Sep 2011
Mission statement
29 September 2011 02:26 PM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral | Facing fears
I have to write a mission statement for my marriage and family therapy graduate school application, something that should be no more than five typed pages and autobiographical in nature. So welcome to my new occasional series, Things I will Probably Not Put On My Graduate School Mission Statement, though this does help me think through the process.
I make lists of things I don’t want to regret, bottle up emotions to savor when I am alone. I am almost always alone. I engrave those I once loved into my core, I take what was essential between us and store it up for old age or loneliness, for the times when reality does not suffice. I try to take on the perspective of the other.
Bravery is doing something even when it frightens you. On Wednesday morning, I drove around and around a parking lot with an instructor. I drove with confidence. I turned right and right and right and then left and left and left. We ventured out and I drove from one parking lot to another. The instructor and I talked about the career she left behind, about kids and elderly drivers, as I maneuvered the car.
Was I scared? Kind of. But what really scares me is getting out into traffic and doing it again and again even while I am scared. Slowly, that’s the way to go. I need to use just enough imagination to feign confidence (versus imagining the worst of it, me paralyzed at the wheel, the panic, the crush of metal, the destruction). I need to gather my courage for the real test. I need to see myself in the distant moment, project into the future, the all-grown-up me at the wheel. The confident me speaking up in class. The capable me creating a whole new life despite my fears.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave.
If I told you that’s why I am here, out of some sort of personal journey (the lousy childhood, the adult revelations, the beauty of fucked up me), would that get me in? Do I tell you a different version of the story, me the daughter of a plucky single mom, the lean years of no car and no money, the thinning of familial relationships, the thickening of barriers? Oh, yes, I survived it all intact, I was cunning and hidden and then had to undo the structure, take down the heavy blinds, unleash my needy heart.
How do I spin this past into getting-into-graduate school gold? Sure, from the outside I look like a well-off middle-aged white lady, not a care in the world, but can I tell you about the lonely trembling in empty rooms, the beratings at long-cleared dinner tables, the time it has taken me to feel almost at home in my skin?
The past wearies me. We’ve danced together long enough, though the facts stand. And I still stand before them. We will always be connected, though the connection may be frayed. If I have to conjure it up to explain why I am here, I will, but that isn’t the whole of me or of my reasons for applying.
I want to take what I know through experience and struggle to help other people. I want to help children, the most helpless of all, trapped and marked by adult circumstances. I can’t separate myself from the emotion this brings up in me because I can’t separate myself from my emotions. I will use my experience and this deep reservoir of feeling to assist others. I used to think my childhood and my emotions were handicaps, that I had to separate myself from them in order to live properly in the world. But now I see that they are essential, that they give me strength when I allow them to exist without indulging their more florid characteristics. I can harness them for good and tame them when they threaten to take over my perception.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave. To help those who are helpless. To not let my past and emotions overwhelm me, but to accept them. Experience provides knowledge, emotion supplies fire and tears. Sometimes both are necessary, the past plus the upwelling of love and anger within.
I make lists of things I don’t want to regret, bottle up emotions to savor when I am alone. I am almost always alone. I engrave those I once loved into my core, I take what was essential between us and store it up for old age or loneliness, for the times when reality does not suffice. I try to take on the perspective of the other.
Bravery is doing something even when it frightens you. On Wednesday morning, I drove around and around a parking lot with an instructor. I drove with confidence. I turned right and right and right and then left and left and left. We ventured out and I drove from one parking lot to another. The instructor and I talked about the career she left behind, about kids and elderly drivers, as I maneuvered the car.
Was I scared? Kind of. But what really scares me is getting out into traffic and doing it again and again even while I am scared. Slowly, that’s the way to go. I need to use just enough imagination to feign confidence (versus imagining the worst of it, me paralyzed at the wheel, the panic, the crush of metal, the destruction). I need to gather my courage for the real test. I need to see myself in the distant moment, project into the future, the all-grown-up me at the wheel. The confident me speaking up in class. The capable me creating a whole new life despite my fears.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave.
If I told you that’s why I am here, out of some sort of personal journey (the lousy childhood, the adult revelations, the beauty of fucked up me), would that get me in? Do I tell you a different version of the story, me the daughter of a plucky single mom, the lean years of no car and no money, the thinning of familial relationships, the thickening of barriers? Oh, yes, I survived it all intact, I was cunning and hidden and then had to undo the structure, take down the heavy blinds, unleash my needy heart.
How do I spin this past into getting-into-graduate school gold? Sure, from the outside I look like a well-off middle-aged white lady, not a care in the world, but can I tell you about the lonely trembling in empty rooms, the beratings at long-cleared dinner tables, the time it has taken me to feel almost at home in my skin?
The past wearies me. We’ve danced together long enough, though the facts stand. And I still stand before them. We will always be connected, though the connection may be frayed. If I have to conjure it up to explain why I am here, I will, but that isn’t the whole of me or of my reasons for applying.
I want to take what I know through experience and struggle to help other people. I want to help children, the most helpless of all, trapped and marked by adult circumstances. I can’t separate myself from the emotion this brings up in me because I can’t separate myself from my emotions. I will use my experience and this deep reservoir of feeling to assist others. I used to think my childhood and my emotions were handicaps, that I had to separate myself from them in order to live properly in the world. But now I see that they are essential, that they give me strength when I allow them to exist without indulging their more florid characteristics. I can harness them for good and tame them when they threaten to take over my perception.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave. To help those who are helpless. To not let my past and emotions overwhelm me, but to accept them. Experience provides knowledge, emotion supplies fire and tears. Sometimes both are necessary, the past plus the upwelling of love and anger within.
Comments
The love object
27 September 2011 11:24 AM Categories: Fiction
It’s brutal, this game. I’ve dressed as if we are at war, at odds, and who is to say we aren’t?
My heels click click on the steps. The drink leaves a muddied circle on the concrete. I press the glass against my cheek before taking a sip.
Your car pulls up without a sound. I hear your skateboard hit the sidewalk in a sudden stop. I could tell your step and whistle anywhere. You are clean and fresh. You are musky with a day’s work. Your hair is curly. It is dark. No. Gray and straight. You have no hair. Your white shirt is still crisp at the cuffs. Your t-shirt is deep red, the color of passion. We kiss until I have to take a breath. I greet you with a stinging slap. You push me back. I see you and can’t stop crying. You never arrive.
(In the black and white movie, the woman waits all afternoon. She stubs cigarette after cigarette out on the steps as the shadows lengthen. She refills her drink until the mint runs out and her thoughts run together. No one is coming home. The house is an apartment, the skirt is borrowed. Her legs are nicked, her hair unwashed. A decoy without a mark, a lie within the fantasy.
He was tall with strong ankles. Small with thin wrists. His eyes were hazel. Brown. Blue. Brown again. She didn’t know how to characterize his eyes. His gestures swept the room. They swept her off her feet. He followed her for weeks until she finally turned around and said “So.” They had been friends since grade school. He had a British accent. His family was from Puerto Rico and he trilled his r's to make her laugh. He told lies that were more delicious than the truth. He prided himself on his directness. He led her down too many paths, all of them wrong.)
