnetic-bottomed lights I could throw on top of my car like the undercover cops had in those old bad-guy TV shows. I needed the PA system that goes with it, with the curly black cord and the microphone with the button you push to yell things like “Slow down!” and “Pull over!” Maybe a shiny badge in a black leather case that flips open. But I digress. The sparkle took over for a hot second.

Within a year of being diagnosed, we planned our move back to New Orleans - the birthplace of everything good and evil - where cussing, drinking, and wearing purple is just your average Tuesday morning. It’s the most welcoming, loving, hilarious, authentic, shenanigans-promoting, life-celebrating, and joyful place on earth. (Legal Disclaimer: I have not been everywhere on Earth.) And my friends are the most welcoming, loving, hilarious, authentic, shenanigans-promoting, life-celebrating, and joyful people on earth. (Legal Disclaimer: I have not met everyone on Earth.)  

It was the one place where I knew that no matter what happened to my health, my beautiful friends would push me out to the Mardi Gras parades and hook up my IV to a frozen daiquiri bag. They would stand at my bedside debating whether they should wedge a joint in my breathing tube or if blowing some smoke in my face would be more effective. The debate would be endless; it’s a lot of lawyers.

My friends are my purple, and so is this brilliant and messed up town. 

----

I wish you this kind of clarity (minus the diagnosis). The kind of clarity that reshuffles your priorities like playing cards and lays them down on the table in just the right order. Something terrible shouldn’t have to happen to do this. Why wait to focus on what brings you joy versus misery?

This work of reshuffling and discernment is the most important work I’ve ever done. It completely changed how I experience my life. Instead of feeling like nothing matters, I feel like everything matters. It’s just that now the universe of my “everything” is much smaller. It’s culled down to a highly curated assemblage of kinder people and thoughts. An ordinary moment has the richness of a fancy sweet. It has the wind blowing through my hair in a convertible, last day of school, first day of vacation, gooey s’mores on a camping trip in front of a warm fire kind of exuberance. It’s gratitude. It’s peace. It’s 99.99% of your brain focused on the present. 

The opposite of being present is ruminating. They are mutually exclusive. You cannot be in your head and be present. It took the “Wake the fuck up!” bullhorn in my ear of a scary diagnosis to put a straitjacket on my overactive brain. I had a constantly churning meat grinder in my head, chewing and spitting out the gristle of day-to-day injustices and interpersonal misunderstandings. There is not enough Botox on planet Earth to stop my face from revealing exactly what is happening in my head. Rarely does my stewing solve anything. It’s just a deep worn groove that is uncomfortably comfortable. A bad habit. It can serve a purpose in my work life, finding clever solutions that no one has thought of, but mostly it’s just exhausting.

Of course, the opposite of ruminating is being present. Once I learned how to be more present, which is no easy trick, it was mine to decide what to do with it. I could progress toward peace of mind through gratitude and empathy, or I could just be pissed about my new reality. Nobody can be positive at every moment. Whoever coined the phrase “toxic positivity” nailed it. Sometimes there is no silver lining. You have the right to wear your cranky suit. Just don’t wear it every day.

There are days when all I want is to stand on an overpass bridge with one fist holding a hand-scrawled posterboard sign that says, “Fuck all y’all!” and the other death-gripping a bottle of cheap liquor peeking out of a brown bag. Mindfulness doesn’t automatically differentiate between productive and unproductive uses of your time. A mindful body scan of me on the overpass might include feeling the wind in my hair from the cars whizzing by or the feel of the metal chain link fence on my fingers. The swish of warm malt liquor down my throat. The sound of horns honking at the ridiculous lady spending her day telling strangers where to go. Technically, that does qualify as being present, but if feeling at peace is the goal, I’d argue against this path. Especially if you, like me, hate the outdoors, malt liquor, and standing. I am more of an indoor, cocktail-sipping-while-seated kind of girl.

Learning a kinder, gentler way to be present at first was (and is still, to be honest) an “I Spy” road trip game of shitty thoughts and owning the satisfaction they gave me. Even the world’s most obvious and well-deserved negative thoughts had to go because they came with a bitter aftertaste and a mild regret hangover. I spy with my little eye... a white truck with metal balls hanging from the back bumper. I spy with my little eye... someone taking their sweet time on their phone while I’m waiting for their parking spot. I spy with my little eye... someone who definitely should not be wearing leggings as pants or fuzzy slippers as shoes.

Nope. Not ok. Not good for me and not good for the world. I am unfortunately talented at very funny uncharitable thoughts. Does it make people and me laugh? Yes. Is it mean and crappy? Also, yes.

