One Hand Typing

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-24T22:16:00.003-06:00

Despite my best intentions, I have not been here as much as I wanted. In part, for good reasons, because I wrote a Nanowrimo novel and I have been working on finishing it ever since. My spare moments have been spent untangling plot points, fleshing out characters, and creating backstory. And it's been as frustrating and wonderful as I remembered it. The words come harder than they once did, during the halcyon early days of this blog. My fairly-clean first drafts are a thing of the past. The words are messy, halting.

But they are coming.

Unfortunately, it's as though I have a very limited amount of words at my disposal everyday, and most of those go towards my story. Maybe next year, when I am more confident, I'll be able to talk about the process of creating the story itself, my new love affair with YA literature, and everything I think I am learning. But for now, I am still so hesitant, too nervous to look too closely at this for fear I'll return to the aching silence of most of last year.

So, instead, I'll just wish you a wonderful holiday season, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza or just the pleasure of your feet crunching in newly fallen snow. I hope that you approach this time with the same "dreaming eyes of wonder" that glow in Madam's uplifted face as she sees her Christmas tree lit up and half-buried in presents.

Revel.

Thoughts in search of a blog post

2009-10-23T00:16:00.002-05:00

*Madam has a serious girl crush on another little girl in her classroom. She pretends to be this girl at home, talks rapturously about their playtime in school, and has even chosen attire based on whether it resembled something the Beloved had worn to school.

*This is seriously adorable.

*And after spending a few minutes with Beloved's mom, let me share my own Mommy Crush. I so want to be her friend. I've made some overtures, which have not been entirely rebuffed. So I live in hope.

*If isolation is the dream killer, well...I should be living in an Endless Day. It's not that bad, but I am lonely. Part of that is moving to a new neighborhood. It shouldn't make as big a difference as it has. And yet. I find myself staring out the kitchen window a great deal and chatting with squirrels. (Insert Nuts joke here)

*One thing I would like to do is start a writing group. I work better when I have some support (and the occasional deadline). Anyone know anyone interested in a virtual group?

*This probably would have worked better when I was more involved in the Blogosphere. Oh
well...have to start somewhere.

*Speaking of deadlines...Nanowrimo is coming! I am excited/nervous/apprehensive/slightly nauseous about the whole thing. I have an idea, but no real outline or scenes sketched out yet.

*Luckily, I still have a week.

*Unfortunately, I'll be extremely busy with family for that time.

*But there are always nights, and I really, really want to write something.

*There is no real way to end a post like this.

*Except, well...like this.

Mardougrrl, 1 and Silence, 0

2009-10-18T23:27:00.007-05:00

(cool picture from here.)

I'm nervous.

Oh, I know there isn't really any reason to be. I'm sitting in my basement (yes, I bought a house! Probably more on that later...) with my laptop perched like a faithful Lab on my lap. I'm not running away from saber toothed tigers or battling conquering hordes or...

And yet.

I'm nervous to break up the pristine deadness of this blog.

Why?

Well, back when I used to write regularly and often, I tossed words here with abandon, careless...if they landed and took root, great...if not? They were so much fodder. And that worked for me, helped me hear my own thoughts when it seemed like my every inch of my life was straining to accommodate the Great Change, aka Motherhood.

This place helped save my mind.

But along the way, others occasionally wandered by, and sometimes they liked what they read, and said so.

Uh-oh. Suddenly, my blog was no longer this foolish hole in which to plant all the words that had no place in my new life. Suddenly, I felt like I had to be Good, all of the time. And well, no one is good ALL the time (I hope!)

My brain obliged this newfound fear by forgetting the entire English language. And if any words managed to evade this verbal apocalypse, well...that's OK, because I also, conveniently, forgot every single thing I have ever known about storytelling. It's narrative aphasia.

It's a damn shame.

Especially since I still long, more than anything, to be a writer.

I don't mean to, but I get very attached to my words, especially when I am proud of them. And I also start to think that, just maybe, I have used up my alloted words and need to be quiet now. I remember the stories I have written here through a haze of sepia nostalgia, convinced that I will never be able to write anything like them again. And maybe I won't. But maybe I can write something different. Maybe I can just keep writing something different. Maybe I can just keep writing.

In the spirit of “Kill your darlings” I toyed with the idea of crashing this whole blog down, erasing the whole thing.

But I'm really not ready to do that yet. This place represents a fertile period for my imagination, and I need it to remember that such a thing is really possible.

Instead, I'll endeavor to create more careless darlings here, and people will either read them (yes, please!) or not (boo! Come back!).

And I'll be doing Nanowrimo again too, because sometimes the very best thing to do is throw down words upon words, good, bad, indifferent.

I won't hope I can keep it up this time. I just will.

Sunday Scribblings: Regret

2009-01-31T18:22:00.003-06:00

(Image from here.)

A word like regret should have sparked about a million story ideas for me...or OK, at least ten. After all, I think most of my writing is about regret in some way—missed opportunities, words that stick in the throat that perhaps could have changed everything. A decision never made that perhaps would have been the right decision.

But nothing really came. See, regret is a really loaded word for me, so much so that I can't seem to fictionalize it (not this week, anyway). Regret is something that was constantly on my mind, for a really long time. There are whole pathways in my brain seemingly dedicated to traveling down the same painful ruts again and again.

I grew up believing in the myth of unlimited potential. That's what people always told me. “You have so much potential.” Potential sounded like the sound of my parents' voice when they had some money in the bank. Their voices grew fat with safety. What mattered, of course, was not spending the money. Not squandering the potential.

But, of course, potential doesn't sit in some cosmic bank account. It certainly doesn't accrue interest, especially if you don't apply it to your interests. And I didn't, not really. I was terrified of making the wrong choices, of wasting this potential—of facing my life with the same blank, pinched expression my parents had when the bank account grew lean again, but the bills kept arriving.

So many great opportunities floated close to me, bobbed within my grasp, then drifted away. So many times that I didn't reach out, didn't risk, didn't turn my potential into something more.

By the time Madam was born, I spent much of my day tuned into my mental radio station, K-RGRT.
(more)

Has anyone ever mentioned that babies are awesome listeners? Because they so are. I would strap baby Madam into her stroller and take her up and down the hill where we lived. The sun would stream through her shade, drenching my little Freudian with a luminescent glow. And I would confess...If only I had gone to graduate school immediately after college! If only I had worked harder in publishing, made more contacts, been less afraid! If only I had finished a novel and gotten it published already! If only I had moved to California before I got pregnant, then maybe I could have become a big wig in television before having a baby!

At this point, Madam would be asleep, no doubt thinking my words were some sort of whining prose poem for her benefit, instead of my own. Certainly, the content of my regrets rarely varied...only the intensity of the pain expressed by my words as I worked myself up to a crescendo of Lost Opportunity and Wasted Life Forever.

The Saturday when all that changed wasn't noticably different from all of the other days. Madam still in her stroller, sleeping in the pink glow of her partially shaded seat. The sky was blue as it almost always is in California. Cars rushed past us as I pushed her on the uneven pavement, up the hill.

I started my litany again, I got myself worked up again, maybe a tear or two escaped while I walked, faster and faster.

Then a new thought entered my mind. Why do I need to tell this story over and over again? Did I think I would ever forget my regrets? Did I think that I might gasp..be happy for a moment with my current circumstance if I could just...let it go? And...would I want Madam to grow up and feel this way? Feel like she was doomed because she'd made some less-than-brilliant choices in her past? I thought about my regrets. Some were things that I had wanted passionately, and had not worked hard enough to achieve. Some were things I had given up on too soon. But some were things I didn't really want, but felt like I should. And some were things I could see I was better off without anyway.

And the most important dream was not at all timebound. Was I attempting to join some Olympic Team of Novelists? No? So then why did it matter so much whether I wrote my novel at 25 or 35 or 50? Maybe no one would ever call me a wunderkind or an overnight sensation, but maybe I'd be a better writer for all that. Potential should be squandered, because potential means about as much as those numbers on our bank statements. It stands for something else--something that must be realized, even if it's as far from pristine "potential" as I am from my twenty-something self. If I manage to teach Madam anything, I hope it's that—to burn through all of her potential fearlessly, to hold on to none of it. To trust that she'll be able to make more deposits to her bank account.

That day changed my relationship to my regrets. Yes, there are long, dark times where I can see every bad choice my younger self made—as though I am watching her through two sided glass, screaming, “No, do the OTHER THING. THE OTHER THING!” But usually I can dig up a little perspective from somewhere (I find chocolate and a nap are spectacular for this purpose) and remind myself that all of these plodding steps are going somewhere. They are going back to the page, again and again, until I spend whatever potential still lies curled within me.

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You won't regret checking out Sunday Scribblings.

Death and...

2009-01-26T21:51:00.004-06:00

Some people can function, create, LIVE while they do their taxes.

I assume those people have accountants.

I am so tired, y'all. And I still have to finish Federal and do two states.

More when I can wrap my brain around something besides Schedule A.

Sunday Scribblings: Pilgrimage (a short short)

2009-01-19T13:04:00.003-06:00

(Hajj pic from here.)

Ed note: Just a short little story inspired by this weeks Sunday Scribbling prompt. It's been a while.
____________________________________________________________
Me? I'm nothing.

You know that feeling you get when you walk down the halls of your school, and a draft of air blows past you? That feeling like maybe you should look around, see if you missed something? But also feeling a little dumb, and not wanting anyone to see you looking around for nothing?

I'm that nothing. And believe me, I've worked at it.

We've all lived in this neighborhood so long it's like we've worn a groove into the cement. First my brothers, Rich and Tom. Then my sister, Angie. Another brother Johnny. Sister Liz. And then me, Jenny. Some days it can feel like my sneakers are trudging into their footsteps, but my feet never quite fit. And so I trip, a lot.

Everybody knows my family. They remember the red sirens streaking across the walls of their houses, breaking through the gray. They remember the muttered metallic gibberish of the police radios as the cops' big hands shoved my brothers' heads into the car. Maybe their heads had a groove too. A rut where only cops' big hands could fit.

My sisters? They kept their terror local—inside the walls of the school itself. I still get the sideline look and scuffle from the older girls, even the tall, tough ones. The ones who remember them, and see my red hair and pale skin as an ugly echo.

Usually, I tried to stay out of everyone's way. This was easier than it sounded, thanks to Aziza Manjur and her family. They've lived in the neighborhood almost as long as we have, and are probably the first Muslims anyone around here ever met. People gave them the weird glances for a while, but they were just too normal. They lived in the same type of two story gray house we all did, with wooden steps that sagged after years of too much snow. Mr. Manjur taught me to drive behind the wheel of their old Honda with the scratches on the doors. Mrs. Manjur taught me to cook mutton, and boil tea. I'm sure if you look at their family pictures, you'll see me, pale as a ghost, floating off to one side. But still there.
(more)

For a while, it was just the Manjurs, and me, and everyone else, but then something happened. It was like a worm hole opened between Somalia and here, and before long, there was a whole community of them here. The girls all looked a little like Aziza, except for those glittery head scarves that made their heads look like sleepy flowers. These girls smiled their shy, toothy smiles at me, but chattered to Aziza in that language that sounded like a bunch of As and Bs and Ms to me. And Aziza, who used to streak her dark hair orange and pink for parties (I used to have to hold her head over the sink for hours afterwards. I'm pretty sure Mrs. Manjur never knew), would stroll over to them, and talk back. The Manjurs were always busy. But they always offered me the use of the house. Sometimes, I didn't bother. Alone is alone, even with cable and nicer furniture.

It shouldn't have surprised me the day I picked her up to go to school, and she was wearing a pink flowered head scarf. She walked next to me like everything was normal, except she didn't even look at me. She kept sneaking glances of her new head in car windows.

“So...your mom and dad finally insisted?”

“Nah, I decided to try it for myself.” She tossed her head a little, like she'd grown a new mane of hair. The spangles in the scarf caught what little light was around us and seemed to reflect little pink spotlights on the dull snow piles.

“That doesn't even match what you are wearing.” I said, keeping my eyes on the cracked, iced sidewalk in front of me.

“You know it's not about that, Jen. Besides,” she added with a grin. “I kind of like the idea that it doesn't match. Feels more like me.”

“So...you gonna teach me how to wear one?” We always tried stuff together.

She stopped short. “Jen...this isn't...I mean...”

“I know.” We'd reached the school. I walked away from Aziza, but not before I noticed the excited crowd of girls around Aziza, pressing against her like jungle birds.

And then at the end of homeroom, Ms. Carena muttered her usual question about “Any announcements?” That was our cue to push our chairs away and trudge into our day. But Aziza stood up and said, “I have something. Uh...I'll be out of school for the next month. My family is going to hajj. The pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims need to take once in their lifetime. We're leaving, uh...this weekend.” I noticed she was using her “Explaining things to non-Muslims, and everyone not named Jenny” voice and felt a little smug, until her words hit me. Going?

I caught up with her in the hallway and managed to tear her away from the Somali girls for once. They were like an honor guard.

“When were you going to tell me?”

“Didn't you notice we were packing stuff?”

“Yeah, to send to family. Like you all do all the damn time.”

“A bunch of us are going this year.”

“Oh, you need to go because these girls are going? Like its Prom?”

“What?” She looked confused. I wished I could still see all of her. “I meant...a bunch of family. From England. From Somalia. It's a big deal.”

“Take me with you.”

“Jen...it's, uh...it's not a vacation. It's a pilgrimage. It's, like, super-holy to us.”

“I can be holy.” The endless rows of lockers faded from my eyes and I started to see myself there, surrounded by millions of other people, a part of the Manjurs' “us.”

“So...OK. Then you stay here. Let your folks go alone. You have the rest of your life to do this.”

“Yeah, like Mama and Papa would just lea...”

“Right.”

“Anyway, Mama and Papa already said no. It's not like I didn't ask.” Her words were clipped. We'd reached my classroom. “See you later.”

“Fine.”

Oh, I wished that I could tap into that blood rage that marks my family. But maybe I'd been neglecting it too long. Unlike my brothers, who would have just slammed Aziza and her new friends into the pavement, and unlike my sisters, who would have found a way to make Aziza kill herself in self-loathing, I...couldn't do anything. Except sit and start my class, so that's what I did.

After school, I sat in the Manjurs' living room, and I couldn't believe I'd ignored all this. Huge suitcases lay open all over the floor in the living room and hallways. Silky piles of fabric and chiffon pooled inside of them, and draped on the couches and chairs. The room looked excited, happy—full of something I couldn't explain. I wanted to be anywhere else.

The Manjurs were trying to include me, I could tell. “Oh, Jenny....could you hand me that file folder? Oh, Jen...could you please make sure I'm not forgetting...?” I already had a set of keys, instructions on where the circuit breaker was, and a stern admonition to “eat for EVERY meal...not just the ones you remember.” Once I caught Mr. Manjur looking at me, a puzzled, sad expression on his face. Again, blood rose up in me, and wanted to flow through the ruts that were already inside of me.

I'm not sure when I found myself alone in the room.

The lamplight glowed warm, red in the room, making it look smaller, shoved up full with stuff for the pilgrimage. The whole room appeared to be leaving at once.

I stood up, stroked the ceremonial white suit draped on the back on my chair. Folded it and dropped it in the mouth of the open suitcase. Closed it, then opened it again. I knew Mr. Manjur had it specially made. I knew he needed to wear it on the hajj, another rule I couldn't follow.

And then I looked at Mr. Manjur's desk.

Piles of bills were stacked there, rubber banded. A plain manila folder teetered on the money. I knew the family paperwork was in there. Passports. Confirmations.

My hands moved towards them, and I pulled them back, hard. Steadied myself on the desk. I saw myself, then, shoving the money and papers into my backpack. Taking a pair of scissors and destroying the clothes. Doing it all.

It would be so easy. Blood hummed in my ears, in my throat. It would be so easy, and it would be so good. Then, they'd stay. Instead of leaving. Like it was nothing.

They'd already left me here.

With the keys. With all they had.

The blood beat in my skull, and roared around my well worn grooves. Rich, Tom, Angie, Johnny, Liz, me. My hands strained, itching with the desire for action. I had to get out.

“Jenny?” Aziza, soft, questioning. Normal.

I rushed past her without a word, ran through the door into a night without any stars, lit by the hollow glow of streetlamps on the tired snow. The circles of light were, and then were not.

The Manjurs went on their hajj, had their holy time without me. But I took a trip too. Maybe even a longer one.

Sometimes the pilgrimage that matters is the one from “nothing” to “something.”

__________________
To take more holy trips, go here.

When the student is ready...

2009-01-16T22:45:00.003-06:00

From this site.

I am currently reading a book that I believe will change my life.

Considering the years I have spent reading self-help and how-to books, believe me when I say that I do not make this claim lightly.

The book is called Mindset by Carol Dweck, Ph.D, and it's about, well, your mindset and how it can help or hinder your efforts at success. She writes about two main mindsets—the “fixed” mindset which is the belief that talent is either there, or its not, and effort cannot change that; and the “growth” mindset that values hard work and sustained learning more than talent.

You can guess which one I have.

See, from an early age, certain things have come easily to me, and these are the things I have built my life around. Books, words, stories. I don't remember learning how to read, because I actually don't remember not knowing how to read. I adored school, adored the constant praise and steady stream of rewards. School was a place where I could be the best, unlike at home, where I was the far-behind youngest child.

Once I had a taste of being the best, well, I wanted to stay the best. And that meant avoiding anything that I wasn't immediately good at doing. I would tentatively try a new activity, and unless I showed unmistakable signs of genius, I would leave it alone. Because if you have to TRY, then it's obviously not in you.

I won't exactly say this attitude worked for me growing up, but I didn't challenge it because I was still doing well. I was still a straight A student in the subjects that mattered to me, still viewed as a girl with a great deal of potential. Potential was my very favorite word while I was young, and I wanted to stay potential forever. That way I could still see my future genius off in the hazy, pearly future—and not have to deal with the possibility that it wouldn't work out quite that way.
(more)

In college, I worked harder than I ever did in my life, but I couldn't seem to make headway in several subjects. I blamed this on the fact that my fellow students had grown up with much more enrichment (in all the ways that mattered)--better schools, more cultural capital, parents who were educated, money. It didn't dawn on me that I was still struggling with the central idea that “Either you have it, or you don't. Either you know it, or you never will.” I couldn't seem to learn, perhaps because I was afraid to make mistakes and then try again.

My professional life didn't work out much better. Again, people saw potential in me, and again I felt incapable of translating that potential into something concrete. I began to see myself as a failure, and stopped seeking career-level jobs. Instead, I worked clerical jobs that frustrated TEG, and others, who couldn't understand why I wasn't blazing some sort of creative trail.

Short answer: Because if I had to try, that very attempt would be an admission that I had no talent, and thus would never succeed.

My mindset changed briefly after Madam was born. Not only did motherhood come with its own steep learning curve, but the tasks were immediate and vital. I had to learn to feed her, soothe her, change her. I had no choice. And because I didn't have any weird beliefs about needing to be a “natural” mother, I was able to learn what I needed, for Madam's sake.
I don't think it's any surprise that the first year and a half of Madam's life were the most productive, creatively, of my life. The growth mindset carried over, briefly, into my writing. I started blogging and began to write fiction again for the first time in years.

But soon, I felt like I hit a plateau. How did I know if I was getting better? So many people were better than I was! And the worst part was: I could see good writing all around me, could even articulate what pleased me about it, but I couldn't learn it myself. I would see people turning their blogs into books, stretching their stories into novels, and I had NO idea how to do it myself. How to start, even. Because if I couldn't envision every step of the process, and couldn't come up with perfect ideas before touching fingers to keyboard, well, then...I needed to forget it.

Yep. The fixed mindset was back.

And so I've kept laboring under this desire to be prove brilliant, without taking the risk of actual work. I've read books and been unable to see past my own sickening envy.

Well, goodbye to all that. Goodbye to a rotten tooth of an idea that has spread its poison over my life for a good three decades. Goodbye to the idea that talent is uber-alles. After all, what really happens if I write a terrible novel? I waste my time? I waste finger energy? I'll be killed for Crimes Against Fiction?

So what?

I'm going to go slowly, and write without inspiration or pleasure until the inspiration and pleasure inevitably appear. I'm going to rewrite even when I am unsure exactly how to fix something. I'm going to be wretched, no doubt.

I cannot wait.

Ponderings...

2009-01-11T22:36:00.003-06:00

One thing that I have been thinking about is resolving my competing commitments. I long to be a writer, more than anything, I want to write novels and publish them and move past this crippling doubt. And I know I DO want those things. My desire manifests itself constantly every time I wander into a bookstore and feel myself pulled towards to those talismans of the writing life—writing books. Books on plotting, planning, creation, starting, finishing, revising and revisiting. Invariably, I pull off the shelf, flip through the pages, searching, always searching for that one perfect phrase, that formula that would pull me out of myself, and replace me with the writer I've always dreamed of becoming.

But I always find myself disappointed. Because the books, inspirational though they can be, can't do the work for me. They can't put fingers to keyboard, they can't pull the words out of my often clenched mind. They can't write the book for me.

And that leads me to the other competing commitment. The commitment to NOT writing, to NOT exposing my dream to the harsh realities of my limited ability. The commitment to protect myself. Because if I really try, and if I see that I am no good, then I will be forced to give up. I will never be a writer. What will I dream about? What hope will sustain me then?

The book I just finished reading said that I should test my big assumption (in this case, the total belief that if I try, I will realize that I will never be good enough or know enough to write, and thus I'll need to give up) with small, safe experiments. But what kind of experiment would that be? Because even writing a few words towards my novel unleashes that fear that the worst is already true and cannot be changed.

This is what I need to discover.

2008

2009-01-07T22:46:00.005-06:00

(great fireworks picture from here.)

In 2008, I watched the life of my dreams and the life of my days move further apart.

It didn't start out that way. In a burst of enthusiasm, I joined Jamie's first Circe's Circle group. I wanted to take myself seriously, to give myself the support I needed. I created a preliminary plan for my novel-in-progress, worked through Jamie's fabulous exercises. And I waited to catch fire.

Instead, I caught a serious case of cold feet. Everything felt uncertain. Was my idea worthy of being a novel? What did I really know about my characters? Did I want to devote myself to this?

While I dithered, my MIL grew gravely ill. TEG flew off to care for her.

I still attended all of my Circe's Circle calls, doggedly, but my nascent novel was abandoned. I was still looking for something, but now I wasn't quite sure what it was. The calls were my lifeline. I bribed Madam with the choicest snacks, the best DVDs, anything to keep her quiet while I was on the phone. I used the “mute” button a lot.

The calls were my connection to that life I was still sure I wanted; the life that now seemed further and further away. I watched as the other amazing women in my group caught fire.

Meanwhile, Madam and I spent a lot of time at home, as TEG's time with his mother lengthened, and winter dragged into...more winter.

I was afraid to admit how depressed I was. I didn't want TEG to worry. And I knew that I was all Madam had.

So I learned to face each day as its own entity, with its own pleasures and tasks. I couldn't see to the end of the month, but the end of the day? Somehow, that always came and brought its blessings (at least Madam would sleep; maybe TEG would call). And there was always YouTube.

My own writing slipped further out of my grasp. I couldn't even think like that. I couldn't access those words anymore. I regressed—watched a lot of television, grew addicted to a soap opera. I gave up.

Then TEG returned...and we packed up and moved in with my in laws for the summer. No writing. No thought. Lots of time at the playground as I tried to give a fun shape to Madam's days while TEG concentrated on his mother's therapy and health.

I suppose I could have blogged about this, but weirdly, I grew increasingly self-conscious about sounding unhappy and negative here. I watched my once-robust readership dwindle (the fact that I all-but-stopped updating and reading may have had something to with it too, but I couldn't quite make the connection). I wanted to preserve this blog as a place I could come back to, when I returned to myself, to my own mind.

Unfortunately, blogging and writing, like everything else, is a habit—a habit I lost in 2008. This only added to my profound sense of having become someone else-someone I didn't like very much.

Did I mention that TEG moved into a different, far more precarious job position?

So. Kind of a wild, down year, but one where I learned some of the most important lessons of my life. About how much I love my daughter, my husband, my family. About how anything can be endured with the help of good friends, and a determination to face one sunrise and one sunset at a time. I watched Madam blossom into a confident, joyous, dramatic preschooler with a penchant for storytelling. It all fills me with a gratitude that I almost can't bear. A gratitude I can hope I can learn to express, someday.

All the same, I want 2009 to be very different. I want to come back here full time, whether anyone reads me or not. I want to make the choice to practice my writing everyday, regardless of my life situation. I know I am starting again, but hopefully this year wasn't a complete waste. My words aren't back yet—the words that make me feel like a writer...but these words are. This moment is.

I won't denigrate that again.

PS: I've been dipping my toes into blogs again, and I am buzzing with the desire to post a Mondo Beyondo list. And I will...soon. :)

Roles

2008-10-12T22:42:00.003-05:00

I think I have figured out what my problem is. I don't value my roles anymore, and yet I am over identified with them.

For example, when Madam was small, I was still reeling from this newfound role as her mother, A mother. So I was fascinated by motherhood itself, reading all sorts of books about the politics of motherhood, the price of motherhood, staying at home vs working outside, how to shape the young baby mind. It was a familiar way for me to be, studying for some exam in the hazy future.

Perhaps I thought that if I crammed hard enough and passed the final, I would move up to the next grade. Where, presumably, someone would take on the actual, well, WORK of parenting, and I could remain on board as a sort of educated consultant.

You can stop laughing now.

It's actually become harder, for me, rather than easier—and I am far less fascinated by the whole thing. Maybe because she's become so much less of a baby, and so much more...all-encompassing. Her opinions are often and loudly stated. I can't just babble to her about everything anymore, unless I want it parroted back to me with frightening accuracy. Maybe I'm just really tired of hearing imperious little demands all day.

But now I feel like I've lost that deep commitment to be Mother, and have just become another mommy.

The same with writing—I feel disconnected from the creative blogging community (totally my own fault—I have all but stopped blogging and reading blogs), and the voices that fed my little vignettes and short short stories have stopped crooning in my ears.

So. Not a writer. Not particularly invested in being a stay at home mother. I feel like I have no more value if I can't find a niche to inhabit—some way to say “this is me.” I cling to my old names—mother, writer, feminist, Latina. I try to poke my former self awake with insults, treats, punishments. But it remains frustratingly, frightening, asleep.

But maybe that's not the point at all. Maybe the point is to remember that I am so much more than any labels I can hang around my neck. That I still have value as a human being, beyond my various roles. That I can learn to hold them lightly, with a sense of humor, even as I wait for the next consuming inspiration to give shape to my days once again.

That's what I am trying to do, anyway.

Pleasure

2008-10-05T21:31:00.004-05:00

(from here)

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about pleasure. Or, more accurately, the absence of it.

It hasn’t snuck up on me all at once. It’s been more like a slow fading, like the color slowly draining from a once vibrant dress washed over and over. It’s so easy to ignore; pretend the dress is still as new as ever. But, soon, you have to face reality. It’s a completely different dress.

I think I have belabored that poor metaphor enough.

The old pleasures no longer please, and new ones have not made an appearance.

The time has come to try something new. No discipline.

Now, usually, being too disciplined isn’t a problem; quite the opposite. And I recognize that enthusiasm tempered with discipline is the way to accomplish my goals. But…I don’t even know what those are anymore. This goes beyond my writing life—this has corroded every aspect of my day.

The other day I was forcing myself to slog through a book, because it was due at the library soon, because someone said it would be good for me. Like cod liver oil, or an enema. My mind was everywhere but on the page, and the Watcher voice cracked the whip, reminding me of my many failures and faults and attempting to drag my unwilling attention back to the words.

No dice.