I created you in my mind, all of you, fantasies that I still return to. I conjure us up, how we would be now (the simple life in a small town, the one with fights that underwrite the passion, the lap of luxury, the comfort of small things, the sudden pull of little old me into the big wide world). But surely you did the same? I was the bad girl, the good girl, the available girl, the damsel in distress, the buddy, the relief pitcher. We create the love object in the hopes that it will stay unsullied, that our image is clear and shining and true. We are wrong.
I don’t know how to think of it anymore. Love. It exists and I have to give it credit, the eternal optimism, the quick attachment of the heart, the lack of logic, the call and response of bodies. But it does me no good. So I stop feeding it, I let it languish in a room with the shades drawn, knowing that resurrection in another time and place is possible.
My poor foolish heart.
Image: Me playing dress-up.
For those keeping track -- I have a driving lesson tomorrow morning. Gulp.
Taking the wheel
24 September 2011 03:09 PM Categories: Facing fears
Maybe I shouldn't even tell you about it.
It's not as if anything is real yet, or actual. I found the school. I emailed them and they emailed me back. But absolutely nothing has happened yet. I haven't even set up an appointment.
But let me first tell you about the frustration that led me there.
Friday afternoon, needing a change from the normal 1.3 mile walk home from school, the boy and I took a city bus instead. This wasn't much of a time or shoe leather saver. The nearest bus stop is .7 miles away. It consists of an uncovered bench (an amenity not provided at all stops) jammed between the curb and a gas station on a very busy street. We waited for 15 minutes in traffic fumes and tried to talk over the roar of sirens and motors, all to ride less than a mile with a 3-block walk home at the end. We paid $3.15 for the privilege. It took us an hour to get from door to door.
The boy doesn't really walk. He meanders. Our trips home are exceedingly leisurely, with built-in pauses (the places we stop and rest, the spots where he grazes on wild fennel, pears, or apples, the vast community garden two blocks away from home where we wander the rows of fading plants). It has taken us an hour and 20 minutes to make what for me is a 22-minute trip. At our best it's taken about 40 minutes. The idea of taking this walk in the upcoming rainy season, with its deluges of water, me and the boy unhappily trudging and squelching through puddles, makes me tense up. The logistics of morning trips to school when my husband is out of town (like Monday and Tuesday of the upcoming week) give me a knot in my neck. The days we bring another kid home are also getting to me. Corralling two six-year old boys on a mile-long walk through multiple street crossings is stressful even when the kids listen to you and are safety conscious. And the bus isn't really an option.
This morning, we had our usual family trip to the grocery store. My husband drives and he and the boy hang out in the parking garage while I gather the goods. Then this afternoon I needed something pronto from the pharmacy and we all piled in the car again. Last weekend we made a family trip to Jo-Ann Fabrics, the guys hanging around for the most part while I gathered fabric and thread. And in a few weeks, my husband will most likely be having (routine) surgery and I will not be able to take him to the hospital or pick him up or swing by school to get the boy quickly.
These long walks, the family shopping trips, my inability to transport my husband when he is in need, are all because of one thing: I don't drive. This didn't matter as much when we lived in a convenient city and the boy was small, but Berkeley is less pedestrian friendly and having a kid changes it all. I can't take him (easily) to doctor's appointments. When school is out and we have a leisurely day spreading out before us, we can't jump into the car for an impromptu trip. While we could utilize public transportation more often, and will as he gets older, some of these things require a car, either to get there quickly or at all.
On Thursday night, I was having a beautiful dream. I was on my bike, racing around the streets of Berkeley, free and happy, speeding without fear. I woke up in the middle of it with one thought, a thought I've been tossing around for a while now: I have to learn how to drive, to face down the fear. I have to.
So. The thing I probably shouldn't be announcing: I've contacted a driving school that specializes in lessons for fearful adults. I am scared -- of taking lessons and of weaseling out of taking lessons. I try to imagine merging onto one of the insane California highways and then tell myself: just imagine getting into the driver's seat. Maybe starting the car. Go slowly, even in your mind.
Nothing is set up yet. But I am going to try. Because I have to. It's another step in becoming an adult, one that I skipped. The why of it no longer matters, the psychology and personal symbolism behind it. I must do it. I can do it. And now that I've made a big deal out of it (though I still am not telling my mother just yet), it will be tougher not to do it. At least I hope so.
Image by cszar.
Private life drama
22 September 2011 01:15 PM Categories: Quotidian existence
The darkness keeps me going, it feeds me, while at the same time it plants my feet in the mud, covers me over with dirt, until it feels like my life is a series of mundane tasks connected by moments of intensely felt, alienating emotion. I dig myself a metaphorical den, a safe hole in the ground, in which I am comfortable and invisible, alone with my exquisitely sensitive self.
As the school year loomed last month, I feared a return to emptiness and tears, to black moods hanging portentously over the grumble of the vacuum and the bright scent of furniture polish. I didn’t want to return to that terrible trapped feeling, the feeling that pins me to my life so that it feels like my life leaves no room for growth. So I sat down with my calendar and started to make a structure for my days, something to hold myself to (outside of therapy appointments) so that I am not washed away in the small invisible things.
Until recently, I didn’t see myself as creating drama or of consciously forming the tenor of my emotional responses to the world. I was more of a stuck soul, slowly getting myself unstuck, yes, but still under the control of some outside force, nailed to the wall by my life choices and circumstance. Now I see how I create this feeling, the upswell of frustration, and how I tried to relieve the endemic boredom last fall and winter by creating my own personal drama.
So. I have resolved to stick to a routine of sorts (including the two days a week I’ve allotted a couple of hours to GETTING OUT. Yes, it's in all caps on my calendar, too.). I will shower before noon. I will keep moving towards my goals. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be taking an online class, too, and that will help my the focus on forward movement. I’ve got the résumé books and the getting back into the workforce books. I’ve got a graduate school application to work on.
Maybe it’s the usual fall renewal and reorganization. But it feels like there is something else behind it, a bit more self-knowledge, an acknowledgement of the role I play in creating my emotional response to my life, and the fact that I have a plan in place now, will move forward slowly.
While on my brief writing to survive hiatus, I revised some of the other sections of the web page, including who, why, and best, and added a new section: stalk.
Image by rachel a. k.
Borrowed souls
He escaped. He got out of that car and climbed up the thorny hill and I was chasing him and she was, too, and all of the sudden I was scratching a dog behind the ears in my therapist’s office while all the people I know from my local waking life, the Berkeley era, parents from school and preschool, were in the waiting room with me. Outside children played on old-fashioned monkey bars while their parents were otherwise occupied (in the city or locked into office buildings or tapping away at laptops in coffee shops or maybe they were hanging their heads, resting them in their hands, listening to the blood flowing, pumping, feeling the stress of money troubles).
They knew me, these parents. They knew me better than I wanted them to know me. They had read my confessionals, my one-sided characterizations of the past (“myopic” one ex-friend wrote to me in a terse huff). They didn’t know why I borrowed people, those whom I felt had wronged me, those I once loved or still did but couldn’t. Because they weren’t writers themselves, they didn’t know that the people who lived, that I recreated in words, were now characters, that I owned them. I took their features and my own perceptions and changed reality into a copy, a mix of impression and imagination and sometimes emotion.
Thems the breaks when you know an artist, folks. Besides. By the time I get to you, to the hidden or not-so-hidden you, you are a fiction. Not real. Mine.