I don’t think Jenny Joseph was suggesting that we quit our jobs and join the circus, but maybe that we walk around a little bit of circus in our hearts. That we stop drawing inside of the lines all the time and remove our feet from the X mark of tape where we are supposed to stand quietly until called on. That we kick out the Shakespearean chorus of uninvited critics and that we are not members of anyone else’s Shakespearean chorus either. That we pour more drinks, hug strangers, not worry so much about who likes our outfits or opinions and live out our last days being the best kind of bad.  

That’s my plan. Step one was moving to New Orleans. Step two is trying to sneak a pretend square dance troupe into the Mardi Gras parades as if we are actually supposed to be there. I may live a long life, and I hope I do. But I’m not waiting to be an old woman to wear purple.

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Jennifer Ramo is a mother of two boys, wife, friend, social justice advocate, lawyer, Olympic-level bridge burner, shenanigans instigator, and questionable decision maker. She and her husband and two sons live in New Orleans and Santa Fe.

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For those nights when you need to calm your nerves and need some Vitamin C!

I have five essays open. None are finished. I am trapped under the heavy prospect of possibly being terrible at this. Oversharing, undersharing, unfunny jokes, offensive jokes, or, the worst, just being an embarrassingly basic writer of the Hallmark After-School Special ilk. (She's Got a Brain Disease, but a Heart of Gold!”)

Much of what I’ve written is in “The Dustbin,” a Word document of text swept up from the cutting room floor. I almost called it “prose,” but that is too generous. “Text” seems more accurate. Just words strung together, forming sentences that don’t fit anywhere. They add to the word count ticker that tells me that I’m producing something for all the fuss I’m making about wanting to write and be a writer.

This substack experiment is as much of a writing practice for me as anything else. I have no agenda. Why I am choosing to share my writing is a bit of a mystery, just as why anyone would read it. I love the process of creating and polishing. I love writing and rewriting. I find myself incredibly entertaining - mostly, if not entirely, because I tend to make bad choices in the most hilarious and dumbest of ways.

If you like the writing, awesome. I’d love to hear about it. If you don’t, you can fuck right off, no worries at all.

Given that the writing I present may actually suck and will 100% not be as polished as the first post, I feel the need to write a disclaimer, so I gave CHAT GPT the following instructions:

“Write a two-paragraph legalese disclaimer that the writing you are about to read may suck and if you have an erection for more than 8 hours go to the emergency room. If you have vomiting or excessive discharge from any orifice, stop reading immediately.”

You will notice that CHAT GPT changed the 8-hour erection to a 4-hour erection. I disagree with this medical assessment and I was a failed pre-med.

So, here it is. Pretty sure it won’t will hold up in court.:

**DISCLAIMER AND ACCEPTANCE OF TERMS**

The reader is hereby forewarned that the forthcoming written material is presented on an "as is" basis, with no assurance regarding its quality, coherence, or relevance ("Perceived Quality"). Any dissatisfaction or objection arising from the Perceived Quality should be expected, and by proceeding to read, the reader voluntarily accepts this risk, waiving any claims against the author, publisher, or their associates.

Furthermore, the reader is cautioned that any physiological reactions resulting from the engagement with this material, including but not limited to sustained erections exceeding four (4) hours, vomiting, or excessive discharge from any orifice, demand immediate medical attention. Such symptoms could indicate serious health risks. The author, publisher, and all affiliated entities are not responsible for any medical issues, injuries, or discomfort that may arise. If such symptoms occur, discontinue reading immediately and consult a healthcare professional. By choosing to continue, the reader indemnifies the aforementioned parties from any claims, liabilities, or damages resulting from their interaction with this material. Engaging with this content signifies your agreement to these terms.

An Incomplete List of Bad Decisions

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.
  ― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

I am making an incomplete list of bad decisions. God knows a complete list would be impossible.  Honestly, at this point, I just hope I don’t fill up multiple volumes, but the night is young. While I don’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, the apparently infinite number of mistakes I’ve made in my lifetime gush out of my pen and onto the paper.

I turned left when I should’ve turned right. I flipped off the guy who tailgated me on the road only to pull up next to him at my kid's school. What I thought would be a “super subtle” cosmetic procedure right before a big event was neither “super” nor “subtle." I trusted the wrong friend with a humiliating secret.

“What is the matter with me?” is a daily question. I exist to make people feel better about their own mistakes.

“Oh, you did what?” I say to a friend pouring out his heart about something he did wrong. Sit down. I can beat that. Accidentally replied all with a snarky comment? Pour a drink.

However complete or incomplete my list may be, it seems necessary to decipher how I’ve gotten into the heartbreaking mess I’m in - a mess that can only be explained by either karma or truly terrible luck. I am free-falling off a cliff, pulling on my parachute cord and begging it to open.  I will do anything for it to open.

