Talk

I am not a particularly good listener. I want to be; I fantasize about being someone who listens exquisitely, who stores in her silence all the beauty and humanity and wisdom she has collected from those around her, so that on the rare occasions when she actually speaks, people lean in closer to hear her.

Did I mention this is a fantasy? This is a fantasy.

I talk (a LOT) for the same reasons I write --to connect, to understand, to reach out and to be known. Some people seem to examine each new experience or relationship, assess its value, and store it without comment in the appropriate section of their brains. Their minds, I imagine, are like the libraries at well-funded, respectable universities. There are sections for skills they have acquired, places to which they have traveled, aesthetic preferences, marginally useful information from their formal educations, events they have attended --all available for anyone with an i.d. and good standing to check out. Information about relationships, Significant Life Experiences, and Other People's Secrets is usually restricted; you need special permission to look at any of that and none of it can ever leave the library.

My brain is more like the personal library of one of the university professors --the one who teaches Poetry and wanders around campus in clothes she probably slept in, reciting "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" and scribbling in a notebook. In this library, only Other People's Secrets are restricted --everything else is jumbled together and completely accessible. Something about a trip to Georgia is next to something about Thanksgiving is next to something about music. Something about crabapples is next to something about camp is next to something about what it felt like to lose Kyle or Aunt Betty or someone who's still living but beyond my reach.

If you go to the university library, you will generally be left alone to find what you came for. There are friendly, knowledgeable staff to help you with your research and you need not waste time with irrelevant information.  If you arrived ready to research travel, you will find all the information that library has available about travel plus anything they are able to access from another, similar library.

If you go to the crazy professor's library (you'll need an invitation, but they're handed out liberally), be prepared to abandon your agenda. Be prepared to browse rather than search. Be prepared to dig in. Be prepared for the professor to rhapsodize about her salad days, the tender bloom of her youth, her moments in the sun. Be prepared to emerge hours, maybe days later, strung out and weighed down by her strange preferences, her rambling anecdotes and misplaced loyalties. Did she ask you anything about yours? Did she pause long enough for you to answer? You don't remember... you feel like you've just spent a year at the Vatican, learning the dark secrets of Man.

Maybe once you have escaped, you roll your eyes and groan. Maybe you grumble to a couple of sympathetic, like-minded friends --LORD that woman talks a lot. Does she EVER shut up? (No, not really). But can you concede for a moment that there's a certain boldness about her messy confessional? Can you acknowledge that listening is honorable, yes, but that sharing is brave?

Nobody rolls their eyes or groans about a listener --there's nothing to judge. They're receiving information, not giving it, so they get to keep their dignity and their reputation and their secrets. Everybody likes listeners ...but nobody knows them.

I talk too much ...about camp, growing up in Edina, growing up Catholic, belonging to a family of intense, inscrutable Gypsies, belonging to a family of vocal, theatrical WASPs. I talk too much about peonies (my favorite) and aspic (revolting) and Colorado peaches (glorious).  I talk too much about my questions and my heartbreaks and my comforts. I feel like at least little bit of a mess at least half the time (ie: while I'm awake) and I left my dignity behind years ago.  I share --I take the risk. It's not always honorable, but it's brave.

Of course I want to be a listener, too. I want to encourage anyone willing to take the risk, open up, invite people in. I want to be weighed down by your strange preferences and your rambling anecdotes and your misplaced loyalties. I'm leaning in. Go. Talk.

Toward and Away

I am packing --I have ten boxes so far. I am trying not to resent the people who bought our house for one dollar and 46 cents; they did, after all, rescue me from a real-estate market summer with three kids and their sandy feet, their camp bags dripping with lakewater/sweat/bug spray, and their fairy camp glitter crafts. I was ever-so-slightly anxious about that.

Every move we make in this life is either toward or away; one motivation is usually stronger than the other. If the choice is between Camp and Somewhere Else, the desire to move toward camp will always win out over the desire to move away from Somewhere Else, even if Somewhere Else is the Valley of Ashes or the DMV. If the choice is between a beet and Something Else, the desire to move away from the beet is always stronger than the desire to move toward Something Else, even if the Something Else is GramBea's rice pudding with sliced bananas and fresh whipped cream. There's a governing force --toward or away.

I began crying a little bit when I was packing the other night. I wasn't surprised at this ... I'm never particularly surprised to catch myself crying and I happened to be half-watching the Glee finale at the time (if you ask me, it wasn't really what it could have been, but still). Even if I weren't the emotional creature I am, I would have expected a certain emotional release when I finally started packing to leave this house; any impetus for motion from here will always be Away. I want to move away from the washing machine flood that wrecked most of our basement and first floor about a year after we moved here; I want to move away from the room I was sitting in when the call came about Kyle; I want to move away from the spot in the kitchen where I will forever see the elaborate poster I made to keep track of all of Caroline's seizure medications.