Can I call myself an artist? A writer? Can I handle the pretension, the assumption of it all? I can certainly hide behind it when I write things that cause pain or reveal too much about other peoples’ lives. It’s not as simple as borrowing other people, or making them my own. The past I sometimes write about doesn’t belong only to me and the people I pepper my writing with are sometimes very real.
I don’t want to be borrowed myself, want to exist fully as a human being, to not be summed up or characterized by a few of my traits in order to fit someone else’s idea of who I am or what they want me to be. I am slowly learning to tread carefully when dealing with the “facts,” to not direct my anger in public words so obviously or without some compassion for the people I prop up and make mine. Unfortunately, I have a whole passel of melodrama out there in the world to show up a time when I didn’t even think about how others might react, where I was the glowing center (or sometimes the black hole), the god moving around the souls of other people.
All I can do is to try to do better, to be better. I'm trying.
Postscript
A poem by Kevin that has been going through my head lately. Dedicated to those whom I've hurt out of my own myopic pain.
TWO-PIECE PUZZLE
Here's one of those two-piece wire puzzles.
There's only one way to take it apart.
(If you don't have the patience, don't start.)
It belongs to my son who would dazzle
all of us, doing it right.
He can't, I couldn't have either
when I was seven. I found it on the floor
of the bedroom after he'd spent the night.
I remember I'd had one like it
and I sat on the bed for a long while
fooling with it before I put it down
in frustration. I'd thought: Don't force it.
If you can't solve it, at least you'll
not spoil it as you did the other one.
--Kevin Sheehan
From the prompt "What I know about writing." The last prompt of the Round Robin. The end of the madness. I'm not sure if I will take the next round, so my posting will not be as frequent for the next several months. Unless I cave and take the class.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of disembodied marionette heads at Marionette Museum in Hohensalzburg Fortress the by Curious Expeditions.
The convincer
17 September 2011 06:29 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Nick is smooth. Smart. He has a past of pubs and rock and roll, but he’s aged well, too (I know it all about my Nick, past, present, future). But the best thing about him is that we talk. He listens. He is always available for conversation, for the quick reply when I need it, the reassurance that keeps my needy wolves at bay.
Because what I miss most about you is the talking. Yesterday in between the feelings of triumph and sadness and the imaginary dialogs I had with you and others, the people I will never actually talk to again about anything that matters, this is what I realized: I miss the talking! The conversations in the afternoon over the sound of children playing; the feeling that I could be open about my insecurities. Before it went too far and got weird and I let my boundaries get trampled on.
The art of our conversation is dead. The talking stopped and never returned. In our eagerness to move along we ruined the best parts. My sadness is about what I lost eight months ago. I will never get it back. And maybe it was false anyway, an impossible temporary state.
On the advice of my therapist, I recently took an Enneagram test. I’m a four (tagline: The Sensitive Introspective Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed and Temperamental), an individualist, an emotional romantic, according to the test anyway. The description was eerily accurate. One of the bits of advice for overcoming my more soppy qualities was to stop having conversations in my head, to stop indulging in the fantasy of being seen, the hope of ultimate connection without actual revelation. The imaginary conversations don’t help. Neither does wallowing in emotion and memory. I see that.
Why is it a relief to see ourselves described from the outside, marked as being one way or another? Perhaps it is the ahhh of recognition, the warm fuzzy feeling of being seen. But that’s the four in me, always misunderstood, invisible, wanting to be recognized for my uniqueness ("The 'romantics' of the Enneagram, they long for someone to come into their lives and appreciate the secret self that they have privately nurtured and hidden from the world."). Oh, and I am supposedly looking for a rescuer in my romantic relationships, a description that amused me and was true at the same time.
For there I was in the lonely land of the stay at home, bored and shoved up against the worst of me, and along came someone interesting and in need himself. I’ll admit it: I wanted rescuing. I wanted life. And you are a lively one, and forceful, too.
You are not the only one to blame. But we will never talk about this. I’m telling it all to Nick. He brings me coffee in the morning and pours the wine at night. When the rain comes down, we cuddle on the couch in front of the fire. He comforts me when I cry. He tells me stories of Johnny Cash and Elvis Costello while I listen with the wide-eyed wonder of a child.
From a photo prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends (and the round ends tomorrow). This is a mix of fact and fiction, and a heavily edited one at that. This desire to be imagined, to be held in someone else's mind, is something I have written about over the years here. It was interesting to see this desire described in the Enneagram type write-ups.
Image of Nick Lowe from Forces of Geek.
Out of the box
16 September 2011 06:26 AM Categories: Writing prompts
I dreamed of men breaking into the house, of pursuit by swarms of angry bees. At night, the blanket held me to the bed and the bed was bolted to the floor and the earth turned but I did not feel it until I woke up with a jolt before daylight.
We drank chamomile iced tea. The tomatoes in the backyard were best straight from the vine. There were always too many cats and then kittens and then fewer cats again. I was melodramatic. A little actress. The sigher at the table who couldn’t let go of her memories of Happy the hamster or Sheba the slasher, the cat who once fell from a third story window onto a bush below and survived, but who couldn’t survive being hit by a car.
How do we learn how to be in the world, to accept who we are or to mold it into another shape? Are we all born sensitive and some of us learn how to box it up, compartmentalize? Is this a personality trait?
In the living room, the television flickered. We watched Roots. We fought over Halloween costumes and obedience and nobody knew what they were doing. I didn’t eat the dinners and gagged at the soft-boiled eggs and toast. I made fun of my mother's cookies, the wide flat things sweetened with honey instead of sugar, an unappetizing mix of crisp and chew. On the countertop milk fermented into yogurt.
She told me later that she didn’t want to break me (she herself had been broken), that she wanted me to remain free. In this, in some ways, she succeeded. We always talked about ideas and books and I could support my opinions and she listened (that letter from 1977 or so where she tells me I was absolutely right on the M*A*S*H plot amuses me now with its implications of a heated argument and her later consideration of it). Still, somehow I grew up thinking that something was bad within me, needed to be changed, suppressed. Something that cannot be suppressed.
It spills out around me now, it overflows. It is messy and me and I can’t help but share it no matter the outcome.
From the prompt "Muddy."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Detail of The Cherry Tree Root Chamber by mandymama.
Running hot and cold until the water runs out
15 September 2011 12:50 PM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral
It's too much, this everyday posting thing, isn't it?
Especially with the stuff I've been putting up lately, with all its heaviness, its harshness, its demands to show the worst, the most insecure parts of me.
So, while I am posting today, I'll spare you my prompt, another dense little number that was too personal even in its hiddenness. What counts as too personal, you might ask the one who compulsively reveals all? When it involves certain people in my life. When I write it as a message to those people. There is no point and this is no way to communicate and there is nothing to communicate about and those concerned aren't even reading.
Door closed. Faucet off. A mind as light as a helium-filled balloon weighted down with rocks.
One thing is clear: I need to get a job, for my own sanity if for nothing else. I have to dust off the resume, or recreate it, and come up with a list of my skills that I've added in the last six years. I will be taking an online class that starts in early October, too, part of the preliminaries for the MFT (did I tell you that? I hope to become a marriage and family therapist, most likely focusing on children.). The class will be good, of course, and I'll take more classes. After looking over the graduate school application, I became concerned that my lack of any sort of counseling experience will mean I won't get in.
