It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Cover Ink

I

Swirls of rose and leaf wings fill the smile between the girl’s shirt and jeans

as she bends to scoop the fallen napkin from the wind-tossed grass.

Tramp stamp

Her black eyeliner is suspect, this tidier of public spaces in low-rise denim and textured hair.

She crumples the paper, spitting into the folds, scrubbing –

in the eternal gesture of motherhood –

Welfare mother

at the jam-blotched face in the stroller before her.  Her waist rolls as she bends, cresting between

shirt and jeans.

Fat slut

II

The spiky black legs of letters crawl across the backs of his knuckles

as he writes the check.

Gangbanger

Images ripple across his biceps and down to his wrists as he lifts the bags, turning out onto the sidewalk.

In the white-hot furnace of a city in summer, a young mother shoves her stroller across the street, barely checking for traffic, to put distance between her jam-cheeked baby and the dark man.

Thug

He sets the bag next to a lamp post, stopping to tighten the boot laces at his ankles.  A blonde woman passes, averting her eyes from the shaven head and script that loops up from his collar.

Dangerous

III

The collar of her blazer rubs against the ends of her bob as she fumbles for the keys.  A man on the street corner picks up his bags, walking away without a second glance as she climbs into her minivan.

Soccer mom

Yellow sun catches the crow’s feet as she shifts the rear-view mirror, checking her lipstick.

Time travels in small folds across the neck above the seatbelt.

Matron

The woman sips her latte, flipping her turn-signal, as she pulls into the elementary school pick-up line.

Public radio tells of another horror in a far off land while children burst from the buildings in a frenzied spring of freedom.

Middle-class cliché

IV

The young mother lays her son in his crib, brushing back a sweaty curl.  She strips off her top as she heads down the hall, a butterfly emerging from the dimpled space at the top of her ass.

As the shower laces across her skin, her brain reviews her thesis and data.  She meets with her professor tomorrow.

One block away, the skinhead opens a yellow door and unpacks his bag, putting paints and oil on a corner shelf.

The letters on his fingers sing of a time forgotten as they pull the brush across the canvas, painting the boy building Lego cities on the kitchen floor.

The professor shrugs off her jacket as the sun pushes through the minivan window.  As she turns to check her child’s seatbelt, a passing parent catches the red and gold ink rising across her back from under the lace camisole.

She has a tattoo?

V

The clerk pauses as a cover in the new shipment catches her eye.  She glances at the back, and puts the book on the shelf.

Can’t judge a book by its cover.

The tribal design that fills the book-jacket says nothing of the words beneath:

Loss, poverty, glory, summer, rhythm, pain, release, love, blood, lust, hunger, exhaustion

The picture says nothing, but when the words are known, it tells the whole story.

 

11 Weeks

Note: It isn't often that I share poetry publicly, so please be gentle.  This emerged from a "failed" long run yesterday in which I wound up with an incapacitating IT band strain and had to quit two miles short of my goal.  But the events started me thinking about the effects of time, not just on our bodies, but how we see ourselves and our challenges.

 

 

The first two miles pound out in creaking joints and calves of jelly.

Gratitude for the gift of a red light, stretching at the signal with the feigned impatience

of a real athlete

The old woman in the body sheds the imagined decades with the miles, each stride kicking off the dust of time.

By the time I cross from the downtown realm of the elderly, my chronological age and I are one again.

Sweat drips between my breasts, on my right, the apartment where my virginity and I parted ways – two decades ago, now.  Woman grown, wife, mother, my head turns and I see the girl holding naked hands with her lover on the brown couch, afraid to ask,

“What does this mean?”

She never asked, and the question is gone, answer blown off in the miles behind.

Over the freeway, decades falling away into light steps that blow across the asphalt pass with the frail feathers of almond and cherry.

Mile four and nearly twenty again – twenty, but for the two undergraduates sprinting by, knees reaching nearly to their upright breasts, feet kissing the ground like fairy metronomes.

The audiobook plugged into my cortex speaks of shame, compassion, and messages.  I dig from my brain thoughts of love for the nymphs leaving me with the blowing pollen and for my own body – stronger in its scars than that of the girl who never asked and never received.

Loss doesn’t care if we risk.  But, reward won’t come uninvited. 

Six miles and only bicycles and shadowy cows spreckle the landscape.  The unwelcome tension of a bladder pushed, prodded, stretched, and squashed by three pregnancies knocks against the present mind.

Tap.  Tap.  A bush over there. 

Too scanty

Tap.  Tap.  Trees?

Not shielded from the path.

Time and body converge.  The twenty year old would have risked a rupture.  I weigh the balance.

The British voice from my phone notes my slowing pace.  Judgmental bastard.  The female voice would have understood.  Phone app gent doesn’t get it.  He could just whip it out at that olive tree over there, relieve that tapping tension, and be on his merry old way, no one the wiser.

“12.2 minutes per mile.  Average pace 11 minutes 4 seconds per mile.”

Plummy prick.  Leave me alone.

Spring sky sits empty, cloud-free and bird unburdened.  They rustle and whistle from the olive trees and long grasses, crossing over the audiobook’s words:

Shame

Resilience

Trap

Connection

Vulnerability

Trust

Can one feel shame about being ashamed?  The pressure beneath the belt of my waist-pack leads me off the path of philosophy and behind a clump of fallen branches and low-hanging trees.

Crouching knees, bare ass, and fears of wet socks trump the esoteric.

A car shoots past, then a male cyclist.

I pretend to tie my shoe and make myself invisible.  A grey haired woman on a bicycle looks my way a just long enough for the rays of judgment to scorch my hair and shoulders.  I think the tree above me is a fig – leaves not yet unfurled.

I pull my underwear and shorts about me as I stand – one smooth motion, I think.  Until the invisible key locks my right knee.