In frustration and guilt, I put the book away, and snuck a longing look at what I really wanted to read. A book I had actually just bought, putting it much lower on the “to be read” list than a book I needed to return. No, this had to wait.

And then another, kinder voice asked me something that gave me pause.
”Why?”

Why did I have to march through a list of books in steel toed books just because I had to return them? Why, indeed, did I even have to finish a book just because I had started it? Why couldn’t I just read whatever I wanted?

I know it might sound like I am over dramatizing this moment, but it was one of those moments where something larger came into focus for me. Why do I turn things that should be pleasurable into work? Because I feel guilty that I am not working for money, and feel the need to account for my time? Because I should hurry up and get started on my “real” writing? I recognize now that part of the reason that life feels so drained lately is that only unpleasant tasks feel legitimate and worthy. If it’s fun, it’s immediately suspect and moved to the bottom of the pile.

Well, no more. Starting this weekend, I've allowed myself to read whatever I wanted, to start when I wanted to (within reason, I still have a boisterous Madam at home) and stop whenever I grew disinterested. I gave in to my natural inclination to have several books going at once, each one informing the others. I know this won’t work forever; eventually I’ll get some immersed in something that I won’t be able to rest until I finish it. And what a wonderful, familiar experience that will be!

I need to allow myself to play again, to find whatever gives my life vibrancy and pleasure, in order to stop running away from it (and by extension, my writing, which forces me to look deeply at my life).

And next, I’ll put my faded dress away and buy a new one. In fire engine red.

On the eve of preschool...

2008-09-02T22:37:00.002-05:00

(from this site)

I don't know who was more apprehensive as we walked into the classroom—Madam or me. Certainly her small hand clutched mine tightly. But I wasn't exactly letting go.

It's a perfect childish wonderland of a classroom. Trains, a jumble of dress up clothes, blocks, stacks of books. A little fish tank in the corner.

Tomorrow she begins preschool—her feet taking their first steps on a path that may wend towards a PhD!

I have been known to get ahead of myself.

But I want her to love it. I do. I loved school—loved the feeling of mastery when I learned something new—that snick (Laini's wonderful word) when a fact settled into my brain and knocked all of the other things I knew delightfully askew. I loved how safe I felt as I burrowed my legs deeper under my desk, pressing my knees against the metal bottom with a clang. A little breathless with a secret I couldn't have explained.

I know the name of that feeling now. It was belonging.

I would be remiss if I pretended that my excitement about tomorrow is all about her starting school. How could I be? I am about to be handed that most precious gift—time. Chunks of time I have not had at my disposal since before she was born. And in the middle of the day! How utterly decadent.

So, yes, excited....but nervous too. As though I am about to go on a blind date, or meet a blog friend. I want to impress myself with wit and fascinating topics. I want to play with creativity and have long, fruitful conversations with myself. I want to get something done, finally. Not just writing this blog (and oh, I am so out of the habit, where I would once think, “Oh, that would be a great topic for the blog,” more often than not now I think, “Ugh, I WANT to write but have nothing to say!”) but also working on that Project that Shall Not as Yet Be Named.

I am afraid I will bore myself, and that now I will see that it has never really been time that stopped me, but fear and lack of talent.

No. I must MAKE this time work.

After all, I just signed up for a one day writing workshop and I need a partial something to bring with me. I was so nervous that my fingers shook as I clanged the mailbox door shut. That poisonous little inner voice that says, “You spend all of this money and try all of these things and NOTHING ever works for you.” was hissing its vicious mantra.

But I need to start again. How many times will I say that?

Until I start. Again.

Novels 1, Me 0

2008-08-17T23:24:00.005-05:00

(portrait of me after a library visit from here.)

(Ed note: I felt such a shift after the last post. I think I finally made peace with my worst impulses, and hope that I can finally forgive myself and learn from my history. Thank you so much for being there. I wish I could tell you how much it helped. Believe me, it did. Thank you!)

Much as I love them, sometimes I think novels and I are in a type of war.

Picture it: I sit down with a much awaited new tome, ready to sit down and drink from the wisdom and technique of another writer, one who reached the holy grail. A complete novel. Publication. Cue champagne corks and violins.

Before I start to read, I decide that THIS time, my reading experience will be different. I will be reading to learn. I will keep track of scenes, notice clever plot points, unravel subplot ribbons for further examination. In short, I will crack the code. Read like a writer, not like a fan.

Ah, but then...I start to read the novel, and like Circe, it starts to croon its song. “Pay no attention to the writer behind the curtain...aren't these characters fascinating? Don't you want to know what happens next? Fall in...the water's great.”

And just like that, I'm in it again, swimming in the blue ocean of the book. I'm absorbed, compelled. Under the spell.

And it's all absolutely wonderful. Until I finish, and try to return to my own story. A novel...trying to be one, anyway. But it lacks that wonderful thickness...that verisimilitude.

A bad angel voice whispers that perhaps I am best served by continuing to write short stories. Maybe short stories are my default format, but...I want to write novels. I dream of writing novels. I prefer to read novels. I have to believe that its a skill I can learn.

I shoo her away, again.
(more)

“How did that writer DO that?” I mutter to myself as I peck words slowly across the white screen. “How do you create such a rich world? Lots of scenes? But which ones? And how many scenes, anyway?”

Shouldn't someone who reads as much as I do have an answer to these questions?

So, I put it to you—all you writers. Do you have certain novels you use as models for your own work? Do you take notes periodically? Re-read? Outline favorite novels to get scene counts and the like? Or do you just trust (as I used to) that you are absorbing all of this through the pleasure of osmosis?

(Yes, I am doing That Novel Dance again. Madam is about to start preschool, and suddenly I'll have open hours in the middle of a couple of days a week. If I am disciplined [ha, more in a future post on THAT], I should be able to make significant headway of a work. I don't want to talk too much about it, yet, for fear I'll talk myself right out of it!)

(PPS: And there it is...my 200th post! *throws confetti* I'm so grateful to have this place, and now that I am myself again [more on that bit of strangeness later] I hope it doesn't take me forever to write another 200. Thanks for reading me.)

Untitled

2008-08-11T00:10:00.003-05:00

I have never really written about the events surrounding Madam's birth. I've written around them—about how that endless second before I heard her cry, the way that silence screamed through my aching, red insides. I've talked about that first year which felt like one long sleepless night (thank goodness for Law and Order reruns and TLC).

It's something I've never wanted to write about. Perhaps hoping that if I didn't pin the events down in words, then it's like they never happened.

Of course, they did.

When Madam finally gave her weak cry, they put her on my chest for a second before whisking her away to the neonatal unit. I remember whispering something to her, perhaps simply, “Hey you.” She made me speechless.

After they took her away, I lay back, tears of exhaustion and fear leaking from my eyes. I remember how they evaporated into salt as soon as they fell into my parched mouth. My mother was alarmed, told me sternly not to cry. She was probably more afraid that I was. She was remembering my niece, who suffered complications at birth and is now profoundly disabled.

I was wheeled into my room, stared at the sun slanting through the blinds. It traced patterns on the wall that looked like a message. But I didn't understand.

TEG was with Madam. I am not sure where my mother was. Hospital chapel, most likely.

What I felt wasn't fear, not yet. It was a disbelief as strange and strong as if I had been deposited into another person's life. This simply could not be happening. I couldn't imagine a world where this was true. I clung to the assurance of that lie.

A doctor came in and informed me, kindly, that Madam would have to travel to the closest NICU—another hospital, about 30 miles away. He brought me a polaroid picture of her, her small hand pressing itself against the edge of her incubator. Already fierce. Was she looking for me?

I nodded dumbly at the doctor's words and he left. TEG would go with her.

I lay back in the bed, wearing my makeshift diaper full of ice for the pain. I propped her picture carefully against my lamp, but somehow it kept ending up back in my hands. I traced her face so often that my fingertip smeared her. Superimposed over her whole face.
(more)

I am sure I slept.

TEG came back eventually, full of stories about the NICU and the doctor's various diagnoses.

This was all my fault. I couldn't push hard enough, and she suffered some trauma in the birth canal. I came down with a fever while in labor. But he never said any of that.

I tried to read. Watched the sunset. Tried to sleep. Tried to feel like a mother, or else remember what it felt to have her inside of me. Neither was quite possible.

The next day, I begged the doctor to discharge me a day early so I could go spend time with Madam at her NICU.

That's when the story becomes strange, even to me.

When I look at pictures of myself as I left the hospital, one thing strikes me. I am smiling. I am happy. What the hell was I so happy about?

That evening, I went to see her for the first time. Wasn't allowed to hold her. So I just sat and watched her sleep. I was so tired, all I wanted to do was go home.

Mothers should want to keep vigil at the NICU bedside. Mothers should tear themselves away only for meals, the occasional rest room break.

I did not spend the night with her there. Not one.

Oh, I had a million reasons. My recovery from the birth was slow and painful (I was taken to emergency care two times while Madam was in NICU). I was dealing with a war exploding between TEG and my mother.

But. None of this should have mattered. I should have BEEN there. I should have WANTED to be. Not just for a few hours every day. But the whole time. The nurses were surprised at me. I could tell. When we called in the morning for her overnight, I could feel their coolness.

And there were moments, even during her NICU time, when I could...forget. Laugh. Watch MTV as I pumped breast milk and feel almost...content.

I carry this guilt inside of me, and I don't know where to lay it down.

When Madam cools towards me, sometimes, I don't immediately see it as the natural separation between mother and child. I think, “She knows. She knows I wasn't there.”

Didn't we bond enough? Will it always be so imperfect between us?

I am obsessed with missing her windows of time. I am obsessed with getting it wrong again.

(Are these words communicating the horror of me? I am not sure. I don't want to protect myself anymore.)

Today, while I sat in a hushed garden with Jessie, I told this story. I am not sure why. She is the kind of person you tell things to, I suppose. Jessie realized that the place where my manuscript stopped was while my main character's newborn was in the NICU. I tried to write around it, then tried to move to other stories. But I couldn't. This is the story I can't tell. This is the story I need to tell.

I needed to finally admit the truth about me. When my daughter needed me the most, I was selfish. I didn't want to go to the hospital, and so I showed up late, left early. I didn't want to sleep there, so I didn't. Not once.

I am so, so sorry about that. I couldn't rise to the occasion. This all showed me the kind of person I really am, after all.

And I can't forgive myself.

(Thanks to Jessie, who encouraged me to get this out and be brave.)

My place

2008-07-03T17:14:00.003-05:00

Credit to Nicole Bengiveno/NYT

Yesterday, I snuck away from our routine, dragged Madam and her stroller and assorted paraphernalia into a tight, unwelcoming bus, and went back in time.

Whenever I go there, to Bergenline, I feel like I lose my words and my writing—not in a bad way, but instead I revel in the pure sensation of motion and rhythm and LIFE, at least the way I define it. People crowding each other off the sidewalk, girls sashaying by, mothers laughing while toddlers loll in umbrella strollers precariously balanced with bulging shopping bags. Assault by colors, energy—the shared million million passions of the people who huddle in the store fronts, gazing longingly at vivid plasticy photos of their homelands, “Giros a Mexico, a Peru, a Ecuador, a Colombia.” Or more frequently, striding past them, unseeing. They've made their choice. They've brought those places here, planted in this welcoming soil.

And always, music. Rap, freestyle, old school, salsa, merenge, bachata, reggeton mix into a sonic soup that rules every step a person takes here. It makes me stand a little straighter, look a little more forthrightly around me. This is my soundtrack and I'm on stage.

I want to take it all in, to swallow every careless grin and shouted piropo, eat every delicious sandwich cubano, drink every cup of cafe con leche. And I want to write it, this place where I first learned that I was me, and me was all of these people, too. Every interaction here means more than it means, to me. I feel superimposed onto old photos, like I'm speaking in this moment, yes, but also as that girl I was when I lived here. Here, the lines blur.

For better or for worse, this is my soul home. This is the place where I can move almost from instinct, guided only by the phantom pressure of steps taken a million times before.

This is where I grew up.

Whenever we go back home, we search first for those landmarks that were important to our youth. Look, there's the baby clothes store, where my young mother, flushed with pride, handed over way too much money for the most beruffled baby dresses, complete with panties frothy with pristine lace. No Salvation Army clothes for me, never. Never mind that we lived in a one bedroom walk up, that my parents were barely legal (papers still going through), that any money we had should have been going to the lawyer, or back to Colombia. I needed to look like the ideal Gerber baby, if the Gerber baby had been brown.

She was as old then as I am now. And I glance at my own Madam as we walk past, feeling a historical pull to purchase something for HER in that store. Something too expensive to show her that she is also cherished, wanted.

Am I trying to convince her, or myself? Who was Mami trying to convince? Was she assailed my kind of voices, the ones that whisper that maybe, just once, it would be nice to walk down these street as a free girl, free to heedlessly spend all of her money on herself, instead of hoarding, hoarding for splashy baby clothes, for those giros back to the motherland?

But then the moment passes and the store is just a store, and I am grateful that it's still there—even if it's still strange to think of myself in the mami role, instead of as the girl in the stroller, curious and alive and hanging onto mami's every word.

Tidbits

2008-06-26T23:34:00.003-05:00

This quote from Writing Down the Bones really spoke to me this week. Things are so messy in my life right now, that I don't think I am really seeing the material possibilities. So this was a wonderful reminder:

"A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, 'It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a cafe when you can eat macrobiotic at home.' Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things in our lives as they exist--the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blonde friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop those details from coming."

Also, thanks for the comments on the previous post. I am still pondering all of your wisdom...but it felt so liberating just to get it out. And Amber, someone emailed me about that Writer's Digest article about Latino Lit. Is it a sign?

I miss visiting you all. I can only get online very late these days, and I am usually too tired to comment. But you are on my mind. Cue Willie Nelson, or the Pet Shop Boys.

Token

2008-06-19T23:01:00.003-05:00

Cool photo from here.

Why don't I want to write this post?

Because it's a subject that feels touchy, feels weighted, feels uninformed, and I hate to put something out there in the world on this subject that isn't well considered.

Also, I am lazy.

In my last post, I spoke at length about my difficulties with writing, and about the massive block that resulted.

But I didn't mention all of it.

See, it's hard for me to believe now, but there was once a time when I was thoroughly ashamed of being a Latina.

Like most interesting baggage, this had its roots in childhood. We were a family that liked to party, and no party was complete without dancing. Inevitably, some tio or tia would notice me in the corner, attempting a hesitant little shuffle, and would push me into the center of the dance floor. “Baila, mija, dance!” Their voices would change on that last word, growing strange and accented. Perhaps that moment of sounding Other to their own ears darkened their mood, made them crave someone to push that sense of wrongness onto.

And there was me-- doing my best imitation, but somehow I never quite mastered the insouciant vibrato shoulder shake, or the perfect flirty hip swivel. Ah, here was something they could do, and I couldn't. Who cared then that I could speak “perfect” English? So they would tease, and laugh, and shake their heads. “La Americanita” couldn't dance.

In hindsight, I think all of us kids got hazed about dancing—it's a prized skill in our culture, and woe to those who can't do it. But at the time, I felt the “American” spotlight squarely on me.

I think I adopted a “if I can't join them, I'll just stay here in the corner and wear black” attitude.

It wasn't always easy. Sometimes I would have to run to the bathroom and lock myself in, dancing with careless abandon to the bass pressing against the door.

I am sure I wasn't so bad, then.

So, outsider feelings, blah blah. I still didn't feel inferior per se; I grew up in a heavily Latino area, and while all of my friends were white, black or Asian, I still didn't see myself as different or worse.

Enter college.
(more)

I met the most amazing, affluent, cultured people. And not a one of them was Latino. I read beautiful literature, none of it by Latinos (I was an English major, after all). I listened to glorious music...well, you get the picture. I started to feel the weight of something, some feeling that I came from a void. Everyone else could claim something in their lineage. I just felt a big blank. Sure, we had Celia Cruz, and sancocho, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but none of it felt significant enough in comparison.

I struggled with this feeling more after meeting TEG, who grew up in India and is fiercely proud of his homeland. He told me stories about the history, mythology, art. I felt sad I had nothing comparable to share with him.

This went on until I turned about 28 or so. I decided that just because I had grown up with little knowledge of the contributions of Latinos to the world stage, that it didn't mean there was nothing there to celebrate. So I started forcing myself to explore, to read Latino literature, both in Spanish (painstakingly slow) and in translation. I realized that I didn't much like Gabriel Garcias Marquez but loved Julia Alvarez. I discovered that the songs I grew up with were beautiful and worthy in their own right, not just always as “booty shaking” music.

In short, I got over myself and learned.

When I started writing again, I felt compelled to write out stories full of Latinos—if only to counteract the (usually unspoken) assumption that if no ethnicity is specified, a character is white. I wanted to share the insides of people who don't always see their own lives as worthy of preservation, and I wanted to show my parents that I could see the beauty of everything they gave up to move here.

All lofty goals, right?

The problem is, all those lofty goals started to feel forced. I found myself wanting to write around them, under them. I wanted to write romances, teen stuff, even fan fiction for my favorite shows. But I still felt like the only writing that counted was the “up with Latinos” stuff.

So, write the other stuff, you must be thinking. Sure, I tried. But then I faced the other side of this problem.

I felt like the only thing that made me special as a writer was my ethnicity. That it was the only thing that made people want to read me (and about me, since I am mostly talking about blogging here). It was my “niche”...my “hook,” if you will. Writing romances, teen stuff, et al...nothing about the way I write those would make me stand out. And I so do dearly love to stand out (just not on the dance floor, at age 11, doing it All Wrong).

Thus, I felt caught in a weird construction of my own making. Writing ethnic fiction was the “right” thing to do, and it was the only thing I had to say that was interesting. But I didn't want to write ethnic fiction anymore. But my other stuff just felt like nothing. And wasn't I betraying all of my newly discovered pride by putting my stories about Latinos aside?

If this sounds a bit like over-thinking, well, you'd be right. But I have been the “token” so much in my life. I was always “my only Hispanic friend.” I was the only Hispanic on my editorial row at my Big Publishing House. And now I turned myself into the Latina in our blogging community (yes, I know I am not the only one; indulge me).

I want to write again, so much, to feel free on the page to say WHATEVER about WHOEVER. And feel that it's interesting, and that it will still matter.

I want to come out of that bathroom, like I should have so many years ago, and shake my hips, even if it makes Shakira herself giggle.

So...why can't I?

Writing

2008-06-15T00:06:00.003-05:00

Jack Kerouac's typewriter, from here.

Remember my awful infected tooth? That's a bit how my soul feels about not writing.

It's time for me to tell myself the story of what went wrong.

It's such a sore subject for me that I need to explore it, to poke my tongue into the painful crevices of the wound.

I had ambitious plans for the last couple of years. After Madam's birth, I discovered a clarity of thought and voice I'd never quite experienced before. All those dreams I had dismissed over and over as a girl and young adult, came back, with an added note of confidence and possibility. I could get through labor, nurse my daughter, survive two and a half years of broken sleep. And I found all of you, living out all sorts of fascinating artistic dreams. Seeing you gave me the everyday courage I needed to start this blog, to share my writing with strangers for the first time in years.

It was good.

And thanks to your generous feedback, I could see what worked and what didn't...I started learning to spot nuances in my own words, and how to tell stories about things that worked themselves deep in me.

But then, something happened. I started feeling a heaviness in my writing, a desire to make it RIGHT or not make it at ALL. I've always been compulsive about reading writing books and writing advice, but all of that well intentioned knowledge became a soup in my mind. I couldn't quite apply what I was learning...I could just recognize it well enough to see how wrong I was. Writing became frustrating in a completely new way. Despite all of my best efforts, I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse. And I couldn't fix it. Story ideas which had seemed so tantalizing now seemed impossible for me to work on. And I kept getting worse.

Somewhere, I'd always harbored the belief that if we work VERY hard at something, our progress would reflect that. Our jagged edges would smooth out. Things would become more automatic, and pleasurable. I thought A would lead to be B and out to a triumphant C, D, E.

And I kept getting worse. Now the joy in writing was also gone. I couldn't judge my own work, at all. I just knew the efforts of producing it felt abysmal and constipated.

Now, during this time, I was a member of an amazing, creative group of women committed to following our creative dreams. We spoke on the phone once a week every week, and shared our progress. We all did the exercises, and I watched their lives catch fire.

And I just kept getting worse.

Finally, I needed to acknowledge that my ambitious desires to write a Great Novel were probably going to have to be dismissed, at least for a little while. I put writing away in all of its incarnations (which wasn't easy—writing is woven into my day. I do morning pages, keep a journal, write this blog). It got to the point where the very sight of a book I might have once loved caused me to wince.

I returned all of my writing books to the library. I started avoiding bookstores.

Today, at lunch with a friend, I shared all of this frustration. I wish I could report that she had patted my hand, looked sympathetic. Instead, she smiled and said, “OK, that's learning.” She even acted it out a bit with the salt and pepper shakers and the ketchup (OK, maybe you had to be there for that one).

Something about her blasé attitude stopped me short. Is it possible...that I've been torturing myself, thinking that I was stupid and incapable of learning because...learning is not linear? Perhaps this is ho-hum common knowledge to you, but seriously, I NEVER thought of it that way. I honestly NEVER thought that sometimes...we get worse. And it doesn't necessarily mean we should stop.

Madam's speech therapist said something similar when she reminded me that Madam's speech would probably start to get MORE garbled as she learned new words, and started experimenting with sentences.

I still feel that lack of love for writing that frightens me. But maybe that, too, is part of the process—my grown up version of the tantrums Madam throws during her growth spurts.

Either way, I desperately want to try again. Garbled words and all.

Challenging can be beautiful

2008-06-10T23:42:00.001-05:00

There is a parenting book out there with the enlightening title, Your three year old: friend or enemy.

Lately, I am leaning more towards the latter.

To her credit, Madam has been spectacular in the face of so much change. Her father's six week trip to India. Our two weeks at my parents' house. And now our seven weeks here. In the meantime, her schedule has warped to the point where it's no longer recognizable.

Of course, we miss the easy rhythm of our days at home. Our familiar haunts, now grown grassy after endless winter. Lakes that whisper with gentle airy laps, relishing fluidity after a hard freeze.

But...here we are.

Unfortunately, all of this change comes on the cusp of Madam's own changes—from two to three, from relative wordlessness to burbling sentences. From loving child into, well, into a three year old.

It's been challenging, to be sure. And yet, the other truth is that she's never been so lovely, so winsome, so brilliant and clever. Looking at her, I feel dizzy and particled with happiness. Until she starts screaming again, of course.

I'll be honest, I haven't been able to learn much from Madam in the last few months. My own depression was like a dense fog, and I was so tired from the efforts of moving from the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen that I was merely existing. Now, I am waking up again, little green shootlets of soul. And the phrase that shot through my mind while watching her today was “Challenging can be beautiful.”

This is something I want to remember.

Returning

2008-06-10T00:09:00.002-05:00

From here.

This post may be a little bit like Genesis with all of the beginnings.

You may also be able to sing it to a blues beat.

So much has happened during the last four months or so. Most of it bad. Turns out that rushing to the emergency room in the middle of the night was actually a high point.

As I mentioned in a previous post, TEG's mother became very ill, and thus we've moved in with his family to help her with her recovery. So that's five adults and one toddler in a small(ish) space. Surprisingly, it hasn't been as terrible as I had dreaded. But seven weeks is a long time to be away from home.

But that's not even what has turned out to be the biggest problem. Like Dante, “in the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” It's been an endless soul winter that moved me inexorably to a worse milestone. My 35th birthday.

Ba da ba dum.

Go ahead and laugh, but I really thought I'd be somewhere else by this time. You know the fantasy—I'd be a polished, brilliant creative writer, living in a fabulous, eccentric charmer of a house, where I often hosted gatherings for my artist tribe. A whole stove of manuscripts would be simmering on every burner—front, back, and side. And of course, I'd have a wonderfully behaved little Madam who would provide endless streams of inspiration and laughter.

Go ahead and laugh. I can wait.

None of this has come to pass (well, that last one is true on very good, really not bad days). Quite the opposite. My writing has dried up, leaving behind a keening muse and sad memories. I am living in a limbo dictated by sick parents, or aging parents, or a million and one practical concerns, not one of which convinces the pouting four year old that I have evidently become.

I had to step away from blogging because I was woefully depressed (and following my Mami's advice, “If you don't have nothing nice to say, then say nothing.”) but also because it wasn't working. Blogging started to feel like some sort of a high school purgatorio where I saw all of you as the Cool Kids, the lucky, bright, brilliant ones, and I couldn't measure up. My genuine excitement for your triumphs was coated over by a slimy ickiness that had submerged all of my finer feelings.

But that's not even the whole truth. I left this place because I reached a point where I was getting angry. Angry that you all were so inspirational and wonderful. Yes, if depression is anger turned inward, mine was a more troubling, encompassing thing, soiling all things at once. Because I didn't have any faith that things could EVER be better, I couldn't stand to read the faith that you all share everyday. I just couldn't believe that things could ever change. I couldn't believe that there would be a day without depression. I couldn't believe in magic or creativity or hope.

And yet, I am back here. Because I need those things I don't know if I still believe in. And I miss you.

I made a radical decision on my birthday this year. If a fuss needs to be made on my behalf, I need to make it. I want to be happy, even if I don't deserve it. Even if I never accomplish another blessed thing in my lifetime. Even if I never write again. I don't want to cut myself off from the whole spectrum of deeply lived life anymore. I get so much happiness from you all—happiness I am still not sure I deserve. I want that, even if your general amazing-ness casts a shadow of envy onto my own life. Because I am happy being an enthusiastic cheerleader, it's one of the few things that I really believe I can do well.

So much more to tell you about—like my foray back into soap opera land, my strange last couple of months, how I've realized that beating yourself up really DOES serve an odd purpose (even though it doesn't actually work) and how I've learned that lying to yourself ruins absolutely EVERYTHING.

Ba da ba dum.

Moment of levity

2008-03-22T19:06:00.002-05:00

Y'all, this made me CRY with laughter.

So...

2008-03-20T14:17:00.003-05:00

I haven't been on a whole lot lately. Not here and not on any blogs. I wish I had a reason, but...I just haven't wanted to be in the blog world. Things have been vaguely surreal since my early morning hospital visit (although we are all fine, and thank you so much for your kind words).

I feel a logjam in my heart...a mass of something overwhelming and strange. And I can't seem to dislodge it.

So I do the next best thing. I try and distract myself, listen to music, sing. Sometimes it even almost works.

What does it mean when you lose interest in almost everything you once loved? I find myself almost viscerally recoiling from books, from words. I practically cross the street when I see a bookstore. My library requests are being returned to the shelves, unread. Today was the first day I have done my morning pages in weeks. They were...not illuminating.

Perhaps it's just worry. TEG ended up extending his stay in India. By the time he gets home, we will have been apart almost a month.

Perhaps it's dislocation. Our lease is up here soon and we need to make a decision on where to move next. A decision we are finding most difficult to make.

Perhaps it's hormones. I finally managed to wean the Madam.

As always, more questions than answers.

Whoa

2008-03-06T23:15:00.003-06:00

This week, I received the answer to three questions that have lurked in the back of my mind ever since I became a mother:

1) What if something ever happened to me while I was alone with Madam and she couldn't call 911?

2) How would Madam cope if we needed to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night?

3) If I ended up in the hospital, would I finally be able to get some rest?

The answers are:

1) My parents would call 911 from Miami when I didn't answer the phone and the police would rush over and pound on the door at around 1:15am, which I couldn't hear because I was apparently passed out in the bathroom.

2) Surprisingly well.

3) Alas, no.

Madam has been sick with a persistent stomach bug since Sunday night, and on Tuesday, I got hit with it, hard. My head spun, my stomach revolted. In misery, I called my mom to get sympathy and a possible homespun cure. But nothing worked, because nothing could stay down.

