I keep thinking that the longer I live, the better I will know myself. I keep expecting to get more solid in what I know, stronger in my convictions, more consistent in my thoughts and actions. It’s really the opposite, actually. As soon as you think you’ve got it all figured out, life will throw you a pitch you’ve never even seen before. And every game plan you think you’ve got figured out for parenting sometimes gets thrown out the window and you have to just wing it.

Earlier this summer, Carys learned that her first friend, her best friend, her ride or die (as the kids say these days), was moving to Lake Crystal. I don’t really have words for the devastation that followed this news. Lake Crystal is only about 40 minutes away, but it still meant that there would be an empty space at the door of the school each morning. It meant an empty seat at her lunch table, an empty space in our driveway, an empty extra bed on the floor of her room – basically a Finley-sized hole in the universe that Carys had grown to count on always being there.

In the heart of the summer, at the peak of her despair, she and Finley sat one night in the kitchen promising each other that they would stay connected, whatever it takes. They planned a few shopping trips, a couple of sleepovers, a concert they wanted to attend together, and a few milestone events like Homecoming. I did what any mother would do when watching her daughter spiral downward into a sadness the daughter was certain she would never recover from: I hugged her. I listened. I nodded my head and said yes, of course, whatever you need, we will do all of the things, yes.

Fast forward three-ish months to a Tuesday afternoon in mid-September. The kids had rolled in from practice and assembled at the kitchen table for supper. As we related events from the day, Carys rather casually announced, “Oh mom – don’t forget that will need your car tomorrow.”

I blinked a few times. “Why do you need my car tomorrow?”

“Well, I have to get to Lake Crystal,” Carys said, a little impatiently. “Remember? The concert you said me and Finley could go to?” And…that was the first time we had circled back to said concert in nearly 90 days.

While I stared, uncomprehendingly, at my 16 year old, she explained that in the last three months, she and Finley had gone online to purchase tickets to a concert. They bought matching outfits. She had arranged with her coach to do a morning XC practice so she wouldn’t miss a training day. She had looked up the attendance policy at school and learned that she was allotted a personal day that wouldn’t count against her attendance record. She had put aside some money for gas, food, and concert merch. She had researched a parking lot, the route to the venue, and planned out the entire day and evening, and now she was calmly and resolutely asking me to hand over the keys to my (much newer and much nicer and much larger) car.

Keep in mind that until this moment, Carys has never driven farther than Truman in her life. (11 miles.) She’s never been out of the county. She’s never driven to MANKATO, much less Minneapolis. There is also, at this time, a complex construction project going on between here and Lake Crystal, requiring a detour that she will have to take not only on the way up in the daylight but then ALSO on the way home in the dark.

And shall we talk about the venue? It’s at the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis. Have you ever been there? Because I haven’t. I’ve never even heard of it. Where is it? Is it safe? Is it an 18+ show? How many people does it hold? Because both Carys and Finley are tiny, helpless, adorable humans who will have no protective or adult figures hovering over them, or even within a 150 mile radius. I don’t know what the Varsity Theater looks like, who goes there, whether there is garage parking or lot parking, or no parking or what. I don’t know the address, I don’t know how to get there myself, and I don’t know why we are even having this conversation right now.

I just looked at her, in absolute shock, and for the first time in forever, I had no words. I looked to Aaron for a little help. He looked from her to me, back to her, and then back at me and said, “Yeah, I’m gonna let you work this one out.” And he scrambled out of the kitchen about as fast as he could.

For the record, I said no. I said NO WAY is this happening. And she said, quietly and gently, but also deadly seriously, “Mom. I know this is hard for you. But I can do this. And you already said I could go.”

I launched the counter-attack. “You have a XC meet the next day.” (Yes, and she is fully prepared and already packed and ready to go.) “What if I come with you?” (Nope – it’s sold out and tickets are selling on the black market now for $295 each.) “What if I just drive you up and back?” (Wait, I can’t. Because nobody mentioned this concert once in three months and now I have meetings scheduled after school and a rehearsal that I can’t miss.) “What if you just don’t go?” (Desperation is setting in – this isn’t even a real option.)

Because what you have to know is this: Carys is, and has always been, her own person. She is confidently individual, choosing to follow her own arrow, even when it departs from the norm. She has a fierce intensity that belies her small stature; she is strong, she is solid, she knows who she is and what she wants. She is deeply feeling; she’s an artist, and her most influential muse is music. Her musical tastes are broad and wide; I’ve never heard of most of what she listens to. But music has the ability to soothe her soul in a way nothing can. All of those things added up to me knowing, in that moment, that she would be going to this concert no matter what I said. I just knew it. And I had a decision to make in that moment – I could accept it, and put into place as many safety mechanisms as I could, or I could fight what I already know is inevitable. Do I want her to be this amazing, strong, confident, Twin Cities-maneuvering girl? I do. I do want that. I kind of love that about her, honestly. Well then, I better help it happen.

I didn’t go down easy, though. I cursed myself for letting this one sneak up on me. I cursed my schedule. I cursed my lack of planning – WHY have I never let her drive in the city with me to get some practice before today?! I cursed the Varsity Theater for having the nerve to bring David freaking Kushner to their venue on a SCHOOL NIGHT IN SEPTEMBER. “I know this is hard on you, Mom,” she said again with quiet sincerity. “Mom, you have to let me grow up,” she said, a little desperately. I finished cursing, and then I handed her the keys.

I made her promise to have her location on. I made her promise to Snap me every 15 minutes. I made her promise that if anything felt unsafe she would RUN for the car and come home. I made her promise to not get separated from Fin, even to go to the bathroom. Then I watched her walk out the door and I went into the bathroom and threw up.

I spent the next 9 hours chewing my fingernails into nothingness, pacing the floor, ignoring everyone in all my meetings and barely paying attention at rehearsal. I watched Life360 like my life depended on it, and tracked her car through every neighborhood, asking for photographic proof of life whenever the satellite lagged and it appeared that she hadn’t moved in 5 minutes. (Yeah, I know, I’m certifiable.)

At 10:30pm, my phone rang, and I shot up out of my chair in the living room to answer it.

“MOM!” Carys was screaming. I do not exaggerate – she SCREAMED at me, “MOM!” And my heart dropped out of my chest and I cashed in about 7 of my lives right then and there. “MOM,” she continued, “WE GOT TO MEET HIM, MOM!”