Lurch.  Stagger.  Adjust waistbands in time for the next bicycle wheel to crest the hill.  I flex my leg a few times.  Ten miles.  Okay, I’m on the Golden Gate Bridge, says the part of the brain tracking the marathon course map.  11 weeks.

I try to feel salt winds on my face but have to skip down onto the gravel shoulder as a car sails round the bend.

The 42 year old knee doesn’t like this game of chicken.  Tendons that had adjusted to the stretch and contract of an even pace are rebelling against the break, the squat, and the pavement chopped like toffee.

Mother shame, says the audiobook.  Caregiver shame.  Body image shame.

Is there shame in a middle-aged woman, slogging alone down a country road?

“Oh, that’s why you have such killer legs,” said a friend meeting me around the bend of a trail.

I have killer legs, I tell them, as the knee screams and the ankle whines in sympathy.  Not even 11 miles.

The knee doesn’t care.  We compromise.  You can walk to the next bend, I say.

I cheat, picking up the pace before the road curves away.  Small betrayals don’t go unnoticed.  Unkept promises return until fulfilled.

12 miles – Off the bridge, into Sea Cliff.  Rolling hills, says my mind to the flat fields and orchards around me.

Invisible gremlins are at work on my knee with an ice-pick.  Stop.

Can’t stop.  Not even half way.

Walk.

Walking.  A truck passes.  A minivan with pressed children’s faces.  An elderly sedan.

How stupid you look, trudging along the crumbled edge of the road – blatantly not running in your fluorescent gear and purple shoes.

That is the voice of shame – not from magazines or enemies, but from the imagined places where whispers of past follies hide.

Fingers twitch at the microphone of my headset.  So easy to call.  My husband would ride up, a knight upon a silver minivan.

Follow the road.  It’s the miles that count.

Pace: 17 minutes per mile.  Average pace: 12 minutes 24 seconds.

It’s the miles.  Just do the miles.  It doesn’t matter how fast.

The run shuffles off into the lurching jog of a zombie with places to go.  Half a mile, I tell myself.  I manage about 200 yards.

Breath floats in and out with the ease of the whispering dewy grasses.  Lungs and left leg could go for miles.

Sinister persists.  I am betrayed by the right.

13 miles

14

Walking now, I’ll run up the overpass, I think.

Four strides and a whimper.  Toy cars buzz below.  Downhill will be better.

Fire and ice shoot across my knee.  The wrinkled, square face of the balding man pedaling up the hill sees the weakness.  His gnarled legs push past me in silent disdain.

Fingers press the microphone. 

“I’m not going to make it the full way.  Can you get me at the AM/PM when you come through?”  Shadows hide behind the question.  Bibbed runners pass in my head, dreaded letters paint in ghost ink next to my name in the marathon lists

D

N

F

Did. Not. Finish.

Purple vetch laces the hillside at our feet.  Girls cluster like flowers blowing at the summit’s edge.  One looks at my clothes and laughs, “Did you run here?”

“Well.  Most of the way.  But my knee gave out.”

Something passes below the laugh.  “Oh.  I thought you were going to say ‘Just kidding.’ You really ran?”

We stand at the top of the spring world.  Knee flexes.  “Yes, but I overdid it a bit today.  I think the answer is not to be 42.”

They laugh as only 13 can, free of the imaginary ailments of middle age – aches, and rent, and taxes.

“She’s training for a marathon,” my daughter tells her friends.

Goats dance on a distant hill.  A toddler staggers with purpose among the purple.

“Today didn’t work, but I can do it.  I have 11 weeks.”

 

 

 

Turning Mistakes

Sierra gets out of school 45 minutes before her older siblings.  Sometimes we wait at the school and play; sometimes she comes back to my office and draws, reads, or does math problems.  Yesterday, I had decided that we would wait at the school since I had work that could be done on my laptop and the weather was fairly nice.  The kid who frequently gripes that “there’s nothing to do at your work” was predictably disappointed that we were staying at the school.

“I wanted to work on my picture!” She waved a large piece of white paper partially decorated with bands of green and blue (presumably grass and sky.)

We stayed at the school, but instead of going to the playground, sat at the wide benches in the breezeway so that she could use one as a table.  Sierra unrolled her crayon case, pointing out the new “graphite pencils” and a couple of colored pencils that I may not have seen last time.  Sierra may be a butterfly most of the time, but art is serious business, and she treats her supplies with professional gravity.

On the first side of the paper, she filled in a house and a row of tulips standing sentinel.  “Are there clouds in Christmas,” she asked me as she pulled her black block crayon from its slot. 

“If you want,” I answered, not bothering to point out that there aren’t generally tulips in Christmas.  “The weather can be however you want.”

She decided that it was snowing, and that some of the snow was melting – the melting snowflakes were depicted by larger and partially open circles.  Once she’d finished the main picture, Sierra flipped the page over to practice writing.

“HIY” she drew in full-page, yellow block letters.  She looked up at me.  “H-I-Y, does that spell ‘hi’?”

“Well,” I paused.  I’ll admit it; I’m a sucker.  I hate disappointing my kids when they’re proud of something they’ve done.  But, we’ve never been fans of unearned praise or of letting mistakes slide by.  “Hi doesn’t have a Y at the end.”

“Oh. I thought it did.” Sierra giggled and pursed her lips, pulling out a blue crayon.

I tried not to cringe as she began to cross out the Y with broad strokes.  I hated seeing her “wreck” her work.  Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, I thought.  She was doing so well on the picture.  Sierra kept coloring, and slowly I noticed that the blue was keeping the inverted triangle shape of the Y.

“I’m making a blueberry ice cream cone,” she said, pulling out a brown crayon.  Carefully, she outlined a cone around the bottom of the triangle, cross-hatching the cone over the ice cream.  “With cherries because they’re yummy,” she added, drawing small red circles, each with a gracefully curving stem, one after the other, on the mound of blue.