The worse part was that I couldn't even carry Madam, leading to much hysteria on her part (when I saw the police at the door, I thought someone had reported me for possible child abuse. That's how much she was crying.).

At some point I needed to vomit again, and after that the bathroom floor looked so inviting...

Next thing I know, the police are shouting "Minneapolis Police, open up!" and attempting to break the chain on my apartment door. It appears I had been out for about ten minutes. They took one look at swaying, pale me and recommended an ambulance.

Now, I was all ready to ride out this weird stomach thing, but I was frightened enough by this episode (My little Madam, alone! TEG, still in India!) that I finally agreed to go, after being assured that Madam would always be with me.

Madam was a complete trooper at this point, and not acting like the same furious child who had just spent the better part of an hour shrieking. "Get dressed, Mommy!" she said happily, clearly excited for an outing. I am still not sure how I managed it, but I got her fully dressed, prepared a snack, refilled her water bottle, and double checked her diapers and wipes. Must have been sheer force of habit.

The paramedic won her heart by allowing her to ride on the gurney with me. He even got her to sit in the ambulance car seat.

They put an IV in me and off we went. I was still a bit in and out, but very aware of Madam behind me, sitting quietly.

In the emergency room, they gave me another bag of fluids and some medicine (I guess I was dehydrated...can that happen so quickly?) and prepared a little bed for Madam. Who of course did not sleep (see question and answer #3). She was too keyed up by the new sights and sounds, saying "Baby cryin', Mommy. Happy, baby, happy!" whenever she heard an infant crying nearby. Somehow I managed to entertain her (with a lot of help from the new situation) while hooked up to monitors and the IV, and after a few hours, they allowed us to go home.

Madam was excited to ride in the taxi with the new balloon that one of the nurses gave her.

It was 5:00am.

I feel better, and more than a little foolish. I probably didn't need to go to the hospital, but I felt so ill at the time that I panicked.

My mom is here and other than a recurring headache and residual exhaustion, I don't think I suffered any ill effects.

But I'll be happy when TEG is home.

Oh, sad wasteland!

2008-02-27T11:56:00.003-06:00

How many times do I need to remember that "blogging in my head" will not actually lead to, you know, words on the page? While my mental alter ego has been industriously writing pithy posts for your amusement, the real me has been sadly less well-engaged. Not that I don't have reason. TEG is in India for the next three weeks--his mother grew ill while on vacation and is still there. He needs to help with her therapy and to bring her home when she is ready. She is MUCH better, though, so big sighs of relief all around.

But...this has all meant that I am living through one of my big fears, that of being a single mother.

It is not *quite* as bad as I thought. Oh, sure, I am tired of being on duty all the time. But having TEG gone has actually given me some space to think about our relationship. While I adore him, I don't always adore *myself* while with him. I spend a lot more time running around doing scut work while he is home, in part because he generates a lot of mess for a grown man, but mostly because I want to prove to him that I am not slacking off, that I work hard even though I don't work for money.

I realized, again, that I don't feel equal in our marriage because I am not earning money. I feel like I have to hold my house and my mothering to a sterling example so that I don't get accused of being lazy. The phrase, "Why isn't everything perfect? It's not like you do ANYTHING else?" hangs over me. The thing is...I know this is (mostly) my own stuff. So how do I move past it? How do I convince myself that I am a fully accredited partner in this marriage, even if the house gets a little dusty while I try to write? Because, dear bloggy friends, I am about to let you in on a little secret.

I know that I am doing all this because I am scared. I am procrastinating, and beating myself up about the house, and about the fact that Madam isn't doing precalculus yet (you should meet the kids at her toddler class--smarties, all!), because it's easier to use all of time-honored reasons to pummel myself than face the truth. Which is, of course, that I am loster-than-lost with my writing, and I don't even know where to START again.

Well, THIS went in an unexpected direction. I just got that tingle, though, the one that tells me that I have just hit on something *true*.

You all are better than therapy.

Charlie Brown

2008-02-19T15:14:00.004-06:00

(from this site)

Lately, any moment of reflection and silence leads to an interaction with THAT voice. You know the one...the one that says you are no good, never were, will never be worthy of attention or admiration and all the people in your life who say they love you are just waiting for you to die so their REAL lives can begin.

Yeah, THAT voice.

I have taken to calling it Charlie Brown.

This has helped tremendously. It helps me smile at it, a little, when it starts with its inevitable whine about how everything good is happening to everyone else. I have begun to see his little bald head, bending down dejectedly after having the football snatched away yet again (oh, cruel Lucy!). I see the striped yellow jersey, determinedly out of fashion, with its hopeful lightning zag across the chest (Charlie Brown has secret superhero longings, like we all do). I see him looking at the little Red Haired Girl, always just out of reach, embarrassed by the force of his own daydreams.

And instead of shoving the voice down into the deepest, most ashamed closet in my psyche, I listen to it. I chat with it. And I have compassion for it.

But I try not to live by it anymore. I remind Charlie that despite his long history of failure, he never fails to give himself one more shot, one more kick at that football, one more glance at the Red Haired Girl. I remind myself that Charlie Brown is bright, and empathetic, and soulful even when the world calls him a loser and tries to shout him down.

I'm learning not to be afraid of him anymore.

But I'm still going to be wary of brunettes holding footballs.

Tagged! Writing advice...

2008-02-03T23:23:00.000-06:00

From this site.

The amazing Delia tagged me to write out three pieces of writing advice that I would like to share with others. It’s interesting. I have wanted to do a post like this for a while, but have always hesitated. Why? I don’t know…didn’t think I had the authority to give advice, needing so much of it myself? I guess I wanted to wait until I felt like I had THE answer—the perfect pieces of advice that would enable anyone (or, OK, me) to get off their excuses and start writing prolifically.

Sadly, this has not quite happened. But, upon reflection, I do think I have things to share—things that have helped me start, and continue, and start again.

Treat your material kindly: The writing books expound often on writing what you know, and that’s not what I mean here. I am talking about those moments when you feel gripped by a topic, or a theme, or a type of character. Sometimes I am dismayed by how much my stories tend to resemble each other, and I am embarrassed by how small they feel. I start to want to write about BIG subjects—war, or terrorism, or global warming.

And then I block.

Because, see, I am pulled towards the stories I tell. I want to write about those who feel like literature is what happened to other people. I want to leave a record of the heroism in these lives, even if the inhabitants themselves can’t see it. Because I can.

So I will continue to crawl over every inch of my material, like an ant who wants to see the whole world. I will continue to write about what calls me. After all, there are lots of people to write the tales of Big History. I’ll be here writing about the bodega owners who live above the store and Minerva the Cat Lady, who likes to drive with them tucked in a basket in her front seat, with access to the window.

Find your community—in people and in books: When I became a mother, I felt like I had already fallen behind. Because with the birth of my Madam, I also gave birth to a surprisingly fierce ambition. I had always wanted to write and had even made some serious attempts at it while I lived in Chicago. But something about holding my daughter in my arms, staring into her dizzying little face, made me long to BE something for her. To show her something in me that, prior to her existence, I wasn’t sure I had. I wanted her to be proud of me.

So I went online, found all of you, not all mothers (not even all women!) but all committed to your creativity and your passions.

And then I started to read books on motherhood and creativity. I needed to believe that it was possible, and the books told me, over and over, yes it is. I return to certain favorite essays often—Anne Tyler’s patient voice has pushed me back towards the keyboard on many days when I couldn’t see past my own irritation and exhaustion. I clutch Judith Cofer Ortiz’s stories about waking up at 5am when her children were small with gratitude (even if I haven’t been able to do that yet). And on days when I just cannot do ANYTHING, I remember that Patry Francis said that she didn’t manage any serious writing when her children were under six.

That seemed to work out well for her. And it gives me hope.

So find those books, those blogs, those people who make it all seem possible and use them to buoy you up when your own life preserver starts to, well, sink. To mix metaphors, if you put on your own mask first (like they say on the plane) you’ll be able to help someone else.

Show others what you can do: This was a tough one for me; still is. I went years without showing my writing to anyone outside of a writing class. It didn’t read like “real writing,” or else it was “too small,” or “not ready.”

Nothing has helped my writing more, and nothing keeps me writing like posting on this blog. Yes, the pieces are rough, unpolished, occasionally awkward. I am definitely experimenting. But your feedback, your questions and enthusiasms help me see my own work as something outside of myself. And that helps me to make it better.

It’s scary to put yourself out there, even in a safe place like a blog. It stings when people don’t seem to respond to a piece I think works. But…it’s good to see that.

And when you like something and tell me that it moves you, well, NOTHING motivates me quite as quickly. It makes it all feel real, and possible. Because it’s not theoretical anymore. Once you put a piece of fiction out, it’s an admission that it matters to you. You are not thinking about writing, you are writing.

So thank you for that.

As far as who I will tag for my three….so many great bloggers have been tagged already! But I don’t think I have seen responses from Amber, Jessie, and Deirdre, so those are my three.

TEG's week off

2008-01-31T22:28:00.000-06:00

A long time ago, a friend of mine married her boyfriend in a whirlwind. They met just when he had signed up to join the Navy (literally, a few days later), and thus had very little time together before he went through basic training and shipped out. She had thought she could handle it; even relished the romance of it all. “I'll be able to visit him in so many places!” she gushed. “And the Navy takes care of basically, well, everything!”

So, they got married by a Justice of the Peace our first year of college (saving up for the Big Catholic wedding of their dreams, which they finally had about four years later), moved to Virginia, and my friend's husband, newly flushed with matrimony, left her again.

It didn't take her long to become discontented.

“He's gone all the time! I'm here all alone!” she would wail on the phone. I tried to be sympathetic, in spite of my conviction that she had rushed into this (she hadn't—they are still together over fifteen years later). But, well...she knew this, right? He hadn't hidden it from her. I still hated to hear her crying.

Finally, she called to tell me, triumphantly, that her husband was getting honorably discharged due to her depressive episodes when he was gone. Basically, they had convinced the authorities that she was so unstable without him that she might actually harm herself. I remember thinking that she had apparently sabotaged something he had ostensibly wanted to do (well, at least before he met her) and was apparently proud of this fact. Frankly, I thought she had been a trifle, well, hysterical about the whole thing.

I was reminded of all this tonight when I realized that it was Thursday. TEG's week long vacation is almost over.

I would be happy to convince any possible authority to let me have him for longer.

Oh, friends, it's been WONDERFUL. He's spent so much time playing with Madam, filling the house with her shrieks during their elaborate games, patiently honoring her many requests to “do stuck” together on the couch, his dark head balanced lightly on her pudgy little legs while they read together. And he's reading again, about passions he's had since we first met, and hasn't been able to explore because he's been so busy. He's let me sleep in, sneak out to meet Jessie.

Best of all, the tense atmosphere that too often pervades the apartment is gone—that feeling that the roof is too close over my head. He hasn't had to bark, “I'm busy!” at any of us all week. He hasn't had to fight off a clinging, crying toddler as he went into the next room to make an important phone call. I haven't gone gray(er) worrying about her noise level during said important phone call.

But now, it's all coming to a close, and it's making me a little teary eyed. I know he needs to work; I'm grateful that he works so hard, enabling me to stay home with the Madam full time. But...the intense, driven way he works, that start-up, 24/7 instability---after four years of this, it's wearying. I miss him already, and I dread to see how Madam reacts to the return of the old way, especially now that she's had a taste of something so very much better.

So, I remember my old friend, and I think I understand her better now. She did know what she was getting into. She just didn't know that she couldn't quite handle it.

This isn't what I came here to write, but I guess it's what I wanted to say.

More cheerful post tomorrow.

I dub it...Patry Francis day!

2008-01-29T15:02:00.000-06:00

I wasn't really going to blog about Patry Francis today. I told myself that she had so many other amazing bloggers and writers in her corner, helping her celebrate and publicize the paperback edition of her book, The Liar's Diary—what could I add to the discussion? In the grand scheme of things, my voice is very small. So I would sit on the sidelines and cheer for the important players on the field.

And then I realized—how utterly un-Patry like of me. She is someone I deeply admire in part because she has insisted on putting forth her words and her vision—even when she was a working mother struggling to balance the needs of her children with her writing. Even now after the diagnosis she received—an aggressive strain of cancer.

Last year, she fulfilled a long standing dream and published her first book, The Liar's Diary, a psychological thriller about how the friendship between two women exposes dark secrets at the heart of their lives and families. Throughout the process of getting the book written and published, Patry shared much of her experiences and wisdom on her blog, Simply Wait. Those of us who are still writing, still dreaming, still hoping, found a champion in her...someone who had some of the same limitations, the same (or more) responsibility, the same STUFF that makes up a life, and who still realized her dreams through her talent and her tenacity. She's such a vital presence in our creativity community, always ready with encouragement, humor, wit, perseverence, and breathtaking writing.

Patry has shown me that it doesn't matter about the size of your gift, or your audience, or your voice.

It just matters that you open your mouth, pour out your words, and sing.

So, everyone, go out and support this amazing woman and writer. Go buy a copy of the newly published paperback of The Liar's Diary.

You'll be so thrilled that you did.

Sunday Scribblings: Misc. people (a story in a letter)

2008-01-27T00:01:00.000-06:00

These dolls from here.

Dear Mami,

I wish that you were reading this in English. Then maybe you could have a taste of what my life is like, Mami—spending the day listening to words that sound just like wearing a coat in winter. Like footsteps on the concrete. But then again, it would mean you having to go all the way to the Plaza Grande, dragging your skirts in the dust, asking for translations. Not that it would be so hard, not these days. I wish it had always been so. Then maybe it wouldn't be so hard for me right now.

“It's so important to us that Thalia grow up knowing her culture, and I don't just mean 'Dora the Explorer' you know? These are the years to learn—it never sticks when you get old like us, huh?” Doña Rosa had said to me, in blessed Spanish. I nod, not sure what to say. Surely Doña Rosa knows that I am spending every night sitting up in my room, tracing my fingers over every word in the dictionary, trying to absorb the smooth letters through my skin. Circling all of the unknown words in that little book of cartoons that Tomas gave me the last time I left. Six months, and there are still more circles than not. “And I told Pedro that if he'd grown up in my pueblo, he'd know the Delgados are known for being excellent teachers.” What good is it being a Delgado who teaches when I cannot learn myself?

Still, it is good that Doña Rosa remembers. It helps me remember myself.

I try to remind her that there is so much more I can do than just take care of Thalia and the house. Thalia is a placid child, content to sit in her little red rocking chair and watch me moving around the kitchen. And the house itself—luxury looks different in los Estados Unidos. It's clean, spacious, all the surfaces hard and shining. All of Doña Rosa and Don Pedro's recuerdos from home, the straw filled dolls, the framed flags, the clay pots—they seem to be swallowed by the smoothness, the glow of these American things. They look extra.

Doña Rosa is so tired after a day at work. “It is not easy to make ends meet,” she says. “People think once you get here, you are saved. But they are wrong.” She sounds angry, as though I have accused her of this myself. “It's not like home.” I mention. “No, she says again. “Not even like your home.” This brightens her, and she loses some of the harsh tone when she asks me to help her in her private office. I am excited as well. This is what I have been angling for since I arrived. Work that will feed my mind, the way you always did it, Mami. Delgado work.

“Please sort these bills into piles, and then I'll ask Pedro to file them.” She showed me how to recognize each bill and match it to others, without knowing the words. Like the card game we used to play.

We worked in quiet, equal silence. Every now and then I would hold up an envelope, and she would tell me, “Just put that aside.” When we were done, that “aside” pile was rather large. She swept them all into a folder marked, “Misc.”

“What does this mean, this word wrote here?” I was proud to ask her in English, but she made no comment on that. She was too busy making notes on a pad, a pencil between her teeth. “Oh, it means miscellaneous.” I waited.

“Uh, its just important paperwork. It's important.”

I filed this away. It seemed a useful word.
(more)

The other day, Don Pedro came home from work all excited. It seemed he had invited a new friend home from work. Bob. The man mooned around as though he was preparing for his Quinceñera, the joy flushed on his face. “Bob says not to worry about cooking anything special. Bob is a very understanding man. He is an important man at work. He does not often go out to people's houses. This is a very good thing for us, Rosa.” Of course, Doña Rosa left me detailed instructions for what dishes I should cook, and as soon as she got home, without even removing her coat, she began lifting the lids off of the steaming pots, and then she starts chopping the vegetables for her special sofrito. She was pleased when I complimented her on it later. “Even the Delgados don't know everything, right?” She said, smiling big as she went up the stairs to get dressed.

I was bathing Thalia, elbow deep in two year old and soapy water, when Don Pedro walked in, pulling his tie straight around his neck. Six months, and he is still hesitant around me. He averted his eyes as though I was the one taking the bath. “Uh, Nilda...” He began. “Perhaps you would like to go to Carmen's house tonight? Or even to a movie?” It was not a question.

“Of course, Don Pedro.” I was not surprised, but it does not feel good to be asked, all the same.

Well, Mami, I decided to make a night of it. I called Carmen and we made arrangements to go to the Rinconcito and then the Copa for dancing. We were both going to speak in nothing but English and enjoy ourselves as though we belong here. I have heard that Miami is a beautiful city, and I am sure it looks better when you are not in the backseat, next to a screaming baby.

Tell Tomas that I did my hair the way he likes it—dance floor hair, all swirls and dips and spins. I only wish he could have seen it.

I could hear their voices carrying up the stairs as I stood there, wondering if maybe I should just go past, quickly, towards the kitchen door. But I was curious about this Bob man. So I went down, directly into the living room, where they all sat, balancing drinks on their knees.

He immediately stood up. “Pedro...you didn't tell me your sister was here.” He was very tall, with blood energy reddening his skin and gentle blue eyes and hair almost white, like the sun over the water at noon. I took the hand he offered, but couldn't think of anything to say. Sometimes this English feels like a funnel, like all of my thoughts are being drained through a too-small hole.

“No, that's... that's just Nilda. She knows my wife's family. From home.” He made the introductions, while Doña Rosa just looked at me and said nothing, loudly.

I'm not sure how it happened, but Don Pedro offered me a drink and I took it and sat down on their white couch, careful with my wine.

They spoke in English, and I felt pulled along by it, always a few ideas behind. But finally, Bob turned to me and asked me how I liked “the States.” Usually I just smile when someone asks me if I need to say it in English, but something about his blue eyes looking at me, so admiring...it was the 'courage of the red dress' like you always say.

I wanted to say something to help them, Don Pedro and Doña Rosa, something to thank them for their kindness and impress this nice American man.

So I opened my mouth and I said, “They are very misc. people.” Silence. Bob looked confused, “Mixed?”

“No, misc...miscellaneous people.” And, ay, Mami, somehow I lost control of that word even as it passed through my mouth, and it came out like Spanish, like English, like everything other than what it should be. I flung it down like a dead fish at the table, and it just lay there, stinking.

Bob smiled like he'd forgotten how to stop. “I don't see what you mean.”

“Important. They are...important people at home.”

I already knew I was wrong, but it was too late. I couldn't do anything about the twist on Doña Rosa's face, or the way Don Pedro's face looked white like playa sand. So I smiled and threw my hands in the air, like a surrender, and just then Carmen came and honked the horn and I escaped.

Before I closed the door to her car, I heard Doña Rosa saying, “Poor thing...not very well educated, you know. Trying so hard. She teaches Thalia, but I think Thalia teaches her so much more!”

And we still went out to dinner, where the sounds of Spanish all around us was like a balm. But I begged off dancing; told Carmen what I said. She patted my hand and told me what the word really meant. Different people or things, from a bunch of places, not all the same.

When I got home that night, Don Pedro was waiting by the door. You charmed Bob, he said. He thought you were funny. Then he said, “You know...business is so...it's not good right now, Nilda. We have no extra anymore. You understand...”

And of course, I do.

Because I know I am extra, because Don Pedro and Doña Rosa are miscellaneous in this new land.

So I need to look here, hard, or you will see me sooner than you think. And I know we can't have that. We also have no extra.

Wish me luck, querida mama. And tell Tomas that his mami misses him more than words can say. In either Spanish OR English.

Love,
Tu Nilda
_____________
For more misc. tales, go here.

Madam

2008-01-23T22:49:00.000-06:00

Madam has discovered a foolproof way to defuse any tension that might ever arise between us. She looks up at me, smiles beguilingly, and says, “Mama.”

Seriously, it always works.

I watch her “reading” her books to her Doggie, using the same inflections I do, and I feel myself lightly tethered to the earth, like any errant wind would be able to lift me up by my pride and send me into the stratosphere.

We rub our noses together, hers a tiny replica of my own, and I tell her, “You are my life.” She considers that for a moment, then says, “Yes.”

Lately, I have been thinking about what it would be like to have another child. Of course, I have all of the standard worries, “Can we afford another child? Do we have the energy?” but the main worry is always, “Can I love another child the way I love my Madam?” I know that I would be a smarter, more confident mama—there are so many things I would do differently. I squelched a lot of my instincts, in favor of what the books said, or TEG, or my parents. As a result, I have chosen what I would consider a very high-maintenance parenting experience—we cosleep. Madam still nurses. She wakes up repeatedly through the night.

I do not think I would do these things in the future. And yet...I have learned to love the difficulties. I still look down at Madam's little nursing head and smile. We hold hands through the night.

Perhaps we love those who prove to us that we can do what we had formerly thought was impossible.

In that case, I don't think our second child, when and if we have one, will have much to worry about.

Not much

2008-01-16T23:03:00.000-06:00

For the past week (what is that you say, it's only Wednesday? Surely you jest...) I have been reading what I like to call “mom-help” books...a lovely subset of self-help that aims to help mothers get back in touch with their inner pre-mommy selves. It's a lovely idea. Really, it is.

So why have I been sniping at Ariel Gore, “Oh, sure, easy for YOU to say...you are obviously naturally creative and also younger and more energetic...” and Vicki Iovine, “Your YOUNGEST kid is six? You are in the gravy, lady”?

Because while I agree with the books that I CAN be a mama and a writer, lover, thinker, and I CAN roar, at the moment...it's taking all of my energy just to be a mother. Every day is a fulcrum, and I feel so perilously perched at the top, trying to throw my weight to balance. I can always feel when things are sliding into anarchy. I just can't seem to do anything about it when it happens.

I realized I just want to be told, “Hey, it's OK to rest...to put those ambitions aside for a little while and zone out. It's OK to not be able to do everything, even to not WANT to.”

This brings me back, as all things do, to my writing. Lately, dragging myself to the keyboard at the end of another exhausting day (seriously, toddlers are exhausting in a whole different way from newborns...I didn't know that!) is just...well, it's not happening. And I have been feeling so guilty about that, skulking around, redoubling my efforts to read or work on my character sketches or...something, anything.

Yesterday, as I rocked Madam to sleep in the dark, singing the 90th verse of my version of Old MacDonald, I started to cry with the weight and the guilt of it all. Of wanting to want to write, and knowing that I just did not. Knowing that so many other mothers have done it so well. Knowing that I have said that I couldn't, and then I could, but knowing that finally, no, really, I just can't. And a sentence flashed across my mind.

I can't bring myself to force myself to do one more thing.

All day, I drag myself through cooking and cleaning and Madam-care and more cooking, more cleaning, more laundry. Keeping Madam quiet while TEG works, and talks to clients on the phone. Grocery shopping. Madam's activities. And then, at the very end of my day, I don't want there to be still more to do. Especially something which is not fulfilling or rewarding me much lately.

I am tired of arguing with reality. This is my life, right now. TEG is frenetically busy. Madam needs lots of care. And, well, someone needs to clean the bathrooms and do everything else, and that someone, by default at the moment, is me.

So, I'm taking a break. Not from this blog, or from my journal. Just from any effort to write anything fictional until I can get my head back together and start to enjoy it again, even a little.

It feels like the right decision, it does.

Even if it makes me want to cry again, a little, when I think about it.

Sunday Scribbling: Date

2008-01-13T23:32:00.000-06:00

From here.

Where I grew up, we didn't date. Oh, not that we were chaste, at all, just that we didn't go through the whole John Hughes suburban ritual, complete with Breakfast Club postmortems and Sixteen Candles ends. Nobody asked anybody out for any sort of dinner and a movie (at least not so I remember). It wasn't our thing, dating. It wasn't our language.

Instead, we had our own rigid hierarchy in teenage relationships. First, there was “going with” as in, “I went with her.” While this might suggest dating, it actually was more akin to desperate sweaty gropes at the playground after dark. Then, if you went with someone more than a few times and continued to enjoy it, you might pursue “seeing” that person. This was exactly as breezy as it sounds—maybe you would see the person in the hallways and say, “hey,” perhaps even share a cheek-kiss before the warning bell reeled you towards class, its strident tone indicating that it knew you were up to no good. You could “see” many people at the same time (well, if you were a guy, alas the double standard!)

After an indefinite amount of time, you might slide towards the holy grail of our high school couplings. You might be officially “going out.” And no, this wasn't usually celebrated by an date either. This just meant that you were now boyfriend and girlfriend, exclusive. This was the end.

I allowed myself to be pulled through this rite because this was just the way things were. Sure, I tried to put my own rules out there. I usually managed to skip the pointless “seeing” phase (I was a good girl; if I went with a guy more than a few times, I liked him enough to move straight to going out. Usually). But...I really wanted to date the way the people in my movies did. It seemed like the way we did relationships was the way we did everything...haphazardly, sloppy. Why couldn't we WORK hard enough to make something tangible, put in the effort like the nice suburban rich kids? I wanted romance, swelling music. I would have settled for pizza and a VHS tape.
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Most of my high school relationships revolved around the band, and I can trace the trajectory of each one through the schedule of football games and practices and band competitions we always lost, those long rides home on the bus, the couples claiming the back seats. Our horizontal bodies hugged by the Naugahyde seats that were always ripped, pieces of stuffing rising up like smoke. Eventually sitting up, dazed, staring out the window together, watching the unfamiliar landscape streak into our hometown.

This was always the source of much discussion---who ended up in those back seats, and when, and why. I was as involved as everyone else, but I always held a piece of myself back. See, I knew this was all temporary, however vital it seemed at the time. I knew that there was a larger world, where guys came to the door and met your parents and brought flowers. Where the buses were modern and whole. Where bands rehearsed as passionately as we gossiped and won awards at the same competitions where we placed fifth, if at all. I knew that eventually, I would figure out the secret of living and stop being ashamed, stop feeling wrong and half-assed.

I just had to wait.

Sometimes, if I really liked the guy I was going out with, I would gently approach the idea of going on an official, mainstream culture date. And sometimes, if he really liked me back, he would agree.

But somehow, those dates were never quite what I wanted. The easy natural conversation we always had would freeze up, leaving us to make strained small chatter about the food, or, um, about the football team, or um...nothing, usually. We couldn't shake the feeling that we were playacting at something that needed to be Serious, and that we were doing it Wrong. Sometimes, I would catch my Boy standing by the pay phone near the men's bathroom, fingering his dollar bills, looking clutched and sweaty in his hand. There was something beautiful about his attempt to please me, but I didn't know enough to see it back then. I just knew that it didn't look right, it wasn't Hollywood enough. It wasn't like those dates that I imagined those suburban band kids would go on, polished and cinematic.

It's taken years for me to see the rightness of what was right in front of me. To be proud of speaking my own language, relishing my own history.

But I won't lie. When TEG showed up at my house that first day and shook my father's hand, it was more than FINALLY right. It was better than any movie starring Molly Ringwald.

Of course, it wasn't a date. We were already going out at the time.

For more dates, go here.

Can mothers think?