When I started breathing again and could ask questions I learned that upon leaving the venue after the concert, a crowd of people moved around the building into an alley. MY CHILD THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA to follow the crowd INTO AN ALLEY. I mean, they DID crowd around his trailer and he DID come outside and take her phone and get a picture and he DID put his arm around her and thank her for coming, so…worth the risk, I guess? Help me, Lord Jesus.

Her phone was on 3% battery, she informed me, and she had no charger because of course she didn’t so she would call me when she made it back to Lake Crystal and could charge it for a few minutes at Finley’s so don’t worry and this was the best night of her life so far. Awesome, cool. I remember thinking, “Well, if she dies in a fiery crash somewhere on 169, at least she lived the greatest night of her life so far. God help me.

My nerves have never been that frayed. Somewhere in the middle of all that came a panicked text from Emma: “MOM. Do you know that Carys is in Minneapolis with Finley right now?!” Yes, I know, I know. I then had to answer for the fact that there was no way in HELL I would have allowed that for Emma. I didn’t even let HER drive to Jackson for a football game once when she was 18, so what in the WORLD am I even thinking? I don’t know, kid. I’m clearly losing my ever-loving mind.

Carys rolled into town somewhere around 1am. She fairly floated to her room on a cloud of freedom, bathed in the post-concert glow of a really, really, good time. I sat up for another hour, wondering who I even am anymore.

This parenting gig is not for the faint of heart, people. If you need any advice, don’t ask me, I am barely alive over here.

I lost my mom six years ago this week. Some of those anniversaries have been hard and some not as hard as I thought they would be. I never really know which kind I’m getting until it gets here, but I’ve been developing a sense over the last couple of weeks that this one was gonna be tougher than others.

This year the missing of my mom is getting complicated because it’s becoming intertwined with my own identity as a mom. Until now, I’ve separated my role as a daughter from my role as mother. But as each of my own kids handle the various challenges that life hands over to them, I’m beginning to think about the way I handled my own and the role my mom played in my life as I grew up. I am wondering if my mom felt then like I feel right now. I suddenly have this deep longing for my mom; I need her words, her wisdom, her perspective, to help me be the best person I can be for them.

These past six years I’ve focused largely on how her loss has impacted me. It’s human nature, I know, to be caught up in ourselves, to think about our own experiences and our own feelings and our own needs. I have thought about my mom’s absence in terms only of what it feels like to ME to be without her. But something has shifted in this sixth year. Now I’m thinking about what it felt like to BE my mom. What did she go through raising me?

My kids have all had their own challenges and for whatever reason, this summer has been a big one for them. Each is going through his/her own thing, and I’m trying to be the person that each one of them needs. Sometimes I’m successful and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes they look at me like they’re glad I’m here helping them, and sometimes they tell me to just leave them alone. I find myself thinking about everything I went through myself growing up – how often did my mom feel like I’m feeling right now? And how did she navigate that? I would give anything to be able to ask her.

There are a few constants in my memories of my mother. One is her fierce protective nature. She was notoriously suspicious of the world, cautioning and warning us of danger at every turn. She was also the fixer; when something went wrong and we needed help, she taught the master class in Getting It Done. Growing up, that protective nature became a little annoying; I would cook up some new adventure and I knew I was going to have to launch my best ad campaign to get past the warnings and the efforts to dissuade me from anything that might result in pain or problems for me. I wasn’t often successful, and I remember straining against that safety net often.

A small example: I remember vividly my sophomore year of high school when our boys basketball team was playing in the Section tournament in Mankato. A group of my friends were driving themselves up to the game. I BEGGED my mother to let me go along. I wanted desperately to be in a car with my friends, listening to loud music and being obnoxious fans for our team. The independence of it was thrilling – I hadn’t left town without my parents probably ever. I barely got the request out of my mouth before it was a big no – we were only just 16. None of us had been driving much, and my mother was not-even-kind-of going to consider letting me get in that car. I was SO MAD. She tried to soften it by having our family go up to the game ourselves and said I could go SIT with my friends if I wanted, but I was riding up with my family. I was so salty about that, that I wouldn’t do it. I sat next to my parents during the entire game and pouted, all angst-y and ridiculous. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t been given the freedom my friends had been given, and my sixteen year old self just could not see past the embarrassment to even consider the other side. Today, I realize a couple of things: until my request, my parents hadn’t even considered attending the game in person. They had no one on the team to specifically support. My dad always listened to games on the radio. Add to that the expense of driving up, eating out, buying tickets for four of us…? Going to the game was an actual sacrifice, made to accommodate ME – made to make ME happy. I didn’t even say thank you. I actually made the entire experience as miserable for them as possible by being a total brat. I also got zero enjoyment from the game, so I sure showed them, didn’t I? Yes, I know this is all part of growing up – it’s completely normal and not even a very exciting story. But when we all grow up and figure out these nuances, we get to say to our parents “hey, wow, that was crazy, and sorry I acted a damn fool for no reason.” I don’t get to say that to her because she isn’t here. And my question today is: did she know?

Did she know I would be sorry about it one day? Did she know that someday I would be 47 years old and would give anything to have her safety net descend when something hard looms in front of me? Did she know that the things she used to do or say that drove me crazy would all be coming out of my own mouth and directed at my own children where I, in turn, get to drive them crazy? I want her to sit across from me at the kitchen table and exchange a knowing smile, and commiserate as parents on equal footing. I want to call her when I don’t know what to say or when one of them brushes off my helping hand and tells me in any variety of ways that they don’t actually need my help.

In addition to being the Fiercest Protector, my mom was also the Solid-Gold Fixer. Any problem, laid at her feet, became her personal challenge. There wasn’t a thing she couldn’t do; she was a master at working a customer service line. She was the most tenacious negotiator, undeterred from her purpose until the mission was accomplished. I learned to be selective about the problems I brought to her. Paperwork and bureaucracies could be conquered easily. Interpersonal problems – not so much. Mom took very personally any wrong or personal affront I endured. She couldn’t stand to see me hurting, and I could sense that early, so I worked through a lot of my own childhood drama on my own, surrounding myself with close friends in the comfort of a social-media-less existence.

