Everything, it seems, wants my complete and undivided attention. My pedometer wants me to establish and maintain a streak, my Spanish learning app wants me to commit to “at least ten minutes a day,” even my social media apps goad me on to collect stickers each time I post.

Life is an endless prep school.

A few weeks away from my 47th. birthday now, the word “late” forties niggling around the corners of mind, prickly, with hard edges, has been dredging up thoughts from the abyss. I am reminded frequently of the life I don’t have, choices I didn’t make – or did make, as it were, hallways where I turned a corner, or opened a door, only to have the others close shut forever. And it’s not regret I feel, far from it, just a strange curiosity.

That time, for example, when my husband and I decided to uproot our family and move out of state instead of staying put. What if we hadn’t? And that’s just one instance, albeit a big one. Every time I have faced a major decision, I have entertained myself with the Many Worlds Interpretation, where in an alternate world, another me exists and lives as the one who chose differently. It’s fun to play with the idea of how different Other Me would be from This Me.

But lately, it seems like those choices – the big, scary ones, are getting fewer and far between. Do I really disturb the universe if I choose Honeycrisp over Pink Lady? Other Me and This Me are staring at each other across a mirror and they’re both holding apples and smirking.

I will never again make a career choice between Literature and Accounting, for example. I will never again decide I want a baby, then more. My husband and I will never again take a deep breath and say, “So we’re homeschooling, then?” Those doors I walked through, have slowly slid shut, hushed and quiet, but their “click” has been loud, the echo following me through the mist.

I cannot turn back.

But then I think, a little wistfully perhaps, of the same decisions haunting my children. Choosing a career, choosing a spouse, choice, choice, choice. I remember how enormous they felt in the moment. Having all those choices ahead required new habits, learning skills, committing. Oh, and the preparations. All that preparing, never quite arriving. Never being satisfied. It meant giving your all, your undivided attention to a thousand dreams, grasping the writhing unknown, clamping down on it and wrenching it free and not letting go until it became a reality in your life.

That is the kind of attention my apps want from me.

“Don’t you want to be ready?” they seem to ask. Raucous, violently colorful, showering me with baubles and shining stars. “Learn some new skills, be ready to take on the world when the chance comes. Launch yourself. Commit.”

And then it occurs to me that the nice thing – the best thing – about getting older is being able to say no. After years of committing and learning and choosing to do things a certain way, I have made my bed, thank you very much, and I’d really like to lie down.

Those doors that will never open again are reassuring. The future is not ambivalent, the choices I made are cast in stone, never to remake. That leaves me far from regretful; instead it leaves me free. I can choose where to spend my time, my energy and my effort.

Good fences make good neighbors and hedged in as I am now over this hill, my fence is looking really good indeed.

I have never been good at sales. Even though I have held various jobs where selling was explicitly or implicitly required, all I remember is techniques of “How to get to ‘yes,'” or “Would Tuesday or Thursday evening work better for you?” My front door has a NO SOLICITING SIGN; I am wary of good speakers.

So why am I telling you this?

Because even though I hate sales, I do love writing. There’s something about hammering a sentence, a paragraph, shaping a word, a thought, sculpting an idea into shape and placing it in just the right light onto paper, um, screen, in this case. I plan on getting back into it.

But none of this constitutes selling anyone on anything. My attitude to strength training and homeschooling is currently about the same: do it or don’t. I believe everyone should, but I feel no great need to get you in my camp.

I’m late to the party. But then when it comes to television shows, I usually am. I like to wait the requisite amount of time to ensure they don’t cancel a show just when I’m beginning to enjoy it. Not to mention I’m incredibly fussy about what I give my time to on the screen.

And so it was with some trepidation that I started to watch the Netflix show Inventing Anna. What can I say, I was bored, my husband was away for a week and it was late fall: the time of year when it gets melodramatically dark at 4:30 pm and stays dark until 8 am the next day in our corner of the Pacific Northwest. I don’t know if it was the lack of obvious political commentary (that came later and annoyingly often, breaking into my willing suspension of disbelief until I rolled my eyes) or the way Julia Garner said, “Why do you look poo-uh?” but I was hooked.

I watched it beginning to end in less than a week.

After binge watching the show, I reviewed it quickly for my Facebook friends. Here’s a screenshot of what I wrote.

I did that partially because I had talked it up on day one. At day three of the binge, I had begun to worry the show was headed in a direction I would probably not appreciate. By day four, I retraced my previous enthusiasm and buried deep into the guilt. I had begun to see through the glitz. I did not like what I saw, or at the time, thought I saw.

Here’s what I did like about it: I liked how they unraveled the plot like a mystery. That was exceptionally well done. I loved Julia Garner.

Here’s what I did not like: everything else.

Halfway through the show, when that uneasy feeling was beginning to settle on me like a shroud, I googled Anna “Delvey” Sorokin. I did not like what I found.

After the show was over, I was still craving my next Anna hit. As you can probably tell, I tend to get a little obsessed. But that’s the beauty of these shows and that’s why I’m sad. Inventing Anna really was done well; if only, if only all that talent hadn’t been used in the way it was.

So I headed over to Amazon and started listening to My Friend Anna, written and read by Rachel deLoache Williams. Oh yeah, that Rachel. You know, the terrible woman who takes advantage of Anna and then abandons her when she’s in prison? The terrible friend who runs away when Neff yells at her? Why would I want to know her part of the story?

Why, indeed.