2008-01-08T13:04:00.000-06:00

In her essay, Can Mothers Think?, Jane Smiley talks about the dearth of great literature written from a maternal point of view. She points out that much of the celebrated books written by women have been written by daughters, women who have never had children. Of course, much of that has changed. Jane Smiley, Alice Walker, Ursula LeGuin, Toni Morrison. All daughters, all mothers, and all fabulous writers. In fact, Smiley talks about how motherhood actually improved her creativity and thought--added urgency and richness.

Of course, it helps if you start out being Jane Smiley.

This happened to me as well. The first year or so of Madam's life was probably the most creative time of my life. I was writing again, after years of only thinking about it. I could play with ideas and characters while I tended to her. I started this blog. It was good.

But the title of the essay continues to haunt me, though, because I've been having a bit of trouble thinking myself lately. Madam is so active, so engaged, so fully PRESENT that it takes all of me to deal with her—my energy, my body, and especially my mind. I find myself missing those drowsy (well, comparatively) infant days where I could be with her even while I daydreamed about my latest story, or blog post. Now, every nerve strains with attention, all of the time. Life has become a tense, operatic thing, like a war, or a flood.

Madam: Where Doggie? Doggie? DOGGIE! (prepares to fling herself on the ground to protest this cruel separation from her Beloved).

Doggie is produced.

Madam: Ah! Doggie! Kiss! Kiss! (falls into rapturous joy. until the next crisis.)

It's like she's gunning for a toddler Oscar.

And I am tired. Sleep, never easy here at Chez Madam, has become naught but a distant memory.

Mothers...share your secrets. I seem to have forgotten how to do this whole “balance” thing. I ADORE my Madam, and I am thrilled at everything she is. In fact, sometimes when she is finally asleep, I catch myself using this precious non Toddler time to think about...well, her. And how much I am enthralled by her. Trust me, I know how lucky I am to be with her as much as I am. It's great, exhausting, all-encompassing fun. So much so that even when I am not with her, I can't seem to transition back to myself. And I have a delicious new idea taking shape—a new story. But...I can't ever seem to work on it. Late at night, I have to remind myself to think about it, at least. And then I feel guilty, like I am abandoning my little brain people, and possibly myself.

I miss my mind. And I miss your minds. At the end of almost every day lately, I barely have the energy to lift the lid on my nifty laptop. So I am horribly behind on every blog I love. But there is hope for the future...TEG is toying with the idea of taking some much needed time off. I can barely contain my excitement—writing time! blogging time! Coffee with Jessie (and possibly even Emmie or herbal tea [finally] with Kate)! Sleep, sweet blessed non-toddlerized SLEEP!

Oh, and maybe TEG and I will even get to spend some time together. It could happen.

So...this post doesn't do much to further the idea that THIS mother thinks, although obviously I agree with Jane Smiley that mothers can think.

After the toddler years.

(PS: I started this post last night after Madam went down. I was interrupted five times in an hour, and finally finished it now--at 1:03pm CST)

The Ugly Wish Jar

2007-12-31T23:22:00.000-06:00

image in honor of the Latino tradition of eating 12 grapes at the stroke of the New Year. From here.

“Do you think the Muse will get offended?” I asked, more than a trifle anxiously, as I clutched my newly decorated wish jar.

“Um...” He seemed to be searching for a way to be diplomatic. “It might...amuse her?”

I took another look at my little jar, and I had to admit the truth. It is, shall we say, unpretty. No, I am not going to post pictures of it--it's frankly embarrassing. It looks a bit like a slightly advanced two year old was let loose with crayons and scissors (safety, of course). I am 34 years old.

Already I was looking for ways to distance myself from it...this childish scrawl, earnestly declaring my one great wish for 2008. Covered in crayon markings, some of them by Madam, most of them by me. I thought, “Maybe I should learn how to draw first, really take the time to find some nice magazine pictures...or I could ask Jessie to make me one! Yes...that would work!”

No.

Because I realized that this amateurish effort, this ugly little jar, was showing me exactly what I need to know about writing as well. I need to get it out of my head, and onto the page, and at first, it will look exactly like the banner on this jar. Because there is so much I don't know. Because a lot of the time, it's just all a mess. But if it's outside of me, then maybe, maybe I can do something with it.

So the jar will stay as is, at least for now. If I suddenly develop more visual skill, I may improve it.

Then again, maybe the Muse will be amused enough to stay around.
____________________________________

Is it any surprise that I love New Year's Eve? Already a pleasant haze of nostalgia surrounds the last year, like a book I read and remember dimly. It all already feels, well, past, and the new year beckons invitingly, a new year in which anything might happen. Not that 2007 wasn't a good year—Madam grew taller and rounder and more tempestuous and funny. TEG and I re-discovered each other and our relationship, and started working together more with Madam. I wrote some stories that I genuinely love—that don't even feel like they came from me. I made new friends. I reached new insights about my family, and started to make peace with never quite getting their approval.

And this year, I followed so many of your stories, your adventures, found myself inspired, calmed, thrilled, excited by your words and your artful amazing selves. Thank you, thank you, for being YOU. I admire you all more than I can say. I hope this year is a continuation of all of the great things you all are already doing, and some new ones, for fun. And I hope that we all let go, finally, of those old ghosts of fear, of ego, of hesitation and self-doubt and silencing. I know I'm ready, and I know even more than you are.

If I had to pick a phrase to sum up my year, I would choose one that Madam enjoys. Whenever I make a mistake, drop something, miss a bus, my little Madam looks at me and says, “'S OK Mama.” in the most reassuring voice.

And it feels right to give Madam the last word this year.

Because at this time last year, she couldn't say anything at all.

Full

2007-12-26T00:24:00.000-06:00

image from here.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been carrying myself tentatively, like an overfull jar of milk. See, I have spent every Christmas of my life with my parents. Every Christmas...but this one.

In November, TEG and I took a long, somber look at our finances and a long, considered look at our Madam, and thought about our own long, slow slide into exhaustion and shook our heads. In a decision that would have been inconceivable a few months ago, TEG and I decided to forgo our yearly trek into the Christmas Bermuda Triangle of travel.

For a while, all I felt was relief. We would be saving so much money! It would be relaxed, lowkey! I clung fiercely to these considerations, resolutely ignoring the occasional twinge caused by certain Christmas carols, or the hollowness I felt whenever I thought about my ability (or lack thereof) to give Madam a nice holiday.

So, I threw myself into preparations, assuming a virtue I didn't feel at first. Madam and I sung Christmas carols, drew snowpeople, read stories. I put up a Christmas tree, a small satellite of my parents' larger tree in Miami (I even bought some of the same ornaments). I bought (and wore) Santa hats.

I watched Madam as she started to absorb ideas about Santa and reindeer and bells that jingle-her eyes grew wise as she triumphantly made the connections. And something started to soften—I allowed myself to remember all of the Christmas traditions I had loved as a child: the tables groaning with pernil and arroz con pasas, the family myths that took me where I had never been, strolling the streets of Cartagena at midnight on Christmas Eve, the moonlight shivering silver and strange on the familiar cobblestones. The tree drooping with tinsel and ornaments, lush and abundant even in the years when our lives were lean. And I felt gratitude for that foundation, and for the opportunity to forge a new one for Madam.

It turned out to be a wonderful Christmas. I disappointed my parents, and I missed them, but no one died from it. We watched the snow fall thickly past our windows, white like benediction. Madam played with her toys and shook the tree bells like a kitten. TEG and I laughed, and snuggled when she was finally down for the night, lit only by the glow of twinkling lights.

Who knows what she will remember? But I hope I gave her something to look back on.

I hope I can carry some of this into the new year—this trust in my intuition, this ability to move forward even when the feelings and inspiration is not quite there.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of my wonderful, inspiring bloggy friends. Here is hoping that we all continue to learn from each other, and grow ceaselessly into our hearts' desires.

When Mardougrrl met TEG...

2007-12-18T00:09:00.000-06:00

Our first meeting was not auspicious. He was angry about something, sitting in the corner by the steps while the rest of us bowled (hey, it was Jersey). He was nursing a long necked beer (ah, underaged drinking) and generally looking morose.

So, of course, I was curious.

“Who is THAT?” I asked my then-best friend. After all, these were all of her new friends from college—I was the one who had gone away. I had a sad little twinge when I saw how full her new life was...without me. I was struggling at college, back home for my first Spring break. But...on the plus side, at least ONE of her new friends was cute.

You can guess which one.

“Oh, that's just TEG.” she replied. “I told you about him.” And then she proceeded to spill the sad events that had led to his blue mood (inaccurately, I found out later).

I saw him again a few days later—we all went to shoot pool. And again, he was taciturn. But we did say a few words to each other; words so prosaic they must be lost to posterity. No, really. I think they were something like, me: “I suck at pool.” him: “yeah, you kind of do.”

Fast forward to the end of the summer before the beginning of sophomore year, a few days before I had to return to college. My best friend (at the time, alas, we are dunzo) and I were going to have dinner after a long, tense time. We were vowing to rebuild our decade old friendship. So, I was surprised to see TEG sitting on her stoop, yanking off his tie and shoving it into his pocket.

Surprised, but not entirely displeased.
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Not a lot of friendship-rebuilding took place that night. Instead, I spent ALL night talking to TEG—arguing about Zen Buddhism and art and philosophy and psychology and technology and, well, everything. My brain was buzzing. I had never been able to speak with ANYONE in quite this way. I was used to shoving parts of myself into the background with my friends, family, boyfriends. TEG saw all of me, immediately. “You are a writer.” he said to me. I tried not to smile, pleased. “Why would you say that?” He rolled his eyes. “It's so OBVIOUS.”

I asked my friend whether she had mentioned my dreams to TEG. “Nope, writing never came up.”

After I got home that night, I told my mother, “I met the most wonderful guy, but I don't think I'll ever see him again.”

She gave me a sleepy smile. “If it's meant to be, mija, it will be.”

A few days later, we went to the beach together. By this time I was hardcore flirting, but TEG was being OBLIVIOUS and yet also delightful and smart and adorable. Did I mention that by now I had a serious crush?

I mean, he threw my Keds into the ocean. How could I NOT?

Fast forward to a few days before Thanksgiving break. I am not someone who usually taps into premonitions; in fact, I am usually the last to know what the Universe has in mind. But...I had a vivid dream that TEG and I would get together. I woke with the absolute CERTAINTY that it would happen.

We got together at our favorite diner during Thanksgiving break, and TEG admitted, frankly, that “I was going to ask you out, but then I thought...nahhh.”

Surprisingly, that didn't discourage me. Validation! He felt the same way. Now I knew it was going to happen. I just didn't know when.

On December 18, 1992, it did. He called me at school, while I was procrastinating with writing up my final exam papers. My roommate had already gone home for wintersession.

“Uh, I'm not asking you for a date; I'm asking you to be my girlfriend.” We were always on the same wave length, after all.

A few days later, I went back home and to TEG.

Sample conversation from our first date. me: “I never want to get married OR have children.”

Y'all can stop laughing now.

I can't say I never imagined that TEG and I would last this long. It might sound cheesy, but from the beginning, I always knew we belonged together. And it hasn't always been easy—we've both changed a lot in these fifteen years. We've gotten married (twice) and have a toddler who rules our hearts.

And yet, nothing has changed. The conversation has never stopped. He's still my favorite person to talk to in the world. He's still the one I run to with every blessing, every hurt.

Happy fifteenth anniversary, TEG. Many, many more.

The silence

2007-12-15T00:06:00.000-06:00

My silence has been filled with words.

The words that I have been painstakingly repeating, working with Madam everyday, watching her face light up as she achieves some sort of mastery.

TEG's exasperated “Just WRITE already!” after too many days of watching me sit on the couch jangling and jonesing for a better metaphor than that one about the junkies. I've lived a sheltered life; never met a junkie.

The long list of DO NOTs—as in “DO NOT complain, or write something embarrassing, or write about loneliness, or write something depressing or ugly, or write yet ANOTHER post that is just a “middle” without much of a beginning or an end.” I like posts that sum up something true, but lately, as I tunnel through a middle I just get to...more middle.

I am embarrassed to admit how childishly happy I was when I decided to take a break. I felt the satisfaction of the toddler tantrum. If words were going to be so hard, then to hell with words! I didn't need them! I would just...stop! Hurray!

It didn't take long before I started missing this place, but by then the gulf between writing and me had grown so much that I couldn't remember what good writing even looked like, sounded like, felt like. I could vaguely remember that every sentence had a subject and a...something that begins with V. And every word seemed linked, inexorably, to a chain of events that led to another writing mess I couldn't fix. It was enough to lead me back to the television.

So I did the next best thing to writing. I started reading, with a desperate desire to stuff the silence with other people's words. You know. Good words. Unfortunately, with the exception of one amazing book, all of the others tended to run together. I couldn't concentrate. My eyes skimmed over the same sentences again, and again, willing an inspiration that never came. I stitched together comfort from pieces of other blogs, other books. It was like standing alongside my own thoughts.

It was better than nothing.

My silence is littered with the detritus of stories that emerged half-born, during odd twilight hours of nursing and putting Madam to sleep. Characters that seemed like they were really going somewhere, with something to say, only to sputter into a sullen quiet as soon as I got near the page. There was a window, and I had missed it.

In all of this notwriting, I discovered that I spend all of my writing time clenched, waiting to be interrupted. Deciding NOT to write until I could guarantee that it wouldn't happen AGAIN.

I have a two year old. Like THAT'S gonna happen.

My silence told me that waiting for the perfect uninterrupted time and being furious that it never came, for me, was a bit like being angry that the in breath was inevitably followed by the out breath. (I've been reading some Buddhism during this break. It's been sinking in.).

This is not the post I wanted to write on my return. I wanted to have something to bring back to the tribe—a summing up full of lush, beautiful language. But that post was light years away. I have to let go of the shimmering promise that if I just wait...a little...longer, I will be able to write beautifully and render the ideal stories in my head PERFECTLY. Think my way out of the block.

But I have learned (again...) that notwriting begets notwriting.

Let's hope the opposite is true.

Sunday Scribbling: Misspent Youth-Psyche

2007-11-25T22:40:00.000-06:00

From here

Ed Note: Thanks to everyone who commented below. Things...have been better. And if you don't have anything nice to say... Anyway, I didn't intend to come back, but I couldn't resist this prompt. My story is a bit of a retelling of the Cupid/Psyche myth. Happy Thanksgiving (belated!)

_________________________________
Beauty was the coin of my realm and I was beautiful—or so they said. “Don't waste it,” my abuela warned. “Beauty misspent is like youth...gone forever.” But I couldn't help it...I was looking for something. I wanted to see this beauty that everyone else swore they saw. When I looked, I could see shiny, pretty things, but in pieces—boxed away from me. “You have eyes like cuentos.” My abuelo said. Like gems. Or stories. So I drifted in and out of bars, lured by the glitter of hard lined men who fell before me and swore, “Oh, baby, baby, I want to wor-ship!” But when I squinted past their electric lust, I saw the darkened temples they left behind them, full of dust and despair. And I steered clear. My coins wouldn't go too far here. I moved on.

And my Mami and Papi—no help there. “You are so beautiful, mija,” they would say, pursed lips disapproving, like I had gotten away with something.

So it was no surprise when I fell for the Dragon and his promises of “everything, baby.” I shivered on the mountaintop, white dress lapping against my bare ankles, and waited.

But the Dragon...he never showed. Maybe it was all too easy.

Someone Else came and gave me shelter. And we rose and fell and I could see myself, whole. It didn't even matter that I couldn't see his face because I could feel the beauty for the first time, and it was in him, and oh, I wanted to wor-ship.

Only one thing. The coins, again. “We gotta save it all up...now. No seeking because what will you find?” And I ran my hand over his eyelids and saved up the words that would have fallen spendthrift from my mouth.
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But I couldn't keep my cuento eyes closed forever, and the voices—the ones that hate on through to the other side—curled up under the spent sheets and hissed their doom song. “What is he hiding? Is he a monster? Are you?”

I had to look, I had to, and the candle shook. One, two, three drops of wax round like coins, and he was gone, in a wordless sigh like smoke.

And then I broke all of the worthless mirrors. I sat in the middle of a pile of useless gold, my heart a barren field. And my records played until until the needle slipped, hissed its nothing song.

Then I gathered up, me to me, and went to search.

Mami and Papi shook their heads and closed the door.

Abuelo and Abuela tried to make me hide, wait until it passed. And so I ran.

I dug my fingers in the ground and the ants ran around them, their spindly legs tapping out urgent rhythms. “Give us some coins,” they said, and so I did, and watched as they glinted off into the earth.

The reeds gave covered me with golden fleece during the rimy night, and whispered secrets into my dreams, twirling around my coins while I slept.

But I was still lost. And so I looked to what I thought was real—back to the world of bars and men. If I couldn't see him, I wanted to be seen. I threw my money around now, but it didn't do any good. The men glanced twice and waited and moved past me. The women whispered of beauty's resurrecting potion, sold for a price. And I paid it.

When I finally woke, fog choked the walls, which grew thick honeysuckle vines and the air swooned as he walked in. And all I could see was my anger, and all of the youth and beauty that I'd thrown away.

“I got no more coins. Beauty's dead.” I said, defiant. “Nothing left to lose, nothing to save. But if I did...I wouldn't close my eyes and turn away again.”

He said nothing, just held out his arms with that sidelong grin, and then the fog burned away and I could see burnished gold at the base of every vine that grew. And I knew. Useless coins might be seeds, after all, and a misspent youth the tilling of a seeming barren field.

And your field, even yours, can shatter into a million violet flowers, and bloom.

To read more tales of misspent youth, go here.

Hiatus

2007-11-02T22:38:00.000-05:00

I'm out of words at the moment (and at a bad time--Nano is a nono this year, alas).

I need to refill the well.

See you soon.

Ouch!

2007-10-21T23:30:00.000-05:00

From mptv.net.

Is the universe trying to tell me something? First it was my scratched eye (ouch) and then, just as that started to heal, I developed a HUGE toothache, complete with Brando-esque cheek, circa The Godfather.

It's not ever a look I thought I would cultivate.

I'm actually in quite a bit of pain, alas, so I won't be around much until I hie to a dentist this week.

Remind me to tell you about this new writing motivation book I am reading, Write is a Verb. If you have trouble dragging yourself to the keyboard...this might be able to nudge you closer.

And here's a question for you all to think about...how do you take advice? Meaning, how do you take information from a class, or a book, or a blog, or a friend, and add it into your life so that it makes an impact?

See you when I don't look so much like a squirrel.

PS: Bloglines readers...is this better?

PPS: Thank you for all of your wisdom about the Madam. I will take all of your words with me when I meet with her team (what a strange word) this week.

On Madam and the Universe

2007-10-17T23:31:00.000-05:00

It's strange that I don't write that often about Madam, considering that she's so central in my life. Part of it is that I have not yet mastered the gift to converting our little inside jokes and outings into stories that would interest anyone except immediate family. Also, whenever I am inclined to complain about tantrums, etc, I like to take a little time to let those particular feelings blow over. So I end up not writing much at all.

But, honestly, the main reason is that I am waiting for the day that I can write about all of the cute things she says.

We're not there yet.

I've mentioned that Madam is having speech difficulties, yes? After some dithering about whether or not to screen her for possible intervention, we finally decided to go forward and test her.

It's a peculiar feeling, watching someone test your child. I was sitting on my hands the whole time, to keep from jumping in. I wanted to pass Madam a cheat sheet, or something. I wanted to tell the nice tester that “she KNOWS this, no really...she does.” Mostly, I managed to behave (although I may have blurted out an answer or possibly two). The whole thing was complicated by the fact that Madam is EXTREMELY shy around strangers, thus, I could barely get her to say ANYTHING to the teacher, or to follow her directions. It took a very long time for her curiosity to overpower her foreboding.

I knew the tester was not getting an accurate picture of Madam. But there was no way for me to prove it.

She's gotten evaluated a few more times since then, and while now she can say some words, they're pretty much unintelligible to everyone except TEG and me. So she's been recommended for services—not just speech therapy, but also possibly occupational therapy to help with the shyness.

This is all good news. But as a mother, of course, it's hard not to feel that I've failed her. We've been working on all this for so long-the shyness, the speech, but I just couldn't help her. And of course, I start questioning every decision—have I been too lenient? Not lenient enough? Does she remember those days in NICU, and not feel sufficiently bonded with me? Did I eat too much tuna while pregnant? You get the idea.

So, I've been a trifle blue the past few days. This has been compounded by the weather—I have SAD and it's been consistently gray for over a week. And my loneliness—I feel like I AM loneliness lately, and people have to recoil to protect themselves from my contagion.

And just forget the writing. Why did I sign up for Nanowrimo 2007? Oy.

Last night, as I went to bed, I was worrying all of these issues around like beads on a mental string. Thoroughly worn, I did something I have not done in a while. I prayed...just a simple request for relief. “I just want something good to happen.”

Well, today, I went to check my mail and there it was. A Laini's Lady and Not for Robots pin! Just a little treat from one of favorite people.

So, thank you, Universe. That is EXACTLY what I meant.

Now I'll be getting out of my own head and helping my Madam in anyway I can.

PS: Please excuse any misspellings or weirdness in this post--I have scratched my retina (I think) and so I can only see out of one eye--barely. :(

Sunday Scribbling: First job (a story)

2007-10-15T00:24:00.000-05:00

You can see my mother's first job on basic cable everyday at 5pm EST. Just Us Kids is one of those annoying family-friendly sitcoms that seems to have no beginning and no end, but exist in some alternate, candy colored universe without rain designed to make you feel, well, unfriendly towards your own family, I guess. My mother played the pre-teen princess on the show, Carrie Butterhill. On her character's birthday, the producers got Neil Diamond to do a cameo and sing “Sweet Caroline.”

That's the kind of show it was.

Now, I am sure you've seen this tele-wallpaper at some point in your life. An airport gate, a doctor's office. A hangover. And it slid past your eyes and off into oblivion, as it deserved.

But that never happened with us. No, every day, we gathered in front of the television—Josie, Todd, and me—Carrie.

Yes, I am well aware about how creepy that is.

It wasn't always that way. I remember spending hours with Mom, reading books and singing nursery rhymes. I swear, she had more energy for all of that stuff than I did. I felt like I was keeping up with her. We never watched television.

Things changed when Josie and Todd were born. Mom had looked blank, confused. “I didn't plan for twins,” she kept saying to me, as though I had been the one to change the script on her. And they were a handful. They screamed when she tried to sing, threw their books instead of listening to her read them. I could see Mom staring longingly at the door. I hoped that she would remember that I'd never been that much trouble, and would take me with her.

One day she said “OK, FINE” and turned on the television. While she was flipping through the channels, Josie suddenly shrieked, “Mommy!” And so it was—Mommy, about 20 years or so earlier. A lot thinner and a lot blonder, but still...something around the eyes was still, and always, Mom.

“Oh.” Mom said, pausing to look down and fiddle with the remote. A small smile bloomed on her face.

“Did you know about this?” I'm not sure what I was accusing her of.

“What? No...I mean, yeah, I knew about the SHOW, obviously, but it's been off the air for so many years...” She trailed off, and stared back into the small glassed in box that held her former self. “My first job.”

I feel like I had known that, somewhere, like Daddy had sat me down solemnly when I was smaller and told me. It had felt important, like a secret. “Your mother was on television,” he had said. “It was a long time ago.” His voice had gone quiet. He had looked off towards the window, then back at me, as though pressing me to hear whatever he wasn't saying. But I couldn't. I was only eight or so then; the twins newborns. He left us shortly thereafter. Mom never held it against him. “He said he couldn't 'do Ohio' anymore.” And then she would laugh, once.

Now the twins sat, silent, and watched that dumb show from beginning to end. Every time Mom's character walked into the frame, they clapped, and whispered, “Mommy.”

“Shouldn't we be turning it off now?” I raised my voice slightly, to be heard above the moronic laugh track.

“Shush...I remember this scene.” The remote hung useless in her hand and it was as though she was lost.
(more)

Well, after that, Josie and Todd demanded to see “Mommy” everyday and Mom gave in, everyday. It became a regular part of our day—our time with Carrie Butterhill. We watched her fight for more allowance, struggle with homework, cry over boys—always looking perfect. Always fixing everything by the twenty-eighth minute or so (I counted). I think the twins were beginning to get confused, honestly. They had Mom, then the “TV Mom,” and, always, Carrie. Sometimes they would look at me as though they couldn't quite place me.

One day, I came home from school and found Mom alone, sitting at the kitchen table, leafing through a fat photo album. I leaned over her, expecting to see pictures of a smiling Josie covered in mud, or Todd on his trike. Or even a baby me.

The pages were crowded with publicity pictures, magazine articles. Mom smiling coyly, blandly, sweetly. Carrie everywhere. I stared hard at the pictures, until I could see them behind my eyelids.

“Where are the twins? And why aren't you at work?”

“Did you know that Scott Baio gave me my first kiss? Well, mine and Carrie's.” Her voice went up when she said kiss, like she was channeling a twelve year old.

“Who?” I grabbed four cookies, then put one back.

She sighed. “I always forget you're just thirteen, Car.”

“You didn't answer me.”

“The twins are with Grandma and work, ugh...I think I need to try something new.” She fluffed her hair then, and I was filled with horror.

“New, like TV? Another show?”

She giggled. “That's so sweet that you think that!” Twelve year old voice again. “But no...” she tugged on one of the publicity stills. “Just something with better hours. You know...more of a future.” She glanced out the kitchen window. It was so dark outside already that the window reflected the kitchen back to us, in frosted miniature. “Maybe it's just winter.” She frowned at me, picked at one of my split ends. “You need a haircut.”

“I don't need one, and anyway, dental work doesn't have a future?”

“Not unless you're the dentist.”

While Mom was picking up the twins, I looked at her album again. At my age, already earning money. Famous. Beautiful. And now she was forty, still beautiful, stuck in a strip mall dental office, checking insurance cards on the phone. “Doing” Ohio because Daddy couldn't.

Maybe what I needed was to find a job.

On Monday I cut school after lunch and went to the mall to think—something about all of the noise made the inside of my own head quiet. And then I saw the line. Have you got what it takes to be a model? The wannabes were already lined up, some two and three deep in places. I weaved myself in and out of the line, always needing to get past them to check myself in the windows of the stores. Tall for my age. Gangly. I didn't look like Mom, or Josie, both beauties. I looked like Grandma—like I'd seen something I wish I hadn't, and I didn't think I should tell . Have you got what it takes? Suddenly, it was though Carrie Butterhill was asking me, and I wanted to answer.

It moved faster than I expected, that line. It was like standing line to get a picture with Santa, that same sense of fear and joy crowding in your throat.

Soon I was behind the wobbly fake-wall. No Santa throne; in fact, it didn't look like much—rolled down beige background, like the maps at school. Wires and black carry cases everywhere. A single metal stool, rusted a bit around the foot rest.

The bored photographer took pictures of everyone, obligingly, and two women looked at them, whispering about hair color and crossed eyes. The women looked glamorous. They didn't belong in a mall in Ohio on a January Monday.

It occurred to me that this was a scam. The mall heat dried up my eyes and I didn't want to look at anything. I started to back out of the line.

“You gonna stay still, or what?” Before I knew it I was sitting on a stool, the photographer moving me before eyeing me in his viewfinder. Then he looked back, startled.

“You're not bad. You ever done this before?” At his tone, the two women both stopped and stared at me.

“No.” I'm not sure what made me add, “But my mother did.”

“Huh. You got good bones.” And then the photos went click, click and something inside of me went click, click back.

The women looked at my pictures, then at me, then back at my pictures again. “You know...we could use you. Maybe.” The photographer handed me his card. “Call us. We mean it.”

Taking the bus home, clutching my pictures and the card, I was dizzy. The smoke curls suspended in the blue winter sky were like happy question marks, and I was the answer. I could see the bus, the road, the dirty snow piled between the parked cars...I was a camera lens. And they were all beautiful.