In my more rational moments, I know not to blame this house for all of that unhappiness, but let's just say it --I don't have that many rational moments. I'm not demanding of myself any fairness to this house just yet. I'm not insisting that I celebrate right now the good stuff that has happened here -- the loud, joyous, giggly breakfasts with my Julie and her family after church; the out-of-the-blue phone calls from people whose voices I hadn't heard in 20 years; the happy hours in the kitchen or the garden; the snowy Saturday mornings on the couch with Brian and the Drewlets. I'll remember those later and be grateful for them later. Right now I only want to be away.

Ideally, the big moves in our lives are more Toward than Away, but I don't have a Toward yet; we're still looking for a new house. It's unsettling. While I was packing for the move to our first house, I used to picture myself reading on the little screened porch, wearing a tank top and soft, stretchy pants. I'd picture myself pouring fresh orange juice from a glass pitcher and nibbling on a scone or some scrambled eggs. I pictured plants and flowers and candles and pillows and books and a knit blanket or two for when it got chilly. I was dreading leaving Minneapolis and going to Cleveland for Brian's residency, but I could imagine a whole, content, interesting self on that porch --I was moving toward that more than I was moving away from Minneapolis.

I do not yet have a porch to move toward as I pack to move away from this house, but I have the tank top and the soft, stretchy pants ...I have the glass pitcher and a truly excellent currant scone recipe. I have the plants and candles and pillows and books and I have a blanket I knit myself from old sweaters and leftover yarn. I moved away from her for a while, but I have a whole, content, interesting self to look forward to.

She's doing more writing than reading these days, this whole, content, interesting self I'm moving toward, and she isn't alone in the scene anymore --wherever she's sitting, whatever she's doing, her husband is done with the grueling residency now and is bringing her a mocha (iced or hot, depending on the season). He made it for her out of coffee beans he roasted himself in a popcorn popper and bittersweet chocolate sauce she keeps in the fridge. Her son is telling her about his latest Lego creation or reading her some of his original poetry and her little daughters are singing Michael Franti's "Say Hey (I Love You)," while they color. The rooms are fuzzy but there is light and warmth and music and good food. There is love and forgiveness and recovery. There are deep friendships for everyone, comfort, understanding, beauty.

And there is me, a woman I have rushed towards and turned away from and dragged towards and run away from and stepped carefully towards and danced recklessly away from --each turn with equal force, motivated by the same question: if I have a choice between my life and Something Else, will I always choose mine, even with its losses and disappointments, even with its occasional loneliness? My nature is to ask this question over and over again even though the answer is always Yes. Every move is toward that Yes.

Endings

I've been (particularly) emotional lately ...things are ending. I am not necessarily referring to the End of the World, which the Mayans apparently scheduled-by-not-scheduling for later this year, though I have to say that the deaths of Whitney Houston, Maurice Sendak, Vidal Sassoon, AND Donna Summer in the same year have me a bit edgy. What could that MEAN?

Lizzie, my youngest, turned five yesterday.  Of course the early childhood years are intense for everyone ...the nursing, the sadomasochistic sleep schedules (theirs and ours), the laundry, the temper tantrums (theirs and ours), the saccharine tv shows, the aggressive bitches who show up at preschool dropoff in full hair and makeup, the vomit, the blood, the tinkle, the poop, the tears (theirs and ours), the pining for our former lives, the very real fear that Child and Family Services are on their way, the diapers, the permanent Lego and Squinky and sparkly bead engravings on our feet.

Even when nothing goes seriously wrong, the early years with kids are enough to rattle most of us. In the midst of the Standard Mama Experience, one of mine started having rare seizures on a December night as we pulled her out of the bathtub. She was two. We did weeks of steroid shots, tried I-don't-know-how-many scary medications for the next three months, had several hospital slumber parties that weren't nearly as fun as you're imagining them to be, then had the right temporal lobe of her brain removed in a nine-hour surgery at Mayo Clinic when she was three.

All of this while I was still supposed to be Mama to a sensitive, dreamy five-year-old boy and a passionate, stubborn 1 1/2-year-old girl. So can we all just agree I had a bigger rock to roll up the hill than most Mamas? I did ...partly because of what was happening to my Caroline, partly because of what was happening to our family, and partly because of what was happening to me. I don't know what fed what -- that's one of those chicken and egg questions that mamas of tiny children don't have time for.