“Do you like my picture, Mommy?” Sierra asked me as we walked toward the upper grades’ classrooms.

“I do.  I especially liked how you turned the Y into an ice cream cone instead of just crossing it out when you messed up.”

“Teacher told us that we can turn mess-ups into something beautiful.”

Sometimes it feels as though one mess-up has ruined the entire picture.  We want to crumple the page, throw it in the trash, and start over.  We want to obliterate the memory of the wrong letter, wrong word, wrong choice.  We’re embarrassed and ashamed that we “made a mistake.”

But, when we shred our mistakes, scribble them out, and turn away, we lose not only the opportunity to create something beautiful, but we eliminate the whole other side of the picture.  When we crumple our “mess-up” and throw it into the trash, we also lose the house and tulips, the gently falling snow with the beauty of the improbable blue sky and sun.

Sometimes when things go awry, we want to forget, to “move on,” to “get over it” as quickly as we can.  We call this healthy, this jettisoning of the “bad.”  But, it doesn’t work.  Our experiences, like our pictures, are too complex; they are mixtures of beauty and pain, light and shadow, triumph and failure.  When we ditch the part that hurts or shames us, we risk losing the lessons we have gained.

In When Things Fall Apart, Buddhist nun Pema Chodron writes of “the four maras,” saying “What we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck.  What may be an arrow or a sword, we can actually experience as a flower.”

She goes on to talk about obstacles at “the outer level and at the inner level.”  You know the outer level – we all do.  It’s that sense of blame.  Who was wrong.  Who has hurt us.  Who gets in our way.  But, of the inner level, she says:

…perhaps nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion.  Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched.  Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast.  But, what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

Wait.  So, pain, loneliness, loss, disappointment – those won’t go away until I’ve learned what I need from them?  Crap.  I can’t just crumple up the picture, throw it away, and start a new one?

No.

Think about it.  Think of a recent loss, argument, accident.  Would you really jettison everything that led up to that point?  Do you really want to throw out the ‘good’ to get rid of the ‘bad?’  Can you even tell which parts are good and which are bad?

Maybe all of it has the potential to become something beautiful – even the ugly mess-ups.  Even the endings.  Even the failures.  Maybe we just need to choose a different crayon.

And add cherries. 

Reasons and Purpose

A particular hashtag has invaded my Twitter feed recently. #whyiwrite.  I’ve seen a number of reasons condensed to the pith of 140 or fewer characters and added my own to the jumble.  But, like most things, this philosophical potpourri didn’t so much give me answers as it made me question.

When one makes the leap into writing for public consumption, if that writing is honest, if it reveals something of the writer’s self, vulnerabilities, pains, joys, experiences, and questions, feedback is inevitable.  Some will laud, some will criticize, and many (MANY) will offer answers – what the writer should do, should have done, why she shouldn’t question herself, why she should be ashamed, proud, institutionalized, or hugged, why she is right, why she is wrong.

Here’s the thing.  I don’t write for answers, and my writing probably isn’t for the people who have them – or believe that they do.  I write to inform, sometimes.  I write to pay the bills, when I can.  I write to entertain, to provoke, to feel.  I write to bring joy, to share pain.  I write for the girls and women I have been.  I write toward the woman I hope to become.

I write to share memories and lessons I have learned.  I write the stories I see when I move through the day.  I write to connect myself to others – more deeply to those present in my life, to touch the memories of those who are gone from my life, to say the things I was never able to say aloud, and to find a link to those whose lives barely brush the edges of mine.

I write to keep the precious pieces of the things I have lost.  I write to inch closer to some sort of truth.  I write when I can’t paint the shadows and shades, when the patterns no longer make sense.  I write, not to provide or to find answers, but to wander down the paths of question.

I write to remind myself not to hide from loss or shame.  I write in the hope that maybe by sharing something of myself, I might help someone else feel that it’s okay to be self-revelatory, that reaching beyond our own bubbles is the only way through human loneliness.

We saw a play at the local high school the other night.  To quote my husband, Avenue Q is like Sesame Street on acid.  There is a strong disconnect between the bouncy kid-pop tunes and the questioning, angst-ridden, and often cynical lyrics.  But one thing stuck with me.  One character drifted throughout the play, tossing away the gifts of friendship and relationships in order to focus on finding his purpose.  Of course, it was only when he came back to the importance of those relationships that his purpose became apparent.

What is my purpose?

That question followed me through the play, and into the parking lot, and home to my bed.  On the surface, purpose is easy – family, friends, loved ones, etc…  But, of course, it isn’t easy at all.  Where are we headed?  What is most important?  What happens when our purpose hurts others?  Or ourselves?  Does our purpose in life shift and change as we grow, as our circumstances evolve?  How many parts does it have?  How many layers?

I still don’t have the answers – not even close.  But, I think that’s part of it.  I think for me, the questions are part of my purpose.  The answers are often irrelevant.  It’s the exploration, the digging that turns up the things I wasn’t even seeking.

And this is why I write – not to find or to give answers, but to create more questions.

What is your purpose?

The Naked Self

Listening to music sung by a friend this morning started me thinking about creativity.  As children, unless we’re squashed mentally and emotionally, creativity comes naturally.  It’s like running around naked.  Rocks are jewels, the world is a canvas, every rhyming word is fodder for a song, and shirts, pants, and underwear are optional.

Yet, as we grow older, fall from Eden, and find the shame in our nakedness, we also begin to clothe our creativity.  We cover it in structure, form, criticism, and conformity.  Think back through adulthood – when was the last time you (independent of a small child) broke out that cool box of 64 Crayolas?  You know, the one with the sharpener in the back.  When did you last make up a song to hum to yourself, even though you can’t carry a tune?  When did you last grab a pencil and paper and just scrawl whatever your hand wanted – words, pictures, doodles, obscene cartoons?