I burst into the house, my mouth already open, the pictures snapping in my outstretched hand like a flag. It was time for Just Us Kids, but for once, I didn't care. We would all move to California. The two Carries merged, and I wanted everyone to see. I was fixing things.

Mom and the twins sat on the couch, reading. The twins sat on the couch, eyes half closed, mesmerized by Mom's story. A crumpled newspaper lay next to her, text boxes circled with red ink, like little surprised mouths.

And the television was off.
___________________
Get hired by going here.

Mother-Talk book review: The Reincarnationist

2007-10-12T00:06:00.000-05:00

What happens when you die? Is it the end of the line—you get one turn on this earth and that's it? Or do our souls return again and again...perhaps to right ancient wrongs? That is the tantalizing premise of The Reincarnationist, the new suspense novel by M.J. Rose (Lip Service, The Delilah Complex).

Josh Ryder, a photojournalist, is on assignment in Rome when he becomes critically injured in a terrorist attack. As he recovers, he begins to experience “memory lurches”--flashbacks to what seems to be a past-life as Julius, a pagan priest in ancient Rome who is fighting battles both without (religious warfare has engulfed Rome) and within (a forbidden love affair with a Vestal Virgin, Sabina). His past and present blur to such an extent that he fears he has lost his mind.

Desperate for answers, he joins the Phoenix Foundation, an organization that studies reports of reincarnation and past life experiences in children. Under their auspices, he returns to Rome to investigate a newly discovered tomb that seems to have some connection to his memories.

Unfortunately for him, he is not the only one interested in the contents of the tomb—the fabled Memory Stones, mystical gems that give the owner the ability to go freely into the past. And others are willing to kill to possess those secrets.

Like Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code, to which The Reincarnationist will inevitably be compared, Rose manages to weave a great deal of research on religious myth and past-life regression into her tale. The flashbacks to ancient Rome are steeped in this scholarship—that world is evoked in dizzying immediacy. In fact, I always felt a little let down by the return to the contemporary story--the writing for these sections was terse, flatter. Josh and his cohorts didn't hold my interest as strongly as Julius and Sabine—the stakes for the latter simply felt higher. Not to mention, their love making allows Rose to show off her skills at erotic writing. The affair is sexy and intense.

Rose also works on a large canvas, with the result that it can be difficult to keep track of some of the characters and their place in the plot. I consider myself a fairly attentive reader, but I found myself paging back and forth to remind myself of who did what. As a writer, I'd love to see an example of Rose's outline—I admire her ability to pay off so many disparate stories.

After a slow start, The Reincarnationist managed to reel me in and keep me sneaking pages all day. Which doesn't say much for my mothering, but hey, I did eventually put the book away. OK, fine, I finished it, but let's not quibble...

This is the first book in a new series, which makes sense, as Rose leaves us with the strong suggestion that there are more stories to be told here. Obviously, she has a wealth of material to choose from. I'll be waiting to learn (and read) more.
_________________________________

To learn more about current research in the field, please visit The Reincarnationist. To read more from M. J. Rose, please visit her blog. Also, you can check out a podcast interview with the author here. To read more reviews of The Reincarnationist, please visit Mother-Talk.

All about books-a meme

2007-10-09T16:01:00.000-05:00

The wonderful Kate at Mothers Who Write tagged me for this meme, and it's a good thing too, as my imagination is as dry as a worried old bone this week!

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why? I love hardcovers for their durability, but nothing beats a paperback for slipping into a diaper bag without causing too much extra weight.

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it...Words to Live By. Or else Green Gables. I'm a dork for that series.

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is...this is a hard one for me, but I'd have to say it's this one from On The Road:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

4. The author (alive or diseased) I would love to have lunch with would be...since I have been on a bit of Virginia Woolf kick lately, I would have to say her. Although I would also LOVE to meet Anne Tyler. She's one of my idols and she gives so few interviews.

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…I am going to cheat a little bit here and say the collected works of Jane Austen. They're published as ONE book, and I think I would be happy spending all of that tropical time with Darcy, Elizabeth, Marianne and Elinor (but not Fanny, she's a bit of a drip).

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…emanated light from within the book itself, so I could read in the dark without necessarily disturbing TEG or Madam.

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of…my favorite library as a child...I loved to sit in the middle of the aisle and pull out those big, magical old books. The mildew smelled exactly like wisdom to me.

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be...probably Anne of Green Gables, once she stopped being an orphan. I'd like to live inside her life AND her mind.

9. The most overestimated book of all time is…I don't know about "all time" but since Kate mentioned my first pick The Corrections, I may have to jump in with my second. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. I hate books where so much energy is spent telling me how brilliant and beautiful a main character is, and how much people love her. It makes me rebelliously end up loathing her.

10. I hate it when a book...fails to make me care about the main characters. No amount of gorgeous writing can salvage it for me then.

I'm tagging: Heather, Rach, Amber, Lisa and Deirdre for this one.

Lead with your strengths

2007-10-04T01:01:00.000-05:00

I don't really learn from my mistakes. Or more accurately, I don't really learn anything new from them. That's because I usually have a sense when things are going to fail; even as I take my first tentative steps, a gonging voice in my head says, “No, go back.” I usually ignore said gonging voice, because it can be difficult to distinguish it from my fear. And it IS fear just often enough to keep me moving in the wrong direction. Alas, this means I don't have a healthy respect for my intuition, either. I am working on that.

But lately, I have been learning from my failed first draft (sadly, still uncompleted) of my novel. It's been interesting analyzing all of the steps that went wrong. Losing the thread of my story in a fear that it wasn't novelistic enough. Giving all of the juicy conflicts to secondary/main characters instead of my poor, ignored main character. Being too vague about my main character's deepest desires.

There is another lesson here, though, and one that surprised me. I didn't lead with my strengths. See, I tend to underwrite, which is why the mini-story blog format works so well for me. I'm not sure if its because I am pressed for time, or because I am rushing to follow the scent of the inspiration, but my writings to be a bit spare. Every now and then, someone will comment on one of my little tales and say that they “can see the characters in a novel.” I squint at my story, words grown strange, to see if perhaps there is something there that I missed. Inevitably, no. I recorded all of my invention. I wish it were different. My stories are the records of spent inspirations.

Somewhere along the way, I read that writers should always overwrite their first drafts. The idea being that if you write and write, you will discover new patterns, ideas, etc that might not have seem apparent upon first vision. It's a good idea, in theory. But for me, theory is where it should have remained.

I tried to overwrite this failed draft, and got hopelessly bogged down in my own excessive verbiage. Instead of seeing things more clearly, I felt myself growing confused as I piled on more and more ideas, details, plot points, backstory. My computer started to make the distinct whir of a tire trapped in rapidly hardening cement. My main character grew more reticent and a little passive, made lazy by the idea that it would take her five, six pages just to cross the room to pick up a nursing bra.

Proust, I am not.

So, now that I am about to begin again, I plan to write my natural way, at least for the first draft. Lean. Perhaps it will give me less to cut, and I might miss out on some interesting digressions, but at least I'll have a story to shape into a second, richer draft.

Do you all do this, in your writing or in your life—try to follow some advice that feels about as right for you as wearing your shoes on your hands in the middle of a blizzard, and then wonder why something that was working, albeit in fits and starts, now sits leaden and immobile?

Sunday Scribbling: Power, full and less

2007-09-29T00:02:00.001-05:00

Generic college picture from here.

We were there to learn to be powerful. We were the women who were going to secure the promises of feminism— exciting careers, equitable relationships, endless opportunities. No glass ceiling for us. It was going to be all sky, baby.

I remember driving up for my first view of the campus. Punkish Middle Sister volunteered to come with me (grudgingly—she was in the throes of a new romance and was loathe to leave). We drove through the snaking road, temporarily blinded by the streak of sunlight glittering in the Gothic windows of the central tower on campus.

“Wow...it's like the movies,” she said, suitably impressed. “Yeah, real Ivy and everything.” I was trying to be flip, trying to act like I was seriously considering going to another school. But this was the best college I had gotten into. This was going to be it. The air smelled rural, like tilled soil and grass. I watched the girls (I did not know to call them women yet) walking under the thickly clustered trees. Did they look happy? Intellectually fulfilled? Did they look powerful? I couldn't tell yet. But they were here, and that had to mean something. Unlike me, they looked like they could have gone anywhere.

We left shortly after a rousing speech by the college's President. “Look, why drag it out?” Sister argued. “You know this is where you will be.” And where she wanted to be was with her boyfriend.

Anyway, I couldn't disagree.

I was still surprised that I had managed to get into this type of school, coming from my decidedly ordinary high school. We were a school known more for the speed and talent of our football players than our academics. But some of us had seized on classes, challenging ourselves to do better, learn more. There was nothing better than the feeling of getting it RIGHT...the math problem, the analysis of the novel, the history question. We had found our talents and we were hooked. Truth be told, we were cocky...perhaps over-valuing ourselves to make up for a lack of enthusiasm in our peers.

I didn't know much about my new college except that it was very highly regarded, very academically rigorous, and that it was all-women. The first two attributes were enough for me. The last one...well, I'd learn to deal. “That's good. You're going to get an education. You don't need boys,” my father said. I rolled my eyes behind his back. I'd managed to juggled top grades and a complicated dating schedule in high school. I had no doubt that I'd be able to do the same in college. There were LOTS of co-ed schools nearby.

So I arrived, with my steamer trunks packed full of Gap jeans and romantic notions. My parents stood in front of me, my father in his baseball cap and my mother in her fuchsia slacks. We didn't look like the other families, like we'd done this before and would do this again. Those other families seemed confident. They knew who to ask for information. They were Fitzgerald people. Their voices sounded like money.
(more)

Nothing I learned as I settled into campus disputed that first impression. My new classmates were not only top scholars, but also poised and cultured women. They were also, mostly, wealthy. I'm not just talking about money. They had something I hungered for even more. Experience. These women had traveled, lived abroad, taken the kinds of enrichment classes I'd always dreamed about. They knew how to behave in every situation. They knew they would make their mark, their power was taken for granted. They knew where they belonged in the world. On top.

I never knew what it was like to feel so persistently wrong until I started the Right School. I watched my classmates take risks, experiment with every aspect of their lives, confident that even if they made a mistake, they would be fine. We were all women, they said—we had been kept down by society and now we had to make up for lost time. But I didn't feel that kinship. I couldn't forget that I was going to be debt for years after I graduated. I wasn't free like that.

Why couldn't their assurance rub off on me? As I inched through the dining hall line, I listened to the raucous Spanish in the kitchen. My well meaning classmates were gracious to the help, but usually they just ignored them. Brown hands spooned the baked beans into the warming trays. Brown people washed the enormous piles of plates, bowls, silverware. I looked up at the workers, smiled. “I'm just like you!” They smiled back, distant and polite. I didn't want them to think I was privileged, because it didn't feel that way to me.

I'm embarrassed to think of how condescending I must have seemed.

So, maybe they were right. I was privileged, even if it was costing me dearly. So then, why I couldn't bring myself to be practical—to study economics and go to business school, or law school like my oldest sister? Because the main privilege I wanted to claim was the right to study whatever I wanted, to follow my dreams just like my friends were doing.

Especially since I found my native heath, my powerful place. The classroom. I wasn't as brilliant as most of my classmates, but I was in love with my English classes, psychology, anthropology, sociology. The pleasure I derived from unpacking a dense poem, or from connecting what I learned about !Kung women with a nineteenth century novel—it made my class resentments, my self-hatred, melt away. I felt dizzy with it. I felt most deeply myself...walking through the campus alone, my feet crunching on the carpet of leaves, talking to myself about all the things I was discovering.

I only felt powerful when I was alone.

How I wish I could give this story a happy ending, perhaps about a caterpillar who became a butterfly. But I arrived a tentative moth, and I didn't leave that way.

Sometimes I wonder if I wasted my expensive education. I'm not a captain of industry. I didn't succeed in the world of work. I'm in a traditional marriage, a stay at home mother who is not exactly challenging the patriarchy on a daily basis. I can fake my way through an encounter with the elite, but I can never duplicate their sense of solid entitlement. Those years were marred by intense depressions that colored everything gray.

But then, I remember finally getting to know some of my classmates, and learning to see them as people, not just as little Daisy Buchanans. And I remember those ecstatic walks around campus, drunk on its beauty and surfing on the ideas that seemed to expand my vision in every direction. Over a decade later, I still remember that power.

And I long to feel it again.

_______________
Fight and claim the power here.

The Bad Book

2007-09-25T17:21:00.000-05:00

From here.

I've adjusted to most of what motherhood entails, for me. I am used to waking up in the night, grudgingly used to being interrupted at the most exciting moment of the book or the writing. I am used to being asked for a snack, then having the same snack rejected for some inexplicable reason.

But I miss Friday nights.

My parents always went out on Friday nights. Always. Even if it was just to a neighbor's house. They could be fighting, shouting over the banging of the closet door and the dance music they always used to get into the Friday mood. But they would go out. Of that there was no doubt.

Thus, I think that same desire is encoded in my emotional DNA. TEG indulged it, pre-parenthood. We might stay home on a Saturday and cuddle on the couch with a movie. We might even go to bed early. But Fridays sang their siren song, luring us out of our house and into the red lit, unpredictability of the night.

So, even though the rest of the week I am (almost) perfectly content, on Fridays I get restless, staring at the ribbon of headlights streaking outside my window. We don't have babysitting, nor any family in the area, so my only outings on Friday nights are the ones in my imagination.

That's when I read chick lit novels, the more frothy the better—something festive, preferably with a stylized picture of shoes. Or a martini glass. That kind of book. It feels a little illicit, like I am cheating on the more serious novels and nonfiction I read during the week.

Now, the thing is...most of these books are perfectly satisfactory. The situations can be a little ordinary, but the characters are well drawn, instantly likable. They follow all of the rules stated in my writing books—setting up the situation, following through with plot suggestions, etc. And, as a bonus the books feel like a couple of hours sitting at a woozy bar table with my single friends, gossiping. They feel like, well, Friday night.

But every now and then you find a book that brings all of those “writing book rules” into relief, and you learn exactly what you DON'T want to do.

I read most of one of those books this last Friday night. It started out promisingly enough, two friends living in London, secretly in love with each other and wondering why their love lives never seemed to work out. And then guy's first love reappears, after having left under mysterious circumstances....

You get the idea. I liked the characters, mostly. I loved the descriptions of London. I settled into my Friday night...until I realized I was thoroughly BORED. For starters, the two main characters kept talking about how wonderful they thought the other person was, but all you saw between them was arguments and history. Their so-called wonderful natures were not SHOWN, but only talked about.

Their work existed only as a glamorous backdrop to their fraught (ha) passion. There was no substance to any of it, and it didn't forward the story at all.

And then there was the flimsy obstacle between them. There was no real reason for them not to just be together, no compelling force keeping them apart. So instead, they acted in increasingly idiotic ways in order to pull the book along. That reminded me, as we all know, that contrivance is not a novelist's friend.

Finally, after yet another drunken and foolish plot twist, I put the book down in irritation. This was no gossip session...it was more like listening to a close friend defend her relationship with a clod you know is no good for her. And who needs a fictionalized version of that?

It wasn't all time wasted, though. I got a few fun London memories out of it (TEG and I went there on our mini-moon) and the realization that all of these writing books are finally sinking in. Sometimes you can learn more from bad art than from good.

Best of all...writer friends..we can do this. This book served as a motivating reminder of that.

So, go and give me something better to read. I'll try to do the same for you.

Sunday Scribbling: Hello, My Name Is...(a sketch)

2007-09-24T00:08:00.000-05:00

From here.

Ed note: This is a very rough draft of...something. A mood piece, really. I'm rusty.:)
____________________________

She sat up, so suddenly that she left her body's impression in the tangled quilt we'd been laying on. It looked like a discarded, lesser twin. We were in her parents' attic. It was summer, a long time ago.

“Don't you wish that feelings came with name tags...like those 'hello, my name is...' things? 'Hello, my name is sadness. Hello, my name is anger'?”

She was always saying stuff like that, asking questions out of the blue. I think she got them from the books she was always reading. I don't know. I rolled over on the floor, staring at the summer rain trailing down the skylight.

“How about 'hello, my name is happiness'?”

She curled her lips into a smirk. “Optimist.”

If you'd asked me when it started, when we started, I wouldn't have been able to answer you. We'd always lived near each other, spending time together at odd times. We never gave what we had a name.

I looked at her, sitting in a loose black t-shirt with her knees tucked in. In this light, you could really see her almost-prettiness. Her frizzy black hair tamed into a knot at the nape of her neck-her eyes big and jet black. She was like the first week of March, ugly Spring. My mother always said, “She's gonna be gorgeous...someday.” So I always looked at her twice-once for now and once for someday.

“Besides,” she continued. “You never see those feelings long enough for a 'hello.' It's always 'goodbye.' You can only feel sadness all the way.”

I laughed. I couldn't help it. She was being so dramatic, and I was just a boy. Oh, I wouldn't have referred to myself like that back then. I was a kid, or ideally a guy or a dude. But, I was just a boy. Gladys wasn't just a girl, though. Not even then.

I took her face in my hands and kissed her on the edge of her lips. She tasted like strawberry jam and witch hazel. “Hello, my name is joy.” That was the thing with Gladys. You always wanted to keep the argument going once it started, even if it hadn't been your idea. You ended up getting swept up in it.

I kissed her again. “Hello, my name is fun.” I kissed her more deeply. “Hello, my name is sexy.” She gave a smothered laugh against my lips then. And then we stopped talking.

Summer ended, as it always does, and we went back to our worlds. Gladys to her parochial girls' school, and me back to the tumble dryer of public school. One day, I was standing in my usual spot, talking to my usual friends. I don't remember about what. Nothing, probably. I was trying to be cool, but ordinary. Normal, as normal as a gangly seventeen year old guy could be. And then Gladys walked up to us. Not in uniform. I wish she had been. She was wearing some stupid hot pink dress and lime green tights underneath and big black boots. I couldn't even see early March, or 'someday.' There was only now, and now was a disaster.
(more)

I was trying really hard not to look at her, but she kept coming closer. Like she expected something. Meanwhile my friends watched the way you do when you are taking notes, getting ready to spread shit.

“Paul?”

I made my face go blank. “Uh...yeah. That's me.”

She was waiting for me to say something else, but I wouldn't acknowledge anything. Not even my name. And I was way better at waiting her out than she was at just standing there.

“Hello?” She gave it one last shot. Her voice sort of broke on the end.

“Yeah, bye.” My friends laughed now, nasty. I felt flushed with something dark and mean and happy. I'd finally managed to surprise her. I felt like I'd named myself.

She turned on her heel and left after that.

School, and school, and school. We didn't speak after that, and we never went back to that attic room. She was happy, though. I knew that much. She finally hit her “someday”—confident, had lots of friends, a boyfriend who held her hand through the halls. Probably he could answer all of her stupid questions with deep philosophy, or with quotes from the books she loved.

Sometimes, I walked up to her house, wondering what would happen if I rang her bell, wearing one of those stupid “hello, my name is...” stickers. Letting her fill in the blank, call me whatever she wanted. Starting again. But I never had the guts.

I was in my second year of college when I got the call. My mother, a sea of words like the static on the radio. Just a few words in perfect, clear focus. “Pills. Gladys. Funeral Monday.”

She was happy. I saw it whenever I took the time to look.

I wish I had shown her how to name it.

__________________________
To learn more names, go here.

Goodbye to my Beautiful Soul

2007-09-21T00:08:00.000-05:00

Lately, I have had a certain fascination for Virginia Woolf. She's always been one of those authors who was my model for everything I could never understand--forbiddingly brilliant. I spent years avoiding her. But now, she creeps into my consciousness a great deal. Why her? Why now? It seems to simple to say, “She was an amazing woman writer, who wrote even through unbearable pain.” Maybe it's just time for me to take a deep breath and fill in this gaping hole in my literary education. So far, I have approached her respectfully, through the back door—biographies, letters, essays. I am finally ready to dip myself into one of her novels—Mrs. Dalloway. I'm excited.

Given this new love affair, of course I noticed the little paperback book nestled on the “new books” table at one of my favorite local bookstores. It's exactly my kind of book too, literary self help. I admit that I want to learn from my novels—how to be a better, braver, wilder, more intense person. So I am always intrigued when I find a sympathetic guide for that quest.

I am usually hesitant to buy a new book—I'll wait until I can find it on the remainder table, or at the library. But this just felt...right somehow, so before I could talk myself out of it, I took it to the cashier and paid. (it helped that Madam was starting to whine, bringing my indecisive ruminations to a quick end).

People, I fell into this book. And it gave me that kind of “aha” moment you get when you see yourself so clearly in print that you dart your eyes around, wondering if its possible that you are truly THAT transparent. In the first chapter, Speak Up, the author mentions Hegel and his “Beautiful Soul”--a character in his writing who remains pure and ideal because he remains silent, thus protecting his self-concept as someone who is “deeper, and different” from other people.

I am not proud of that idea. I believe it actually made my cheeks burn as I read it...but it is me. I have been cherishing my own “beautiful soul”--in my life, in my blogging, in my life. I would rather remain silent, gloating over ideas and knowledge that will never be sullied by being expressed in my imperfect words. Isn't the book that lives in our head already perfect, without needing a crass word on paper to ruin it? I would say no, but my behavior speaks otherwise. And I realized that in order to move into a life that I actually WANT to live, I have to stammer out all of my wrong words. I have to write my mangled manuscript, no doubt ruining the Platonic ideal of my inspiration in the process. I have to write my blog posts, even if they feel half-baked, not eloquent. I have to tell people what I know, even if I am afraid that what I know is very little. Alas, I am probably not deeper than any of you, nor “different” in that delicious, teenage goth sort of way. And of course, now that I have spoken, I have removed all doubt.

From my explorations into Virginia Woolf's life, I have learned that she worked and worked over every manuscript, despairing over her ability to capture the ineffable nature of a mind thinking. Sometimes she succeeded (obviously). Other times, she feels that she failed.

I am so grateful to have her words—so grateful that she put them out onto paper instead of hoarding them in her mind. And so I'm going to keep trying to destroy my Beautiful Soul, so that I can finally get to my own imperfect, confused, visible words.

Facing it

2007-09-12T23:18:00.000-05:00

From the Cary Academy website

No ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams

I loved the writing of my first novel. I've never experienced that kind of flow--it seemed to be growing wider and more interesting from scene to scene. I felt immersed in the writing and the characters. I even made myself cry a few times. I was thrilled with it.

Until I read it.

It needed so much WORK. I realized I have a tendency to underwrite, to shorten scenes, hint when I should be showing the events. My little, beloved draft didn't have that wonderful thickness that a real novel has. On the contrary, it seemed, upon re-reading, to be a little shallow. It felt more like the rough outline for a novel than than the novel itself. And all of the problems that I had forced myself to ignore as I finished my draft...well, I still didn't know how to solve them. My story seemed a poor, plucked little sparrow. I was so disappointed, and put it away.

Now I am working on my second novel, and am trying very consciously to avoid the problems of the first. I have come up with a great deal more plot and elaborate background stories for all of the characters. I have what I think is a clever conceit—a road map which should help me through the sticky bog.

And I am unable to go on.

I wasn't really sure why, until tonight. I've spent the last few months castigating myself, “too lazy! Not a real writer! Lots of mothers write after their children are asleep...why can't you?” But every time I opened my document, or indeed, any document related to my novel, I just froze. I can take notes; in fact, I have laughed in glee at some of my fiendish plot twists. I just couldn't seem to turn any of those ideas into actual scenes.

I've spent the last two days reading through a writing book by Robert Olen Butler that has forced me to see things a different way. The author stresses writing from what he calls the “dreamspace”--writing from the “white-hot center.” Now, this kind of talk always makes me feel inadequate—because it seems to imply that unless you can go into a mystical trance, you aren't a real writer. And I disagree with several of his exhortations, i.e. don't ever write unless you are in the "zone"—for someone like me, sitting around waiting for the force of that perfect intuition is lethal. But, to his credit, he offers concrete suggestions for achieving this dream state. He also shows examples of what he calls”from the head” writing and contrasts them with more immediate, sensual work.

That's when it hit me. I've wanted to force myself to write a REAL NOVEL, full of complicated plots and reversals and deep meaning. I've tried to graft them all to the myths that offered the original inspiration. I've wanted to show off what I know, sound smart.Oh, I have a lot of ideas and psychological insight and theories--the problem is that they feel false, shoved onto my poor characters. And to that teetering tower, I've piled on a concern with the mechanics of skill.

You know those wedding dresses that seem to be drowning the bride in festoons of lace, net, taffeta, and billows? Yep, it's like that. I've made my little tale so complicated, I can't approach it anymore.

Butler talks about trying not to force your material into a structure too soon. Some stories naturally lend themselves to novels, while others to short stories or even poems. See, this isn't even something I want to face—the possibility that I am really a nonfiction narrative writer, or at best a short story writer. Those are the forms that have brought me the greatest writerly pleasure. But, oh, my dream is to write a novel. That's all I have ever wanted

So I am scrapping the cosmic MEANINGS and artful plotting and getting back into the humble things of my core story—even if they're not so smart. Even if they result in yet another underwritten novelette.

Because at least then, I'll be writing from the white-hot center again. I'll be writing true.

Sunday Scribbling: Writing Exorcism

2007-09-07T16:39:00.000-05:00

(From here.)

I admit it. I am obsessed with writing. Every detail. Writing books are like magic beans—I keep reading and buying them in the hopes that eventually, I'll be able to grow a Novel Beanstalk. Someday, I'll write up a catalog of every writing book I own, for your amazement and (it's OK, you can admit it) envy.

For years, I tried to deny my desire to write. It was almost too innate—too predetermined. I wanted to go to college and discover a hidden talent, something to change my destiny. And I tried. Photography. Music. Media. Art. Dance. I had fun, sure, none of those forms were really me. I still longed to write above all things. I just didn't think I really could. I loved books so passionately, I could never do them justice. I felt like I was cursed with just enough talent to understand the stories I loved so much, but not enough to create any myself.

Despite my wholesale ingestion of every writing text I could get my hands on, I've never felt confident. Part of the problem is the books themselves, I imagine. I have a very hard time taking the templates they offer and applying them to my own work. Where are my inciting incident, my antagonist, my hero's journey? Not always sure. I am beginning to suspect that the formulas only make sense after you have written something.

But another problem is mine. I compare myself to the books, point by point, until I find a dissonance. Then I sigh and try to think of something practical to do with my life.

Well, no more. Here is my exorcism of the most destructive ideas I believe about writing. I hope that seeing them outside of my mind will show us all how ridiculous they really are. Feel free to include your own crazymaking ideas about writing. Then we'll have a big bonfire and be free to discover new, better truths.

Whole books are out there in the ether, fully formed, waiting for me to sit and channel them into existence. They are perfect, and complete, and inevitable.
If I'm not in some sort of trance while writing...if my characters haven't taken over my fingers themselves...then I'm not producing quality work.
I need to be very smart, highly educated, and utterly fascinating to write.
I also need to be temperamental and more than a little insane.
Ideally, my wardrobe would consist of nothing other than peasant skirts, black chiffon dresses, and high heeled boots. And a beret.
Don't bother writing if you haven't lived in Paris, in a garret.
Books and babies don't mix.
Fiction is all that matters. Nonfiction writing isn't “real writing.”
I haven't done anything worth writing about, and yet, I must always “write what I know.”
Only writing directly into a work in progress matters, forget planning or notetaking or even just occasionally THINKING about what I want to say. If I need to think that much, I am not a real writer.
If my writing doesn't resemble the examples in the writing books, I am not a real writer.
If I am too unhappy, I must not really love writing.
If I am too happy, I must not be “deep” enough to be a writer.
Be suspicious if it comes too easily. Be suspicious if it's too hard.
Either you are a genius, or you are nothing. And you are probably not a genius.