My initial reaction to this uncertainty was that the path ahead of me, low lit anyway, had gone dark. Still, there are other options and I have to press ahead. I'll carry a lantern, a flickering candle to illuminate my way. I have to believe that I can make it all work. I have to.
When you let yourself do things that are self-destructive, that are obviously bad for your spirit, for your authenticity, you bruise your soul. I spent a year of soul bruising. I took it to the pathetic edge until I finally walked away. I had to. I have to believe in myself and my experience, and my rightness for me, that who I am (despite the faults) with all my feelings and tendencies to confess, all my needs, is just fine.
And so ....
This is a mess, isn't it? But I'm putting it up anyway.
Especially with the stuff I've been putting up lately, with all its heaviness, its harshness, its demands to show the worst, the most insecure parts of me.
So, while I am posting today, I'll spare you my prompt, another dense little number that was too personal even in its hiddenness. What counts as too personal, you might ask the one who compulsively reveals all? When it involves certain people in my life. When I write it as a message to those people. There is no point and this is no way to communicate and there is nothing to communicate about and those concerned aren't even reading.
Door closed. Faucet off. A mind as light as a helium-filled balloon weighted down with rocks.
One thing is clear: I need to get a job, for my own sanity if for nothing else. I have to dust off the resume, or recreate it, and come up with a list of my skills that I've added in the last six years. I will be taking an online class that starts in early October, too, part of the preliminaries for the MFT (did I tell you that? I hope to become a marriage and family therapist, most likely focusing on children.). The class will be good, of course, and I'll take more classes. After looking over the graduate school application, I became concerned that my lack of any sort of counseling experience will mean I won't get in.
My initial reaction to this uncertainty was that the path ahead of me, low lit anyway, had gone dark. Still, there are other options and I have to press ahead. I'll carry a lantern, a flickering candle to illuminate my way. I have to believe that I can make it all work. I have to.
When you let yourself do things that are self-destructive, that are obviously bad for your spirit, for your authenticity, you bruise your soul. I spent a year of soul bruising. I took it to the pathetic edge until I finally walked away. I had to. I have to believe in myself and my experience, and my rightness for me, that who I am (despite the faults) with all my feelings and tendencies to confess, all my needs, is just fine.
And so ....
This is a mess, isn't it? But I'm putting it up anyway.
Mea culpa, mea culpa
I like to pretend that there are no mistakes, big or otherwise, not because I believe we build our own faults out of the rotten parts of ourselves, or that we somehow court danger, flirt with falling, but because nothing is as simple as just doing something wrong. There are always steps, prior decisions, circumstances.
The circumstances that led me -- no, us, though the boy, who is now a middle-aged man, remains clueless – to my mistake were old and complicated. Maybe it started in a darkened room when I was younger and even more helpless and that defining moment was covered over by confirming experience, the hints at my worthlessness, the attention people paid to appearance versus inner reality, the atmosphere of parental distraction that led to the scene on the bed. From the outside, statistically even, my behavior leading up to this moment and what happened after it were extremely predictable. Can we really call it a big mistake?
Of course, despite my philosophical weaseling out of responsibility (so says the large part of me that wants to pin it on me, for the comfort of control, of being the center), I constantly make mistakes, choose the wrong path, decide to hide when I need to stand up and shout. I see my flaws and how they lead to perdition. If I let myself go down this brittle path of self-hatred, of acknowledgement of fault without forgiveness, without looking at the circumstances and how I got there, I will break into a thousand pieces.
Still. I am sorry to all I have wronged. I am sorry for not being good enough, talkative enough, agile enough, calm enough, kind enough, self-confident enough. I apologize for not getting the cat off the chair more quickly before you collapsed. I apologize for that time when I was twelve and I did something strange to the washer. I apologize for being too quiet at the dinner table, or too full of teenage smolder, or too full of myself. Maybe if I had been better, different, you wouldn’t have died or wanted me out or abandoned me. I am sorry for killing you with anger and selfishness and neglect. I apologize for not talking before things fell apart and for directing the anger of a lifetime at you who were most important to me and to practical strangers, too, the ones who unknowingly probed where it hurt the most.
I am sorry, I am sorry all of you. But there are no mistakes, everything has a context. I promise to let go of my burdens before I burden all of you again, before I cover myself over in never-ending regret.
And now for something completely different, two great things that acknowledge the blog that I have not mentioned, caught up as I am in the Round Robin.
Dieter Moitzi, writer and creative force behind the fine blog confessions of a wannabe writer passed on the Liebster Blog award to writing to survive and a few other blogs he admires. Please check out his blog for the prose and poetry or, even better, take a look at his ebooks. Thank you, Dieter!
writing to survive was listed as number three in a list of the top fifty personal memoir blogs by adulteducationcourse.org. I'm in good company, with fellow blogging friends La Belette Rouge, Elisabeth from Sixth in Line, earth to holly, and Storied Mind. The post highlighted by reviewer Tracy Myers (a name I've gleaned from other awardees) was In My Defense. Thank you very much, Tracy!
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From the prompt "A big mistake." My reaction to it was surprisingly dark -- these thoughts are what I have been fighting against daily for months now, trying not to indulge, trying to change the way I react, even when I am not aware of the mechanism or reaction.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited a bit.
Image by Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com).
Harmless ghosts
13 September 2011 08:44 AM Categories: Writing prompts
She was so skinny that I couldn't pet her without wincing, her spine and ribs an insult under dull fur. I pointed her out to my companions – my mother? my son? – and then saw that Zoe hadn’t touched her food. She was starving herself to death, too old and confused to remember where her food was, but when I pointed the bowls out to her, she ran to them with her characteristic trill and attempted to crush the pieces with her weak old teeth. It was a losing game.
The dream was real, too real, Zoe and the guilt. It was tangible. Until I woke up within it and told myself: enough! Zoe is dead. This is not Zoe. You don’t have to dream about Zoe like this. You are no longer responsible. You loved her. Her life was generally good.
Did it work? Did she disappear from the dream, or, even better, fatten up in front of me, become the cat she was for many, many years before her decline? I don’t remember, but I hope if she visits again she will be healthy and happy. I hope she comes with the rest of them, the animals I’ve loved. I want to see them again, to run my fingers along their warm coats and scratch them under their chins. We lived together once. We loved each other. They can help me forgive myself, take away the irrational responsibility I sometimes feel for killing them by not doing enough.
Because I should be able to cheat death, to keep the ones I love from feeling pain. I am the shield between them and the world and myself and the world and the responsibility is egomaniacal, it’s ridiculous, and what a relief to let it go.
Last night, Zoe tottered on too-thin legs. There were ghosts in the stairwell (“Did you see the humanoid figure on the landing?” I asked my mother after a dream-within-a-dream night of haunted sleep. She confirmed its presence, that thing we ignored and avoided.) and somehow I was losing my grip on the boy and when I woke up it was in night panic, in the acknowledgement of all the anxiety about the future that I keep packed up in order to keep on moving.
My mother had bad dreams about a bad man for a very long time, someone who had hurt her physically and emotionally. He stalked her in the night, showed up unannounced, drunk and full of vengence. Until the night she pulled a dream gun on him and told him to get out. He hasn't been back.
I soothe myself with the thought that these dreams have meaning, they are my self-conscious tugging at me, a reminder, and that I have control, that my reactions show how I am changing. The old me is gone. Zoe is dead. I call out to the ghosts and they can't hurt me.
