Monthly Archives: April 2013

Identity, motherhood, parenting

The Sound of Shutters

My kids are hams.  Crack out a camera and they strike a pose.  As soon as the shutter closes, they spring forward, hovering above my shoulder to see the image on the digital display.

Please understand – I have not conditioned them to this.  In fact, I quite discourage it.  I am from the camp of ‘candid is king’.  Plus, I don’t want them anywhere near the most expensive camera we’ve ever owned, albeit several years behind the times by now.

I don’t want them obsessed with their perceived image.  I don’t want them so invested in the perfect snapshot that they don’t live in the present moment.  I don’t want the canned smiles and stiff expressions.

I want to capture the true essence of who they are and the moment we’re experiencing.

Then the camera turns on me.

There’s always one member of the family who is nearly nonexistent in the family albums, isn’t there?  Growing up, that was my dad.  The family’s official photographer, we have countless photos of holiday dinner tables laden with full plates, anxiously awaited by full chairs, except the one he’d vacated to take the shot.  The next frame might include him switched out by one of my aunts, but never the whole set unless he’d packed the tripod that day.

Now, most of the time, that’s me.

When my husband mans the camera, I’m usually focused on the children in some manner of loving gaze (and if not that, some manner of goofy face) – probably because I’ve forgotten how to pose.  I can’t smile on demand.  It’s too taxing, too fake.  I know I’m not at my best and don’t want to capture that on film or digital download.

For all the lessons I want my children to soak up, I haven’t had a single picture of me as my profile pic on Facebook for years.  There have been family portraits, my daughter unleashing a primal scream at a particularly low point, a flower I stenciled onto my wall above my writing desk – never me by myself.  I honestly couldn’t find one I liked enough.  Is it because I hadn’t been candid enough to capture my true essence?  Or because I’d been too candid and didn’t like what I saw?

Last week, as we exited the trailhead of a hike we’d made in the White Mountains, my husband called to me and snapped a pic as I turned.  I threw my arms up and bugged my eyes out and grimaced(?) – I don’t know what that was.  The next frame, I smiled.  When we returned home, as I reviewed the pictures, I deemed that second one as close to a true capture of me as I’d had in a long time.  Was it because I was in my long-abandoned hiking garb?  Because I was partaking of an activity that long ago defined me and my beliefs and was long ago abandoned?  Was it because I’m sick of a caricature of myself and ready for authenticity – or acceptance – or a new perspective?

In any event, I uploaded it to Facebook as a new profile pic.  It was as the comments rolled in asking if I was summoning the forces of nature or singing ‘The Sound of Music’ that I realized I’d uploaded the grimace shot and not the smile.  The most-telling comment, I think, was one that said, “The perfect representation of motherhood.”  I laughed out loud, all too knowingly.  Whether it was the ‘come on, guys’ attitude one person suggested or the stress of packing a family of five up for a road trip or the persistent frustration of getting little people to tow the line, the look on my face pretty much is the perfect representation of motherhood for me right now.  And another reason why I don’t want my picture taken anymore.

The Hills are Alive

Maybe because it’s not about me and pictures just remind me of that.

But even though I crown myself the ‘Queen of Candids’, I can still artfully edit the pics I chose to focus on.  I can focus on the smiles and the fun and the love instead of the grimaces and struggle and pain.

Or I can try anyway . . . until the shutter rotates open to let in more light.

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anxiety, Living

All You Can Eat Buffet

Buffets are not the best means of eating for anxious people.

So many choices, so much activity, so many chances for E. Coli and bacteria.

Then the bus loads of people coming in, adding to the tumult.  Kids cranky from traveling.  Everybody wanting food at the same time.  Not unlike the distractions of life, pulling our attentions from our goal: homing in on the buffet line.