If you see any of these ideas walking down the street, looking for a new home, be sure to cross the street. But first, give them a kick in the shins for me.
________________________
For more writing know-how, go here.

Write Stuff Short Story Contest: Skin

2007-09-06T13:26:00.000-05:00

Music plays everywhere, the Punjabi drumbeats that always sound exactly like happiness to me. My feet itch to dance, but it’s my mendhi party, so I sit instead, as the three mendhi artists write my fate on my hands and feet. I’m a bride. Finally, as my parents would say in relief. Finally, as my aunts and uncles would sigh. Finally, as my whole culture would shout, one collective shudder of joy. I had escaped that horrible fate, the one everyone had predicted when I went away to college. I wasn’t going to be some rebellious American girl, like Dadiji had predicted, staring balefully into her chai cup. Every relative was full of stories that had to be told. Warnings that had to be delivered. They tried to convince me. “Not that you shouldn’t go to college, beta. It’s important for you to be a smart, well educated girl. But…go closer to home. Stay with your parents. Lots of crazy things happen in this world. It’s not like home, you know. I see what it’s like. I watch the news.” I only managed to escape by promising that I would always remember who I was. Who I had to be.

Since all I could move was my head, I concentrated on watching the partiers, these people who came together for every wedding, naming, funeral, then scattered themselves to the winds again. These people who had seen me grow up in steps at each event. Family that never seemed to change, that seemed to exist only to celebrate, dressed in fine silks, bent by heavy gold jewelry. I couldn’t connect these people to the mundane tasks of life any more. It was like we kept them into storage and brought them out for parties.

I know how much my parents saved and scrimped for today. I remember my mother tracing her hands on the big motel ledger, muttering numbers to herself, chanting prayers for our prosperity in Hindi. They wanted to step out of the day to day too…everyone here was pretending to be in a Bollywood movie, or else back in India. Outside this hall might be gray Atlanta skies, but inside, we were all in Bombay. For a few days, my whole family stepped back into their native skin, speaking their language, eating their food, telling the same old stories and jokes, and singing the same songs that had been sung at their weddings.

All of the women invited were sitting around me on the floor, getting less elaborate mendhi on their hands, laughing as they tossed compliments and teased each other. Babies and toddlers ran around their mothers, sitting on the floor, thrilled to be taller than Mummy for once.

So I watched them, these mendhi women as they held their cones of putty like pencils and concentrated on covering every inch of my skin. They tucked their mangal sutras into their buns and wiped the tips of their cones carelessly on the old cotton saris they wore for their work. The green goop feels cool on me, like cucumbers on your eyes after a night at a smoky club. Not that I would know anything about that, ha ha. My brown skin turns into a canvas, full of swirls and pictures and lines. Telling the ageless story of every Indian wedding through my skin. I tried not to shift too much. One false move and everything that was so clear now, would smudge and become unrecognizable.

They continue to write on me, to draw the ancient wishes that would help turn me, for one day, into an incarnation of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth and Good Fortune.

And I wanted to be that. I wanted to make my parents proud, to take the seven steps that would turn me into a woman, into a wife. To wear the bridal sari and the sacred markings on my forehead, the jeweled bindi of a bride.

I wanted the mendhi to write over everything that had come before this day. The tumbled kisses as we danced, he and I. The feel of his calluses on my skin—hard meeting soft. The way his skin grew whiter when I told him, harsh so he would leave, that I would never choose him over my parents, over everything I was.

The way I felt it in my skin when he left and slammed the door.

My parents were surprised when I told them I was finally ready to be married. But they tugged on the family network and before I knew it, I was engaged. I like him, my betrothed. Like my parents would say, “He’s a nice boy. Good family.”

The mendhi was done. The women stood up, wiping their hands on their laps and stretching. Everyone crowded around me, their bare feet sounding like the tabla drums beating through the speakers. This was their favorite part of the ceremony.

“Look and see, Nisha…now you have to try to find his name in your mendhi. That's how you know he's the one who is fated for you!” I looked down at my hands, covered now by a gorgeous intricate design.

I tried, stared intently at hands grown beautiful and foreign. And they waited, these women I’ve known forever, waiting for me to become one of them.

I tried, muttered something. The aunties laughed and shouted, "She's just too modest, a proper blushing bride!"

But that wasn't the truth.

The truth is, I couldn't find it.
__________________________
For more entries in the Write Stuff Short Story Contest, go here.

East, West, Home's Best

2007-09-04T22:41:00.000-05:00

From here

When is a vacation not exactly a vacation?

When it leads to an unintended blogging break. I was prepared, nestling my new Macbook into the diaper bag like a cherished egg. Already anticipating the time I would have to write, while sipping some delicious cafe Cubano in my parents' sunny kitchen.

But, alas and alack...someone tampered with their wireless router and despite my best geeky attempts, I was unable to fix it.

It wasn't all terrible, though. I'm always inspired at my parents' house (which is strange, since they tend to be so critical of me) and this time was no different. Without the distraction of the internet, I was able to sit down and patiently retrace my steps through my story, figuring out where I was stuck and planning a tentative work-around. I was also able to read three wonderful novels, and two writing books besides. So, productive.

I missed this place, though. It was strange to be around people who aren't obsessed with what they are writing, or painting, or thinking.

I like our way better.
One slightly worrisome question for the parents out there—is it normal for Madam to be so uncomfortable around my parents, still? She saw them in July for her birthday (for a week) and just spent ten days at their house. And yet, she won't be alone in a room with them (seriously, she was my little toddler shadow for ten days; I had to shower with her sitting on the floor of the bathroom, watching, unless I waited until after bedtime) or even really allow them to carry her. Am I doing something wrong? It makes me feel horribly guilty, especially since my parents adore her and would gladly spend their time lavishing her with loving attention.

More later when I am less exhausted. I cannot WAIT to catch up with all of your blogs!

A small reminder

2007-08-23T00:15:00.000-05:00

From here.

Dear Self:

Thinking about writing...is not writing.

Daydreaming about writing...is not writing.

Chatting about writing...is not writing.

Reading about writing...is not writing.

All of these things are a delicious part of the whole writing MEAL, but without the main course, they are just so much garnish.

It's OK to start again. As long as you start.

Love,
The One who is Stuck

Sunday Scribblings: Diaries

2007-08-19T00:53:00.000-05:00

From here.

Isn't it seductive, perching on a Great Writer's shoulders, privileged to watch the slow accrual of genius? Even the set backs, the struggles, are satisfying because the ending is a foregone conclusion. Art. Creation. Fame. And occasionally, even fortune. That's the allure of the writer's diary...the ability to observe a creative mind at work and play.

This is why, even if I became exceedingly famous (hey, a girl can dream), I'll never allow my diaries to be published.

For starters, you know that nascent seed of brilliance, carefully nurtured in the fertile soil of the diary? Yeah, not so much in mine. In my pages, I am barely literate, barely conscious, perhaps because usually I am barely awake. For the last couple of years, the only consistent diary I have kept are those morning pages recommended by Julia Cameron. Stream of consciousness pages that stream forth the way real, considered writing barely ever does. Picture me, propped against the kitchen counter, pushing pen against that pocket of resistant time. Words piling on words frantically until, inevitably...mama! Or a little hand comes to pull me away from the page, back into my life.

These are not the words I want to be remembered by.

And then there are my girlhood and adolescent diaries, where I freed myself to explore every obsessive enthusiasm without the fear that I was making anyone (i.e. my parents) nervous. When I loved or hated, much to their chagrin, I kept myself at a white hot pitch of excitement, stoking it with the words of all of my favorite writers. I loved like Scarlett O'Hara. I wrote like Jo March in a “vortex” (or wanted to). I wanted to experience what couldn't be put into words...and then write about it, like D. H. Lawrence. I told myself that I contained multitudes, like my beloved Whitman.

Unfortunately, like most adolescents, my diaries fluctuated between high-minded philosophical musings and boys, dreams for the future and boys, imitations of my favorite authors and boys. I wanted to be offbeat, not to care about teenage crushes. But I was depressingly normal in that way. I cared about my teenage crushes, passionately.

I can't see any of that as a worthy legacy.

Sometimes I do think about starting a writer's diary, using my life consciously as material for stories, as a way to practice my craft and observation skills. But, I shrink from having yet another place where I have to perform, where I can't just relax, be foolish, naïve, angry. Bad. I use my diary to dig, dig through the surface emotions, to try and find a deep breath between them. I don't want to become self-conscious there as well.

So, no, I won't ever publish any of my diaries, should I ever become famous enough for someone to ask. The diaries are all process, not product. My terrible handwriting is like the jagged lines of a lie detector—the pages keep me honest, but they don't really reflect what I would like to do as a writer. Hopefully, whatever work I manage to produce will speak for itself.

That being said, if the literary establishment is very insistent, I'll can always point them towards a certain blog...
______________________
To unlock more secrets in a diary, go here.

On the Road turns 50

2007-08-16T23:18:00.000-05:00

From Fred McDarrah's, Kerouac and Friends published by Thunder's Mouth Press

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

I don't remember exactly when the Beats came into my life. It feels like they've always been there, lurking in my life, whispering confusing axioms that only make sense in hindsight (and after some wine).

But I do remember the first time I read “On the Road”

In college, a close friend of mine began dating an Irish man—green eyed and poetic. I was torn between disapproval (she had a wonderful boyfriend back home) and envy (he was the type of man who had never been interested in me). One day, I was assigned to babysit him while she attending a rehearsal. We walked along the lake—I was diffident, a little shy. He knew I was an English major, so before long we were talking literature. Romantic poetry. James Joyce. He expressed surprise that I'd never read “On the Road.”

He stopped walking and gripped me by the shoulders. “It changed my life...look, I'll lend it to you. You need to read this book.”

He was true to his word. The next time he came to campus to visit my friend, he brought his slightly battered copy of “On the Road.”

I found it difficult to follow at first; Kerouac's use of language was so different from what I knew—thoughtful, precise, scholarly. No, his language was a rush, exuberant, a dare that took you careening from page to page. He wanted to bend language until it wailed like a sax, until it droned low like a railroad car. He wanted it to burn through your eyes, burn through your mind, burn to the touch.

And it did.

I became obsessed, reading Kerouac's books one after the other, then reading some of the many biographies about him and the Beat movement. I admired them immensely—they wanted to make their mark, to live so artistically as to dazzle the world into giving them a place in the exalted canon. They wanted to read everything, to learn everything, and then to distill it into a way to live life more authentically.
(more)

There was just one problem. The more I read about them, the more I started to feel excluded by the very words which had set my aflame. See, the Beats didn't have much use for women. Oh, sure, they slept around, maybe even fell in love. But no woman could compete with the group, with the writing. The women existed to pay the bills, to do the mundane living work so that the men could make Art. These were men with discomfort about women—Kerouac's “mommy issues” were legendary; Ginsberg's mother was institutionalized while he was very young; Burroughs's “accidentally” shot his wife during a game of “William Tell.” Female characters in their fiction were either burdens on the men's vaunted freedom, or personifications of mythic sex, or reflections of the Eternal Mother. They weren't people. The exception, for me, was Mardou Fox, a character in Kerouac's The Subterraneans. Despite his attempts to view her only as the “exotic Other” (Mardou was half black), she came alive for me.

It helped that she was the only female character to willingly walk away.

To read them, to admire them, I felt as though I had to take their side, and I couldn't really do it. I knew, even as I devoured their words, studying them (I ended up writing my undergraduate thesis on Ginsberg's bardic poetry), that they would never have taken me seriously, looked at me twice. I would have been one more Square, frightened by their excesses.

And they wouldn't have been wrong. I was frightened by their excesses—their wild drinking and drugging and that ceaseless travel and their relentless mind-scraping self-absorption. No, I couldn't have been friends with them, alas. It took me many years to be able to say that without (too much) self-hatred.

I loved them, and yet I couldn't see myself in their world at all.

I still can't, but I've brought them down into mine. I don't necessarily believe in the whole myth anymore. I don't think writing entire books in a Benzedrine haze is the One True Way to genius. I don't think editing destroys the first thought. I don't admire their fear of growing up, of responsibility. But...they wrote anyway, in spite of their fears and their drugs and their many insecurities. They were messes, not always mythic. But they wrote through it all.

And years later, I still hear their voices whenever my life grows too stifling, too conformist. They remind me that there is more to me than my motherhood, than my dailiness. They whisper awake that bit of wanderlust that flows through my veins like mercury. And I still long to follow.

Sunday Scribblings: Goosebumps (a fairy tale)

2007-08-13T00:12:00.000-05:00

(From A Tribute to Adrienne Segur)

Once upon a long time ago, before our mothers' time, and their mothers' time, there lived a beautiful Princess in a kingdom on the edge of the world. This Princess lived a very solitary life, with only scores of moonfaced, silent servants and no playmates except her Shadow. Her own dear mama and papa, the Queen and King of the land, had both passed away when the Princess was just a baby. She hadn't thought much about this—it was just a vague, dull ache of confusion—until she heard the whole story whispered in the hallways of the palace.

Her parents had hosted a large, sumptuous dinner to celebrate the Princess's first six months of life. All of the nobles from around the land attended. and merriment went on far into the evening hours. But all was not well. The door knocker banged—one, two, three. And then there was one unwanted guest, a disgruntled fairy who had been overlooked for the Chief Fairy position one too many times.

“Bumps!” she had shrieked without preamble. “Bumps will end your lives...all of them—and doom this kingdom forevermore!”

Well, no one wanted to upset the fairy further, to be sure, but, as far as curses went, this one wasn't exactly menacing. So first a footman grinned, then a lady in waiting giggled, and before long, the room was engulfed in helpless laughter. Even the King and Queen smiled, wanly and carefully, as they had the most to lose. The infant girl on the Queen's lap paused in her nursing to clap at the tumult.

The offended fairy might have forgiven the servants in their witless merriment, but the sight of the King and Queen smiling sealed their doom. She turned red, then blue, then green, then striped (very difficult for a fairy, unless in a right fury). And then, she vanished without another word.

She was as good as her word. Every single person who attended that dinner fell victim to some bump or the other. The Queen perished from an infected bee sting. The King tripped over a bump in the royal carpet and bled to death. Only the small Princess was spared, because in her infant wisdom, she had merely clapped, not laughed.

After the endless time of tragedy, the people of the kingdom grew deathly afraid of bumps of any kind. Carpets were smoothed ritually every hour. Bees were kept under strictest supervision. The mashed potatoes were stirred until they were smooth as milk, to say nothing of the gravy.

Thus, the Princess grew up in a world as wide and flat as a piece of unlined paper. The horizon stretched endless, like the monotony of her days. She sat with her Shadow where the garden had once been. It was now a patch of perfectly even dirt.

They were bored.

“You know,” she said to her Shadow one day, “I'll bet if we rode hard for three days, we could reach the end of the land. Maybe we could find the fairy and beg for her clemency.”

“At the very least, we'd see a few shrubs.” agreed Shadow. They packed food and water, and set out.

On the evening of the third day, as the Princess drowsed by the (perfectly level) lake, she heard a scream. Her only friend, her faithful Shadow, was gone!

Immediately, she mounted her horse and rode after the abductors, but to no avail. Her Shadow was gone. The Princess fell to the ground, weeping. By the by, she heard a soft voice. “I can return her to you...for a price.”
(more)

Instinctively, the Princess knew the Fairy's voice.

“I'll do anything.”

“Are you sure about that?” The Fairy asked again. “Seems you didn't lose all that much. You could go on, much as before, without your Shadow.”

“I don't want to.” the Princess whispered. “Tell me.”

“I get cold in the winter.” the Fairy said. “Make me a quilt that contains one patch of fabric from each peasant hovel by the border. You must earn them—they cannot be given to you. You've gotten enough handed to you. And don't forget...one bump will spell your end.”

With that, she vanished.

For the first time, the Princess knew real fear. The peasants lived underground, as any dwelling they built after the curse would be considered a “bump” on the land. She ruled over them, but had never seen them.

But then she remembered her poor Shadow, lonely and terrified. She couldn't bare to think of that utterly even palace without her Shadow there. So she rode off towards the border.

When she arrived, she knocked on the ground until one of patches of earth slid open. “Who goes there?” A deep voice asked.

“The Princess.”

“And what does she want with our humble abode?”

“To cook and clean—do whatever it takes to earn a small patch of fabric from each of your houses.”

“That could take a long time.” The voice sounded amused now.

“I have nothing but time.” The Princess replied.

Finally, the voice rose up and became a young man, covered with dirt and dust and the occasional bruise. He was not handsome, but his dark eyes glowed with intelligence and good humor.

“Come on in.”

He took her down into the Under-kingdom—dark, dank, but...not flat. At all. The hovels went down into the bowels of the earth, and rose up almost touching the perfectly smooth lawn. They were ugly, but individual.

The Princess was fascinated. And the peasants were, as well. By her.

“But...we're just give you the fabric, your Majesty!” they said, bewildered. “Is this some sort of loyalty test?”

“No, no...and thank you for the offer, but the Fairy stipulated that I needed to earn them.”

After a long silence, one of the woman said, hesitantly. “I...I could use some help with the pigs.”

And with that, the Princess lived among the peasants. Hours turned into days turned into months. She slopped pigs, swept floors, tended babies. She also became bruised, dirty, scratched. But miraculously, no bumps marred her smooth skin.

In between her work, she got to know the young man who had opened the Under-kingdom to her. He shared his most secret dream with her—to build dwellings like those he had created underground, but that touched the sky. “We all want to see the sun again.” he confessed. And she told him about her loneliness, the vast emptiness of her life without her parents. He was the only person who understood exactly why she needed to rescue her Shadow, without asking.

“I'm not beautiful anymore, but bruised and dirty.” She said to him, ruefully.

He shook his head. “Before you were merely beautiful. Now you are beautiful and interesting. You tell a story.”

She blushed at all she felt at that, and could not say.

Soon, the Princess had all of the necessary patches to make a glorious, if somewhat grimy, quilt. But she didn't know how to sew.

“I'll teach you.” The young man said. And he did. They stayed up for three days and nights until it was done. When she triumphantly unfurled it, the young man took her into his arms and kissed her. And a million butterfly wings batted in her stomach, and she shivered with her first ever case of goosebumps.

“Now I will surely die.” she said. “But...I die knowing love. I must thank you”

He held her close as they waited for the curse to be fulfilled. “There are many ways to be dead,” he whispered to her. “Take me with you.”

And they waited. And kissed. And waited.

Instead of the death, the Fairy appeared, hand in hand with the Shadow. “You have pleased me well, my child. You've always shown great promise, even as a baby. And now that promise has been fulfilled. The curse is lifted.” The Princess and the Shadow embraced, weeping. Then the Princess introduced her young man. “This is the man I will marry.”

At that, the hovels rose out of the earth and became splendid houses, and the thrilled peasants were suddenly rich landowners. Music sounded in the background, and the Princess and the Builder became King and Queen.

The King fulfilled his dream of buildings that scraped the sky. The Queen ruled compassionately and well. And the Shadow enlivened them with story and song.

And they all lived happily, and bumpily, ever after.
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For more tales that go (goose)bump in the night, go here.

Movie Review: Becoming Jane

2007-08-10T18:49:00.000-05:00

It seems almost unnecessary to say that I love Jane Austen's novels. She's a beloved icon for bookish women everywhere, who created characters ahead of their time. What woman doesn't want to think of herself as an Elizabeth Bennett, full of intellectual vigor and witty repartee? A woman loved for her mind and personality more than her beauty. Who doesn't cry when cool, reserved Elinor Dashwood finally breaks down and admits her love for Edward? And secretly, come on, don't we all want to be Marianne Dashwood, all fire and passion and romance? We know we would have fallen pray to Willoughby too, at least for a moment. But hopefully our good Elinor sense and Elizabeth sense of humor would save us from going too far down THAT path.

I'm not a purist, though. I'm happy to take my Jane set in high school, or even filtered through the brain of one exceptionally funny, neurotic British woman.

That being said, I wasn't sure what to expect from the movie Becoming Jane. I've never been that curious about Austen's life, assuming that she put all of her what was best in her inside her unforgettable heroines. But...the question IS there. What was Jane Austen really like? She was a brilliant, sardonic observer of the mores and morals of her society. She was an extraordinarily gifted writer. But...who was she, really?

This is the question the movie brings to life. It's absolutely a fictionalization, a “what if?” exercise of the finest order. So bring your imaginations and leave your encyclopedic knowledge of her life (if you possess it) at the door.

Anne Hathaway surprised me in this role. Not only did she produce a credible British accent, but she inhabited the role with a sort of edgy intelligence—exactly the way we all imagine Jane Austen would have behaved, especially at an idealistic twenty.

Like Austen's books, the movie takes us through the tense desperation straining underneath the genteel manners of polite society—the desperation of women who must either marry well or live in poverty, even as men were also cautioned against marrying women who didn't have their own wealth. Jane, like her heroines, is not rich, but unlike them, has already chosen to be a writer. She shares her latest words with an approving audience, but...oh, all is not well in Austen-land.

Enter Mr. Darcy, er, Thomas Lefroy (James McAvoy), a friend of her brother's who doesn't quite entirely share in the general esteem for Jane. So, of course, inevitably they must fall in love (having many witty and literate Austen-ian exchanges along the way), Pride and Prejudice style.

I love period movies and this one did not disappoint. The clothes, the bucolic British setting, the elaborate balls—it was all cinematic chocolate for this tired Mama. The dialogue was appropriately literate and cutting (good work done by the screenwriters, Sarah Williams and Kevin Hall); the actors, especially Maggie Smith as Lady Gresham, as well as James Cromwell and Julie Walters as Jane's parents, seem to have been born to wear velvet and britches. McAvoy and Hathaway have excellent romantic chemistry, and you believe (or want to) that he will defy his father and...it's all very romantic. And, in our hearts of hearts, we WANT Austen to have had that blinding romance, to have lived by our modern ideals of marriage for love only. After all, no one is a better spokeswoman for that point of view than our Elizabeth Bennett herself.

The writers concocted the story from brief mentions in a few of the real Austen's letters; they didn't rewrite her life story, and thus, you know how this one will end.

But I can't consider that a tragedy. After all, regardless of what happened in her life, Jane Austen lived up to her ambitions. She created works of enduring power and beauty despite living in a society that didn't support independent female artists. She claimed her identity as a writer.

I'd say that was a wonderfully happy ending.

For more reviews of Becoming Jane, please visit Mother-Talk.

Bullets and Awards

2007-08-07T15:59:00.000-05:00

Writing that last post about decision making was more emotional than I could have anticipated. I've always laughed it off, this indecisive nature of mine, nodding ruefully at TEG's and my family's gentle (and not so gentle) ribbing. But it BOTHERS me, this distrust of my own desires. When I spend the better part of an afternoon fretting about the best way to make use of an Amazon gift certificate (an activity which should be FUN, damn it!), then I know this is something larger than just a joke.

That post, and your responses, have forced me to think about it, and more importantly, to think about ways to work through it and change it. So, as always, thank you.
_________________________________________

Stealing from the best isn't really thievery...it's more like an homage. So, here is my homage to the bullet point posting style that Phantom Scribbler uses.

You would think that after the emotional pummeling I received last month when my parents came to visit, that I might be alittle hesitant to see them again so soon. And you would be right. And yet, in two short weeks, the Madam and I will be winging our way to South Florida to see them again. And my whole family. Wish me serenity.
Yes, Madam is speaking now. Just single words, but OH, how much less frustrating our lives are! I ask her what she wants to play with, she says, "'ide" for slide and everything is wonderful!
Not to mention, hearing her say mama is...well, it's indescribable.
But weaning is still nothing but a pipe dream.
Or it would be, if I were sleeping.
I have decided to speak to myself as though I were a really good friend of mine for the week.
I realized that if I had a close friend whose husband was working about 100 hours a week or so, and she was tending a toddler about the same amount of time, I probably wouldn't yell at her because she wasn't working on her novel.
That being said, I have been working on mine. Well, does thinking count? I've decided the tortoise is a beautiful and underrated animal.

_______________________________________
Thanks to Crystal King and Tammy Vitale for awarding me a Rockin Blogger Award and a Blogger Reflection Award, respectively. I'm honored...thank you!

I need to pick five bloggers to pass on each award. To make it more challenging, I've decided not to allow myself to pick bloggers I've already awarded in the past.

When I Finally Decided to Get it: Tori consistently inspires me with her open spirit. It's like she is EATING life, which definitely rocks.

Marvelous Madness: Alexandra is busy studying and living, so she's not posting as much as she used to, and I am sure I am not alone is saying that I miss her unique, beautiful spirit, and her fabulous (literally, as she has an amazing imagination) posts. Come back, Alexandra!

Earnest and Game: This one is cheating, a little bit. Heather is a dear friend in life, and thus I can personally vouch for the fact that the witty, erudite voice she uses on her posts IS in fact the way she speaks. Which rocks.

Bohemian Mom: Because have you SEEN her dioramas illustrating scenes from her favorite horror movies? And have you read her fun, hopeful posts? She, well, rocks.

Creative Everyday: Leah's art is simply gorgeous and her posts never fail to make me think...

Which leads me to the Blogger Reflection Awards:

Bub and Pie: Her fertile mind can make connections between even the most incongruous topics. I always feel like I've gotten a delightful brain massage when I read her posts.

The Silent K: She turns her life's experiences into alchemy. Krista's words resonate long after I've read them.

Be Alive Believe Be You: Melba's experiencing what can only be described as a total life awakening and her excitement and thoughts are contagious

Frida's Notebook: Even in the midst of her important, difficult work, her writing glows with soul and beauty.

Mother Words-Mothers Who Write: Kate is what I aspire to be--a mother who can use her entire life to create beautiful works of writing. She expands my ideas of what is possible for a mother-writer.

And because I can't help but break the rules slightly, here are three people I COULD NOT leave off this list:

The Believing Soul: Amber is the reason these types of posts exist. She gets into the depths of her life, and imbues it with faith and meaning.

Simply Wait: Patry Francis is living the dream now, sure, but she's always been an amazing, generous writer--she can't help herself.

Phantom Scribbler: It doesn't matter WHAT she is writing about--the woman can WRITE, and her words never fail to make me see things a different way.

So, there you go! My awards. And phew, I'm tired.

Sunday Scribblings: Decisions, decisions

2007-08-04T00:24:00.000-05:00

But is it ever..REALLY?

You know how difficult it is for me to make a decision? I just wrote out about eight different first sentences for this post—and that was after I spent a few hours debating whether I should attempt to write fiction or nonfiction!

Seriously, I am probably one of the most indecisive people you could ever meet, a fact that has caused me serious unhappiness in my life. I'm a devotee of the “deer in headlights” method of decision-making, aka “if you ignore it long enough, it will change and then you won't HAVE to decide.”

I once debated for years about whether or not to buy a pair of sneakers.

This is not good. This leads to regret. And I do regret—I regret almost everything that I've done in my past—or failed to do. The wrong jobs. The right jobs left for the wrong reasons. The wrong jobs left for the right reasons, but which perhaps could have worked out if only I'd stuck it out. Not going to graduate school before getting married. Not going after getting married. And most of all, I regret not using that lovely expanse of time before motherhood to write seriously. Oh, sure, I wrote, in spurts...but considering how much time I had to work with, what else was I doing? Sleeping? Eating?

Hopefully, sleeping.

It's ironic that I want to be a writer at all, considering how much decision making THAT entails. I have no doubt that is why I am so often blocked. Should Catherine break up with Nick before or after she gets fired from that last acting job? Should Marisol reveal her family's deep dark secret in order to save her best friend's life? And...what would that dark secret be, again?