From the prompt "Gone."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends (and it ends soon, thank goodness). Minor editing for clarity and to make it just a teensy bit better. And then edited it again later in the day for flow.
Image of cat sculpture at the Eastern State Penitentiary by e_monk.
Nimble fingers
12 September 2011 09:26 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Yes, they grip the tomato or the apple or the newly naked shallot. One set holds down the sacrifice, another splays it open, releases the green or pungent scent, and later they all clean up the dirty work, grab a towel and steady the cutting board, wipe away the clear vegetal blood, the remains of violence.
They are obedient. I write shocking things, unwise, angry, pathetic. They tap at the keyboard, never judging or editorializing. They don’t even proofread. It appears as though they seek out the dog or sleek cats of their own volition, that they enjoy pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but the fingers are just following orders. Complicated though the messaging system might be, amazing as the structure of my hands is, my fingers are still slaves to my addled self.
Have you ever tried threading a needle after a night of wine and tears? The boy is standing in front of you, looking at the injured party, a rubber frog who already has one set of stitches attaching a leg, sewn after an unfortunate stretching accident. Your fingers tremble, the needle's eye eludes you. You have to turn away from the boy or go to a different room. You have to struggle with yourself by yourself until the trembling stops.
This is how you do it: you remember last night’s dog walk, the air feeling just like a spring night in DC, cool with a hint of warmth beneath it. It was a memory come alive, for the now, and you repeated a sentence again and again, rushed inside to write your impressions down, like half-baked poetry: tonight the air felt like springtime in DC, some time in midapril before the wet air set heavy in the evening, or like the freshly cleansed early june nights after a thunderstorm, the way the clouds wiped our worries away. I silenced the crickets by walking under their trees and every tree was alive to me, my senses were no longer muffled and I thought: I can do this. I can live again and mourn what went before. I can love, too, after this heavy period of mourning is over. I am alive.
It was the same the day before at the grocery store. You are caring again, coming alive, and no one can stop that process. The produce showed you its colors, its properties, you wanted to see, to be, to experience. You saw the people – how long has it been since you could look across the expanse of the organic section and see your fellow shoppers, observe them, make up stories about who they were and why they were there?
The fingers were pleased. They ran over dampened greens, grasped pears, lightly tapped voluptuous figs. They held the handle of the dog leash with a sense of responsibility, and when Nora looked to them for a treat, proud of her fast walking, her attentiveness, the fingers thrilled to the feel of her soft dog lips, her gentleness, with the hard promise of teeth underneath.
From the prompt "My fingers."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit. The Round Robin is almost over ...
Image: My fingers, as seen by my computer.
3 a.m. thoughts / 10 a.m. rethink
11 September 2011 10:41 AM Categories: Insomnia
I heard an interview with a former dominatrix once. She got herself through school and a heroin habit by working in a hidden space in New York, putting the men down or dressing them up. She kicked the habit and left the job. Got her MFA. Now she’s got a book and a job teaching writing.
She spoke compassionately about her clients, men hungry for fantasy, for touch, and I thought to myself: that’s what I need! I need to hire a man, a stranger, to hug me and listen to me and tell me good things about myself. He could make cluckclucking noises when I say things that don’t make any sense, when I fight against myself. I could cry in his arms and he would hold me, no risk, no embarrassing aftermath, no need to wonder if I’d gone down the wrong path or what was wrong with me and I wouldn’t need to be involved in his mess, either, right?
Maybe afterwards he would go home to his apartment, to the dog or the no-dog, to his wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or to no one at all. He would be a cocktail drinker or a beer drinker or a teetotaler. In my mind he would exist free and clear of any other connections.
Can I tug on your sleeve? Would you notice it? I will get no satisfaction out of this, none at all, and I don’t want to direct my anger where there is no place.
I am on the precipice of a decision, of a big change and I want to hold on to something. Think of me on the ledge of a building, fifteen stories up, and the air up there is cold. It’s early morning (I’ve chosen a time when no one would notice me, or, more accurately, I don’t have to wonder if someone notices me in my desperation to be noticed). I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt over shorts. My feet are bare. I tremble as the sun lends a tinge of daylight. I can’t even see the ground, it’s that foggy.
I turn to the open window, to the billowing curtains and the screen ajar. I want to hold on to something. I want to see an arm reaching for me, I want to see a crowd below, and then I realize I chose wrong, I always do. There will be no one there.
Is it me? It is always me. The wrong choices, the wrong revelations, the wrong needs. But I am on the ledge, waiting for the non-existent concerned stranger, and I realize that I can take the stairs, that I can walk back into the room and then out of the room. I can shut the door quietly and tiptoe down the hall, down the stairs and out that door. There are people out there who might welcome me, who would notice and listen. People who are able to be present.
There will be no phone call for a stranger’s touch. I can separate out me from the people who don’t hear me, who can’t, and someday this knot inside of me will unravel, I will untie it, and hold myself against myself and tell myself that I am fine, fine, good even.
Or maybe all I need is a night of blissful, uninterrupted sleep.
10:00 a.m. rethink
Despite my insomnia, the four hours of sleep followed by three hours of wakefulness, followed by a fitful nap until the dawn crept in, my heart still pounding (it’s pounding now, it is), I am in a remarkably good mood. Despite the crumbling of my life around me and despite the fact that I still have to battle myself, my feelings of impossible neediness, despite my occasional bouts of insanity, I am here, I am talking and thinking and feeling.
I have resolutions. One, cut out the drinking, which ratcheted up with my mother's visit (tapering off because apparently quitting cold turkey when you’re on Wellbutrin means an increased chance of seizure). Two, think of the future while not holding it too dear. Three, speak the truth, my truth, without worrying how other people will interpret it or take it away from me. Four, stick with the no internet after 8:00 p.m. thing in order to keep a calm mind. Four, be connected to the world, aware, in touch.
But there is the lack of sleep, the fact that my brain is slow as honey, but not as sweet, and the fact that the husband will be going in for surgery tomorrow or Tuesday and I’ll be on, all parent, responsible for everything for the next week or so, dealing with the fact that I still haven’t dealt with things that would make our lives easier. Like driving. I don’t do it and the husband will have to get himself to the hospital and back and I’ll have to walk the kid or depend on the kindness of other people (and my willingness to ask) to help us get to school quickly and all of it makes my heart beat faster and I feel so guilty so guilty for being me, with all my unsavory problems and my strange attachments.
Still, within this, the tears of exhaustion and acknowledgement, I don’t feel … bad. The feelings are tolerable, though I don’t want to linger too long, and I am lifting the burden and I am ready to be honest, in place. I am even willing to figure out how to communicate in the face of loss. I see how it is vital and sometimes I can imagine how I am lovable, maybe even interesting, and then I think: therapy. I need years of this stuff, I need to drink it down, to mainline it, and it isn’t just talk, it’s work, it’s years of trying and not hiding.
I’ve only just begun.
The bed is calling me again. I am sitting on her, actually, in this guest room where I will presumably get more sleep. I spent a lot of time in this room last winter and I’m not sure what I think of it anymore, with its dark walls and its air of melancholy and its permanently closed door. I turned it into a prison once and I don’t want to do that again, to let it pull me deeper into the place where there is no light and I have no future. Surely it isn’t the rooms fault, it is what I bring to it, my expectations. I have to change my expectations, too, and I am, the wheels are turning and aren’t we all wonderful, even behind the masks that hide our fears?