I’ve tried to pick up her model; I’ve become the do-er of the family, the one who handles the problems, whatever they are. I make the phone calls, I fill out the paperwork, I do the research, I make it happen. I, however, didn’t have to navigate the world in the way that my children have to navigate it today. I wasn’t faced at every turn with instant and immediate feedback, confrontation, or evidence of the drama that swirls around kids today. I recognize this is a new era, and with the constant presence of texts and Reels and TikToks and Snaps, the drama goes wherever they go and it’s next to impossible to escape it. How could they manage all of this without me? Figuring out who needs what and how and when is exhausting – and then the worst of things happens. You discover that sometimes you can’t fix it.

I want to call up my mom and say, what did you do, Mom, when you realized that you couldn’t fix it? It’s by far the worst and the hardest part of this parenting journey – watching when their world comes crashing down and I can only stand there, helpless to stop it from happening, unable to soften the fall. Mom, how did you bear it? How do you hold their hearts through it? How do you carry their pain with your own? I didn’t appreciate, then, that every time I was sad, every time I was scared, every time I was worried, my mom was probably all of those things too – maybe even exponentially so. Parents are supposed to protect their kids from the hurts, and our failures to do so are a real blow to weather. She probably hurt just as much I as hurt, and that never occurred to me.

When I lived in Scotland during college, I took a two-week trip backpacking around Europe. There are a hundred million stories from that trip, but the one I’ll relate here is the one where I got robbed in Salzburg, Austria. To make a long, long story very, very short, I was robbed and left only with what I was wearing and carrying under my clothes – my passport and a plane ticket from Frankfurt, Germany to London. That’s it. I had no money, no credit cards, no bus pass, no rail ticket. Somehow I had to figure out how to eat, find a safe place to sleep, and secure some method of transportation from Salzburg to Frankfurt and I had three days to do it. This was long before cell phones or electronic forms of money transfers, and this was a real challenge. I made a panicked phone call to my mother at 2am Minnesota time to lay this massive problem in her lap. I remember vividly knowing that there was nothing she could do about any of it – I just told her because that’s what I did – I told her everything, all the time. I cried my eyes out and felt sorry for myself then I hung up the payphone (yes, I had called my mother COLLECT from Austria) and then went to work at solving my problem.

This story really isn’t about me solving my problem. Obviously, I’m alive to write this 27 years later, so I figured it out. But here’s what I can’t shake: what kind of pain did I put my mother through in that phone call? How in the world did I call my Protector and Fixer and knowingly serve up a problem she couldn’t fix or save me from? How many years did I take off her life? I never thought about her feelings once; it never occurred to me – never once – that she was going to feel her own level of panic and helplessness. I probably took ten years off her life that day.

But would I do it differently? I don’t think I would. Certainly I feel sorry today that I put her through it, especially knowing now how much the parents feel when their kids are going through the tough stuff. But I’m not sorry that I called her. She had positioned herself as my person; the One To Call. There was so much comfort in knowing that I HAD someone to call; that someone would pick up that phone and be there, even if they couldn’t do anything to help. (Incidentally, the girl I was traveling with who was also robbed, didn’t have a person. She made no phone calls, she just waited, wide-eyed and terrified, for me to do something.) My mom was my person, and that’s what I’m hoping to become for my kids, if they’ll let me.

Today my mom would be 70. I wish I could tell her that I’m sorry that I didn’t think more about her feelings; I want to tell her that I understand it NOW. She should BE HERE so I can tell her that, dang it. I want to know if she knew it all along – did she know how much I loved her? Does she know that every day I see her more clearly? Does she know that I’m trying to be the best parts of her?

And really, I just want to know her secrets to bearing the pain that was not only her own. She held the hurts for all of us and soldiered on. She was the keeper of our hearts, and she held them so gently; I want to know how to do it so I can hold them for mine – the gorgeously tender and sensitive souls I’m blessed to be raising. I’m not made of the toughest materials like my mother was, so this is an art form I will keep working to learn.

Love you, Mom. Happy Birthday.

All the small milestones culminated this June in the first of our big ones: Emma graduated from high school. When people say it happens so fast, they’re not kidding.

I couldn’t tell you how many people asked me how I was holding up through all the “lasts.” I probably disappointed them a little, because I honestly wasn’t sad – I wasn’t very emotional, at least not the way that some of my other parent friends were. I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on that. Here are a few observations I have from this moment in our lives.

I’m not sad about high school ending for Emma. I don’t wish for more of those days. High school was all the things high school is; it was good for her sometimes, even great. It was hard for her sometimes, even terrible. She had some really wonderful moments and some that she wouldn’t want to revisit for anything – but that is what high school is. I’m not sorry for any of it – it built her into who she is, and she is ready to move on from here and take those gifts into the next adventure.

Lucky for me, I get to go with her into the next phase and experience all the highs and lows of what is coming next. She’s always going to be mine, so I am not afraid of her new things – they’ll become my new things too. And whoever, whatever, she becomes in the next phase – I will be next to her the whole way. She isn’t doing it without me, she is doing it next to me, and I get to see it, I get to be part of it, I get to love her through it.

The part that maybe does give me a little heartache is the part attached to all the people and events that Emma was part of that we won’t be experiencing any more. I will miss my backseat filled with ball players and duffel bags and stinky shoes. I will miss the surrounding cast of her life – the faces and laughter from her friends and their families. I will miss watching her throw together class projects on the upstairs table the night before they are due. I will miss the late nights of pizzas with her friends in my kitchen or my backyard.

I will miss our softball family terribly – those people feel like my own. Not setting up my chair in front of Matt & Eric, next to Pam and Jamie and Melanie and Karen and Anna and Loretta and Angel and Connie and LaRae, and not hearing Tracy all the way from the third base line, and not harassing Terry whenever he is behind the plate – that part is gonna be really hard. I would have been Cory’s parent rep forever and ever, if I could have been.

But already, Emma is transitioning to the next phase. That love of playing ball has gradually shifted into the coaching of the game – she took on coaching an 8U team this year and I get a whole other kind of thrill from watching that. This is maybe the heart of what is keeping me going. She’s not leaving anything truly behind, it just adjusts, shifts, morphs, changes into the next thing. The cross-country days will continue, just on a college team, where I will learn all kinds of new things, I am sure. Softball will be in her life forever, in some form. She is still a little tender about basketball; I asked her to come with me to a summer league game for fun and she burst into tears. That one is gonna be the one that sticks the hardest, maybe, because it was such a gorgeous season for her in so many unexpected ways. But her friends will always be her friends, and she will make new ones next year who will add to her already wonderful life and give us even more memories.