Creativity gets compartmentalized, assigned to art class, music lessons, writing seminars, or the theater.  In our adult world, we assume that creativity is given only to “artists.”  How often have you said, “I’m just not creative,” or “I wish I were a creative person so that I could do that.”?  I know I’ve heard it more times than I can count.  Yet, assuming that creativity is limited only to those we classify as artists or eccentrics is akin to deciding that only movie stars, nude models, and strippers have bodies.

I don’t think it is a coincidence, this simultaneous constriction and repression of our creative and physical selves.  Creativity is a nakedness of the soul.  We can filter how we present ourselves in our everyday lives, put on social costumes, but when we are truly creative, we can no longer hide the things that distinguish us from others.  When we create and share our creations, we are totally exposed – everything that we are is out there for the world to see and to judge.

That’s where the damage lies in this concealment and conformity that we impose upon our creative souls and upon our bodies.  We fear judgment and we clothe ourselves in it.  And, in doing so, we teach the next generation to loathe both their bodies and their individuality.  Think back – when have you heard these: “Put on some clothes; you’re too old to run around the house in your underwear.”  “That’s a pretty picture, but the sky is blue, not orange.” How many of us have been taught to color inside the lines, or grew up listening to the adults in our lives criticize their own bodies and those of others?

My own upbringing was wonderfully supportive of creativity.  I had more paints, crayons, and modeling clay than any 50 children could want.  Music lessons, journals, easels, you name it.  Comfort with one’s own body was another story.  Most of my ancestors hail from the British Isles.  When your spiritual ancestors are Knox and Calvin, appreciation of the human form isn’t exactly hard-wired into the familial structure.

As I reached adulthood, I made a few abortive attempts to become comfortable in my body, but those quickly fell victim to a combination of insecurity, fashion magazines, and motherhood.  I learned to clothe my body in ways that expressed whoever I was being at the time – to hide any bulges, knobby knees, to minimize my linebacker shoulders.  And, as I reached adulthood, as I fell into the roles of professional and mother, I put away my creativity.  Any outbursts of crafting were carefully and appropriately directed toward projects for the home or my children.  Grownups don’t draw and paint – unless they are artists.  They don’t play instruments – unless they are musicians.  They don’t write – unless they are authors.  Grownups don’t reveal their souls or their bodies.  They wrap themselves in convention, in small talk, in business suits, in politics, in book clubs.

In 2008, in the downslope of my 30s, I realized something.  I can’t be a grownup.  Covering up and burying the parts of myself that make me unique was killing me.  I broke out a journal.  I began to write and then to blog.  I got my easel and oil paints down from the attic. And, about the time I began this blog and first submitted essays for national consumption, I began to run.  I decided to enjoy my body.  To clothe it in ways that make me happy.  And the more I learned to appreciate my body and to become comfortable in it, the more my creative side thrived.

Self-revelation is terrifying and exhilarating.  And yet, I can’t help wondering if we make too big a deal about it.  What are we hiding, exactly?  When we refuse to paint because “I’m not artistic,” or we decline to sing along for fear that someone will hear us and judge, when we agonize in a dressing room and finally put that gorgeous bikini back on the rack, what are we saying about our humanity?  What are we telling ourselves and the world about our gifts, our potential?  And how much are we denying others permission to share of themselves?

One of my proudest moments as a mother came a couple of weeks ago.  I have a 13 year old daughter.  My family history is not rife with examples of secure, confident, healthy adolescence.  I had assumed anxiety, body issues, and insecurity to be part of the territory.  So, it was with great joy one evening during family banter that I heard these words come out of my daughter’s mouth.  “I like my body.”

I wanted to bronze that sentence and give it to her and to every other person on the planet as a gift.  When we like our bodies, when we like ourselves, when we like the creative impulses, the quirks, and the out-of-the-box-ness that make us unique, we are capable of greatness.

We all have the same number of chromosomes. And within those chromosomes we have an amazing array of unique genetic coding.  We are all alike, and we are all absolutely unique.

Nakedness, of body or of soul, takes tremendous courage.  And yet, perhaps, if more of us practiced revealing ourselves, sharing ourselves, less courage would be needed.

So, here you go, I’ll take the plunge.  Not perfect, not a celebrity, not an artist, not “special” – just human.

Stitches in Time

As my fingers teased the threads from their multicolored rat’s nest, and wound them around the spools – plastic, Styrofoam, and wood – memories strung themselves along the strands…

Chubby, awkward fingers – mine – playing with empty wooden spools, stringing them on bits of yarn, rolling them along the floor and underfoot, stacking them into castles of imagination.

Patterns strewn across the table, fabric stacked on the futon-like bed where my sister and I were to sleep, checking the same bed for needles and pins before rolling out our sleeping bags.

Instructions issued around a mouthful of pins.  “Stand still, and I won’t prick you.”  Standing still was never possible, not in half-finished dresses, shorts, or tops masquerading as porcupines.

Spreading buttons across the table, feeling them bump and clink beneath the pads of my fingers, sifting them like erratic sand into piles of wonder.

Hours in fabric stores, wandering the aisles of notions, sliding between bolts of fabric, sighing at aching legs and dreams of ice cream.

“Tiny stitches.  Take tiny stitches.”  Patiently exasperated fingers, picking apart my rebellious work – stitches grown longer, no tail left to secure the end.  “Tiny, even stitches are stronger.”

Sewing badge tossed in the tray of my lime, plastic sewing box – defiantly unattached to the green sash.

Weakening arms, holding my son, my second child – on a couch in the wrong house.  “When can you take the sewing cabinet back with you?  I want you to have it.”  A toddler and an infant underfoot – what would I do with a faded, mid-century, laminate cabinet in my Craftsman house?