But now Lizzie (the passionate, stubborn baby --who KNOWS where she gets those qualities?) is five. Not quite ready for summer employment on an Alaskan fishing boat, perhaps, but able to poke her own straw through the hole in her juice pouch without spraying juice everywhere, able to choose her own bold fashion ensembles, and able to sing soulful and expressive (if ever-so-slightly off-tune) renditions of most Disney songs. She still needs me to snuggle her and scratch her back after she's had one of her intimidating Corleone tantrums, but she doesn't need me to feed her. Reason isn't exactly featured in her personal philosophy but she is able, for the most part, to comprehend it. She is five. She is not a baby anymore.

The baby years are over for all three of my children. That fact has been traveling through my nervous system for the last month or so, lighting it up with hope and wonder and possibilities in this minute, then flooding it in the next with longing for those lumpy, helpless beings who fell asleep at my breast, dreaming (I assume) of their former lives as explorers or priestesses or fortune tellers.

It's getting harder to find the babies I started with in the faces of the children I have now. Henry is nine, experimenting with obscure Greek and Egyptian mythology jokes he writes himself and going off on week-long camping trips with his dad and grandpa to the Boundary Waters. I assume he will return after this summer's trip with a full beard.  Caroline is six --creative and theatrical and quite possibly very bright despite the tumor and seizures. We'll know when we know and it doesn't matter to me either way --I got to keep her; I will never forget to be grateful for that. And now Lizzie, my babiest baby, is five --social and emotional and funny. They're real people, growing up and away.

This is as it should be --you'll never hear me say I don't ever want them to go out on their own. I do, though I want that for them, not for me. I want them to have close, deep friendships so they can sit in their rooms and talk about what a nightmarish disappointment I am as a mother. I want them to experience epic, mind-blowing failure; devastating, unrequited love; crushing, faith-testing disappointment. When these calamities befall them, I will want to rescue them in those moments, move mountains and crush enemies and give them the world. But I will want that for me, not for them, so I'll force myself to resist the maternal heroics. I always want to be the Red Cross in their lives, not the liberation front.

In my own life, of course, I must be both, I must manage both my own rescue and my own restoration. Once I have marched into the burning cities of my recent history and freed them from the dictators, I will still have to restore the architecture, the masterpieces and artifacts. That is just fine ...I'm ready to do it and I know how to do it. My own wise, selfless parents allowed me to grow up, granted me my failure and unrequited love and disappointment, so I know how to do it.

My children's babyhood is ending, the years of their helplessness and blind trust and love-bordering-on-worship are ending ...but the world isn't ending.

Return

I sense a return to myself lately, as if I am both a lonely house in the country and the tired but happy resident coming home to it. I have started knitting again --that's always a hopeful sign for me-- and the other night I stayed up until after midnight making ice cream (blackberry crisp, some of my finest work to date if I say so myself, which of course I do because I have barely an ounce of humility in the kitchen). I have at least temporarily stopped hiding/unfriending people who mention exercise in their Facebook status updates, I thought about fashion for a minute or two last weekend, and I didn't cry OR chant "IhateyouIhateyouIhateyou" while I was getting ready for today's showing. Excellent progress.

I wouldn't say I'm fully restored; I'm still explaining myself and defending myself and apologizing for myself too much. I'm still accepting shit the Strong Me would never accept ...but at least now I see it. I see that my formerly excellent underwear collection has become drab and uninspired (really, there's no need to be a slave to fashion if you look fantastic underneath), I see that I am giving far more than I'm getting in a few key places, and I see that my little family has been going through roughly six dozen eggs each month because all I ever cook for dinner is pancakes or scrambled eggs and toast. I see that I have been reclusive for the last several years --staying dark, still, and quiet (relatively speaking), until I could go back home, welcome myself home.

There's some interest in our house. We'll see --no offers yet so I'm not packing or anything, just hoping. The hoping is really the clearest signal that I may be coming back around; I confess I've been cynical this winter, which isn't like me. Gardening helps, of course --it's nearly impossible to be cynical in a garden-- and music, which speaks for me when I can't speak for myself. Devoted friends and chirpy, affectionate children and sleeping with the windows open all help.  The screeching birds auditioning for the next M. Night Shyamalan movie in the tree outside my window at 4:30 in the morning do not help, but I need them so I don't cross over into perky. There's no coming back from perky.

So I am here, both traveling and waiting. My traveling self, headed home, hopes for the best: a garden full of peonies and roses and hostas like the one at dad's; parties full of clever laughing people like the ones at Mom's; rooms full of golden light and piano music like the ones at GramBea's; a basement room filled with bright fabric and sewing patterns like the one at Grandma Betty's.