This is the lesson, I think. Nothing is ending…just another beautiful beginning.

It’s been a rough winter.

Cooper sustained a buckle fracture in BOTH wrists during basketball practice right before Christmas break. He was able to get the casts off in time to play during his travel ball season, and now he’s working on regaining some of the grip strength he lost during the six weeks of cast and splint time.

Carys hyperextended the tendon in her arm during a basketball game and has been frantically rehabbing it to get healed in time for her tournament this weekend. Fortunately for her, we already possessed a pretty good arm brace from Cooper’s injury, so we were well prepared.

Emma became the third Gudahl in as many years to endure a broken nose. It happened during a rebounding drill at – you guessed it – basketball practice. She took one look in the locker room mirror, grabbed the bridge, and realigned it herself. She slapped an ice pack on it and told me in no uncertain terms that we would NOT be visiting the hospital. Rather, we would be driving to Mankato to pick up a faceguard because she had a game the next day and she would not be missing it.

Of course, everything happened RIGHT after the health insurance rolled over into a new year, ensuring that we will pay the absolute most amount of money possible on every bill. *sigh*

The good news? I’m still thinking. I’ll let you know.

I said this already, out loud, twice, during school today: “It took a lot of years, a lot of effort, a lot of luck, and the alignment of the stars themselves, to get to today. And it’s the happiest I have ever been.”

Please understand that I live and breathe for my children today and for always, of course. I am speaking professionally – the thing that consumes nearly 16 hours of my daily life from August to June. The last two years have been the hardest teaching years. The hardest. Someday I might try to articulate that more precisely, but not today. Today is for joy, and I have missed this joy, this spark, this lightning bolt of energy, so bitterly that I’ve considered more than once that I might have to find a new profession before this pandemic is all over.

But today. Today is the happiest I have ever been as a teacher, and that is saying a lot.

This semester, I am teaching college-level Creative Writing for not one, but TWO hours during the day. Can you believe it? Just me and 40 of my new best friends, sitting around tables, reading Anne Lamott, being inspired by samples from Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain and Molly Gloss, and writing gorgeous sentences about mundane moments.

I almost can’t articulate what this feels like. Planning for this class feels like going on a long-awaited vacation. Reading the research I need to best structure this course for new learners feels like beach reading – easy, lighthearted, interesting, and fun. Writing my curriculum map is like designing my very own adventure theme park. I’m as excited to practice writing with them as I am to read whatever pours out of their fingertips.

Compounding my joy, the response to Day One has been overwhelming. This is an actual sentence from a student today: “This is already my favorite class I’ve ever taken.” Um, yes. Yes, you are speaking true words. And also, me too.

There will be work, I am certain. Grading papers is no joke. Just ask Last Semester Sara who taught Honors Composition and graded 74 essays at six different intervals throughout the semester. But I know this – workshopping with creative writers every day, twice a day, for the next 18 weeks is going to save me.

To get here, I needed a Master’s in Creative Writing, the faith and backing of a school district to make it possible for me to get it while still employed full time, permission from Minnesota West to teach it concurrently, and 40 students who persevered through the foundational class and still liked writing (and me?) enough to sign up for 18 more weeks of it. See what I mean? Stars, aligned.

It’s the happiest I have ever been.

Reconciliation (noun)

1. the restoration of friendly relations 2. the action of making one’s belief compatible with another; harmonization

When you read fiction a lot, as I do, it becomes second nature to step into other worlds and then step back out of them again. I can walk into and out of mysteries and dramas and fantasy worlds with ease. I’m well-practiced; I can move fluidly from one to the next, identifying the markers of good storytelling and I tend to focus my attention on author choices. I love to examine the techniques they use to bring characters to life. It’s not unusual for me to think about them long after I set them down.

Reading Native American fiction has been no different for me. It has always had the same effect: I can walk into it, look around and admire it, then walk back out. I can be in awe of the way Louise Erdrich brings the Kashpaw and Lamartine families from Love Medicine into sharp focus. I can run my hands over the table that Joy Harjo sets in the poem Perhaps the World Ends Here and then I can close the book and walk back into my white life and the white culture I belong to, holding them at arm’s length.

That all changed for me last year. As a literature teacher, I tend to live primarily in the land of fiction. While there is nonfiction present in the curriculum at our high school, zero percent of the nonfiction happens to be Native American. Until I read Neither Wolf Nor Dog, my exposure to the real-life Native experience was essentially just the reservation that I drove through occasionally when we lived in South Dakota. You would think that South Dakota, so rich in Native history, would be an ideal place to learn and understand the Native experience. Sadly, I can’t say that was very true for me. (I fully recognize I’m probably going to be disowned by a whole lot of family members in a minute or two for saying this, but I have to say it like I saw it, even if they don’t like it.) What I observed during my youngest years, is that it’s totally fine for roads and rivers and counties and buildings to have Native names as long as none of the Natives actually interact with you personally. I really can’t remember anyone around me speaking often or kindly about Native peoples. Maybe they did and I was just too young to know it, but I had a distinct impression growing up that Native people were “other” and they were separate from me in every way.

NWND isn’t technically nonfiction – but it does center a white perspective as the foil to Dan the Elder’s protagonist, and the effect on a white reader is powerful. After that book, I began picking up other works of memoir and nonfiction, such as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Chief Joseph. In the past year and a half, I have learned and grown in a way I had not anticipated. Which brings me to today, December 26th.

I’ve read a great deal and watched a number of documentaries about the Dakota 38, the men who were executed in Mankato the day after Christmas by the order of President Lincoln. The story is not a simple one; it is filled with all the complexities you might expect of a tumultuous time in our State’s history. There are no winners – only regret and sorrow and loss. Today a beautiful memorial stands in the place of the executions, and every year the Dakota 38+2 Memorial Ride arrives on the site to say a prayer of Reconciliation and Healing. Reconciliation: an act of restoration, intended to restore harmony between two peoples, White and Native.