Knitting needles shaping squares and rectangles – something to do with yet another child at the breast.  A memory of buttons, perfect for this purse!  Pushing through cobwebs in the garage, climbing the detritus of cast-off stages of childrearing.  Pulling open a drawer – packed with tangles of thread and elastic; the plastic anchor buttons from my long-ago sailor suit.  A knotted handkerchief is bundled in the jumble of bits and pieces.  The handkerchief is heavy; it clicks and bubbles.  Knots untied reveal the missing pearl necklace.

Moving away from failure – smaller house, more compact life.  The sewing cabinet has to come inside.  Covered with a bright scarf, it becomes the “Nature Table” – layers of feathers, leaves, and pinecones mill about the surface.

“Why don’t you just use your sewing machine?”  “Too much trouble.”

Clothes too worn to donate.  Something of her Depression-induced frugality enters my bones.  A shirt with sentimental value becomes a pillow.  A silk top and old slacks, a purse.  Slowly patching together new from the fragments of the past.

Piles of clothing and fabric creep across the living room.  I run out of thread and turn to the cabinet.  No more pearls, but strands of silk, cotton, and nylon in hues beyond the rainbow. 

Cleaning out the shelves of the cabinet, slowly claiming ownership.  Faces and fashions of an increasingly distant past gleam from still glossy pages stuck with scraps of tweed and knits.  Pillbox hats and cap-sleeves enthrall my children.  “That’s in style again,” says the thirteen year old.  “The miniskirt freed women,” remarks the fifth grade boy.  “Sissy would like that dress; wouldn’t you?” asks the youngest.  We sit, cross-legged, pouring through the old Vogue fashion books, my memory teased by the albums of my childhood.  Finally, the tears come.

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years” – attributed to Mark Twain

I didn’t want to learn to sew.  Along with cooking, cleaning, ironing, crocheting, and making babies, I relegated sewing to that pile of “Things you’re supposed to do if you’re a girl.”  But I was a girl of the ‘70’s, a child of feminism raised on the saying “Anything boys can do, girls can do better.”  Anything, obviously, did not include sewing.

I loved the outfits my mother and grandmother sewed, knitted, and crocheted for me as a child.  Even during the height of my pre-teen anti-domestic arts campaign, I adored the knickers my grandmother made for me one Christmas.  They were a gorgeous, rich russet brown sateen corduroy with brass buttons at the knees – hey, it was the early ‘80’s; what do you expect?

I even loved trips to the fabric store as a child (when they didn’t take too long).  I loved the endless rows of shimmering colors and textures, the glitter of buttons, the candy-like spools of thread. 

When I was small, before I determined that such things were a path to domestic servitude, I learned to piece together square fabric scraps, making endless quilts and small pillows.  As I got older, I progressed to dresses for the dolls in my dollhouse (muslin, of course.)

But, when Grandma wanted to teach me to use the sewing machine, and started espousing the economic and style benefits of making my own clothes, I put my foot down.   No way.  No how. 

I love food, so I had learned to cook – but, in true form, I became an adherent of the wing-it, recipes are only guidelines, throw in a little of this and a little of that culinary style espoused by the male members of my family.  No leveling the flour with the edge of a knife for me!  Cooking was an expression of creativity, not a job.

Life shifts.  I believed my grandmother hopelessly outdated when she spoke with concern about the difficulties of juggling career and children, when she said things like “children really need their mother.”  I believed she was being condescending when she praised my mother for “even though she works, she’s always at home when you kids are.”  I wasn’t going to have kids anyway, and even if I did, I certainly wasn’t going to compromise my career. 

Life shifts.  I married a man who negotiated me from my position of never having kids to agreeing to two (don’t ask about the third.)  I put down my paintbrushes and sketch pads sometime after school – too much trouble with work and a new child.  But, I began to find that mending the loose buttons and torn seams of life gave my fingers something to do.

My grandmother lived to see two of my three children.  She saw me ask for and receive my first sewing machine when Caitlin was a toddler.  The first Easter without her, my kids wore outfits that I made myself – with pain and swearing and many, many phone calls to my mother.

It is amazing how wise my grandmother became in the years approaching and since her death.  Cooking and sewing became for me, as they had been for her, art, expression, and necessity.  I’ve learned to make career shifts and compromise to balance family and work.  And, the sewing cabinet is finally in our living room.

I finally got around to organizing the drawers and making the cabinet my own this last weekend – roughly a decade since my grandmother’s death.  Time allows us to sort through conflict, guilt, and loss to make the memories our own. 

Making room in the bottom shelves for some of my own materials, I ran across stacks of Vogue fashion magazines – the kind with pattern numbers and fabric swatches.  The kids and I spent close to an hour, cross-legged on the carpet, pouring through one season after another.

As my sister and I had once been, my kids were willing helpers in the tasks of freeing the tangled threads and corralling scraps and bundles of trim and elastic into plastic bins, sorting safety pins and buttons into glass jars.  Watching Sierra earnestly wind separate bits of rickrack around individual strips of cardboard brought smiles and a tear or two.  Grandma was a true product of the Great Depression.  She never threw away anything that could be reused.  I found tails of thread that I would have tossed, neatly coiled around folded cardstock that had once been a card of snaps.  As I appliqué patches cut from an old top onto a pair of cut-off shorts made from tired jeans, I think that somewhere my Grandma is smiling.  And, possibly saying a little “I told you so.”  I wouldn’t put it past her.

Shame Yields Right-of-Way to Joy

I live in fear of the misunderstanding -- not the big, relationship-rending miscommunications but the small gaffes, the simple ‘oops, I got that wrong’ moments.  This sort of minor awkwardness has never been something I’ve been able to brush off; instead, my fear of “getting it wrong” is occasionally paralyzing.