My waiting self, scanning the horizon, dreads the worst: a strong but tired girl, wanting the garden and the bright dinner guests, the golden light and pretty fabric but finding instead just an old house, not nearly as bright or beautiful or charming as she remembers it. When the girl returns home, will she be happy to stay? Will she at least be comfortable, knowing the old place is, well, older?

I know I'm being a bit maudlin ...please indulge me; I turn 40 this year. I'm not typically proccupied with my age. I've got pretty skin and I figure I have at least a few more good years until I have to start hoisting my boobs into my bra with a crane. If I'm aware at all of 40-as-Beginning-of-the-End, I'm aware of my diminishing ability to recover from catastrophe, my declining capacity for bouncing back. I have always relied heavily on my resilience. As I wait for my former, happier self to return, I start to worry that when does, she will look around and quickly leave again. I want her to stay --at least for the summer. I miss her, I need her.

I need her to throw the windows open, play loud music and invite friends for late dinners and trash tv. I need her to embrace the creaking stairs and drafty windows. I need her to be glad the flash has been replaced with polish --I need her to prefer the polish.

Because if she does ...if the girl I used to be before all the illness and loss and disappointment and uncertainty of my thirties can return to her life already in progress and value it even more for its cracks and imperfection, then maybe others can, too. Maybe my most valued people can. Maybe I can.

Maybe I can stop explaining and defending and apologizing --welcome the people who try to understand, who are happy to come to dinner, and turn away those who seem to willfully misunderstand, who accept the invitation but stay away without explanation. Maybe I can stop blaming myself for that shit. Maybe I can stop accepting it. Maybe I can slowly restore myself, welcome myself home.

Please forgive

No new post today, Dear Reader ...my computer has succumbed to complications from Pepsi poisoning and the one I have been using literally has duct tape on it to keep the power source. I should have the new one in a couple of days and will post on Friday, promise.

Please forgive.

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Letting Go

I have been cherishing an idea lately that I will be allowed to leave this house when I have finally learned what I was sent here to learn. I am still a little bit Catholic in that way --fatalistic. I buried my statue of Saint Joseph in the yard, upside down and facing the house, and prayed to him, the patron saint of happy homes, to please please pretty please help us sell it quickly and find a new house, a more peaceful one where we can be happy and whole.

I don't know if Joseph handles the request himself or if he is just an administrator and God works the actual magic. Whoever it is doesn't seem to be saying no; the answer feels more like "not yet." We've had plenty of showings --several of them second showings-- and one insulting offer, so we should be close, but the whole thing is dragging along in this very Old Testament way. It's not excruciating so much as tedious, so I don't feel punished; I feel tested.

I'm pretty sure the test is about Letting Go, which is my spiritual Achilles' heel. I'm an emotional hoarder, storing old injuries and kindnesses in my memory the way some people hang on to old magazines and clothes nobody can wear. My memory is powerful ...and sometimes mean. It's mean to make me remember what has hurt me, but it's just as mean sometimes to dredge up old indulgences and sympathies and spin them into ideas of lasting friendship or attachment.

I'm a big believer in shared history --the longer I know someone, the more I love them. I love them for who they are of course, but I also love them for the story I get to tell myself about our connection. The richer these stories are with understandings, misunderstandings, love, anger, resentment, and forgiveness, the more attached I become to the main characters. I assume this is yet another symptom of my Romanticism, though I am not just talking about lovers; Romantics (at least this Romantic) can put just as much stock in friendship and family connections, if not more.

So I hang on. Tight. I call, I write, I beg to be loved as completely, as fiercely, as desperately as I love my people. I beg with my devotion and my passion, with songs and silence. I know when a friend or cousin or classmate is resisting this, when they want me to let go. It breaks my heart. I feel humiliated by my need and I hang on tighter. I resist rescue by the people who truly value me, I resist reason and acceptance and dignity. I don't want the story to end. This weakness has made me a rather ineffective fiction writer. It also gets in the way of my writing my own life.

The sad fact that everyone except me seems to understand is that I can't hang on to everyone. There are people from camp and school and even my family who just don't want to keep the connection in any meaningful way. In some cases it's not such a big loss --there are people in every life who read like living versions of One Hundred Years of Solitude or Finnegan's Wake --but a few who have gotten away from me are truly original, insightful, extraordinary people. I want to keep reading, but they don't value me in the same way ...even if some of them used to value me a long time ago.

Letting go feels so permanent to me --I worry about that. I am a bridge burner; could I find my way back to someone who called out from the opposite shore? Would I be willing to try?