The myriad choices are like our choices in life.  So many desirable options.  Mac n’ cheese.  Fried chicken.  Tostadas.  Sweet and sour pork.  Then what we should eat: the salad.  Also a lot like life, no?  We can choose what we know we need and is usually more cost effective (i.e. veggies) vs. what we want or think we should have (bacon-wrapped filet).

In the world of an anxious person, who cannot prioritize, who perseverates over decision-making, who gets overwhelmed easily, the all-you-can-eat buffet is a microcosm for life on a very bad day.

Unfortunately in real life, we do not have a Reina, the queen of bussing, to clear away our messes – or watch us to decide when that’s needed.

Or an all-you-can-eat ice cream bar.  Damn it.

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anxiety, motherhood, parenting

Holiday Road

Packing for a trip is worse than the outside stimuli that necessitated the trip in the first place.

At least with children it is.

A vacation.  A getaway.  A respite.  From everyday life and its trappings.  From routines and schedules.

That requires that every stitch of clothing in the home be washed so the one pair of sweatpants your child wants is clean – and located in the bottom of a basket of clothes that had been clean to begin with.

That requires digging through bins of off-season clothes to locate the bathing suits – and then digging some more to find the perfect one with the peace signs.

That requires testing dry-erase markers till we find one that hasn’t dried out yet for the all important game of car bingo – which will more likely be used to tattoo the inside of the car than the bingo card.

Books, magnetic games, coloring pages, stuffed friends, flash lights. . . . packed, unpacked, played with, tossed about the floor where they had previously sat stacked neatly waiting for loading into the car in the morning.

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Can I just leave the kids at home?

 

Then it would be a vacation.

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motherhood, parenting, Poetry

Water for My Soul

poem

Good Morning my family

Do you think that this rain will bring flowers?

 

The lovely poem that my kindergartener brought home yesterday.  More of a survey, really.  She left a space for each family member to respond – except the three year-old “because she can’t write yet.”

God, I hope it brings flowers.  And I hope you stay as lovely and sweet as you are right now.  With your sense of wonder and hope and excitement.

 

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Living, Poetry

Out with the Omens

Is it a bad omen that I keep thinking about this poem since I wrote about chainsaws?  Or is it all the warnings I’ve since received?  Do not fret; safety will be first, people!

“Out, Out—”

by Robert Frost

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19976#sthash.6Fhe7JKp.dpuf

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Identity, Literacy, Writing

Be the Book

I think all frustrated writers, those in the fits and starts, the various stages of creation and denial, dream of becoming the next great American novel.  Like the bedraggled outcasts wandering around in the flickering firelight murmuring lines from books at the end of the Fahrenheit 451 film, we imagine our stories and us as one, words burgeoning forth from our being.

fahrenheit

When I first started to take my dream seriously, I mentioned it to a close friend.  As we discussed the perils of the publishing world (read: nearly impossible to enter), she suggested, that since I taught middle level ELA and studied that literature extensively, I write young adult literature: an up-and-coming worthy field and one not as constricted by that impermeable culture (at least at the time).

I had the workings of a character already, her life – or at least neurosis – already well on its way.  And her neurosis, while certainly presenting itself in an adult way then, could easily be adapted to any stage of the human condition.  So I imagined Kathryn as a high school senior, about to embark on the most significant journey of her life thus far – with no freakin’ clue where to go.

I drafted her all the way through her preparation for graduation, her stretching and breaking, hitting rock bottom, and starting to put the pieces back together, shedding her sarcastic armor in favor of some spiritual guidance.  She hasn’t reached her destination at the end of the draft, but she’s got her suitcase packed and some of the itinerary fleshed out.

Only one problem: my YA novel wasn’t exactly YA.  It straddled the line between adolescence and that liminal space beyond.  Transitional, I believe they’d call it.  And when I looked back over what I’d done, it was the time after she’d left high school that I liked the most.  Broken into two parts, the second was longer, stronger, and more developed.  Had I written Part One to satisfy the YA gods before I got to the meat of what I really wanted?