What if the party wasn’t today?  What if I’m at the wrong house?  What if I pronounce his/her name wrong?  What if I’m standing in the wrong place?  What if I was the one who was supposed to call?  What if I wasn’t supposed to call?

This circling rat’s nest of anxieties has a simple name.  Shame.

Shame is the feeling that dogs me at 3A.M. following an embarrassing miscommunication (often one so minor that I’m the only person who notices.)  Shame is the heat that floods my face, creeping up from my chest and paralyzing my legs when I realize my error.

We all experience shame in one place or another.  For some, those feelings may center around work.  For others, parenting, or sex.  We all have the things that trigger shame, that we try to work around, to avoid, to pretend don’t bother us.

But, we aren’t perfect.  And so, the stuff we try to protect against pops up anyway.

I’ve written before about Brené Brown’s work.  Brené is a ‘shame researcher’ whose books The Gifts of Imperfection and the one I’m currently reading/listening to, I Thought it Was Just Me (but it wasn’t), address the issues of perfectionism and its counterpart, shame.  As Brené says, she researches the things that get in the way of joy.

And, boy does shame get in the way of joy, but guess what – joy can get in the way of shame, too.

Recently I had one of those dreaded miscommunication moments.  It was so minor as to be a blip in time – a matter of my misinterpreting something someone had said to me.  Yet, once I realized what had happened and how I’d misunderstood it, that familiar tail-chasing, self-name-calling cycle started.  I had forgotten something the other person had told me, and that had led to my not catching the meaning of the conversation later.  No big deal, right?

Well, of course, me being me, not only was I ashamed for misunderstanding, but I fell into the self-centered trap of being appalled at my own self-centeredness.  (That one can chase itself in a circle for days.)  About the time I was using self talk like You stupid bitch, why can’t you get out of your own stupid head long enough to remember something for someone else.  I ran across something so beautiful that it completely broke the cycle of shame and self-negation.

I found this on both Facebook and Twitter, shared by Brené Brown and Quiet author Susan Cain on each of their pages.  This was posted recently on the Atlantic’s website – a flashmob, performing (appropriately enough) “Ode to Joy.”  The sight of all these people, risking vulnerability, putting themselves out there, risking ‘standing in the wrong place’ just to make something beautiful completely changed my mindset.

If you let it in, joy is the antidote to shame.  In the meantime, watch…

 

 

Failure and Success -- of a Man and a Mouse

Anyone who has ever visited Disneyland has probably read or heard the quote from Walt Disney that “It all started with a mouse.”  I’ll admit it, I was raised on a steady diet of Disney.  We took family trips to Disneyland; the Disney Channel was the first cable channel I remember.  My husband, who was raised in Anaheim, was even more immersed.  Yet, until this past weekend, I didn’t realize that the mouse would never have come into existence if his creator had not first failed.

Mike and I recently visited the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio on an anniversary trip to San Francisco.  In the museum lobby, visitors are confronted with an impressive, and intimidating, array of awards – an entire case of Oscars, the French Legion d’Honneur, and a polyglot mosaic of certificates medals, and trophies.  By any fraction of these awards, the bearer would be judged a success.  However, as we entered the museum exhibits and wandered chronologically through the life of Walter Elias Disney, the thing that struck me over and over was not the mind-boggling success, but how often the man had failed.

We aren’t talking small, niggling failures.  His first animation company went bankrupt – the papers are posted in the exhibit.  In recorded interviews played near the exhibit, Walt says that when he arrived in California, he and his brother Roy (recently discharged from the VA Hospital) had more than brotherhood in common.  “We were both unemployed.  So we decided to start our own business.”  This second company, for which Walt and Roy encouraged friends from Missouri to relocate to California, flourished for a while – until some unfortunate business dealings with a distributor.  One letter from that distributor contained sentences like dagger thrusts.  The “gentleman” wrote that his company had seen no financial returns from any of the films Disney had sent them.  He then followed with the excoriating phrase “you should be heartily ashamed.”  Words to make most of us curl under the covers and hide, words to make us flee from that which we had failed.  Yet, Disney kept making films.  Ultimately, this distributor wrested away the rights to Disney’s main character, a rabbit named Oswald. 

Disney and his wife traveled back to the east coast in an attempt to retain the rights to Oswald.   On the train trip back to California, after their efforts had failed, he didn’t drink himself into a stupor, apparently didn’t moan to Lilly about his failures.  Instead, he started to think about mice.  Mice were “cute and could do anything” and until then had been supporting characters in animated work.  Walt began to sketch and soon developed a little guy he called Mortimer, a name his wife declared “terrible” and that was soon changed to …yes, you know.

Disney’s success may have started with Mickey, but it didn’t continue along a golden path from there.  There were other setbacks, other unscrupulous business colleagues, a union strike that bitterly divided the Disney studios, the second World War, films that were less than successful.

But the resonating theme of the museum was the extraordinary optimism of a man able to retain vision, ambition, and creativity in the face of failure and defeat.  That sort of optimism requires not naiveté, not simple-mindedness, not calculation, but raw courage.

We saw another offshoot of the Disney machine this weekend – the Disney/Pixar movie Brave.  For once, we saw a princess not only unwilling to submit to her fate, but one who chooses to change her fate herself. Merida recognizes the damage caused by her mistakes and, rather than waiting for someone to save her, works to right the wrongs herself.  In the end, she says of fate that it lies inside us, “you only have to be brave enough to look for it.”

Too often we see our failures and mistakes as negatives, as reasons to quit, as indications that we are “on the wrong path.”  We expect success to be golden and smooth, the soul-crushing patches to be magically edited out.  We envy the “luck” of those who appear to have achieved success easily or completely.  But, finding and fulfilling our destiny depends less upon luck than it does upon resilience and courage – and those are available to anyone.