In early 2019, I noticed that my right hand and arm weren’t quite functioning properly. Typing with my right hand felt as if I was wearing a mitten or had a cat paw instead of a hand with independently moving fingers. My typing was so inaccurate I started dictating everything.  My right arm was stiff and bent at the elbow, held up by an invisible sling. The fingers on my right hand clenched into a rigid death grip around anything I held, like my phone or cup of coffee. When I lifted a fork to take a bite, the silver tines tremored above the plate. 

Too much working and not enough resting seemed to make for a sensible explanation. After a year of ignoring it, I finally made an appointment with my brilliant friend Amanda, a neurologist, to see what kind of physical or occupational therapy might help. 

I walked back and forth in the cold hospital hallway as she observed.  She crouched and watched me walk fifteen to twenty feet away from her.

“Stop. Turn around.” Five or six times, I went back and forth for her.

“Can you straighten out your right arm?” She watched carefully and just nodded.

We went back into the exam room, my sweet husband in tow.  I sat on the examination table and she pulled up a stool on wheels. One at a time, she took each arm and closed her eyes, and moved my forearms all around. I had no idea what she was feeling for but was not at all alarmed.

I sat and tapped my feet for her.  First, the right foot…tap, tap, tap.  Then the left.  More nodding and mostly silence from my doctor friend. She gave me a pen and watched as I drew spirals of circles on a legal pad and wrote sentences.  The words got smaller and smaller as the sentence went on. I showed her how when I move my right hand in a certain way, it manifests a jerky cogwheel quality like an old-fashioned robot.

“It looks Parkinsonian.” I froze. Was Parkinsonian the same thing as Parkinson’s? Did she just say I had Parkinson’s?

 “You think I have Parkinson’s?” She nodded so sadly. Her eyes were wet as she looked directly into mine.

“Yes. I think you have Parkinson’s.”

“Isn’t that a progressive disease?”

“Yes. It’s progressive.”

“Is there any cure?”

She sighed. “Maybe in our lifetime.”

The conversation was so fast. So to the point. That was it. Four or five sentences. No nuance, no sugarcoating. The words were out, and they couldn't go back in. I couldn't even cry. It must be the feeling that people feel when they hear that a loved one is dead. You just sit there.  The before still clearly visible from the after.

What I thought was a mechanical problem turned out to be a brain problem.

On January 27^th, 2020, my youngest son’s tenth birthday, and mere weeks before the world locked down for COVID-19, I received the news that at the age of forty-nine, I had Parkinson’s Disease - an incurable, progressive brain disease.

Only because I was nowhere near absorbing either the seismic shift or the earthquake itself, I went home to watch my sweet boy open his presents, blow out the candles, and nosedive into his birthday cake. I knew down deep, in the ways we all do, that this was no nightmare, but I had to hold it all in until that beautiful little man was sound asleep.

Then, I lost all pretense of holding it together. I drowned in unending tsunamis of catastrophizing panic. The moment that my mind began to relax, it shocked me back to reality. With each bolt of fear, I ran to my closet to curl up into crumpled-up towels and musty t-shirts so my children couldn’t hear me wail. There I sat for sometimes an hour, waiting for my red face and swollen eyes to subside enough to return to the living room as if nothing was wrong at all. It was a terrifying and terrorizing horror flick I watched on repeat starring me in a wheelchair and unable to speak.

My kind, handsome, and hilarious soulmate husband and I may not grow old together. I might not be there to watch my beautiful and brilliant two boys blossom into exactly who they are supposed to be. I pictured their weddings without me and my dearest friends at my funeral and the brunch afterward, where they toast me and then get on with their lives after the check is paid.

I was being forced at gunpoint to accept the unacceptable.

Between the deafening drumbeats of impending doom, my brain has latched onto the basic human question of “Why?" “Why did this happen to me?” And “What will make it go away?”

It is magical thinking to conclude that what I have done wrong caused this disease or that anyone is to blame for the unrelated horrors that may befall them. But magical thinking is part of how we all get through the day, isn’t it?

“Good things happen to good people,” they say. Does that mean that bad things happen to bad people? I know this can’t be true, but the world stops spinning when I realized that maybe I did this to myself. If my behavior led me to this moment, I must have been much worse than I thought.

If, by any minuscule chance, there is an appeals process for this sentence I’ve been given, surely an inventory of my bad decisions will be required. So, I’m writing a simple, old-school list of my transgressions, bad decisions, poor judgments, and the times I knowingly squinted at the text of the Golden Rule. ("I’m so sorry, Golden, you’re breaking up. I think we have a bad connection.”).  