I wanted to go to the ceremony today in the worst way; I wanted to be there myself, to see and hear and listen and continue to learn. Circumstances forced me to watch it online – I was driving through Mankato to pick Emma up at the airport, but much much later than the riders would be there. So I watched it at home. Fears No Enemy spoke beautifully, and I was very moved by both the ceremony itself and the 17-day, 350-mile horseback ride the riders made in honor of their ancestors.

Later in the afternoon, I began my trek to the cities. As I neared Mankato, I was suddenly seized by inspiration – I just had to stop and visit the park. Even though it would be empty, the memorial is permanent, and it just felt right that I stop and say a few words of my own. I pulled off onto Riverfront Drive and waited at the stoplight by the Cub Foods. Something caught my eye – there is a Smoke Shop off to the left, and I found myself turning into the parking lot. I have learned a lot about the offering of tobacco – when it is Wakan and how it should be given. I parked and gave myself a little pep talk in the car because 1. I have never been to a smoke shop. 2. I have no idea what kind of tobacco is the “right” kind of tobacco. 3. I still operate under the “I’m a teacher and what if somebody sees me and thinks I’m setting a bad example” way of thinking most days, especially living in small-town conservative USA. And 4. I have no idea if this is something a White person should do or not. And 5. Did I already say I have never been in a smoke shop? Ugh. I reminded myself that I’m a fully grown person and I got out of the car.

God Bless the smoke shop worker. I stood, paralyzed, inside the door, completely out of my element and on the verge of bolting. This kind young man took pity on my pitiful self and said, “Can I help you?”

I blurted out, “I need loose tobacco.”

“Okay, here’s the case with tobacco. Do you know how much or what kind you need?”

What? You’re asking me questions? I hate being uncertain of myself – it’s not a comfortable feeling and I avoid it at all costs. I scanned the case – there was a section clearly labeled “Ceremonial Tobacco.” It had brightly colored packets emblazoned with Natives wearing headdresses and holding peace pipes. As I stood there, awkwardly fumbling for words, I had thoughts racing through my mind in rapid succession. What if ceremonial tobacco is different than the kind my dad smokes? Am I supposed to buy something special? Should I buy this packet with a Native American on it? What if it’s a White-owned company capitalizing on stereotypical Native imagery? That’s not good, I don’t want to encourage that. But what if it’s a Native-owned company? Then I DO want to encourage that. What if a White person isn’t supposed to have ceremonial tobacco? I don’t want my goodwill to be done poorly. Then – Holy crap, tobacco is EXPENSIVE! Ack! I had no idea! I better just get the kind my Dad smokes so it doesn’t go to waste. I hope the Great Spirit will understand; waste of resources might be worse than a well-intentioned White girl picking up the wrong type of tobacco.

I swear all of that happened in my head in the space of two seconds. I finally said, “Do you have something cherry flavored? I think my Dad likes that.”

The nice kid packaged up my $15 tiny pouch of tobacco and then he CARDED ME. Bonus points to him for that – this old lady sure appreciated having to dig out my driver’s license for the first time since I renewed it almost two years ago.

I fled to my car where I sat for a few minutes trying to recover my sense of security. Next thing’s next – I know that offering tobacco so that it is Wakan – sacred – comes under certain conditions. I had to do at least one thing right since I probably totally messed up the tobacco purchase. I turned on my Google microphone and said this exact sentence into my search engine: “If a White person wants to offer tobacco at a sacred site, how are you supposed to do it?”

And guess what? Google has an answer. It came from the Indigenous Offices at Carleton College. I needed a fabric square, a piece of yarn or string, and tobacco. I ransacked the car until I came up with a small square of fabric that I usually use for my makeup. I spread it out on my lap and filled it with a corner of the tobacco from the pouch. The yarn or string I know should be personal – so I pulled the ponytail holder from my hair and wrapped it around the pouch and drove the next few blocks to Reconciliation Park.

The last part of the offering turned out to be the easiest. You have to think good thoughts as you are making it, and you have to say good words. I thought about everything I’ve learned over the past two years. I thought about how I felt I was making real progress in my life toward openness and understanding. I rambled for a good five minutes about how I hoped that my own Creator and the Great Spirit were as close to each other as I suspect they probably are. I started to understand why sometimes Dakota prayers are super long. Once I got comfortable talking, the wind disappeared, I wasn’t cold outside at all, and thoughts just kept coming and flowing out of me. I hoped I was making reasonable sense. When I finished, I set the tobacco tie on one of the rocks beneath the memorial, and then I read the prayers out loud that are printed there.

“Remember the innocent dead, both Dakota and White, victims of events they could not control. Remember the guilty dead, Both White and Dakota, whom reason abandoned. Regret the times and attitudes that brought dishonor to both cultures. Respect the deeds and kindnesses that brought honor to both cultures. Hope for a future when memories remain, balanced by forgiveness.” ~Reconciliation, Katherine Hughes

“Grandfather, Father, Creator, look down upon us. Whatever works we do in a humble way, In the future when the children see them, they will understand and have knowledge. For this reason, here at this gathering place, we have come. Have pity on us and look! Make us live in friendship as a community.” ~Dakota Prayer, Eli Taylor

It was so quiet, so still, and so peaceful. I walked around to the other side of the memorial, where the names of the 38+2 are printed. I was whispering their names out loud to myself, trying to pronounce them, when I became aware of a line of cars at the stoplight right next to the park. I looked over and made eye contact with a college-age young man who leaned out of his car passenger window and yelled straight to me, “GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM.”

And here’s where I pause. I pause because there really aren’t words. I’m tempted to stop here, because what can you say?

After a full day of thinking about it, I don’t think I will put on paper all of the thoughts that I had. I will just tell you what I did next. I WANTED to invite that young person to stop and have a conversation with me. He assumed, I’m sure, that I’m Native myself – I mean, why else would I be there, right? Why would a white girl be there? Instead, I ignored him, and finished the list. I said every name. Then I walked down to the river. I have always felt the most myself near the water, and I do all my best thinking and feeling when I’m near it. The river was flowing next to the park, and walked down and sat on a rock. The peace I had felt was gone – the wind picked back up and felt biting and cold again. I fumbled an apology to the wind – sorry for the ignorance and the hatred that seems to permeate everything these days. I hoped it didn’t cancel out my goodwill.