Kathryn was born in one of the first depressive periods of my life – even though I didn’t necessarily know it at the time.  Not to say that I didn’t feel the movings of it in high school (particularly at the end where I chose to place the beginning of Kathryn’s story), but it’s been a definitive part of my adult experience.  And I know what Kathryn grows into, in this alternate universe where a spiritual awakening didn’t occur in post-graduate studies.  Not to say she’s not an amazing person as a young woman, but holding her to the fire longer strengthens her mettle even more.

And now the true question: would this novel be stronger and serve the world better by seeing a woman through her darkest days of mental illness and how she somehow comes out the other side?  Is that what this story is meant to be and I was trying to cram it into some other mold?  Yes, I could make it work – and well – in its other incarnation, but would I be ignoring what it’s been trying to tell me from the beginning?

Have you ever known the answer before you’ve asked the question, but need to go through this circuitous route before you trust yourself?  Or not even trust, but just listen to that little voice that’s been there all along?

Peter Johnson told me you have to write the story the way it’s meant to be written.  You can’t worry about convention or trend or even length.

Maybe I’ve finally learned that all you need to worry about is being true to yourself and your characters.  Maybe now I can be the book.

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Identity, Living

Chainsaws Explained

Or How I Learned to Love the Saw. . .

In my telling of eleven random facts about myself as part of my Liebster Award duties, the fact that I wanted a chainsaw ranked as # 10.  I followed it up with a # 11 that said that I was not, in fact, a psycho-killer, but some apparently were not convinced.

My aunt, an ardent supporter through all my trials, approached me and said, “Now, Jen, I know why you want a chainsaw, but others may not – and given the nature of some of your other posts . . .”  She let the sentence drop, but the silence that followed said it all.  As did our laughter, which has gotten our family through many a tense situation.

Mere weeks after we moved into our new home, Hurricane Sandy paid a visit, leaving numerous housewarming gifts in the form of downed trees and power lines.  An extremely generous and helpful friend – with a chainsaw – helped us gain access to our front door and clean up our front yard, but two-thirds of a substantial oak trunk lies askew on the hill in front of our house, as well as tangled branches and pine boughs.  With cold weather approaching and a passably clean swath of land surrounding our home, my husband was satisfied.

But as spring starts to take hold in our corner of the woods, my gardening gene is kicking into full effect.  I grew up in the suburbs on a tidy plot of land my mother whipped into sunny submission.  I learned the names of perennials, the joys of collecting random stones for use as borders, and how to identify, deadhead, and divide.  Here in the “wilds”, not only do I have a different landscape to contend with, but completely foreign flower beds.  I feel like a detective as I scout the yard for tulip leaves poking out of the dirt.  I don’t know what’s there.  But I do see the possibilities.

Just beside our monument to downed trees is a slight opening cascading down the hill to the street.  There are two Charlie Brown Christmas trees at the top, set three to four feet apart, scrawny sentinels at the beginning of what I’m determined to turn into a woodland path/garden.  I envisioned a shade garden, as our house is north-facing and the dining room at the front of the house has been a cave all winter, but as the weather warms and the sun moves higher in the sky, the hill is actually bathed in sunshine for a good portion of the day.  Now I need to change my game plan slightly, but I’m dreaming of hens and chicks, phlox, lavender, ferns poking out and growing in amongst the fieldstone steps I’ll build into the hill.

Enter the chain saw.

I’m nature girl.  Once upon a time, I walked through the woods on my wee little legs burnishing my Audubon bird call.  I prefer kayaks to motor boats.  I always used my shears instead of electric clippers when I shaped the forsythia bushes at my former home.  So, why this antithetic shift in my philosophy?

tree trunk

That darn oak trunk is cramping my idyllic woodland knoll.  I can’t start relocating pieces of ledge from my backyard to the staircase at the front of my yard until I move it and the mess of broken limbs it created as it fell and then got thrown back down the hill.