There is a room at Hogwarts Castle (yes, I'm talking about Harry Potter again --just indulge me, will you?) called the Room of Requirement, where any student who knows about it may enter and find exactly what s/he needs at that moment --a place to hide, a place to meet, a place to stash something, etc. More than one person can be in there at a time but it can only be used for one purpose at a time.

In the final book in the series, one version of the Room of Requirement burned with unquenchable fire. Did all the other purposes for that room burn with it? Was any form of that room still there when the castle was rebuilt? Or is it still burning, never able or willing to let in someone who wants to return to it? When I let go of someone for good, my heart is that Room of Requirement, burned away for that purpose, that relationship. I wish I could ask Dumbledore about the possibility of rebuilding, reopening the room someday, so I wouldn't be so afraid to let it burn now.

It would never be exactly the same, of course -- there is no magic to undo a fire like that. The room would have to be different, conjured for a new use. That would be okay. I could live with that. But what if the room's capacity for magic is diminished by a fire like that? What if it gets weaker? I worry about that for the Room of Requirement and for my own heart. I'm pretty sure I can guess what Dumbledore would say about it: he would say something about second chances. He would say the burning will stop, the room will be restored when you love someone enough to let them back in even when you know --horribly-- their capacity to do damage.

That may be what Letting Go really means for me --allowing the fire to burn what it will, to hurt, to ruin, to steal my dignity by exposing my attachment to someone who doesn't feel the same way about me. There's no letting go of that fire --it's part of me, proof of my capacity for the magic that starts it in the first place. Letting go does not mean letting go of my People, it does not mean letting go of my wish that those who walk away from me will someday value me enough to return. Letting go means letting go of my fear that I won't let them. Of course I'll let them; I love them no matter what. Isn't that what we're all sent here to learn?

Thinker

"You think too much."

I hear that a lot. I always want to answer, "perhaps you think too little," but of course I don't because I'm too busy obsessing about whether they're right. Do I think too much? I think a lot. A LOT.  What choice do I have? I am the only child of a lapsed Episcopalian WASP with forty-six advanced degrees and a highly-disciplined Catholic Gypsy who speaks 17 languages (give or take). I'm a writer AND a Scorpio AND the product of a privileged-suburban-community pressure cooker. AND a Romantic.

If I don't think, I'll die.

I think about life, death, sex, religion, the Afterlife, previous lives, music, how I don't understand men --not one bit. Then I think about God and what He's hoping I will learn before I turn 40, what I'm hoping I'll learn before I turn 40, what I should make for dinner and what I'm actually willing to make for dinner. Then I get the kids off to school and have my morning coffee.

While I'm buzzing around the house, trying to clean it up before my caffeine high wears off, I think about selling the house, whether it will happen this week or this month or even this year and how when it does I will spend an entire week watching trash tv in my bathrobe, eating strawberry Haagen-Dazs out of the carton and never making a single bed. I think about whether my cousin Kyle's ghost will be willing to come with me to my next house and how I really hope he will. And I think about how it's been four years since he died and I still haven't absorbed the loss. I think about how losing him has also meant losing both of his brothers and I cry about it. Don't feel sorry for me; crying is medicinal, especially for chronic thinkers.

When I'm done with my cry, I think about how exhausting fashion and the current standard of feminine beauty are, how I need more original art in my life --if not to own, at least to look at -- and how weird and destructive and important and meaningful Facebook has been for me. Then I spend a couple of minutes wondering if I'm a cliche. I think about what camp looks like at that exact moment, how misguided and vitriolic American politics have become, and how controlling I can be when I'm scared. Those last two don't seem to have anything to do with each other, but they do.

Sometimes I think about how much I have always hated group projects --only a handful ever felt truly collaborative. I think about how I almost always took on all the work so I could direct how the project turned out. I think about how relationships are like group projects and how in some of the important ones, I am still doing all of the work for the exact same reason.

I think about how my People are flung to the far corners of the earth, how lonely that makes me feel sometimes, how I wish they were all here so I could run into them at the grocery store or walking around the lake or at church or in my neighborhood. I think about what a gorgeous surprise it is to see each one in my life after all this time and then I don't feel so lonely; it's enough that they're out there and we belong to each other.

And of course I think about my little family. I think about us starting out in Cleveland with a tiny boy in a laundry basket (he was three weeks early; his crib arrived eventually), I think about us driving back across the Minnesota border when we finally moved home again --I cried all the way across the river from relief and belonging-- and I think about us now, in suspended animation between the suffering we have done in this house and the healing I hope we will do in the next one.

I think about our next house, living there, living in my kitchen, my garden, my senses, living in my deep breath and strong back and mended heart. I look forward to that. I could never think too much about that.