As I drove the rest of the way to Minneapolis, that great city named for the Sioux word meaning water, I thought about how every inch of the road travels over Native lands. Every other city, street, or county is named for or by the people who were here first. Go back where I came from? If I were Native, I would already be home. I’m new here, regardless of how many generations of my people were here before me.

Sometimes I think we have come so far. We, as humans, have overcome so much – but there is still SO much work to do.

Welcome, friends, to my very own website, with my very own dot-com, free forever from hosting platforms. It feels like a brand new life, typing in this new font on this new background. Maybe I should be telling some crazy wild story, totally out of character for us, making you believe that we have changed and evolved into something completely different – kind of like when you get an extreme haircut and nobody recognizes you for a while. Alas, it is only me, only us, fully ourselves and barely different at all, unless you’re counting calories or gray hairs.

To clarify – I had to leave Blogger. It served me well for a lot of years, but that hosting site was wide-open, meaning there was lots of unpleasantness all over the place. (Think: ads and scammers and promoters and random visitors commenting ridiculousness.) It feels safer here, I guess, so I finally carved out thirty minutes of my life and made the export/import of the old stuff into the new space and paid a tiny little fee for the privilege of a domain that everyone can find. Everything’s here – all the stories and the photos and the crazy that I call my life. (At least, I hope everything made it. I haven’t pored over each post, or each word yet. I’m just trusting like that.)

Contrary to what my last post would tell you, waaaayyyyy back in May, I’ve been writing like crazy. Our summer was one gigantic ball of stressful awesomeness and I typically write to help manage that stress. Unfortunately, posting on the old blog was a definite no-go – so all those lovely posts are sitting in a draft folder, hoping to be resurrected one day in a fit of nostalgia. In the meantime, please enjoy this brief recap of some of the highlights.

In Which I Went Traveling: The travel industry might be the only reason I’m still functional as a human and that is not an exaggeration in the least. In the space of the last year, I took Emma to Nashville to see my brother and I took her to Spokane to watch Tyrell graduate from the SERE program. Both trips gave me a chance to bond with Emma on new levels, which I will treasure when she’s gone next year. We all went to Colorado again in what is becoming the best family tradition ever invented. I’m not sure why the Flavin family just flings open their doors, their refrigerator, their camper, or their lives for us, but they do and I can never repay them ever ever ever for what they’ve given us. I am the most myself in the mountains, and my kids are finding that peace too, asking every week if we can go back again. Erin, if you’re reading this, I wish I could live next door to you forever and have that easy friendship we have between us as part of my daily existence. Thank you, my friend, times a hundred thousand.

Finally, when I was filled to overflowing with family life and love, I got to escape to the great Minnesota North with Cyndi and Amber. I have lots of words and lots of feelings for them and for our adventures – all of which I am keeping to myself for the moment. I kind of understand that whole “what happens in Vegas” thing – except in our case none of us are doing anything immoral or illegal. It’s just that our adventures are ours; we are living in moments that can’t really be replicated, so if it just lives there, by itself, I can visit it when I need to and feel it, unchanged by the perceptions of others. We did, though, make a TikTok about it, which shall live in infamy.

In Which I Entered The Phase of Denial: Emma is graduating in May. (Insert moment of silence while we all take that in.) I’m not in a full-blown panic yet, but almost. We’ve taken some senior pictures – one batch in CO with Arie, and one batch in MN with Lindsey – and we’re digging our heels into the ground and holding on to every last second we can hold on to. When did she grow up? When?

In Which We Are Trying to Maintain Our Sanity: Speaking of graduation, Emma seems to feel that the perfect venue for that celebration is our backyard. This brings me to the Gudahl Family Stressor of the Year: The Remodel. Please know that I did NOT decide to remodel our house just because the oldest is graduating. This has been a six-year project that just happens to be finishing in 2022. Graduation is purely coincidental, though it is significantly increasing our urgency lately.

Back in 2015, we started on the inside, replacing every floor and painting every room, one at a time, piece by piece. It was easy to do a floor here, a floor there as time and funds permitted. But when it came to the outside, piece-at-a-time-remodeling is not a useful strategy. Every window (25 of them) had to be replaced. Every door (5 of them) had to be replaced. The roof had to be replaced, and the entire house had to be sided. We decided to do it all, in one fell swoop, and we have been in continuous remodel since June. It’s not all the way finished yet, but we can finally see the finish line.

Remodels are stressful. I’m barely alive.

So in addition to this new blog with this new look and its new domain, I’m living in a sort of new house with windows that open at will and seals that keep the northwest wind from whipping through the house. It’s going to be SO pretty when the yellow and brown concrete block is sided in Deep Ocean Blue. I’ll be sure to post pics when we’re done.

 This is always a hard holiday for me because I miss my mom so much. I usually kind of lay low on these milestones and avoid social media, but this year was a little easier than others I have had. My dad has been filling in for my Mama in every way, every day; he took me shopping for plants and we had a lovely breakfast at Edie’s – just us – on Saturday. Today I immersed myself in house projects, and throughout the day my kids celebrated me in the way that only my children know how to do. Hallmark won’t be calling to patent anything that happens at our house, certainly, but I wouldn’t have it any other way – they’re crazy, but they’re mine. We consider sarcasm an important life skill around here. Please enjoy these snapshots of Mother’s Day 2021.

Priceless Memory #1

I alternated back and forth today between wanting desperately to turn off the news, and not being able to turn off the news. I logged into social media tonight and stared at that question blinking at the top of my screen, “What’s on your mind?” What’s on my mind doesn’t fit in a Facebook post, so here I am. 

1.) I thought about turning off my social media completely and refusing to honor my space with an acknowledgment of the atrocity occurring in our nation’s capital today. And then I thought that to look the other way and not comment on it was probably far worse. 

2.) I’m not surprised, but I am so sad. I’m not even going to pretend that it wasn’t calculated and fully orchestrated. Having watched a number of protests evolve over the last four years, I know that there is no way those people would have gained access to our Capitol building unless there was some complicity on the part of the people who were supposed to protect it and prevent it from happening. Absolutely everyone saw it coming, and don’t tell me we didn’t have the resources to stop it before it happened.