The Pain We Choose

“I just wanted to thank you for making it so easy on me.”

“Huh?” Ok, so my response wasn’t the brightest, but in my defense, I’d been imitating a statue while trying to ignore both the buzzing in my right ear and the needles carving along my shoulder blade for about two hours.

Gus, the tattoo artist, explained.  “Most people move around a lot.  And complain about how much it’s hurting them.”

Nope.  The explanation didn’t help.  My response was still an internal ‘Huh?’  I pondered for a minute, and then said, “I don’t really get that.  I mean, they knew that they were having a tattoo done, right?  And that it involves needles?  I don’t understand.  Why complain about a pain that you chose?”

I could understand how someone’s concept of his or her own pain tolerance might not correspond to what is found in the face of actual pain.  I get the discrepancy between what we think we can handle and how pain manifests to us in the moment.  After all, we aren’t really wired to sit still and let a predator gnaw on us – even if the teeth are sterilized needles dripping ink instead of saliva.  Still, complaining about it seemed odd to me.  It’s not as if tattoo artists run around saying, “Don’t worry.  It doesn’t hurt.  It feels like fairies are tickling you with dandelion fluff.”  C’mon folks, there’s a reason that tattoos have come to symbolize “tough” in our society, despite the increasing number of middle-aged women such as myself sporting ink.  (My apologies to true aficionados of tattoo art.  I can’t help feeling a bit like a poser, a dilettante dabbling in something that feels just a little dangerous and daring.  But, that’s a discussion for another blog…)

Once I moved beyond the notion that it is insane to complain about the side effects of a completely elective event, I started thinking about pain, choices, and acceptance.

My own relationship with physical pain is probably a bit atypical for my background.  In modern society, members of my gender, generation, and education don’t run across a lot of opportunities for injury.  But pain and I are old friends.  No, don’t get the wrong idea here.  My parents were very non-physical (I think I was spanked about three times, pretty average for the ‘70s.), and my only experience with whips has been me holding them while riding or lunging a horse – no other humans anywhere near.  However, the combination of my own clumsiness (my most recent skinned knee happened within the last 12 months), my physicality (I don’t wait for someone big and strong or wearing gloves to move something for me), and 30+ years of working with horses means that I have ample experience with a variety of bruises, lacerations, sprains, strains, and fractures.  Add in an inclination toward migraines and having borne three children, and my response to physical pain tends to be, “Yep, it hurts, but it won’t hurt forever.”

Other pain is different, though.  I realize that like Gus’s other clients, I do sometimes struggle with accepting the pain of my choices.

Tara Brach’s book, Radical Acceptance, has taken up more or less permanent residence on my dresser – handy for me to open on the days when I only have the strength to sink onto my bed and think ‘What the hell am I doing?’ Brach talks about the relationship between pain (emotional or mental, and sometimes even physical) to our feelings of unworthiness.  Think about it.  How often does “This isn’t fair; I can’t believe this is happening to me” really mean “I can’t believe I got myself into this.  I suck.  I’m stupid, lazy, blind, etc…”?  In Radical Acceptance, Brach emphasizes that the way out of this death spiral, what she calls “the trance of unworthiness” is to completely accept our circumstances – where we are, what got us here – and to be compassionate with ourselves in those circumstances and around those choices.  Acceptance, by the way, is not the same as resignation or even as condoning.  For instance, we can accept that we have lied to ourselves or someone else or have done something else not compatible with our own ideals without giving ourselves permission to continue down that path.  Acceptance is neither rolling over and peeing in the face of the inevitable nor giving oneself an out.  Think of it as being one’s own best parent or teacher – clear sighted, loving, but giving firm guidance.  (That’s my best translation.  I recommend reading the book.)

Unfortunately, we aren’t programmed to accept.  The human animal, like most, is wired to hide, escape, or attack in the face of pain or danger.  Even when we have knowingly walked up to the threat and poked it in the nose with a stick, we have trouble accepting the reality.

Modern day risks are less likely to involve stealing a fish from a bear, and more likely to involve emotional, mental, or financial risk.  In other words, it is our sense of self and of self-worth that is most likely to be placed in danger.  We are uncomfortable with risk.  We live in a society that both lauds and demonizes the risk takers.  We make heroes of the highly successful – the bold capitalists, the extreme athletes, the flamboyant artists.  Yet, at the same time, those who step outside of the safe mold are often marginalized.  Why?  Because, their lack of conformity is a threat.  It shows us both what we can be, and what we stand to lose when the gamble fails.  Why else do we avoid eye contact with the panhandler on the corner?  Why do parents come unhinged when their teen comes home with a piercing, punk haircut, or tattoo (yes, I couldn’t resist.)?

We convince ourselves that if we do the “right” things, if we make the “safe” choices, that our lives will be free of pain.  We complain about the pain that we choose, because we are unwilling to accept that the choice was ours.

We have both more and less control over our lives than we would like to think.  The safe, conforming path is no guarantee of happiness, fulfillment, or safety.  However, things rarely “just happen” to us.  We often choose the circumstances that place us in the path of pain.  We frequently choose our pain. 

I first became aware of this tendency to complain about the consequences of our own choices years ago.  It was one of my first experiences with an elementary school event.  I was a shiny new mother, eager to volunteer, with starry-eyed visions of nurturing parents enhancing the educational community.  The glow faded rapidly as the margaritas and dissatisfaction started to flow (at 10:30 in the morning).  These mothers didn’t seem to be feeling the glow of contributing to the growth of the children they had chosen.  They sounded resigned, beaten down, tired, bitter, and frankly resentful.  It was clear that they had volunteered for the event because that was what “good mothers” do, but not because of any true desire on their parts. 

