Normal Gets You Nowhere

started speaking to him every day in their home. In fact, if you ask my mother, he’s still living on the second floor. So I’m very aware of the fact that my daughter is watching to know how I behave toward my mother, and I’m encouraging my mother to continue her relationship with my father. To be honest, this is where my yogic training has given me an edge over my siblings—in being able to embrace my mother as a woman, and not just as my mother. She’s just another beautiful young woman who fell in love with a really great guy who rocked her world, brought out the best and worst in her, and fathered her kids who eventually grew up and left the house, leaving the two of them alone together yet again. At death, we see this kind of panoramic view of life—I saw my mother not just as an old woman, but as a little girl. I saw her as the teenager, as the lover, as the mother, and as the grandmother, all simultaneously, in a gorgeous kaleidoscope view of the feminine. And I knew I was just another kaleidoscope looking at her.

When I was in Ireland recently, I found her a Victorian necklace. She can unscrew its small capsule and fill it with my father’s ashes, so she can keep him close to her heart. This way, she and her lover can leave the house together.

Epilogue

The truth is, I actually do practice all the things I preach. I really do believe that normal gets you nowhere. After all, from the time I was seventeen my life has been anything but normal, from starting a company in my early twenties, to selling everything to become a tarot card reader and living on a yoga mat in Los Angeles, to getting randomly signed to Atlantic Records in my late twenties on a total fluke (despite not being able to read music). Throw in a couple weddings and divorces and ultimately having a child by myself at thirty-five, and, well, none of these things is normal.

In fact, it got to the point a few years ago that normalcy started to seem like a really exotic fruit that I really, truly wanted to eat. I had no idea what it would be like to drive my daughter to a ballet lesson or soccer game on a weekday or even to live with the father of my child as a family, to walk down the street hand in hand together. I’d never had the experience of someone coming home at seven and saying, “Hi, honey. Do you want to go out to dinner?” It’d been years since I’d lived with anyone at all! I mean, I think maybe the last movie I saw in an actual theater was the first Harry Potter, when I was pregnant and in Montreal on business with Ava’s dad. And what can I say, I guess it started to irk me when I’d meet cute, seemingly happy families at my daughter’s friends’ birthday parties and imagine them wearing matching Snuggies and watching TV on Saturday mornings on the couch. Or when I’d walk by bistros in my neighborhood and see couples having what seemed to be romantic dinners at seven thirty on a weeknight. Let’s face it, seven thirty was basically lunchtime for me, and there was nothing romantic about it.

I admit I’d let my schedule get a little out of hand at the time: On a typical day, I’d wake up at seven, meditate, see my daughter off to school by eight fifteen, work, work, work, drink coffee all day, grab a salad at two, work, work, greet Ava when she came home from school, see her at six for her dinner, put her to sleep at nine, get my own dinner at nine fifteen, usually with someone I worked with, and then work until one or two in the morning. I even slept with my BlackBerry under my pillow in case someone called wanting to work in the middle of the night (now, with the recent research on cell phones and cancer, I keep it off but still within reach). I know I’ve said my work is my yoga, but there was nothing yogic about this schedule. It was more like boot camp for really crazy monks.

And so it was that around age forty even I started to envy the so-called normals out there. In fact, I became a little obsessed with normalcy. I wondered what it would be like to fall asleep at night in a home where there was a man to keep me safe. Or to have more time off to walk around the city with Ava or to go for bike rides. I wanted to find out if the relatively easier lives that the people around me seemed to have were as pleasant as they looked. So I started to try to emulate them. I insisted on going out to dinner with nonwork friends. I tried to be open to dating. I went to Home Depot and Michael’s craft store. I considered scrapbooking (I eventually decided against it because it seemed like it would take $800 to get my scrapbook going and, frankly, that’s a Margiela shirt). Believe it or not, I even strung my whole loft in bright Martha Stewart and Lily Pulitzer tissue paper flowers I put together with Ava; this was the décor for our Easter dinner!

And I didn’t stop there. I took a chunk of the money I’d earned on MTV and announced to my employees that we should all start exercising. Then I bought each and every person at People’s Revolution a $500 bicycle and christened us the Grand Street Sports Club. We had baskets and bells; we were even featured in the New York Times for our riding prowess! I also denounced grocery stores; instead, you could find me throughout the week with the rest of New