Will I use the chain saw myself?  If I can lift the thing and maneuver it properly.  Am I exploiting my husband’s Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor penchant for power tools?  Perhaps.  But if a portion of our tax refund monies will be used toward a quality chainsaw capable of removing that current eyesore and potential firewood from my hill, I will be a happy camper.

So there are no nefarious plots wrapped up in my desire for a heavy piece of mangling machinery.  Phew.  Got that off my chest.

Then today my husband goes on the manufacturer’s website for the chainsaw he’s interested in, which has a plethora of instructional/informational videos.  From my spot on the other side of the room, I listened vaguely, mostly cracking jokes at the running commentary of the video.  Then, at 1m 30s in the “How to Safely Operate a Stihl Saw 8”, came the piéce de résistance.

After the disembodied (ha – ironic) voice states that one of the required supplies is a first aid kit, he states that one should “never operate [his] chainsaw if [he’s] not in good physical condition or mental health”.  At which point, the kids came from the other room to see at what I was laughing so heartily.

“Well, I guess that means I’ll be the one operating it, then,” says my husband, deadpan for a moment before he cracked up, too.

After I slugged him, I said I was laughing because I had more of a ‘Jason’ scenario in mind, not me.  But I guess it does fit the profile of what my aunt was talking about.

I am hereby taking the oath that I will not use any chainsaw to harm myself or others – just that damn tree trunk in the way of my calming woodland retreat.

*** And it did not escape my attention that at the beginning of all the instructional Stihl videos, it stressed the importance of attending to all eleven chapters of information.  Eleven seems to be the magic number.  Just as one can’t fully understand proper chainsaw operation and maintenance without viewing all eleven, so one won’t know I’m not a psychokiller unless you read through to the eleventh random fact. Qu’est-ce que c’est

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Identity, Living, Poetry

Secrets

Secrets are only dangerous if you keep them.

Shameful until they are aired.

A counterintuitive twist of fate,

relinquishing them releases you from their grip.

But what of those that belong to the collective –

Not just yours to share.

Do you bind yourself to others in your freedom?

A guilty conscience from your gushing?

How does one get free when he is beholden to others?

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anxiety, Identity, Living

Still Waters Run Deep

I’m not stagnant; I’m just catching my breath.

A wise woman reiterated these words to me recently.  I’d heard them before, but benefited from their run through my ears once more.  And probably will again someday.

Two Christmases ago, my mother presented me with a framed quote from Jodi Hills.

She wasn’t where she had been,

she wasn’t where she was going,

but she was on her way.

Though at times like this, when I’m walking in my sweats through the land of sinus fog after days of leading my children out of it, and I feel like I’m in some sort of stasis, I am not the person I was a few years ago.  My cynical, smart-ass, survive-with-laughter self says, that’s for sure.  And there are a good number of negatives with what I’ve experienced over the last three to four years.  But after being so low, I was able to honestly assess to which heights I wanted to rise.  And how to get there.  And how to push myself despite the risks and fear because I realized joy is ours to grasp, not to be handed.  And that I wasn’t alone at the bottom of the pit.  Maybe I could shine a little light down into it, if not pull someone out of it.

Realizing and doing are two different things, however.  I have a business plan to write.  I have a child who is too smart for her own (and my) good that I have yet to enroll in preschool.  I have my own anxiety to swallow.  And the usual chaos that raising three children entails (Seriously, did I not see this coming?).

Right now I like being in my sweats.  But I wonder if being in them too long will make me break out in a cold sweat.  Too long out of the loop.  Too long in the confines of my own house with little people.  Longer than the short fuse of my resolve from lessons hard learned.

It’s easy to be a wimp.  It’s so damn hard to push forward into uncharted waters.  I’m trying at least to keep up with the current; tread water or cling to my little rock in the midst of it all.  The flow certainly isn’t stagnant, though.  I’m just trying to get enough huff and puff to get back in there.

still

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