Exactly.

And it's not just plot points. Every time I read a book on craft, I am paralyzed by the sheer number of concepts I need to keep in mind. Narrative arcs. Character arcs. The three act structure. Point of view. Is my dialogue moving the story along, and revealing character without being too “on the nose?”
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By this point, I've vowed to read and re-read the Literary Canon before attempting to write another word. Or else I've already allowed my attention to wander to the television, or to conversation. Or, usually, I just keep writing in my head, convinced that if I just work out all of the possibilities in my mind, I'll smooth out the tangles before my words land on the page.

Writers, stop laughing.

In fact, I think this ceaseless search for certainty—for direction that will help me avoid mistakes—fuels my passion for reading. When I'm feeling more self-confident, I read novels—exploring each character and their universe, discovering snippets of wisdom along the way. When I am feeling less-than-confident, I read self-help books. And writing books. And horoscopes.

Guess which ones I'm reading more and more lately.

I think my inertia about decision making stems from this absolute belief, one I can't shake, that if I make a mistake, I won't be able to fix it. If I go down the wrong road with my novel, I will have ruined it beyond repair, squandering a promising idea and proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that I'm never going to accomplish anything in my life. If I apply to the wrong graduate school program, then I will have squandered our hard earned money, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that...well, you get the idea.

So I wait. And I read writing books. And every day, I decide to stop, and then I decide to start. Stop. Start. I dither, and doubt, and do everything except just write. I try to keep William Stafford's exhortation in my mind, the one about "aiming lower." I really try. But...in those OTHER immortal words, the ones said by Yoda, "There is no try. Only do."

I can't even choose whose advice to take...about making a choice.

I'm not sure how to end this post. Maybe I'll decide that later as well.

Oh, and I finally bought those sneakers. And enjoyed them to no end. But never really felt like I lived up to them.

There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.

If only I could decide what it was.
___________________________
Decide to read more posts here.

The place that is home

2007-08-03T12:01:00.000-05:00

Madam heard them first, as she always does. She stopped her reading, chubby finger still holding her place, and looked up at me. Engines! she said. I nodded, as one, two, three ambulances screamed by. I said a silent prayer for the intended passengers, and out loud as I reminded Madam, “Remember...good luck, people. Good luck, people.” She nodded solemnly, and we went back to our book.

A few minutes later, the phone rang. My parents, asking for TEG without preamble. See, the bridge had just collapsed, and they remembered that TEG uses it a lot, and...

Confused, I reassured them that we were all OK, and went online for information.

It looked...well, you all know how it looked by now. The school bus dangling precariously near the edge. The truck in flames. The tons of concrete falling and falling. The people.

It was incomprehensible. See, if you know Minneapolis at all, you know that we ALL use that bridge. All of us. And you know that it's always choked with cars. Always.

Unwillingly, I imagine what it was like for those cars, those people. To have something as solid as earth give way. To fall and not know.

I've only been here a year, but I've developed so much love for this city. Not just because it's the site of so much of Madam's growth--first crawling, steps, words, classes—but also because it's welcomed us. Never a day goes by when I don't share a delighted “Minneapolis story” with TEG—a nice lady helping me with my tray at the bagel shop; a teenager inquiring if he should shut the window on the bus because “the baby might get cold.” Quite simply, I have never met people like this anywhere. And so, a city in which I only intended to stay out my lease has become a place I want to stay.

The place where my daughter learned to say “home.”

I wish there was something I could do, to give back to this city which has given me so much—friends, beauty, kindness, pleasure, community, inspiration. So I pray, for those who have already been lost and those who are still missing.

Good luck, home. Good luck.

Sunday Scribbling: Phenomenon

2007-07-28T22:24:00.000-05:00

(Needs NO introduction...)

Do you remember what it was like to watch your older siblings or parents getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, when you were too young to go? It was a ritual that began in the late afternoon. My mother and older sisters would carefully pin up their hair in enormous wire curlers (that we called “rollers”) to try and tame their curly hair into something approximating Farrah Fawcett's famed “shag.” Then there were the costume changes—long skirt or shorter? High heeled boots or wedges? And then, the hours spent in the bath and doing their makeup. When they finished and finally released their hair from its confinement, they looked like dazzling late 70s pinups.

The men in my family were not far behind. My father had a shiny black suit for such occasions, a suit I can only describe as pimp-like. He liked to pair it with a poly-silk blend shirt with a rather wide collar. His handkerchiefs (monogrammed, naturally) always smelled deeply of his favorite cologne. My brother was more adventurous in his attire. That white John Travolta suit of “Saturday Night Fever” fame? He owned a replica. Along with the stacked heeled shoes to go with it. He would strut around the apartment in a low slung towel, carefully laying out his clothes down to the socks. His ebony straight hair, the envy of every female in my family, flopped fashionably in his eyes.

These nights were the epitome of vicarious pleasure for me. While I stayed home with a tia watching the Love Boat, the rest of my family was off to live the glamorous Three's Company party life. Hey, I was young, and not very sophisticated. To me, being an adult meant being able to go out dancing like Chrissy, Janet, Jack, and Larry.

This is all to explain a bit of how I felt the last couple of weeks, during the height of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Like the world had decided to throw itself a party, and all I could do was watch it get dressed and boogie out of the door.

Oh, I have read (most) of the books—ravenously gobbled up books one, two, three, and four, but started to lose a little taste for it sometime around book five. I never got around to book six, and well, here we are.

But this post isn't really about that.

No, I was fascinated by the growing sense of celebration and excitement experienced by the fans. For years, they had plowed so much of their attention, love, and creativity into this fictional realm. They went online to plot out elaborate theories, to debate their various romantic preferences, to connect to others who felt as they did. They wrote reams of fan fiction; posted gorgeous music videos cobbled together from movie scenes.

And so, this was their moment. They sowed passion, and reaped a joyful riot in return.

It all made me think about what I was digging deeply in my own life. I'm the kind of person who is happiest when she's passionately, obsessively consumed with something—whether it be a relationship, a work of art or pop cultural entertainment, or anything. I love being invested at that level—the satisfaction of "your" team wins the World Series, or World Cup. The way some people feel when their fictional romantic couple finally declares their undying love, and shares a kiss. Finally get to see the Police reunite, or hear Aida at the Met.

If I am honest, I am not giving myself away in that way right now. Sure, I am engaged in the day to day mothering of my Madam, and while that is deeply satisfying, even joyful work, it's not quite...the same for me, for reasons I can't exactly articulate. I am getting close with my novel (finally started to daydream about the characters, a sure sign that they are becoming real for me), but...that's solitary work. And my poor little blog is also suffering from my inattention...my posts are more scattered, less frequent. I feel disconnected from this place, and from the larger blogsphere that once fed me.

I am sowing inattention, and reaping apathy.

So, while hordes of Hogwarthian revelers thrilled at the culmination of their particular passionate phenomenon on July 21 at 12:01am, I made a quiet vow to myself. I would remember this “Saturday night Love Boat outsider” feeling, and use it to as a reminder of feed my passions, and spend myself in them, no matter how foolish they may look to outsiders.

I'm already planting the seeds.
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For more phenomenal posts, go here.

Procrastination

2007-07-27T00:31:00.000-05:00

(from babycenter.com)

I've always taken my inspiration from one of my favorite literary heroines, “I'll think about that tomorrow.”

Yes, I've always been a procrastinator. I counted on that late burst of adrenaline to power me through the hard part of papers in college. When I worked in publishing, many nights saw me hunched over the kitchen table, flipping through a manuscript I needed to read by the next day, praying that the words would take over and make me forget the sleep I was missing. Besides, there was always the weekend. I could sleep in!

Moment of silence for the weekend sleep-in.

So, yes, I've always procrastinated, but I vowed that after Madam, I would get things done efficiently. Like a good mother.

For the most part, I have kept to this pledge. Oh, sure, the writing goes slowly more often than not, and let's not talk about the state of my nails, or my waistline. But mothering tasks, those get done promptly—bills paid, appointments made, dinner made, laundry done (and done...and done...).

I'll try not to hurt myself with the back patting.

But this post is about a mothering task I AM procrastinating about...I can't seem to find my way into it, and oh, it so needs to be done, like, yesterday.

I am talking about weaning. I need to night wean, desperately.

And I have no one to blame but myself. Everyone said it. Don't let the baby associate sleep with nursing. Don't don't DON'T!

I was so careful on this point, so aware. I would nurse her until DROWSY, just like the books said, and then rocked or walked or sang her the rest of the way. And TEG took at least one of the night wakings. Anyone, with enough patience and a soft touch, could put her to sleep. TEG, my mother, sister, MIL, SIL, friends, heck, even my Father-in-law could do it.

And it was good. I was smug, I admit it. Madam was a good but fairly indifferent nurser, and I had apparently dodged the “nurse/sleep association” bullet.

I was kicked out of Eden at about six months. Madam and I got sick, and in order to get us through it, I did the awful, terrible, very bad, no good thing. I started nursing to sleep.

And now I can't seem to stop. I've tried sleeping away from her. I've tried singing, rocking, patting, stroking. Madam's had a taste of the good life, and she'll be damned if she'll let go now.

So...here I am. Exhausted—she wakes about seven times a night. Aching (not to get too graphic, but Madam has all her teeth and enjoys a bit of thrashing while she nurses. You make the connections). I've always loved nursing her—her little sighs of contentment, her plump hand like a sleeping starfish on her breast, her little head nodding yes, yes while she drank.

But...it's time to stop procrastinating now. Beyond time. At least at night. Have I mentioned that I am tired? And achy? And that I live in an apartment building and thus can't just let her cry, even if I wanted to (and believe me, lately I am more than open to that)?

So, I appeal to you, lovely internet readers—please, break it down for me—night weaning? Without screaming? How?

And here is my public service announcement—don't do the awful, terrible, very bad, no good thing. Don't nurse to sleep. No, no...not “just this once.” Because there will BE no “once.” Once the baby's figured it out, there is no turning back. For either of you. It's just too easy. So..like the Ancient Mariner (who I resemble more and more these days), heed my tale of woe!

Thus ends my PSA.

When short on words...meme!

2007-07-24T16:13:00.001-05:00

Honestly, people, where HAS my blogging voice gone? I couldn't even find a way to work through the Sunday Scribbling post this week...and the word was wicked. WICKED, people. I love that word. I can use it as a noun, an adjective, and possibly even a verb. I am steeped in wicked. And yet...nothing.

Even though Madam fills my days with profound love and occasionally aching frustration, I seem to lack that gift that turns those events into charming, bloggable stories.

I would love to say that my thoughts are tumbling ever forth, like a rushing river, but powering movement towards my novel instead of my happy blog. And actually, that's not entirely far from the truth. While I am not exactly writing, per se, I am plotting again--immersing myself in the world of my novel to such an extent that I am beginning, slowly, to hear their voices again. And to have more of a sense of what they are doing, and why I care about what they are doing.

Now, I just need to tell myself the story of how it ends, and then I can go back to the work of putting one word after another. For some reason, I can't write anything until I have a pretty clear idea about the ending. Anyone else have this problem? Have you discovered a workaround?

Thanks to the lovely Kate, I can pretend I have something to say.

Eight things about me:

1) I hear music in my head ALL DAY LONG. It's my radio. I just finished a book that referred to it as the "jingle channel" and mentioned that no psychologist has really bothered to study it.

2) So now, of course, I want to study it.

3) Unfortunately, I also have a "horror channel"--where I see all sorts of Gothic horrors surprising me in dark closets, narrow hallways, etc. Sometimes I think my true talent must lie in horror writing, but then I am afraid that I'll be MORE afraid all of the time.

4) Since starting this blog, I have completely changed my mind about one thing--I no longer believe that our present lives need to be negatively impacted by our upbringing. I still write about my childhood and my parents, but more in the service of the stories themselves, instead of looking at them as some sort of a Master Key that will "fix" my life.

5) That being said, I am still looking for that "Master Key" that will fix my life.

6) I take out entirely too many books from the library, and then feel guilty and stressed that I can't finish them. Then, I return a bunch unread, feel virtuous for a bit, and repeat the whole cycle again.

7) I came very very close to working for a literary erotica publisher in New York--the same publisher who put out Henry Miller's novels. I actually got to have a long talk with the man himself. The publisher. Not Henry Miller.

8) At the height of the breakdancing craze, I hired a friend of the family to teach the rudiments. I was all about 10 years old.

Bonus! 9) As of today, alas, I cannot break dance. But I can do a mean Worm, if you get me drunk enough.

Tagging: Jessie, Emmie, Heather, and, uh, YOU, if you want to play!

Sunday Scribbling: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow (a short fiction)

2007-07-14T23:30:00.000-05:00

Medusa by Carvaggio

Ed note: Yes, that is an unforgivable pun in the title...but what can I say? It fits my story. :)
_______________________________________________________

It wasn't once upon just any old time. No, it was May 24, 1980—the day my sister and I were born.

“Gemini twins!” shrieked my Tia, happy to flash her astrological know how. “And they're right on the cusp.” The cusp of what, she refused to say.

We were not identical twins. Marta, my sister, was a whole pound heavier than I was. I know they say you can't remember your time in the womb, but I can imagine it—her using those fetus fins to sweep in more and more foody goodness, which I spun around in confused somersaults of starvation.

But that wasn't even the main difference. No, my sister was blessed with something else. The most beautiful, wavy, fairy tale hair you ever saw. Never frizzy, never flat. The kind of hair described as “raven tresses cascading like a waterfall” down some heroine's back.

And the rest of her lived up to the promise of her hair.

As for me? My hair also reminded people of a story—the story of Medusa. Kinky, curly wild hair that stood up and snarled at you. It would bite if you got too close.

I'd like to think the rest of me was an improvement over the tale my hair was telling people.

Things went along, we all grew older, and then one day, just before I turned eighteen, I woke up and saw that my hair was about six inches shorter. I thought it was a joke.

“Marta...did you cut my hair while I was sleeping?” It's kind of an odd question, but if you knew us, you would understand why I had to ask.

She sniffed, “Me? I don't go near that stuff without a rosary and a bottle of holy water!”

So it wasn't her. And if it wasn't her, then it wasn't anybody.

The next day, and the day after that, more inches. My hair seemed to be getting sucked back into my head.

I can't say it was any great loss.

On our eighteenth birthday, we had a huge party. Sometime after the cake was cut, I heard it.

Pop.

My scalp had finished drinking in the last of my hair. I was now completely bald.

“Ay, Dios mio!” My mother said. “It wasn't very good hair, but bald! Hair is the crowning glory of a woman!”

“Not Jiselle's hair.” said Marta, trying to be soothing.

“And her with those freaky eyes, too” said my Papi. “Ojos que tragan.” Swallowing eyes.

Well, it would have been enough to depress almost anyone. But truth be told, I was happy to be rid of that hair. It never really felt like me.
(more)

Not that I didn't try to grow it back, or grow something back. I used special shampoos and conditioners and creams that made me feel like the first human Chia Pet. But at stubbornly wild as it had once been, it stayed just as stubbornly gone.

Nothing to be done. So Marta and I go off to college—different ones, thank goodness. And I played with wigs and hair color—pink for the punks, blonde for the party people, brown for the studious intellectual types.

It was with that latter group that I met Victor Rana. “Like the frog,” He said cheerfully, holding out his hand. “Ha,” I said, weakly. “You know your Spanish.” But Victor Rana did not look like anything at all like a frog. Quite the opposite—straight black hair that fell over his green eyes (I always look at the hair first, of course), tall, handsome. It didn't matter if his nose was a little bulbous, or if his lips a little too frankly full and feminine. He was my ideal man, my Prince Charming.

Which, of course, meant that he didn't think of me as anything but a good buddy, someone who always took perfect notes in class and was willing to share.

“What can I say? Those eyes, those eyes of yours see everything, know everything. They can see what the professor is going to write before he does it." Then his voice would drop and get all serious. "What else do they see, Jiselle?” I would never know what to say to that. Hope had never worked out for me before. So I would say something smart-ass and after a weird moment, he'd always just shrug and laugh.

Right before Halloween, Marta calls me and says she wants to come to campus. “I heard you all have an awesome party every year!” Typical. I was going to that school and I had never heard that.

She shows up a few days later, and we spend the whole day before the party getting ready. She's going as Rapunzel, of course. She's even prettier than I remember.

I fuss and search all of my wigs, looking for inspiration. But I can't think of anything to wear. Finally, I tell Marta, “You go on ahead. Just let me finish getting dressed.” Of course, I had no intention of showing up. Why should I? I could see where this was going to end up—Rapunzel and my Prince Charming would meet, fall madly in love. It had happened before, you see.

At around 11pm, there is a knock on the door. Marta must have forgotten something.

“Forget to let down your hair?”

It was Victor, looking adorable and confused. “What?”

Now I'm the one who looked confused, and not even close to adorable. Plus, I hadn't even put on a wig. So I was standing there, in front of Victor, totally bald.

“What...what are you doing here?” It occurred to me that he was looking for Marta. “She's at the dance,” I said, trying to pre-empt his question, act like I was all cool with the fact that he was infatuated with my sister.

He stopped at that, took a deep breath. Like he needed to prepare for whatever he was going to say next. Finally, he said “No,” and took my hand. “She's not.”

Turns out he hadn't just liked me for my note taking ability. And the bald thing didn't phase him at all, once he confirmed that it wasn't because I was ill. “It's kind of sexy.” He said. “Brings out those amazing eyes.”

Marta came back to the room after the party, and found us there, talking furiously, holding hands. She was thrilled for me, and so was the guy dressed like Prince Charming that she brought back from the dance.

And happily ever after? There's no after yet—just a beautiful now.

But the day after Victor and I started going out, I looked in the mirror and saw a slight peach fuzz growing on my scalp. And I smiled.

“Welcome back.”
_____________________
For more curly tales, go here.

Storytelling, parents' style

2007-07-12T17:01:00.000-05:00

Think of it as an exercise in storytelling. That is what I have been telling myself for the last week, as I listened to my parents narrate my life back to me, working themselves into fevered crescendos, quivering with italics and outrage.

Oh, I know they mean well, I do. They are just like those articles in the newspaper, the ones that swear that they will tell you the one way to avoid disaster and mice in the pantry, because you are the kind of special person who should never suffer, or deal with rodents in the rice. Except for the fact that my parents tend to skip the kind lead in, and thrust straight to the black heart of the matter.

They disapprove. And that is an understatement. They disapprove of my life so thoroughly that as I listened to them, I found myself agreeing—their arguments had such force, and passion, and characterization! If I could write the way my parents harangue, I am sure I would have a bestseller on my hands, or at least a page turner.

The thing is, they DO mean well, and they DID focus unerringly on several aspects of my life which are also causing me great dissatisfaction. The aforementioned weight gain, the disturbing lack of writing motivation, the long stretches of lonely days while TEG works himself into a fervor. TEG himself, and our relationship, or lately lack thereof. These are all things I have noticed myself, things that make me frown and look for solutions. So my parents' lectures were a bit like reading Cliff Notes for books I have already analyzed to death, but being no closer to writing that definitive paper on them. It's beyond frustrating to see problems but no answers everywhere. Where is the lag here? What am I not letting myself acknowledge?

I've spent most of the time since they left arguing with them, mustering up all of the arguments that would finally trump theirs, and prove to them that “see, I'm not such a passive little loser!”

But they can't hear that. No, they really can't, because in all of my 34 years on this earth I have never ONCE managed to outshout my parents when they feel strongly about something.

Their voices are still echoing in my ears, and I am working on separating what I agree with, what I can safely ignore, and what I need to recast in order to remove the sting of hurt and make it palatable. Because I don't agree with everything they said, especially with regards to my ambition (or as they see it, lack thereof). Just because I don't want what they want to me to want, doesn't mean I don't WANT at all.

Anyone who can make sense of that previous sentence gets a cookie. As you can see, the writing is and continues to be a problem. At this point, it's like a bad relationship—I want to do something dramatic for relief, to flounce away, tossing my hair. To get a restraining order against my manuscript.

I can see why people burn their writing. That one moment of freedom, of trumping, must be like an “AHA, IN YOUR FACE, WRITING!” even if you spend the rest of the time berating yourself for being weak.

Which leads me back to my parents and their visit. Other than the ego lambasting I received, this wasn't a bad time. My main goal was to have Madam spend more time with her grandparents and I think that aspect of the trip worked well.

Now I just need to spend a few days licking my wounds until I feel like I'm back in my life again.

Hiatus

2007-07-08T22:35:00.000-05:00

My parents are in town for Madam's second birthday. These are the first words they said to me as we hugged near baggage claim:

"Oh, you've gotten FAT!"

*sigh*

The reality of them has chased all possibilities of writing away. I miss your wise words horribly. See you in a week, or so.

Wish me sanity.

PS: Writing about my fears below, and your compassionate responses, has helped me more than you know. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Running from the fear

2007-07-02T00:11:00.000-05:00

When I talk about fear here, I usually mean “fear of failure” or “fear of not writing” or even the ever present “Fear of being a bad mother.”

But this past week, I have been running away from a very different kind of fear. Physical fear. The fear of being harmed during one of my outings with Madam. The fear that something will happen that I cannot control. That I will not be able to protect her.

Since becoming a mother, I have had a few panic attacks, all centered around issues of Madam's care. One memorable episode was in the aisles of a grocery store—I was unnerved by my new responsibility—she was no longer nursing/on the bottle exclusively and I was attempting to chart the brave new world of solids. Perhaps for most mothers, this would not have been cause for alarm, but I've always had a perfect horror-movie script of an imagination. I could see Madam growing weak, ill, because I wasn't feeding her correctly. Or not enough. Or too much. Or the wrong foods.

You get the idea.

The most frightening attack, though, occurred this past winter. It was a rare warm-ish day and so I took Madam across the street to yet another grocery store (maybe the lesson here is to avoid grocery stores!). Being winter, darkness fell swiftly. When we left the store, it was completely black outside. Now, I don't want to be dramatic (well, not this time)--I live in a safe area of town, I was right across the street, and there were people shopping and walking and eating near by.

And yet. Suddenly, I was struck by how small she was, by how much she depended on me. But she felt safe, even though it was dark, because I was with her. And I felt completely unequal to that challenge.

It was so very dark.

I scooped her up in my arms, and basically ran back home. And it was fine, but so nerve wracking that I burst into tears upon handing her back to TEG.

What if? What if?

I don't go out with Madam in the darkness anymore, but lately these thoughts have even begun to haunt me in the day. What could I do to stop someone who was determined to hurt me or my child? Am I careful enough? Aware enough? So not going out in the dark has become practically not leaving the house at all. That means I haven't been able to see the awesome mommies I know here, because they live on the other side of town. Or take my daughter to story time. Or to browse in a bookstore.

It's become so very dark in my mind.

None of this is helped by my new addiction to the news. I read way more than is good for me—an assembly line of abducted women, families destroyed, children killed. Senseless, wanton. Terrifying. I know that these stories are usually hyped by a media who lives by the credo “If it bleeds, it leads.” I know that basically, we can take our precautions and hope for the best.

But it is very difficult to escape the feeling lately that women are targets. Women and children.

Becoming a mother has made me feel more vulnerable than anything in my life. I think back to the risks I used to take in my previous life--working late, walking down dark streets alone. Oh, I was always careful, and aware. So what has changed?

It's not just me anymore.

I didn't want to write these thoughts out, because of a pervasive dread that I might somehow bring on the very things I am scared to think about. But...by trying to suppress these thoughts, I think I have let them grow stronger in the shadows. Like everything else I am afraid to face.

I haven't wanted to write here lately until I felt like I could give a full narrative shape to my feelings—a beginning, middle, and end. And I can't yet. But I needed to write it down, and make myself see it.

Recently, I read the “Gift of Fear”, and the author reminded me of something I have always known, but perhaps needed to hear again. Nonstop anxiety actually makes us LESS capable of seeing a true threat.

So I went out with Madam. Tense, a little shaky, but outside.

I just want to feel like I can protect her. I just want to feel safe again.

Friday Frivolity

2007-06-22T23:40:00.001-05:00

This has been a tough week, with Madam not feeling that well. We stayed in a lot and I can feel my thoughts becoming wary and inbred as a result. Also, I've been watching the news, and feeling the weight of the world's ills to such an extent that I want to scoop Madam up and clutch her to my chest, forever.

I need some fun. And when I think fun, I think India.

I always have difficulty in writing about India--my love for it perhaps entwined throughout the words of languages I don't speak. So I won't try (again). Instead, I'll share a snippet of a song that has always brought me joy--capturing a hint of that vibrant energy. Consider it a vacation--surround yourself with swirling silk, put on your best jewelry, and DANCE.

Click below. You won't be sorry.

Happy Friday!

Sunday Scribbling: Eccentric (a character sketch)

2007-06-17T00:18:00.000-05:00

It's OK to stare. I'm used to it. You recognize me, don't you? From a book you once read. Or a half-forgotten dream.

I guess I'm not what you expected. That's fine. I get that a lot. A lot has happened, since “and they lived happily ever after.” I mean, there's a reason the story ends there. Only it doesn't really.

After the Royal Wedding, I settled into life at the palace, doing the Princessy things everyone seemed to expect of me. Basically, the equivalent of whatever Miss Universe does these days. Visit people. Cut ribbons, that sort of thing. But right away, I realized my problem. I couldn't quite let go of the way things used to be for me. I would look at these people in the kingdom, these poor people, and I remembered. Remembered every meal of ashy bread thrown on top of the dung heap, Remembered every night that even THAT would have been welcome. I couldn't just smile and nod at them, like that's all they needed to make their lives better.

But every time I brought it up to my in laws, the King and Queen, they smiled vaguely and indulgently at me, and then changed the subject. I expect they were waiting for me to outgrow it, to forget the past. Except I couldn't. Because, you see, except for better meals and clothes (and not that I am discounting that, believe ME), my life hadn't changed a whole lot. I was still waiting for the other glass slipper to fall. Still waiting for midnight to strike. I couldn't get comfortable here—not even with Prince Jim.

All I could think about was Am I doing it right? Do they really like me? Should I drink out of the goblet before or after each bite? It was like my Stepmother and Stepsisters had taken up permanent residence in my head. I was still just little Cinderella on the inside.

I thought no one had really noticed my misery. But one day, as I was staring at myself in the moat, I saw my fairy godmother's face in front of me. “Oh, dear...this is highly irregular. We're not supposed to meddle more than once, you see.” She said, sighing. “But I couldn't stand seeing you this way anymore. I feel..well, I feel sort of responsible.” I assured her that, despite appearances, I was happy with the Prince I loved—well, happy enough. “Enough! Posh!” She snorted in a most un-fairylike fashion. “I didn't go through all of this trouble for enough!” She took a deep breath. “The secret, dear Ella, is that I've been holding out on you. I gave you all of the trappings, but I failed to pass on the most important bit of information.”

“More important than 'Be home by midnight'?”

“Yes, even more than THAT. The secret, Ella dear, is in plain sight. Just a dear, commonplace little word...but more powerful than any magic spell. The word is...” She paused dramatically. “SO!”

“So?” At that moment, I was feeling exceptionally bereft. I'd been longing for my Fairy Godmother to come back and rescue me again, you see, and now here she was and she was...well, obviously daft.

She rolled her eyes. “Did you forget I can read minds, dear?”

Oops.

“Of course, I am not daft! Go ahead...try it out.” She prompted me. “Oh, Cinderella...you aren't dressing the part, you know. You need to pay less attention to all of those peasants and more to your Peerage! After all, people are talking about you. About where you came from. Wondering if you'll measure up.”

I said the word, slowly, “So?” It didn't come naturally. But it felt exactly like the whisper of a cool silk ball gown against your skin.