3.) I think my heart hurts so much because I have grown accustomed to watching Americans be filled with righteous indignation over terrorism that originates from outside of our borders, like 9/11. The fact that our own people are willing to tear apart the fabric of our nation hurts on an entirely different level. 

4.) People of color in our nation have grown accustomed to oppression and to having their needs overlooked and ignored for so long…and they have been forced to tolerate it and swallow it, expected at all times to be quiet & keep the peace. They are consistently lectured over what deemed to be inappropriate protest (Colin Kaepernick.) Yet a very small minority of white people, completely unaccustomed to not getting their way, made the decision today to desecrate a symbol of the nation they purport to love and adore. The irony of this is not lost on any of us.

5.) I’m used to reading about this kind of news in history books. I have been increasingly concerned over the division I see widening in our country, but in my privileged white girl world I have been able to hold much of the world’s trauma at arm’s length. Tonight, more than ever, that feels selfish, and my thoughts are mostly consumed with what I’m going to do about it. I know I have a responsibility to play a part; I don’t know how to do it yet. I have no idea what to do, but I’m listening, I’m paying attention, and my heart is wide open to learning how.

5.) My heart hurts for my country. That’s what’s on my mind tonight. 

The world speaks to us all in different ways. For me, it has always been the written word that carries the wisdom of the universe and deposits it into my heart. Authors and musicians have long been my heroes for the artistry they bring to the human experience. As this crazy year draws to a close and I search for a path forward into a better tomorrow than yesterday, I’ve found my way out of the chaos through words and the connections to those who brought them to me. 

The last year that was this hard on me was 2016 when I lost my mother and the world descended into something unrecognizable. I learned lessons that year and spent the time since then searching for the good that emerged out of it. In some ways, I expected to handle this pandemic better than most because I felt prepared for disaster; it didn’t seem like anything could be worse than what I lived through already. 

But we all know how that turned out…2020 had its own special blend of surprise, bewilderment, and downright tragedy. I don’t even have to explain it – everyone living through this terrible year already knows and has their own version and story to tell. Sometimes it was easy to wallow in the misery…and believe me, there were days when I Wallowed In the Misery. 

In the midst of the awful, though, there were some really wonderful things. Hard things were balanced by good things. Sometimes I had to look for them…had to look pretty hard…but they were there, often hiding inside a song, a moment, a book, or a conversation. So my year-end post this year will do both; acknowledge the worst and celebrate the best of my year through the wisdom of the authors and artists who saved me. 

I’m starting with words – they’re my first love, after all, and have seen me through a lot of my highs and lows. And top of the list is Glennon Doyle. Untamed is the book of the year, in my opinion. I don’t think it was an accident that it ended up being released in March…that’s when the whole world fell apart and it’s when I began to put my life together the way it should have been all along. This is the third book I’ve read by G, and I was waiting for it. I didn’t know it was going to affect me so profoundly; I’ve read it three times through already and I find more and more each time that gives me pause. Untamed was not what I was expecting. I had to set it down sometimes because it was challenging my way of thinking and I needed to sit in the quiet stillness with it. “I looked hard at my faith, my friendships, my work, my sexuality, my entire life and asked: How much of this was my idea? Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?” Staying home and being very still during the pandemic afforded me the opportunity to really examine myself under that lens. To be honest, I’m not sure I love everything I discovered about myself, but there is real power in understanding who you are for real, when you strip away everything external. 

Which brings me to teacher number two. While Glennon focused my attention on the influences the world has on me, Jen Hatmaker’s Enneagram series peeled back those outside layers and helped me discover who I was at my center. It turns out I am a hard-wired 2, and the 2 is known as The Giver. Her world revolves around relationships, and her value is rooted in what she can give to others. In her best light, The Giver is there for others, she’s a listener and a caregiver and feels personally responsible for others’ happiness. In her worst light, a 2 will sacrifice herself for others – rule number one is that their comfort comes at the expense of her own. I know this about myself already, but I didn’t know how deeply ingrained it was in my psyche until Covid took away my access to people. I mean, It’s REALLY hard to be a Giver to people when you’re not allowed to interact with people! And it turns out that being a 2 has some real downsides – since they put everyone in front of themselves, when Covid separated me from the world, I discovered that I only had myself to take care of. I had no idea how to do it. 

So I tried to work on that a little this year. I established some routines I didn’t have before – I started running again and biking again, and spending enormous amounts of personal time reading and listening to my inner voice. She’s normally pretty quiet, but she got louder in the silence of the world. I also established some boundaries this year I didn’t have before, and the results were rather mixed. I discovered that some people in my life responded really well to that, cheering on my autonomy and supporting me; others disappeared from the landscape. It’s possible that I was only valuable to people because of what I gave to them…and if I wasn’t giving to them, I wasn’t worth keeping around. Ouch. So that was a whole process…I had to do a lot of reading and self-therapy to help me work on my feelings about that. And I still have work to do on it – I might have to work on it for the rest of my life because as Glennon keeps reminding me, the world made me this way and it doesn’t just disappear overnight.

Teacher #3: Alicia Keys. My book club family suggested this read and the perfect design of the Universe was never more evident when I read it. What else could possibly explain how Glennon woke me up to the world and then Jen shined a light on who I was and then Alicia drove the point home? “It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment when we internalize [the world’s] assessments; it’s usually not just a single experience but rather a series of moments that bruise the spirit and lead us to distrust ourselves and those around us. And then we wake up at age seventeen or twenty-five or thirty-seven and realize we don’t know the last time we’ve lived life only to please ourselves.” Please myself? What in the world is that? I’m a wife and a mother and a teacher…and an Enneagram TWO for heaven’s sake – we don’t please ourselves! But this summer, I decided I was going to try it out. 

The pandemic gave me such a gift in this regard; my usual summer responsibilities were out of rotation, so I had hours and hours to just please my dang self. I graduated from SNHU with a master’s degree in English Creative Writing. I lost 25 pounds. I got a great tan. I socially distanced my way to Chicago and Lake Michigan with my best friend. There is really nothing that six hours in a car with Cyndi can’t fix…sometimes I wish I could just plan a six hour road trip once a month and that might be the solution to every problem ever. Anyway – add the road trip to the vast expanse of Lake Michigan laid out in front of us, the softest sand between our toes, and I guess my family’s just lucky that we decided to come home…for awhile it was maybe a question. On top of that, every single day I sat in my backyard, looked out at the blue waters of Budd Lake, and lost myself (or found myself) in a book or a music playlist. Books and music and water and stillness…a powerful combination. 