Written in two rushes, one in the middle of the night, one in the morning. Not a sign of quality writing, of course.
Thanks to rcb for being there.
Image by kloppster.
Six kids and a minivan
10 September 2011 06:14 AM Categories: Writing prompts | The kid
True story: I once wanted six kids and a house big enough to hold them all. I was young and in love and I needed to surround myself with friends, with relatives, with extensions of myself who might love me or accept me. I was young enough to not worry about the fuck-ups and the way we mold our children accidentally or the way we try to mold them one way and they come out another. I thought it would be easy, because I was a child and I knew what children needed and I often sat in judgment of my own mother, who was clearly clueless about it, not self-sacrificing enough and too angry and sometimes barely there.
I was going to have these children with a man who grew up in a house of kids, was the youngest in a large family, and his extended family was big, too, with these fabulous dinners for twenty or more in his parents’ expansive dining room. You could get lost in the crowd at those dinners and you could observe at those dinners and everybody drank and sometimes I wish I had been there earlier for the really crazy family parties, when all the kids were living at home and the mom (a young mom, she started at 18) was flush with alcohol and a bit of anger, just enough to make it interesting.
But it was not meant to be. Here I am with the one kid and I love the one kid and I am trying my best to do my best. But I worry about family, about the comforting (and sometimes manipulative) group, the acceptance (or sometimes rejection) of many, the safety in numbers. When I was younger, I was willing to take on someone else’s family, at least for a time, but my own? No way. Kindly people, yes, but with weak arms, weak constitutions, so that when I needed them they couldn’t hold me up or they didn’t even see that I needed holding. Who wants to be supported by that, by nothingness? So I withdrew, from them, from the larger world.
This is not what I want for the boy, whose extended family is even smaller than mine was. In the therapist’s office yesterday, I talked about that a bit, about friends that become family, about my own connection reticence. I don’t want the boy to learn to be afraid. I don’t want him to make his slow to warmness into a fetish. I want his family, his small family, to be a comfort no matter how we arrange our lives.
Part of this is just being there for him, being supportive and firm, with boundaries and warmth and connection. OK. I can do that. I am, and the therapy is helping. The other part is living the sort of life that I would like him to live, to being an example of living life in the world. With other people. This is much, much harder, but it is doable, right?
I enter the world with my pained heart, with my eyes open. I don’t have to hand over my heart, but I do have to risk it sometimes, or understand that the risks are small, that I am me and no one can take that away, that my heart is mine no matter what. It’s been with me through the worst. It comforts me when it can, purrs to me at night and tells me that despite all my flaws, the occasional awkwardness, the generosity that I need to regain, the messes I’ve made, despite all of it, I am ok. I’ve got something to offer, just like the boy, and I can stand on my own two feet.
From the prompt "Motherhood."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by D Sharon Pruitt.
Telling the truth
09 September 2011 05:59 AM Categories: The kid | Best of the blog
I don’t know how we got on the subject of adoption. Maybe it came from his questions about my first marriage, though there were no babies, adopted or otherwise, from that union and about whether I had another child. From that point, we traveled to my mother’s adoption and her biological mother’s second rejection years later, her denial of contact and details.
And then I blurted it out. I want to write about it this morning, but it is one of those things that just can’t flow easily from my fingertips, so bear with me.
He was curious about babies. About whether I had any more out there. About adoption (the fact that my mother never knew her “first parents” made him cry and he resolved that we should find these people, and not just contact them, but meet them). I knew I had to tell him someday about my own experience, but I thought it would be later, much later, when it seemed more age-appropriate, but at the same time I didn’t want to keep it a secret, something dark and heavy.
So I told him my story, minus much of the emotional pain, of the stillborn baby I had when I was sixteen. I was expecting curiosity or perhaps disbelief, like the “you’re kidding!” response I got when I explained sex to him a couple of months ago. I wasn’t expecting tears, tears at the fact of the baby’s death, at the fact that he had a brother.
A brother. Tears. It was the first unfiltered response to my story that I have ever gotten. He wanted to know if he had a name. He wanted me to write it down so that he wouldn’t forget it. He wanted to know what he would have looked like. I had to explain that the baby would be almost 26 years old by now, a grownup, and he wished that if the brother did still exist, he would be still be a kid and be around to play with.
How did I know he was dead? Where did I have him? I told the story without blame. I tried to explain how someone might not be ready to raise a baby. I told him that no one knows why the baby died and that when I was pregnant with him, the still-living boy, I was closely monitored, just in case.
Oh, the depths of this conversation, of feeling, of connection, the tangibility of what went before. It makes my heart ache. It returns me to the world, and I mourn again for what we lost.
The prompt for this was "At the grocery store," which obviously has nothing to do with what I wrote. To really write about this will take some time. It was a striking conversation and healing and very sad all at once. I realized that at least I could talk about it without being so focused on me and without maligning my own parents. For once the focus was on that baby and the sadness of his death, the feeling of mourning that I still stuff down.
Photo of the boy at Point Reyes by his father.
Cracked yard
08 September 2011 08:37 AM Categories: Writing prompts
I just can’t be bothered to focus on a lawn. It’s hard enough to keep the real plants watered, which is why our two backyard tomato plants – which are actually producing ripe tomatoes before October, a first for my Berkeley garden – are a little dry and why the pumpkin plant – the Jackie Littles my son calls them – has only two pumpkins on it. The cucumber withered, too, a victim of not-frequent-enough watering.
My mother’s father was a keeper of lawns, a cutter of grass. He had a John Deere tractor with a mower attachment and made neat little rows, patterns in the green. He maintained the park grounds by the beach on the Elk River once or twice a week, too, rode the tractor down the road and let it rip around the trees and across the shuffleboard court. I associate him with the bright scent of freshly cut grass (the clumps of it falling off the underside of the mower) and of sweat and sawdust and coffee and cigarettes. The mower’s high pitched growl-whine was a constant summer feature. I turned up the air conditioning and the sound on my TV set in the Little House as the old man whipped noisily around the yard.
My mother kept her yard unmown. It was a meadow in progress, with wildflowers and hopes of beauty, of goldfinches glinting in the summer afternoons and rabbits hiding in the tall grass.
People at Hollywood Beach liked everything tidy, the grass groomed and plants trimmed. Mom’s next-door neighbors, the ones with the Doberman named Babe who snapped at me from the end of her leash, called her yard a shithouse, a comment that was the source of much amusement to us. All my friends mistakenly thought she had burned her brains out in the sixties, that this was just another sign of her hippie hangover when it turned out that she just needed a bit of the wild, a place to stand. There were candlelit discussions with K about yards and the bourgeoisie and money, the way people needed to control with cutters and poisons, the vast expanse of green groomed for croquet and badminton.
A yard wasn’t simply a yard and a silence was always in judgment. There was no way to win between them, so we took our punishment as it was meted.
From the prompt "The lawn."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I've worked with this one a bit, to no avail.
Image of Big Skully in my backyard by me. I don't think the boy was making a commentary on the state of the lawn when he propped the skeleton up on a stick and stuck the stick in a crack in the dirt. He just needed evidence that there were once vicious cyclops in Berkeley.