My idea of what an appeals court would look like is appropriately overdramatic. A black-robed Court of Karmic Appeals panel with white powdered wigs is sitting up on the dais combing through the fact patterns of each of my errors with painstaking attention to detail.

Bang! Bang! Bang! The wooden gavel pounds down, startling everyone in the room.

“The case of Jennifer Anne Ramo vs. Her Bad Decisions is next on the docket!” 

The losing parties ahead of me file out of the courtroom, heads down, grasping file folders stuffed with dog-eared legal arguments now headed for the shredder. The Justices grumble and nod their heads in agreement as they comb through a lifetime of my blunders. I can hear an occasional breathless gasp.  I sit alone in the back of the courtroom, wishing I could object.   

“What’s that you say?” the panel asks with a vinegar tone and crisp British accent.

“You slept with your friend’s boyfriend?!” Scribble, scribble.

“You drank how much before getting into a car?!”

The hearing is unending. The judges are not impressed, and their disgust compounds with each seemingly unthinkable choice that I have made. By the time they make it to the present day, they seem exasperated and ready to slam down the hammer on me.

“We’ve heard enough,” one of them croaks. Then, they file out one by one behind giant ornate doors, where they vote on my fate. Was it the mundane bad decision that did me in, or something more nefarious that engraved my destiny in stone? I will never know, but the sentence is a very different life than I would have chosen and certainly from what I’d envisioned.

If nothing else, I want to know exactly what in this life I’ve done for good and for bad. I want to leave the planet with the knowledge that despite my many bad decisions, I left the people I loved and the world better off than when I arrived. I want to be thorough, but I fear this may take longer than I have.

How does any one of us begin to collate even a day of good and bad decisions, much less a lifetime? How do I decide which ones matter and which are not worth the time to examine? Which decisions were forgivable and which decisions were beyond the pale? Which deserve punishment and which fall under the normal wear and tear provision of life’s lease? If it ended well enough, was it still a bad decision?  Shakespeare had an entire play literally called “All’s Well That Ends Well.” That has to be worth something.

Where do silver linings fit in the equation? What about intent?  Acts of omission? Are there any compassionate exceptions or waivers? How about time for good behavior? Is there a rubric somewhere?

If the point of the exercise is somewhere between reparations and mitigation, then intellectual honesty is non-negotiable. There is no place for the sleight of hand that seeks to bury poor choices under a pile of “Look over there’s” and “Nothing to see’s.”  Sugarcoating seems as bad as the crime itself.  A nearly post-mortem audit of my life's mistakes and the damage they have done is more complex than I thought.

I haven't zeroed in on a bright-line rule for what qualifies as a bad decision, but my working definition seems reasonable enough.

A bad decision is one that we regret or should regret.

Even the “should regret” part gets a little fuzzy for me because there are definitely choices that I should regret that happen to bring me unhealthy levels of satisfaction. Sometimes people suck and watching them get their due is not the worst thing in the world. I will save that for future musings, which I shall entitle “Burning Bridges with Panache” and “Schadenfreude: The Essential Guide.” Right now, I’m just on the entry-level “Bad Decisions for Dummies.”

I can’t think of a single human being who walked the earth that did not make a bad decision or two. Making mistakes is core to the human experience. If we are paying attention, we learn to make better decisions.

Raise your hand if you aren’t always paying attention.

In the table of contents of An Incomplete List of Bad Decisions that lives in my head, there are chapters of stories. The bulk of my bad decisions likely fall under the chapter heading entitled “Sheer Stupidity.”  At best, they are embarrassing, and at worst, they didn’t result in palpable damage.  Just a few months ago, on the first day I ever wore prescription glasses, I took my then 16-year-old son to the orthodontist.  I parked the car while he sat down in one of the reclining dental chairs lined up in a row to get his braces tightened. I spotted my curly-headed boy and sat on the parent’s bench beside him. I rubbed his leg while they yanked his open jaw here and there for the monthly torture session.  Twenty minutes of love pats and gentle leg scratches later, I noticed that these were not my son’s legs and then panned right three chairs over to see my actual son lying there waiting his turn.  I rose slowly and made a brisk escape out of the office and into my car to sit there and die.  There were no extra paper bags in the car to put over my head, so I just hid in plain sight, hoping not to hear any police sirens headed in my direction.