The picture that emerged from her book was completely different. And it made me dig deeper. I will say this: the show made a sleuth out of me. I found out that the reason the producers had made Rachel appear as such a despicable character was because Netflix paid both Anna and Neff to tell their story, but Rachel had signed a deal with HBO. Many details in the show had been unapologetically changed and straight out created to put Neff and Anna in the best possible light and perhaps because every story needs a bad guy, Rachel took the hit.

Yes, yes, we need drama. Of course, some details have to change. It helps make the show interesting. They never claimed it was a documentary. Every episode began with a reminder that everything is true, except the stuff that’s completely made up. However, you cannot use real people, real names and real events that occurred to garner sympathy for Anna (and don’t even try tell me they didn’t) and then ruin someone’s reputation. Or can you? Isn’t that called defamation of character? The show had plenty of that.

At last, I read that Rachel Williams has sued Netflix for defamation. I sincerely hope she wins.

I highly recommend you watch the show, though. And also that you read Rachel’s book. Because it does bring up some questions – important ones, I’d say. How much should you bend the truth to make something interesting? Is just slapping a disclaimer on something enough? And also, if you met a con artist, would you recognize him or her or be taken in?

As far as I’m concerned, while watching the show, we find ourselves in the position of the real Rachel Williams: taken in by the story and the glamor only to realize it’s hollow and we’ve been sold a bill of goods.

After ten years of being a stay at home mom to three children, after homeschooling all of them (still am), after three years of working outside the home, I’m back. I quit.

I remember having written something earlier about quitting, about knowing the right time to quit. Unapologetically. So many blogs and books mention having an exit strategy, knowing when to quit before you begin. But honestly, how many of us know who we will be tomorrow? I certainly do not. I envy people who have lived in the same city, the same town, who know their neighbors, their streets, maps imprinted on their brains, replacing old shopping malls with new names, new stores.

“Oh, it’s where the old Cash-N-Carry used to be!”

It’s a code, a transaction. A conversation. And I am who I have always been – an outsider.

“Oh?” I say, enjoying a good history lesson.

And coming back home sure feels like one. A big history lesson where, for once, I am the subject, the actor, the one not standing along the sidelines, deciding if I understand the lesson. For perhaps the first time in my life, I get the lesson – I understand it – fully, completely.

Looking back, growing up, I had always wanted to be madly in love. Madly in love with my husband, my children, my life… whatever that involved. My biggest fear, I think, was going through the motions, unimpressed, uninvolved, waiting for something better, waiting for the world, my world, to be different.

I feared – I do fear – being frumpy. I don’t know when staying home, keeping a home, began to equal being frumpy in my mind. Perhaps noticing that neither of my parents handled retirement well conflated things in my mind. Maybe I bought into the toxic feminist narrative. Maybe I just lost my mind.

Either way, I worked at three different jobs in turn – one at a warehouse, one as a cashier and another in a kitchen. While I knew that none of them was a career, I did enjoy them. And I won’t lie – I did enjoy the fact that for a little while, my wish that I would be known as someone who isn’t just a mom came true. People knew me for me, by my name. I was expected to show up, by myself, for myself and do my job that was no one else’s responsibility but mine.

But then I figured out how much that wish of being only me by myself mattered to me. And, honestly, the answer surprised me by being: not much.

In spite of Facebook groups telling me I needed a separate career and checking account. In spite of Pinterest and Instagram, in spite of Hollywood “rom-coms” selling me on the narrative of what the slightly-better-than-average- 40-something-American-woman looks like.

It didn’t matter that much because there were also other things that I was expected to show up at, by myself, for myself. There were also other jobs that I wanted, other things that I had agreed to be that were no one else’s responsibility but mine: Doctors’ and dentists’ appointments for the kids, homeschool filing dates, teaching my three children, cooking lunches, breakfasts, dinners, meal planning, vacations, camping trips, holidays, date nights, budgeting, grocery shopping, investing, saving, organizing, keeping everything in our family on track. And there were other things, I realized, things I hadn’t considered that took time as well – finding the time to stay sane for one, things like reading and writing this blog and taking the time to process events and emotions and dream and, yes, dare I say it, time to stay pretty and fit.

These were important, precious, but they suddenly became overshadowed by Work. My job became the be-all and end-all. As if those other things weren’t important. Suddenly, my job seemed to take precedence, first place, as if I was born to fit my kids and my other passions and desires around the time my job afforded, and only then.

I felt pulled in more directions than I could handle. And the odd thing about it was that no one else was doing the pulling. It wasn’t “society” or “patriarchy” or “capitalists” or “The Man.” It was me. I had chosen to take on this role.

I realized, much to my chagrin, that I had lost sight of my true goal.

My goal had always only been to be madly in love with my life and the fact was and remains that between my husband’s work outside the home and mine within it, we were living our dream. We had enough – for bills, for retirement, for a little fun. We had enough. And beyond enough, there’s not more enough, there’s excess.

I was drowning in the excess.

You might disagree and that’s okay. See, it makes no difference to me what you think. But it used to and I think that’s where I made my last mistake – I misread myself; I bought a lie, even if it was for the right reasons. I assumed that it was normal to get back to employment as soon as the older kids were old enough. They were older, they were grown – I had done my time – and it was time to get back to living my life. After all, did I want to be frumpy forever?

Younger people talk about taking a gap year from formal education to learn about themselves. To this day, I have heard of no such thing for adults, least of all for homemakers. But this was mine.

My story may not be yours. If you are happy working outside the home, have found that elusive balance and are happy, good for you! Pencil me in for girls’ nights! I’ve just chosen a different path – but I’m sure our goals are the same.