The unfolding never ends
07 September 2011 06:54 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Insomnia
We were all up before five a.m., my mother and husband because he was taking her to the airport, me because, well, that’s just me, and the boy because he tends to wake up in the early morning hours unless there is someone sleeping beside him. I turned off the hall light and coaxed the boy back into bed. We lay next to each other and listened to cars starting up and trains mournfully announcing their presence. I coughed and he told me he was sorry that I was coughing and then he settled in and I resisted the bed’s seduction and pulled myself away. The boy is sleeping still, though that may not last much longer.
I’ve been using my inhaler more lately, with my weird bedtime coughs and little gasps. It waits for me on the bookshelf next to my bed, beside the tissue box and the flat stone that Kevin found years ago where I set my cups of hot water, my glasses of wine. The shelves underneath hold magazines (New York, the New Yorker) and books and journals in various states of legibility and angst. Any notebook you might find in this house, any notebook of mine, will have a journal entry in it somewhere, from a time when I just couldn’t help myself and had to write to get something out of my head, to figure out how I felt.
Journal writing hasn’t interested me lately. There’s too much that I am not yet ready to make real. I tire of speculating and predicting and sounding like I know what the future holds. While it may be comforting to believe that, it’s a lie, a form of control, one of the things I need to leave behind, this death grip on an idea of reality. I have to ride reality out in its solidity, let it reveal itself to me gradually, a toe here, an ankle there, the slow striptease, the show of flesh.
Ah, and here is where my mind gets caught on the feel of a hand on a knee. I distract myself with the vision where nothing exists but touch and desire and the unfolding, the never-ending unfolding, the story without end, the landscape rolling out in front of me.
From the prompt "Bedside table."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by ♥KatB Photography♥
Must be some kind of way out of here
06 September 2011 06:01 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Best of the blog
I have decided that there is no past, nothing to talk about, that I have detached myself from it, have jumped off the side of memory into the deep, into the ever-present now.
There will be no more conversations about the cold hospital room at Georgetown and how the phone lines didn’t work, the frantic call earlier in the day from my mother to get out and the way my coworkers and I didn’t know where to go and gathered around a Capitol Hill fountain under a searing blue sky before walking home, the forced march with the others, and the rumors flying about bombs and planes intermingling with the truth.
I don’t want to discuss dead pets. Or the way K had a way with the rhetorical knife. Or the summer the three of you spent on Smith Island, sunburned under dead sky, the fights about evolution and carpentry, the way the ice cubes melted in the glasses of gin and tonic, and the son sat quietly, protected but not, because we know now that his reticence was a permanent condition, not something stuck to childhood.
We agree on the facts, most of them, and we share the history, and it is not comforting to me now as it gets further and further away. The main characters are dead. They have moved to distant states with people we've never met. We shared houses once and meals and sometimes conversations, and there were summers of entwined limbs or afternoons on the damp couch with the paperbacks, and the road shimmered in the heat. I am in the dark now, in the waiting room (so many times this comes up, the waiting room) and if I look back, I am afraid I might get stuck.
On that day almost ten years ago, I walked home. I made sure my boyfriend, who was at a meeting in northern Virginia, was ok. In the surreal beauty of a Washington DC September afternoon, he and I walked to the hospital. It was one of the last “normal” afternoons for K, although the world was changed from the outside, soon to be changed from the inside. Then it was bleeding and ventilators and tubes shoved down K's throat. It was traches and Factor VII and anthrax and for one week I had “All Along the Watchtower” going through my mind when we thought K was going to die. He was, but it was months away, and everything was burning.
Before that it was sickness. Before that, anger mixed with talk. Neglect tempered with love. Insanity, insanity, and I detach myself from that. But I am just detached right now and I hate it, I am searching in the dark for a path, making sure that it takes me forward, not back into the muck and if I am not careful I will spend every moment lost, in tears, holding it together so tightly I destroy myself, wondering how the story will end.
From the prompt "Ten years ago."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by lost in pixels.
No place like home
05 September 2011 06:36 AM Categories: Writing prompts
In my sleep last night, I created new homes, new spaces where we tried to fit in old furniture. Some rooms were filled, others empty, and we hadn’t gotten it down yet, how to fit it all in or talk about how to do it, and I fumed, looking at where he put everything, without consulting me and where was he, anyway?
Before sleep, as we hurtled here and there and looked at the view, after we pushed through sand (the finds! a pale sea star, tiny, near death, that slowly caressed my hand; a mussel covered in purple barnacles, exotic ladies with their fans that my mother tossed back into the ocean) and then went up and down the steps to the lighthouse, I thought: I miss home. Not my home –- though I miss that, too, the stately townhouses of DC and the fields and water of the Eastern Shore – but a sense of home.
I am disconnected, floating along, detached, and a person can’t live like this, in the emptiness. In my mind, a home, a personal culture, is often a shared thing, and I don’t know how to do it anymore. Is it fear? Is it something else? What am I looking for? We are cowards. We are delicate, easily bruised. We are all wrong.
This is what I grew up with: me and her, me and her, my mother, my grandmother. The men were interlopers and the best times were when we were alone. The last man was bad and also good. We shared something, the three of us. But he’s dead now and that life has been gone for ten years. Then it was me and my man and then me, my man, and the boy, and I realized: I don’t know how to do this. To make the world larger. To contain a family. I flirt with it. I want it, this sense of shared self, but it is as dangerous as a riptide, and unfamiliar.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re getting somewhere. But I feel like I am treading water and I am alone and I can’t do it alone but I can’t do it together either.
Yesterday we stood in line as a foursome, waiting to get a peek at the lighthouse lamp. My legs trembled like they never have before. They were tired. They needed more fuel, more food. We watched my knees shake and felt the tremors in my thighs. But I kept going. I waited. I stood. And when the ranger's talk was over, my mother and I tackled the stairs, walked thirty stories up without stopping, barely looking behind us, knowing the man and the boy were somewhere down below. Five minutes later, there they were, fifty pounds of boy on his father's shoulders, clinging against the wind.
Together we started the long walk back to the car, the tired stumble, preparing for a quiet ride against the earth's contours, the long ride home.
From the prompt "Undeniable."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit, though it feels unfinished. Funny how groggy I can be when I sleep in until 5:30. Groggy but slightly more refreshed.
Image: The boy and his father at the Point Reyes National Seashore. Hipstamatic by me.
Pattern recognition
04 September 2011 06:08 AM Categories: Writing prompts
They went away on Canadian vacations. I sometimes accompanied them for weekends at his trailer near the ocean (but actually on a manmade lake dug out of red clay, the water too still, where mosquitoes bred in the relentless summer sun and once I came back from with a shimmering jar of tadpoles). My mother brought me carved wooden animals, maple sugar candy, books of Canadian stories. One of the stories angered me. It was about a girl who spent time with her grandmother, baking cookies, mixing up the flour and sugar and butter, dropping the dough by tablespoonfuls on a baking sheet. Another girl came along, an orphan or someone else with a sob story, diverting the grandmother’s attention. The orphan needed her too, needed her more, and eventually the granddaughter understood this. I never did. Wasn’t there enough love and time for both? Did one need to be excluded to save the other?
I was always jealous, there was never enough for me, and I was melodramatic, too, with my heavy sighs and foot stomps, my silences heavy as lead. I’m not sure what she could have done differently. I was raised in an atmosphere of debate and art and anger (suppressed until it exploded) and last night I realized how many dinners and afternoons of soothing, of ignoring, she must have colluded in back then. It was all fine, it was important that it be fine, when clearly it wasn’t fine.
