This Isn’t Your Practice Life

Plus a BOOK GIVEAWAY

Today I’m giving away a copy of the soon to be released (TOMORROW) delicious new novel It Girl from my friend Allison Pataki. More on this glorious book later this week including an interview with Allison. You will adore it. Paid subscribers can comment IT GIRL to be entered (US Only).

And how do you become a paid subscriber? Thanks for asking. You can pay the $80 a year subscription, or order a copy of The Parisian Heist (or two) today and fill it out this form. Then I’ll give you a free subscription for a whole year. Trust me. You want it. We have some INSANE premium content coming up ,but more on that in a sec.

So hiiiiii from Midway, Utah. I am doing an event here tonight at the woman-owned Folklore Bookstore (interview with the owner also forthcoming).

Midway might sound familiar to you. It is indeed the home to the Ballerina Farm store and is just 30 minutes away from their Dairy Farm. I have been to both and I have so much to tell and show you in stories, pictures, videos and podcasts. That is the premium content I’m talking about. We will start rolling it all out next week so you want to get your Parisians ordered and get this subscription!

I’ve gotta say, I have never seen so many identical, perfect barrel curls as I have in Utah. At first I thought Dyson must making an absolute killing here. Everywhere I look it’s the same glossy, bouncy, just-left-the-Drybar hair.

Meanwhile I haven’t washed my hair in three days.

But then my friend Lindsey who lives here told me they were all extensions! Do I want extensions?

No. I truly do not have time for that shit.

I drove by a sign painted on the side of a barn on Saturday out in rural Utah when I was heading to the Ballerina Farm Dairy (where I took a tour, MORE TO COME).

It said: This is not your practice life.

I loved it so much that I actually stopped the car. I backed up and sat there for a minute thinking about getting out to take a picture of it. And then I decided I didn’t want a picture. I just wanted it to live in my head.

I’m out here in Utah for work. Ostensibly for work, anyway. I have a one-night book event and then I quietly stretched the trip into four days, mostly so I could ski by myself at Deer Valley. Which, if you are a parent, especially a parent of little kids, feels wildly indulgent. I felt a lot of guilt about it.

But this is not my practice life.

We’ve dedicated this winter to teaching our big kids how to ski.

I keep saying it’s a sacrifice for our future happiness. But right now it’s a shit ton of hard work, achy backs, mood swings, and tears. If I have to say PIZZA PIE, FRENCH FRY one more time I may never eat another french fry. But it’s also got moments of joy and happiness and excitement.

Anyway that’s why I came out here and skied alone.

This is not my practice life.

There was something sticky on my ski goggles when I put them on in the morning. It might have been maple syrup. It might have been the remnants of Sour Patch Kids. My kids steal everything I own now. Everything that’s mine is now theirs.

It’s been that way for the past nine years. Everything I am is theirs too. My body, my mind, my energy, my happiness. All of it gets poured into them first.

It’s only in the past year that I’ve gotten better at carving out time for myself. At saying, out loud and without apology, that I cannot take care of everyone else if I don’t take care of me.

Deer Valley might be one of my favorite places to ski in the entire world, even if the snow hasn’t been great this year.

Being here also feels like stepping into a time machine. I spent twelve years coming out to Park City for Sundance when I was an entertainment journalist. Twelve years of wild, debauched, ridiculous fun in my twenties and early thirties. Driving through Park City had me drowning in nostalgia.

I remembered the year Burton Snowboards tried to teach a bunch of journalists to snowboard and somehow I ended up in a lesson with Lil Jon and a gaggle of Victoria’s Secret models. I remembered the time Courtney Love flipped me the bird at nine in the morning for absolutely no reason while we were both walking down Main Street. The time I watched Dustin Diamond from Saved by the Bell staggering down the sidewalk carrying so much swag from the gifting suites that he nearly toppled over. The time I shamelessly flirted with Adrian Grenier for two hours before realizing his girlfriend was sitting right next to me. And finally the time my friends Angie and Kelly and I danced on top of a bar with the men’s Danish Olympic ski team. I can’t find any pictures of any of that. But here’s one of me drinking a beer at 11 am on the mountain from 2007.

I was so much fun. Because I knew back then, when I was single and child-free, that I was not living my practice life. But somehow once you settle into the marriage and the kids you keep telling yourself you’ll do the things you want to do sometime in the future, when the kids are older and more settled, when they don’t need you as much.

Somehow you settle into your practice life.

It’s been nine years of tiny humans needing everything from me. Nine years where my body, my mind, my time, my calendar, and most of my identity have poured into raising three small people.

And now I feel like I’m just starting to emerge from it a little bit to live for me.

Yesterday I skied by myself all morning. I rode the lifts alone. I tapped out the final words on my new book on my phone. I didn’t really talk to anyone all day except for one brief interaction in the chairlift line.

Some guy muttered “bitch” under his breath when he thought a woman had cut him off.

I poked him with my ski pole and said, “It’s International Women’s Day. Show some fucking respect, bro.”

He did not respond.

This is not my practice life. I will say whatever the fuck I want.