I was almost in tears by the time we headed home.  I remember telling my husband how I was afraid that I would someday resent my own children.  The toxic atmosphere felt as though it had leached into my bones.

Years later, I am one of the older, experienced mothers.  And, I’m now able to see both sides.  Yes, I do find myself volunteering for tasks simply because it seems that there is slack that needs to be taken up.  And yes, sometimes I’d rather be doing something else for myself.  The stars in my eyes cleared out long ago.  Yet, even as I ponder the rash on my arms from the bales of straw lifted at the school May Faire this weekend, I’ve learned to remind myself that this was my choice.  I chose the children, the school, and to say “yes” when asked to volunteer.  Each step along the path is one that I chose and that I need to own.

Most of the pains in my life – physical or non-physical – have stemmed from my choices.  The thing for me to remember, and the thing that helps me to accept and to say, “Yep, it hurts, but it won’t hurt forever” is that most of the time, I made those choices because something else accompanied the pain.  I’m no masochist.  Every choice has two sides – risk and benefit. 

We risk the pain of a failed relationship for the joy that it brings before.  We risk the loss of a job for the rewards that job brings while it exists.  We risk the fear of losing a child or the exhaustion, conflict, and tears of raising the child for the love and laughter the child brings into our lives.  We risk the pain of the tattoo needles for the beauty or symbolism of the art.

And on that note, here is my recent tattoo – a phoenix rising from the flames.  Can you guess what message I was sending to myself when I chose it?

Just Let Go (of the plan)

My phone just sent me a reminder.  “Just let go,” it says to me every morning at 6:00.  Just let go.  I am a widely acknowledged control-freak, and some mornings I need that message more than others.

I ran across this photo yesterday morning on Facebook:

Obviously it’s pretty difficult and rather inefficient to go through life with no plan at all, but I think we program ourselves to believe that PLAN = SAFETY.  Our intellects know this not to be true.  We have a raft of sayings… “The best laid plans of mice and men…” “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” And on, and on.  Yet, how often do we catch ourselves saying, “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

We treat our plans as though we were plugging ingredients into a recipe or numbers into a formula.  If I do A, B, and then C, I will get result Q.  Except sometimes, we don’t get result Q.  Sometimes the outcome is X or 42 or purple.

I’ve been working with a team on developing a student loan simulator designed to help give veterinary students and pre-vet students an idea of how their choices after graduation may affect their loan balances and repayment.  In the introductory text, we have a bunch of disclaimers to the effect that this simulator isn’t a way to predict your future, it’s just an illustration, etc.  And as I have worked on those sentences this week, part of me imagines the students who will be entering their numbers, their visions of their future, and hitting “Calculate.”  I’m willing to bet that they have plans.  Many of them probably have their future mapped out so clearly that they believe they know what path their lives will follow until they die.

I was one of those students.  Yet, at almost every turning point of my life, I have found myself saying, “This wasn’t in the plan.”  We were going to have two children, not three. I was going to own my own equine practice by now.  We were going to live in our old house until our grandchildren were grown.  I went to veterinary school because I would never be able to support myself as a writer.  And, the list goes on…

Yet – and this is the reason for the phone reminder – most of the best things in my life have come from letting go of the plan, from allowing my life to flow with only gentle guidance from myself.

I took a watercolor class taught by Caitlin’s teacher last night.  Rick Tan is not only a terrific teacher but an amazing artist in his own right.  Just check out his blog.  We were working with wet-on-wet watercolors in the method the students use in school.  This particular technique uses a lot of water, and as anyone who has swum or boated in open water knows, water doesn’t like human control.

In high school, I hated watercolors; the pigment never seemed to stay where I wanted it, so I moved on to oils where I could layer pigment and control my brushstrokes and even the thickness of the paint for texture.  The down side to oils is that they take forever to dry, so they aren’t very practical for a two week camping trip in a crowded car in the Pacific Northwest.  I took up watercolors as an adult in order to be able to paint on our vacations.  Very practical for a landscape painter.  Part of the plan.  Gradually, I learned to adapt my perfectionist tendency to work with the watercolors rather than against them, but I still used relatively little water so that I could maintain control.  This painting of the Awahnee hotel in Yosemite shows the detail of the leaves applied with a very dry brush.

Last night, Rick started by telling us that we were going to play with color for our first painting.  He had us begin “with a blob of yellow…”  Something seized up inside me for a moment.  All of the control voices started shouting at once.  “I’m a landscape painter.  I paint from life or photos.  I don’t do abstract.  I know how to paint.  I don’t need to experiment with color.”  I’ve had some practice with these voices lately and I’ve learned not to argue with them.  Instead, I left them to chatter in the back of my head and loaded my brush with yellow pigment.

As soon as my brush touched the meniscus of the film of water coating my paper, the yellow flowed from the bristles and began to tendril out along the page.  I moved my brush in swirls, back and forth, in S-shaped swoops.  I played with deepening color in some areas, and lifting it off in others.  As we added different pigments to the page, I could feel the layers of my emotions flowing with the color – swirling, blending, deepening in some areas, lightening and bouncing along in others.                             C. Corp-Minamiji,  original watercolor 2010

 

 

C. Corp-Minamiji,  original watercolor 2012

 The end result wasn’t what I’d envisioned when I first dipped my brush into the paint, and I think that’s a good thing.  A friend of mine fought with her brush strokes during the first piece, her struggles reminding me of my own watercolor battles in high school.  “I think most of the trick to watercolors is letting go of perfectionism,” I commented.  And as she relaxed into her second work, her painting shifted.

How often do we try so hard to cling to our concept of the way things are “supposed to be?”  How often do we say things to others in the hopes of forcing the response that we want?  And how often are we disappointed?  Yet, it seems, to me at least, that when we let go, let events, people, and feelings follow their own currents, that’s when the richness swirls in.

Try it: “Just let go.”