With a wink, my Fairy Godmother dissolved back into the water.
(more)

I was hooked.

It took some getting used to, but before long, I was saying the word inside my mind all the time. And finally, I felt like I had gotten rid of my steps, mother and sisters, once and for all.

One night in bed, Jim asked me about my newfound, ahem, ardor. I told him my secret. To his credit, he took to it in no time at all.

In fact, it was his idea to leave.

We packed up everything we could carry on our backs, and snuck out the side window of our chamber while the palace snored on.

And of, from that day on, what a life we led! I suppose you could call us a little eccentric. We just called it FINALLY being ourselves. Psychoanalysis in the Swiss Alps, sailing with pirates searching for buried treasure, a year living in an igloo, whirling with the dervishes and reading Rumi for a year, dancing all night in a little club at the foot of a volcano where they named a drink after me...we did it all. We decided we were good will ambassadors from the Kingdom, and so it was our mission to show people how to live...to help all we could. And whenever we caught ourselves caring what people think, or being scared of rolling eyes and sarcasm, we applied our word like a vaccine. “So?” It worked like, well, a magic charm.

My Jim passed last year—snake bite while we camped in New Mexico. You might have seen the funeral on television...I never know how much coverage our lands get in your media.

Anyway, I was sort of numb there for a while...waiting for someone to rescue me again. Waiting for life to start making sense. It's hard to say, “So what?” to death. But finally, slowly, slowly...I realized that's exactly what Jim would like for me to do.

I'm moving a little more quietly now, but I'm still moving. Setting up a school, to teach people to save themselves. And my fairy godmother loves it—says she'll even teach a class!

And one last secret, because I can see you want to know.

Yes, these are the shoes. I wear them everywhere. These glass slippers are stronger than they look.

________________________________
For more eccentric tales, go here.

Courage

2007-06-15T23:40:00.000-05:00

(If I only had da Nerve...)

I seem to be attracted to books with the word “Courage” in them lately. The Courage to Create, The Courage to Achieve, The Courage to Write. I stare at the word on the spine until it becomes a hieroglyphic—the C leaning urgently, protectively towards the O like an open mouth; the U like arms outreached, and then the rage rushing heedlessly towards the next challenge.

I want to unlock the secret of this word so that I can find it in myself. Instead, all I see are spaces where courage SHOULD live, but does not.

It's embarrassing, almost an eighteenth century problem, this problem of feeling silenced as a woman. Why should I feel silenced in a world that appears to be saying yes, yes, yes? Since childhood, I was groomed—gifted classes, honors track in high school, Seven Sisters' college. Again and again in my world, girls and women were encouraged to reach out and take whatever honors we could reach. This praise started to feel like loans I'd someday have to pay back, with interest. I felt that I could only survive inside the soft, welcoming nest of academia. I longed to go straight into graduate school, but I was afraid of making the wrong choice. Already I was worried about the impracticality of my education—I didn't quite feel like I knew how to do anything, but whatever I did, I should somehow do it exceptionally well. And my ambitions were equally hazy. I wanted to do something GREAT, to cover myself with glory and justify all of my awards. But...what? In the midst of all of this expansive yes, a stronger voice was already uncoiling in my mind, repeating its mantra of no, no, no.

Betty Friedan wrote of the “problem with no name”--the stifling of female ambition by a society that wished them only to stay home and clean house. But these women were trapped by external barriers. Once Friedan identified and dared to name the problem of the “feminine mystique,” the women's movement was effectively born. I know that I have benefited from this movement, and have always considered myself an ardent feminist. And yet, my life feels like a betrayal of those beliefs.

Oh, I don't mean being a stay at home mother—that just fills me with impatience, most days. It's difficult, as aforementioned, to butt heads with my willful Madam, but that's not the whole story. In spite of everything, I am thrilled to be able to watch her unfurling, growing, changing. This is a time I'd truly hate to miss.

No, I am talking about these persistent fears—this fear that I cannot take care of myself, that in some essential way, I cannot survive on my own. My mind is full of locked doors, where I hide my true, outsized ambitions. THIS is the betrayal, that I have such trouble admitting that I want to DO something, BE something that matters in the world. That I want to stop saying things like, “I'd just be happy with...” and “It's OK that...” It's NOT OK.

I want to be a writer. Not just that, I want to be a GREAT WRITER. And even more than that, I do believe that I have the potential to do so. But first I have to be brave enough, and honest enough, not just to admit it but to admit that I am afraid of the distance between me and this dream. I am so afraid of wasting more time, of going down yet another wrong road. I admit this too—I want a guarantee that I'm going in the right direction, that eventually, if I write a great deal and work hard, I'll find my way. I want to skip to the end of the book and read my ending. Because I am afraid (there is that word again) to spend the rest of my life working towards something that might never reach any sort of fruition.

I just don't want to fail—if I don't try, then I'll always be the one full of potential. But if I try, without coolness, being as open and geeky and occasionally pretentious as I KNOW I am, and STILL fail...then what am I? Someone who had every advantage, who was nurtured and aided, and couldn't make her name. Someone who let everyone else down.

So I read my books on courage, and writers' diaries where they confess the same fears I have everyday. But of course, somewhere, these writers found the courage to move forward in spite of the pervasive voices of their fears. In spite of familial disapproval, societal disdain, poverty, obscurity. I suppose this courage finally came from a wordless deep soul-breath, something inside of them that finally opened the door.

I hope that this confession of my ambitions, something I always, ALWAYS avoid, spurs me to move my hand towards the lock.

I am standing in front of it now.

Where I'm at

2007-06-15T00:32:00.000-05:00

Every evening, as I sit in the bedroom waiting for Madam to go to sleep, I blog in my mind. Yes, if I wrote down even half of those posts, I would be one of the more prolific bloggers instead of, well...me. Usually, I manage to have an idea, develop it to a certain point, and lose interest in it all before Madam's eyes start to droop. I am aware that this perfectionism serves no one, but it's almost like I am watching it approaching like a storm over the trees. Powerless to stop it.

So I am writing now, if only to be able to remind myself that the words CAN come, some of them, even when they don't seem to be going anywhere in particular.

In my moments of block, it's easy for me to think that the problem is a complete lack of words, but usually, it's too many words. As you all know, I read obsessively, one book lighting the other. Words whirl and crash and crowd thickly, but not my words. I can't manage to hear myself at all. During these times, I think about Julia Cameron's advice about going on a media fast, but...I don't have the willpower. My books bring me SO much pleasure—propped against the toaster as I make my morning coffee, waiting for Madam's occasional nap How could I give that up?

Besides (she says virtuously), every now and then the books deliver on their promise. Thanks to a recommendation from Catherine in my last post, I picked up the Outlandish Companion by Diana Gabaldon. I remember having read, and enjoyed, her Outlander. But it was her words on the writing process that I have found positively inspiring. And her confidence! She claimed her creativity and storytelling ability without apology or disclaimers. Listening to her made me face something. I don't believe a lot of what I say about myself. I put myself down as a form of self-protection, so that people don't do it first. So that people don't ask “who does she think she is? She's not that good.” It's easier to live down to lowered expectations, I suppose. Listening to someone who refused to do that was startling, a slap into sanity that reminds me that it's a CHOICE to put myself down all of the time.

Maybe, just maybe, I am that good.

Is it possible for me to admit that?
____________________________________________
Thank you all for your birthday wishes! It was a lovely day—a wonderful new present, flowers, and a three hour nap from Madam! I have so much hope for 34. THAT'S difficult for me to admit as well. I have an ingrained belief that is sort of the opposite of the Secret/Law of Attraction mentality. I believe that if I allow myself to dream big and HOPE, the Universe's vast disapproving eye will pivot towards me, and misery will rain down on my head.

So I'm hoping...openly, and carrying a big umbrella.

Tomorrow

2007-06-06T23:25:00.000-05:00

Thanks to everyone who responded to my last couple of posts about Madam’s tantrums and my difficulties with her. To answer a few of your questions: Yes, she has been evaluated on account of her speech delay, and will be again when she turns two next month. And we have been working on signing, but the only ones she is interested in remembering (and repeating) are the signs for swing, slide, library, school, and playground.

I know you are all shocked.

I have come close to losing it this week with her (another TOUGH week) and re-reading your kind advice has really helped.

So thank you!
________________________________________________
Tomorow I will be 34. It’s strange. I never thought I would make it past 21. And I have. I guess.
________________________________________________
In grade school and high school birthdays were very very important.

I still remember my parents waking me up every birthday morning with "Las Mañanitas" playing on the stereo. And tottering through the school hallways, carefully balancing my two boxes of bakery cupcakes (because no way was Mami going to bake them herself, and besides the bakery ones were better). I always wore something girly and dressy on my birthday, a sharp contrast to the careless way I dressed the rest of the year. Birthdays were no time to blend in and be ordinary. On my birthday, I indulged my desire to be a STAR.

"Do you feel different?" My teachers would ask. "No," I would lie. But I did. More solemn. Heightened.

I've always loved rituals.

In high school, your friends would make a poster sized card for you and hang it by the lockers, so that all of your other friends and acquaintances and teachers could sign it as they passed by. They would buy you flowers and Mylar balloons, which you needed to negotiate through the crowded hallways until an assistant principal inevitably confiscated them until the end of the day, and then you complained even though you were secretly relieved because now you could walk to class without bashing people in the face with your balloons.

Several of the more enterprising florists near the high school took to opening at 7am to capitalize on the tradition of floral and blown up devotion.

Quickly, I learned that although I loved getting presents and flowers and cards, what I really loved about my birthday was making it a DAY—special clothes, my favorite foods, wandering around in the Village with my friends buying used books and going to a movie at the Angelika.

I usually spent the days before my birthday summing up the previous year in my journal, and creating wildly ambitious plans for the next one. No, really, one of my main goals from age 11 to about 23 was “To become enlightened.” I am not sure what happened about 23. Maybe I believed it had already happened? Or never would?

Or maybe it was just that birthdays with TEG were less about enlightenment and more about pure sensation--traveling to the beach at night with our makeshift picnics, the thick salty air pouring into the car as we talked over each other, that endless conversation between us. TEG always gave me a huge bag full of little presents that I could scatter through my days, reminding me of his love from every angle. Bead necklaces, photos of daisies and kittens, Sandman comic books, books of poetry. Again, it was about feeling cherished, about feeling surrounded by abundance. Revelling in the experiences.

Last year I was so deeply engrossed in moving to Minneapolis that my birthday passed over me like a breeze. I was too tired to gaze at my navel, for once.

Not so this year.

So, in that spirit, I want to share what I know and what I want to know:

What I know:
Having a toddler is hard work.

What I want to know:
How to keep my sense of humor (and sanity) during her travails. How to be a better, wiser mother.

What I know:
It’s difficult to write a novel if you insist on writing it from beginning to end in order.

What I want to know:
Then, how else do you do it? No, really? Help?

What I know:
Sleep is very important.

What I want to know:
How to get more of it. Without screaming that agonizes the neighbors.

What I know:
It’s unfair to expect TEG to “take care of me” and thus protect me from my own fears.

What I want to know:
How to learn to lean on myself and act despite my fears. How to stop being Cinderella.

What I know:
I didn’t really become enlightened at 24.

What I want to know:
If I did, would I feel the difference?

Tomorrow I will be 34. And the big goal for this next year? To really embrace 34, abundant, messy, grown up 34, with humor, with wisdom, and with less fear.

Sunday Scribblings: City and Country

2007-06-03T01:13:00.000-05:00

My ancestral city: From About.com:Colombia in Pictures

We are city people. We have always been city people. So my parents have never understood the allure of living off the land, of trading civilization for a log cabin in the middle of the forest. They would listen to Americans gush enthusiastically “going camping” and living “a mile from the nearest neighbor.” My mother would say, “maybe our campo is different from their country.”

Campesinos were not rugged individualists, sucking the marrow out of life ala Thoreau. No, they were merely subsistance farmers who lived in small, rural villages, and had always done so. People who were routinely the butt of jokes, seen as illiterate, ignorant of citified sophistication.

For a time, I became fascinated with the idea of being a country person—a sort of more resourceful, shadow self. Even the word resonates like music, describing people who were intertwined with the campo, the woods. I imagined these people possessed a sort of mystical knowledge of how to survive.

I knew that I would not last ten minutes in the campo by myself.

Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books fed my interest. These people could do seemingly ANYTHING—could tell apart plants, discover which ones were poisonous or edible; could build houses with their bare hands; knew the seasons for sowing and harvesting, and how to sew a dress. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family faced incredible hardship, but even the daily chores seemed difficult and exotic. Living in a dug out by a creek? Sleeping in the hay? Playing with the pig’s bladder after a slaughter? Amazing.

While I devoured these books about prairie living, I didn’t really notice my parents adjusting to their own version of the frontier—U.S. life. People probably assumed my parents were like “campesinos,"not commanding and glamorous the way they seemed to me. None of the knowledge that had served them so well in their homeland seemed to have any currency here. Although they had lived in a beautiful city in Colombia, no one here had ever heard of it. They spoke haltingly, using small words that must have felt like going back to childhood.

Despite everything, they managed to survive and thrive here. Perhaps that’s why “roughing it” never appealed to them. They spent years roughing it—between jobs and paychecks, sometimes without health insurance, apart from their families.

I’ve lived a pretty privileged life, so I’m wary of the country for a different reason. I’ve always lived in the noisy friendliness of the city, surrounded on all sides by teeming, overabundant life. I love the sound of music trailing loud and flat behind a car, the sound of teen girl giggles down the street. I know how to survive here—when to smile back and when to avert my eyes. How to walk down the street in that easy alertness that marks the citydweller.

The country would throw me back on myself—force me to face my deficiencies. I can’t really see myself in nature; I don’t know enough about it. I am afraid of what I might discover if I take the time to step away from the endless distraction of city living. Here, like it or not, I can always get a reaction. I always know that I exist. In the country, in the middle of the woods, the trees would grow impassively around me. The animals would whisper in their own languages. Plants would be food or foe; I certainly wouldn’t know. I’d be forced to make decisions, over and over again, without any direction.

Is it possible to die of uncertainty?

So, I stay in my life, and try to ignore the reckless allure of the dark woods that lurk just ahead. And I try to ignore the persistent question of my life. My parents were able to forge ahead and clear a trail in a new, incomprehensible land. So why is it that I cannot?

Why am I so sure I wouldn't survive in the dark unknown?
_______
For more explorations of the city and the country, go here.

Coming up for air

2007-05-31T23:41:00.000-05:00

William Wordsworth said that poetry (and thus, writing) is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility.” Which might be the reason I am getting so little writing done lately. My days are full of emotion, all right, but tranquility?

I’ve re-read some of the posts I wrote last year, and I’m amazed at how lucid they are, in spite of the severe sleep deprivation. Once I learned to ride the waves of hallucinogenic exhaustion, my mind adjusted. So why can’t I do it now?

One word. Tantrums. Tantrums that leave me frustrated, confused, and guilty. I understand that the severity and frequency of Madam’s freak outs is related to the fact that she cannot speak. But…shouldn’t I be able to do SOMETHING to mitigate their ferocity?

And therein lies the guilt. Why doesn’t she speak? Is something wrong? What am I doing wrong? Because, of course, it must be my fault. So I spend the whole night marinating in recrimination and second-guessing—not exactly fertile states for the would-be novelist. Especially one who still feels so unsure, like I am breaking all of Aristotle’s rules of drama at once. If I am going to spend precious mother-energy writing a novel, I need to justify it by being very, very good at it. And, of course, nothing kills "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" faster than THAT.

The very act of wanting to write the novel makes me anxious, as though I should be spending that time reading parenting books.

Now, a confession, much as I love research and reading, I hate reading parenting books. Inevitably, they suggest changes in our routines that I am not sure we need to make, or they give me solutions that don’t seem to work on Madam. And they contradict each other wildly—console her when her emotions grow overwhelming! No, ignore her, otherwise she’ll learn that tantrums get her what she wants! Try to reason with her! No, distract her! No…

You get the idea.

Not to mention the fact that after a whole day of being Mommy, the last thing I want to do when I’m off-duty is read about all of the mistakes I made while being Mommy that day.

That being said, clearly, something is wrong here. There has to be something I can do. At the very least, I can spend every evening harshly blaming myself over every parenting decision I’ve ever made. Some nights, I even go back to her NICU stay—did we miss some crucial bonding window while she was there? Did I not spend enough time with her? Did she pick up some hint of my fear and uncertainty at the idea of being entrusted with her WHOLE LIFE?

Last night, while talking to a dear friend who suffers from anxiety, I mentioned that worry can feel like it’s giving us some modicum of control—at least we’re CONCERNED and AWARE! Even if that concern is completely depleting us, and the awareness is accomplishing nothing.

I need to take my own advice.

I know that on some level, I am feeling guilty for wanting to work on my writing at all—because I should be tirelessly devoted to Madam. And…is the novel the culprit here? Those times that I spend daydreaming about characters and plots—are those the times that Madam could be learning to speak, but isn’t? I read to her a great deal; should I read more? Different books? Do I talk to her too much? Not enough? Is too much of my speech over her head? Are those moments I steal to write while she is watching television ruining her?

Am I being selfish for believing that I can write a novel and be a good mother at the same time?

So I pay my penance. I have started reading parenting books—gentle ones that don’t imply that you have probably ALREADY ruined your child for life. I get enough of that from my parents.

Someday, I’ll look back on all this and smile, if not quite laugh.

And I’ll spend hours talking with my Madam about my latest book.

Losing my religion: Mother Talk Blog Bonanza

2007-05-25T00:20:00.000-05:00

I have wanted to write about my struggle with my faith, but I always flinched away from the topic, allowed myself to be distracted. Well, thanks to the good people at Mother Talk for asking people to blog about religion and faith, inspired by the book Parenting Beyond Belief as part of the Mother Talk Blog Bonanza.
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Sitting in church every Sunday morning for years is probably very good training for a future writer. Think of it, those long sonorous sermons holding people captive just long enough to get a foothold in your imagination—people who all look like they have secrets (especially to an imaginative kid). Once you’ve got the responses/movements down, you are free to be carried along on the waves of emotion/repentance/ecstasy that break over the congregation, called by the priest’s powerful chant.

I don’t want to imply that I spent all of those Sundays daydreaming. Growing up Catholic was very important to me, so much so that I used to tell people that being Catholic was the most important fact about my life. Stepping inside the hushed, cool church, with the light making jewel colored shadows on our faces—it was like coming home, and I’d have to swallow hard past the tears that inevitably came. My parents viewed my religious fervor with approval, if a little confusion. They were (are) good Catholics, who observed all of the holy days, abstained from meat or attended church according to the Papal calendar. I don’t remember being taught my prayers, or the responses in Mass. Those were things I always knew, and that was because my parents made it that way. But they didn’t stray too far from conventional interpretations of the Bible, and they were pretty content to keep Catholicism unambiguous and comforting. Whereas I, with all of the enthusiasm of adolescence, sought out St. Therese de Lisieux and St. John of the Cross and Matthew Fox and Meister Eckhart—as well as the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao te Ching, the Heart Sutra. And the more I learned, the more it seemed like this brand of mystical ecumenical Catholicism was my own church, Catholicism with a capital C, instead of the more pedestrian little-c weekly Mass.

And yet, I have not been to church in over a year. I have not baptized Madam. I’m unsure as to whether I ever will.

The disillusionment started in college, as it often does. I sat and listened to my more brilliant, atheist classmates systematically prove that the Church was a harmful influence on humanity. Inquisitions were mentioned. The Church’s treatment of women, of black people, of Jews. And I realized that, a lot of the time, I didn’t have a good response.

I was also swimming in a sea of beautiful poetry, philosophy, and literature. They gave me that transcendent ache I used to equate with my faith. I started to see the Church from the outside, and even though I used to console myself by remembering my “own” brand of Catholicism, that was starting to sound a little hollow.

But so much still pulled me back to the church. Whenever I came home from school, I would attend Mass with my parents, and it was as much a homecoming as that first moment when I would walk into my bedroom. Catholicism is intertwined with Latin culture a lot of the time—baptisms, Quinceañeras, confirmations, weddings—a quick sign of the Cross before any major endeavor (or just leaving the house)—novenas to the Virgin to ensure a good grade on a test, or a new job. A priest coming to bless a new house, a new car. Candles lit to St. Jude, whether or not something could be a considered a lost cause. My mother had a small altar set up in her bedroom, with a prominent painting of Jesus looking tired and loving, arms open in perpetual welcome. I used to sit there with her, watching her as she muttered her rosaries. It comforted me to know that she was asking for me, for all of the family. I was certain that when my mother was praying to God, God was listening.

Things changed, definitely, during my wedding. My dream was to get married in the same church that I had attended for years, the church where I made my first communion, where my nieces and nephews had been baptized. But the only priest who would deign to marry us had serious issues with the fact that my husband was not Catholic, and would not be converting. During his homily at the ceremony, he went on about how it was my duty as a good Catholic woman to “show him the light” and also about how marriage was just “pain and suffering.”

I was livid—not just at him, but, irrationally, at the whole Church. Hadn’t I stayed faithful, in spite of serious misgivings? Hadn’t I defended the Church against so many worthy accusations?

It didn’t matter.

Although I made brief stabs at returning to the faith, it was never the same after that. I kept straining my soul towards that sense of connection that had always sustained me, but nothing connected anymore.

And then I got pregnant, and everyone told me that NOW I would find that missing emotion. And I tried. It felt important to give my child that same sense of spiritual union that I had grown up with, that sense of being beloved by something much larger than yourself, or even your family. I tried to go back to my readings, reminded myself that TEG always said that we would raise our children in both of our faiths (he was raised a Hindu, but attended Catholic school all of his life). But he’s not the slightest bit religious—he just wants to make sure that she understands the cultural importance of the Hindu rituals.

I want so much more than that for her, but whenever I reach out, it is like grabbing through mist. I am empty. And I’ve been that way for a long time, even through the fear of her NICU stay, and the strains in my marriage. I still pray, but without that feeling of union that I remember from those times with my mother.

Now, finally, I am feeling some faint religious stirrings again. But they are not leading me back to Catholicism, but rather towards Buddhism and Hinduism. How will I reconcile these longings with my desire to immerse my daughter in her Latin culture—and in her grandparents’ tradition? How will I create a place for faith and practice in our lives without TEG’s participation? How will I learn enough to feel like I can teach her these faiths without feeling like a dilettante?

I’m not sure. But I’m open to all suggestions. Even divine ones.

Sunday Scribblings: Mask (a mini-story)

2007-05-22T01:21:00.000-05:00

Ed note: Very very late first draft--Madam's been sick, I've been sick. Bleh.
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We moved in with the Old Lady about a week after Halloween, with three medium sized suitcases and a small box. When she saw us, she smiled and nodded with approval. “That’s exactly what I expected, Carmen. Good work!”

That smile bounced and landed on Mami’s face, but uncertain, like it didn’t quite belong there.

It hadn’t been easy, packing up our whole lives like that. Mami had stood in the center of the room, hands on her hips, surveying the mountains of clothes and stuff while Sandra and I crawled up the mounds and slid down.

But she knew we couldn’t bring everything, or even most things. “We will get it ALL back.” She said, firm voiced. “This is only temporary.”

One of the things I did manage to bring was my Halloween mask. Cinderella’s face glowed and grinned at me. I had flaunted the plastic costume around the house until Papi asked me if I was Cinderella before or after the ball. That made me throw it out.

Sandra laughed at me, “Paola…please! Ain’t no little black Cinderellas running around here but you!” She always liked to rub it in, my big sister, that she looked like Mami, beautiful and pale, while I was darker, like Papi. I’d always run to Mami to ask her about it, but she’d shoo me off while she separated our lives into smaller and smaller piles. Maybe she didn’t have an answer for me, or one she thought I would have liked.

If I stared at myself in the mirror at just the right angle, Paola disappeared altogether, and only Cinderella remained, blondely, sweetly smiling.

The mask made me beautiful.

So I shoved it at the very top of the overflowing suitcase and it made the journey to the Old Lady’s house.

One thing that surprised me was that the house was so big, easily three times bigger than our old apartment.

“Why couldn’t we just keep everything, Mami?” I asked her when we got to the small area the Old Lady called “our rooms.”

“Shush, Paola. This is not our house. Don’t be fresh.”

“But if it's not our house, then why are we living here?” Sandra asked.

“Because…because. Because the Old Lady is doing us a kindness. Better schools, better everything. And…it’s only temporary. So don’t let me catch either of you making ANY trouble while we’re here.” Something about her voice, some little catch of fear, turned Sandra and I into allies. Solemnly wide-eyed, we both nodded.

Mami’s face, her beautiful face, was flat, like a shut door.

We got used to it, the way that kids always do. School kept us busy—it was all so much harder than we were used to. We didn’t know much about what our parents did during the day, and we were quiet and well-behaved around the Old Lady.

A few weeks in, the Old Lady decided to give a party. Sandra and I knew that some of the kids in our class, and their parents, would be there. We also knew, without asking, that we were not to invite anyone. We would be there, but on the sides. It wasn’t for us.

On the day of the party, I was surprised to see Mami and Papi dressed in formal black outfits, like nothing either of them had ever worn before. Mami always wore bright colors, flouncy girl clothes. Nothing this straight and plain. And Papi liked bright shirts, open at the chest. Nothing this strict.

“Maybe it’s a costume party?” I asked Sandra, real hope in my voice. I was always looking for an excuse to wear my Cinderella mask.

“Nah, don’t you get it yet?” Sandra was a worldly nine to my seven years. “Mami and Papi are servants here. That’s why they’re dressed like that!”

Servants? I pondered this knowledge.

“Does that mean that we’re like Cinderella?”

She snorted. “I told you, there ARE no black Latina Cinderellas!”

She sounded so sure; I decided not to argue the point.

So I wore the mask that night—Sandra and I were out of sight anyway, not being allowed to be up that late. But we were, and we watched Mami and Papi refilling drinks, cleaning up, serving food. Their faces were curved in gentle smiles that looked nothing like them, that made them invisible.

The people with kids left and the rest started getting a little drunk and kind of rowdy. It started to look a little bit more like the parties in the old neighborhood. Just whiter.

The DJ put on a salsa that my parents loved and after a breath, people started shuffling towards the dance floor. Once they got there, they kicked and jerked--ignoring the music like it wasn't there. Their bodies sagged, then stiffened and they laughed. They waved their hips back and forth like the music was turning them into animals. They made doing it wrong look like the right thing--like Mami and Papi and their friends were stupid for loving it, taking it seriously. And I could hear it, suddenly, like they did. Not beautiful, like the classical music we heard at school. But loud, blaring—ugly.

"How embarassing!" Sandra hissed, a blush darkening her face. But they didn't look embarassed. They looked happy they hadn't had to try.

I kept waiting for my parents to get on the dance floor, to make it beautiful again. But they never did. And I remembered what Sandra said—that they were servants. They were working at the ball.

Nothing much changed after the party, except that we all got even more busy—my parents with their work for the Old Lady, Sandra and I with school. So busy that our visits to the old neighborhood sort of…stopped. So busy we didn’t have time for the old food, for that old music. And so we lived in the Old Lady’s house, in her life, and Mami was wrong. It wasn’t temporary, after all. And even after the Old Lady helped us find a place of our own, we never got it all back.

I’m not sure what happened to the mask after the party. Probably I left it out and it got cleaned away.

Now I’m in college, where people call me Paula and I don’t mind. It’s just easier to say they say, and I agree.

And sometimes, I start remembering and almost feel the safety of the plastic edging of the mask scraping against my face, pulling against my brittle hair. I wish that they could see me in the smooth, pale Cinderella beauty.

But I know they can’t.
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To look behind more masks, go here.