There is nothing to be done about it now, as I make my own mistakes and accept my feelings as real. I recognize the continuation of a pattern (with a different flavor). I name the emotions, I tell myself they are legitimate and that I am ok for having them, I promise that I will always acknowledge those of the boy, and that I will never, NEVER tell him that I know exactly what he is thinking, that I knew he would say that. I won’t take away his emotions or his autonomy. I will not rob him from himself.
From a photo prompt that has nothing to do with my text.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. It's probably a bit obtuse, this post, but I can tell you that it is based on a (calm) revelation and conversation I had with my mother last night, something that reminded me how far both of us have come and how separate I am feeling from the past (with a few exceptions). There are still some sore spots, of course. One thing at a time.
Image by godzillante|photochopper.
Chimera
03 September 2011 05:51 AM Categories: Writing prompts
“It could be much worse,” I told my mother as we completed mile four of our Berkeley march, the meandering from resale shop to park rock to bakery to salon product pick-up to iced tea to waiting for the boy outside his classroom. “We’re both lucky in so many ways.”
I am loved and have enough money and a lovely place to live. I am healthy. The boy is healthy. My brain still works, although it is leakier than it was before, and when I am not healthy (the brain fog, the never-ending crying jags, the unexpected blood) I have health insurance to cradle me and doctors and a phalanx of mental health professionals waiting to reassure.
It could go away at any moment, all of it, a heavy fact that lurks in the back of my mind, along with the discontent, the ugliness. It could go away. I don’t deserve it. I have been a passive player in my life, a provider of care and user of someone else’s money, piggybacking on the labors of my husband. If I went with the usual flow of words here, I’d call myself a parasite, but that isn’t quite right. There is an exchange, some of which is implicit, some of which is my self-sacrifice to the gods of luck, the gods that know I don’t deserve a damn thing.
I clean. I cook. I do the laundry and the dishes and organize much of the boy’s life. I have taken the things that I love – cooking high on the list, emoting and caring on a deeper level, deep thought and appreciation of art and the world in the mix, too – and boxed them up, the small and large parts of me. No one asked me to do this, but I don’t know how to live my current life, how to join it to those parts of myself that feel … deviant? No. Subversive? How could that be?
It’s suppression, plain and simple, and I’ve written about it for years, usually indirectly, often with anger. But it’s nobody’s fault (but mine). I’m chipping away at the boxes and trying to give the feelings room. Still, in that conversation about the things to be grateful for, the many things, I realized how little enthusiasm I have for my life. That pisses me off, because I remember caring a lot about the world and life and emotions, and I’m tired of not-feeling, of not wanting to go to the edge of the emotional sea, to the churning and tossing and the moments of beautiful calm, the uncertainty about the weather, the immersion in warmth and sunlight.
I’m tired of the suppression and I’m grateful for the good things and I still haven’t figured out how to join selves, to take the pre-parenthood me and the mother me and join them to make a new creature. Or maybe I’m doing it, but it feels so slow and there are so many other pieces of baggage along the way, the heavy legacy of the past, that it’s sometimes hard to see my way forward.
From the prompt "I am so grateful for..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Note on the title: I spent more time debating the title than I did writing the post. Ultimately, I think it fits. You can find out more about chimeras here and here and draw your own conclusions.
Confidential to people looking for my yicky post. I deleted it.
Image by Stuck in Customs.
Born again
02 September 2011 05:47 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Best of the blog
I tossed one leg over the other. The hanging foot twitched and bounced. I knit my fingers together and took them apart, knit together and took apart, and when that was no longer satisfying, I tapped my fingernails against themselves, hid one set under the other. My hands were one creature, my arms connected, they would never separate, would never open up for another again.
I distracted myself with thoughts of sex, of fields at night, the trembling under a fitful breeze. Every landscape was dark, the sun gone, but the moon made shadows of trees on the ground. The stars twinkled. Every cliché about light in the dark came true, and I didn’t know who was beside me and I didn’t care. The glow from his cigarette hung in the dark. I knew the other end touched his lips, the lips that didn’t let words out, that caressed the edge of wine glasses and pecked me on the cheek in the morning. He turned his head to the side and removed the cigarette, the glow moving with him.
I knew his hands once, the long thumbs, the thin fingers and broad palms. What was it about men’s hands? I used to watch him write letters on Sunday afternoons. I glimpsed his fingertips as they held the newspaper or tapped out email. I reached for those hands, he reached for mine, but now there was no familiarity. I had taken to looking at the hands of strangers, the men at the coffee shop grabbing distractedly at sheathed paper cups, the guys on the street clutching cell phones or holding the looped ends of dog leashes.
He extinguished the spark and said goodnight, his footsteps crunching up the dune. Waves returned to the beach again and again and again. I buried my feet in the cool sand and closed my eyes against the murky dark, imagined a man who spoke, who knew how to use his hands. I conjured him up from dream and memory, and in my mind we walked along the edge of water, talking, never stopping. There was no barrier and the words were born, they lived and died and were born again.
From the prompt "Pregnant," which is almost as bad as "A baby."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
I dreamed last night about planes and crash landings, about people holding blowtorches to boxes of raw popcorn in order to cook them in the heat. Small explosions and runways carved out of dirt: what does it mean?
Image by ElvertBarnes.
Playing dress-up
01 September 2011 05:55 AM Categories: Quotidian existence
Three years ago I wore nothing but faded fabrics and loose-fitting t-shirts. My shoes were generally athletic or practical, a-b devices. Then I decided to drop the mommy gear and focus on form. Form-fitting shirts. Pants that actually fit (necessitating trying them on versus buying them online). Shoes again, the glorious world of shoes. I realized that I wasn’t a preppy dresser, though neither am I one to toss around boas and chains, so my purchases began to reflect that.
Is this frivolous? Am I living life totally on the surface, with my cares about flattering shapes and forms? Can I help it? I’d like to be visible as long as I can, to acknowledge that what we wear matters, that one can look good and still be a mother (or, gasp, a middle-aged woman getting older every minute).
Yesterday, my mother and I went shopping at Crossroads Trading Company, a clothing resale shop. I bought skirts, the kind that flow in the breeze, and pants, and a loose-knit sweater (or she bought them, an early birthday present). And there in the back with the flats and the metallic sneakers and the strappy sandals was a pair of high-heeled black Mary Janes.
I haven’t worn heels since I was working, and even then the heels were generally low. But the shoes were cute and I tried them on and then tried them on with the skirts (always with the black and white, me, the stark patterns). They looked fashionable. They looked like fantasy, you know, the kind where I am always dressed up and feel good about myself, where I have a place to go and people to interact with. I pictured pulling on the silky flowing skirt with the black flowers on white, my shirt black (which one? I have a lot of them.), with those Mary Janes and my hair done right for once. I’d walk downtown to the psychiatrist’s office, prove to her that I was doing fine, just fine, and then I’d sashay to the drug store or the restaurant. I’d cross my legs and smoke a cigarette on the park bench outside the BART station with the rest of them, the crazies and the lost, the passengers.
OK: I need to aim a little higher in my dress-up fantasies. For now, though, I’ll take the outfit, the shoes, the plans and ideas, the way they hurtle me into the future and change how I think about myself.
From the prompt "A strain on the relationship."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image: the shoes.