When school started in the fall, I finally felt very centered. The extreme lows during reflection this summer were fading; I felt stronger, more in touch with who I am. I already knew that school was going to be different and I had been preparing for it all summer long. I was going into it in the best possible way…and it still completely kicked my ass. (Sorry. It did.) This teaching year, number 21 for me, was the hardest year I’ve ever had by a long mile. Look at me, talking about it like it’s over and it’s only December…! 

But if the written word saved my summer, music saved my fall.

If it’s the last thing I ever write, I want to say that music education might be the answer to all of life’s problems. I mean, I’m a super big fan of reading, obviously, but great words set to MUSIC are genuinely next-level. My youngest years were saturated with great music that my parents had on repeat in my home – my earliest memories are all accompanied by a soundtrack. When we moved to Blue Earth I was ten years old. It was the biggest school I had attended so far and it was also the first school I had ever attended that had a music education program. It’s important for me to talk about this; I know that I would never have developed the relationship I have to music without it. 

We had two hours a week devoted to music class. When I heard about it for the first time, I remember being in absolute disbelief – it felt wrong, somehow, that school should be that much fun. I used to watch my elementary music teacher float around our music classroom, graceful and beautiful, arm outstretched, directing our young voices and I absolutely worshipped the ground she walked on. She let us lay on our stomachs on the floor with tiny pencils and paper; she played vinyl records and asked us to identify pieces of music. She told us stories about musicians, talked to us about their lives and their passions, and explained how the music told their stories. She held the secrets to mysterious things like time and key signatures – concepts that were completely foreign to me. It was my favorite class…and then I got to high school where I landed in the classroom of one Mike Ellingsen.

I could write for three more days about Choir. But this is what you need to know, really. I can still sing almost every song I ever sang for him and it was almost thirty years ago. I still know all the words to everything. (Even Zigeunerleben and Regina Coeli!) You only have to say the word “Amahl” to me and I have an almost physical response to it. He was perhaps the most singularly passionate teacher I had; a particularly good performance of ours would move him to tears sometimes. I know I was supposed to be watching his hands when he directed, but I always watched his face. I could tell if we were on or off by a slight furrow of his brow, by a lift in the corner of his eye, or by the way he sometimes demanded more from us by stepping a little bit closer, as if he could bring it forth through sheer will. No matter what, he smiled broadly at the close of every performance; if we were great, he smiled through tears, and I felt a swelling of pride when we could elicit that from him. I know that the reverence I hold for music today is born of their work; I don’t listen to music, I experience it. 

Fortunately for me, musicians found inspiration in this pandemic too; they laid bare their souls this year and bravely handed it over to the world and said, “here – take this and feel better.” There are a few in particular that are moving me through this exceedingly difficult fall and winter season. My #1, Eric Church, delivered some incredibly powerful new music this summer, tackling world issues and daring to criticize the country music establishment. Cyndi & I saw Ashley McBryde last summer, and she’s become our favorite new country artist – I think she wrote a song just for us, because “Hang in There, Girl” is our ANTHEM…she finally released it as a single this fall and it seems to pop up just when I need to hear it the most. Taylor Swift’s new music has been playing on loop; there’s something really beautiful happening with her lyricism lately, and this particular sound she’s working with has this soothing, calming effect on me – I can’t get enough of it. 

Tonight my kids gave me an early Christmas present…I’m a collector of vinyl records and they gave me Chris Stapleton’s new album. When I had heard his newest single the first time, right as the school year was beginning, I cried. On my way to a grocery store pick-up the song came on when I was parked and waiting for them to come out to my car. I had just finished a week of back to school workshops and I had finally started to realize how HARD this year was going to be. I didn’t feel like a veteran teacher, I felt kind of terrified, to be honest. The opening line of the song…“Well the road rolls out like a welcome mat / to a better place than the one we’re at”...it kind of broke me. I didn’t know until that moment how close I was to just bolting – I was that stressed out by all the changes and uncertainty of the school year looming in front of me. By the second verse, the lines “This might not be an easy time / there’s rivers to cross and hills to climb / some days we might fall apart / and some nights might feel cold and dark” I was a puddle of jello. Thank God for the mask I was wearing when the guy came out to load my groceries – hopefully it hid the worst of my big, huge tears. I cried all the way home…for everything that was lost to me this year, and for the terrible uncertainty of what was coming. 

I feel like 2020 was a giant reset button….in lots of ways this year, I’m Starting Over.

My kids really know me. Emma knew how much this song, in particular, moved me, and I suspect she was the one behind this gift. When I opened the album tonight, the most perfect inscription was written inside: “In my life when I’ve needed strength, love, peace, joy, friendship, focus, courage, understanding, hope, or healing, I’ve found these things in music. As you listen, I pray you find some of these things here. May we all look to the best of who we’ve been, and the promise of who we can be. Here’s to starting over. ~C.S.”

The pandemic took away a lot of things this year; it took our activities and opportunities for social connection; we missed softball and track and tennis and the spring play and prom and graduation. The political climate of 2020 became unbearable and social media made it a thousand times worse. I lost people, I gained some perspective. I lost some confidence, I gained some personal strength. But 2020 also taught us to be grateful. I can’t remember ever before feeling so GRATEFUL for what I do still have. It taught us to be patient. It taught us to be still. There were hard things – and there were good things. 

I’m closing this big long introspection with a poem. It perfectly captures this year, so much more artfully than I could ever write. Best of all, it came from Heather, who somehow knows all the words and finds the right ones at the right times and sends them to me when I need them the most. It’s a reminder that every hard thing – even the small ones, are always accompanied by the good.

Any Common Desolation 

can be enough to make you look up

at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few

that survived the rains and frost, shot

with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep

orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird

would rip it like silk. You may have to break

your heart, but it isn’t nothing

to know even one moment alive. The sound

of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant

animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.

The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.

Warm socks. You remember your mother,

her precision a ceremony, as she gathered

the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,

drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath

can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,

the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything

you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves

and, like a needle slipped into your vein—

that sudden rush of the world.

~Ellen Bass