There is the pamphlet-sized chapter called “Substance-Related Bad Decisions,” It includes gems such as falling asleep under my work desk after a weekend of partying too hard, curled up with a vintage fur coat, foolishly thinking I was invisible until my boss walked in and saw my feet sticking out. (I was fired). Eating an entire pot brownie at a music festival just because I was hungry. Drinking any cocktail that was blue.  Taking the "I'll have one of everything" approach in Amsterdam resulting in an ER visit and the EMTs making fun of me while I thought I was dying. ("You should hear what the Italians say. Mamma Mia!" Roars of laughter with my boyfriend at the time, who was having a great time on his particular drug-fueled roller coaster). Drugs and I were not meant to be friends. Drugs are a bad decision for me.

The “Dating and Relationship Bad Decisions” chapter isn’t much better. It is a short chapter with a few long paragraphs. Like everyone else, I dated assholes and was an asshole.  The lone exception is my beautiful and nearly perfect husband. Somehow, I got out of my own way and let him into my life.

“Bad Decisions I Made that Hurt People I Loved” is the one chapter that keeps me up at night. It’s a longer list than I would otherwise like to believe and the most likely source of my karmic damage. Just a few bullet points into the list are enough for me to realize that even though I think of myself as a good person and try so hard to be one, many times, I have failed in ways that have caused deep, no-joke pain to others.  

In my head, I think I’ve only been kind and generous. But, in my heart, I know so much better. “Nobody’s perfect” is neither a shield from accountability nor karma.

“Just being honest,” I have said. “I don’t mean to offend you, but…” I might deliver it disguised as a joke, but the message is always clear: “I think you are breathtakingly stupid.” Honesty was the spoonful of sugar meant to distract from the bitter and belittling cruelty behind it. I have been both surgical and careless just because I thought I was correct. What else is there besides being correct? It took me a long time to realize the difference between “can” and “should.” So many times, I won the battle, but at what cost? I had to learn that being right is only relevant when you don’t care about how you leave the person you think is wrong.

I tease my husband, “I am more pros than cons, right?” I ask, “If you had to sum me up on my headstone with one math term would I be “>, <, or =?”  His answer depends on the day. At this point in my desperate quest for redemption, an equal sign will suffice. He thinks I’m wonderful. He also knows all too well that I am more than capable of causing pain to the people I love.  Thankfully, he can hold both of those realities in his mind at the same time and still love me. 

If it’s not too late to say it, let me do so now.

I’m so sorry. I am sorry I chose to disappear from relationships over confronting the issues. I’m sorry I made you feel small and beneath me. I’m sorry I left you in pain, wondering what on earth you could’ve done to deserve it. I thought I was being funny or fair or just or measured, but I was none of those things. You deserved better and more of my love, not less.

Bad things do happen to good people just as good things happen to bad people. That truth, though, doesn’t really sink in until something truly bad happens to someone truly good.  Or, at least in my case, someone who truly tries to be good, knowing full well in the back of my mind how imperfect I am.

* * *

I sometimes wonder if we aren’t all busy cataloging and organizing our own Incomplete List of Bad Decisions.  I’d be willing to bet the chapters look pretty much the same. Maybe it’s not such a bad assignment for any of us if it makes people realize that we all make bad decisions. We all have times when we wish we’d done something and when we wish we hadn’t. Acts of omission carry just as much venom as acts of commission.

Every day I sit with this diagnosis. I don’t really believe in Karma. I believe in loving kindness (including for myself), making amends, and leaving everyone better off because of my presence. I believe that we are all trying our best, and even when it is woefully inadequate, it’s still our best.

We all have regrets. We all fuck up. The worst in us hopefully does not tarnish the best in us. At the end of the day, maybe a realistic goal isn’t that we never make bad decisions. Maybe the realistic goal is that we try harder to make more good decisions than bad decisions. That we try to be more pros than cons to people we love. For me, I'm just going to shoot for a >, and hopefully, I end up at an =. Or, as Shakespeare once said, "All’s > that ends >."

* * *

A cute-as-pie twentysomething barista at the local coffee shop tried to entertain both of us by flipping a paper coffee cup and trying to catch it behind his back. It fell on the floor and rolled around for a few seconds while we both looked at it.  Without missing a beat, he looks up and says, “I’ll edit that in post-production.” I wondered aloud which of my mistakes I’d like to edit in post-production. He responded, “The list is long. I don’t even know where I’d start.” Me either, my friend. Me either.

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Postscript:

Thanks to science and the Michael J Fox Foundation, the Silverstein Foundation, and countless brilliant scientists and willing trial participants, I am on a medication that has stopped my progression, and there should be gene therapy coming out soon.

Jennifer Ramo is a mother of two boys, wife, friend, social justice advocate, lawyer, Olympic-level bridge burner, shenanigans instigator, and questionable decision maker. She and her husband and two sons live in New Orleans and Santa Fe.