Processing

Somehow the people who try hardest to love me, give me gifts or really listen, make me afraid of them. My favorite teacher is constantly asking me to do things and I find myself looking down and leaving class the minute she dismisses us, to avoid her. I somehow believe they must be mistaken about investing in me, must want something from me, or will soon realize I am shallow.  So I let them grow up in my weeds or rocks or bad soil for a few minutes, before squelching them so they can never flower in my garden.

One of my college roommates wrote me a story about the day I was born, a five page deal with beautiful detail and lots of love. She made thirty paper flowers and coordinated with thirty people to hand them to me throughout the day. To top it off she threw me the only surprise party I can remember. I was cold in response. I secretly wanting her to miss things and be less important so I could say, no big deal, you are not that amazing or important and neither am I. It pains me to think about how I refused the joy and delight of her unconditional love.

Five years ago, a best friend stopped calling me to see if I would pick up the phone and initiate and I didn’t. I was afraid that if I let her in, I would not be able to hide the dark personal stuff I was facing.

Recently a close family friend chose not spend time with us during my mom’s memorial. I found pleasure in my own indignation. I could focus on stories about how they don’t care, making me feel justified in my distant.

My entire college career has teachers commenting about my papers with things like, “what do you really believe.” I hear them say, “you are a Parrot repeating everyone else, but what matters to you?” Or in art they said, you copy what has been said, but what do you want to be?

I have a print of a woman’s arms moving a black iron across fabric, which was stolen from Picasso’s Ironing woman. My husband has always loved it and while in NY with me on a business trip he stumbled on the original and recognized where mine came from.

Sheesley encouraged me to find my own way, Lundin constantly spoke of “not same love in copy speech, but counter love, original response. Then for my senior show, Shrek raked my layers of armor in questioning my pregnant lady sculpture, demanding that I figure out what the lady was really holding (which was in no way a fetus). In my pregnant sculpture, I wanted to pretend something profound and he saw through it. It turned into the mask of an angry man and still haunts me to this day.

This is one more unfinished thought as I look at deep failures in relating to others. I know that I want people and gifts to matter and I want to respond in love. I don’t want to push you away. I want to sit and listen, without any obligations to pretend. I don’t know what I am supposed to say and so I might just close my eyes and watch your words in my head! 

I know that the starting point is being honest with God and writing down my skeletons so they can be released or at least spoken to! I ask God for patience and to free me for real interactions!

In the past few days I have sat around thinking about personal struggles with abusers, navigating in relationships and how I play active or passive roles in engaging. My friend Melissa wrote an amazing blog about doing the dishes or not doing the dishes, that everyone should read!! She says the following: "There are only ever really two options: do the dishes or don't do them." http://casting-off.blogspot.com/ (Entry for April 13)

I think about this in terms of "save money, or don't, cook or don't, clean or don't, write or don't. The test of deciding what is important to me and what is not is tricky. I often pretend I don't have two options, and then leave the dishes like an unreturned phone call I may never return.

My husband is responsible for cleaning the kids ears and so they are either cleaned or not. If I want them clean, I can clean them, but I don't. He will get to it and manage it if it is important and I have to trust that things will be just fine.

I can't help but think this is same thing with relationships. I can call people I love or who I think need me or not. In reality, I tend not to and then spend hours thinking about how I should call. I keep wondering about this because I would never state that I don't want to talk, but my actions speak for themselves. I passively avoid the conversations. When I do talk, I often think that I don't want to say what I am thinking and flounder on to topics like the weather.

 My friends blog says, "Procrastination is Fear." I think it has to do with fear. Fear of being vulnerable, rejection, bored, alone. Maybe my blog is the answer. I want to talk to all of you, but I don't know how to be there to listen. I have ADD and worry about what I am not asking, remembering or saying to help you. On the flip side, I love moments where we are free to talk about anything and everything without worrying about if we will be ok, because we are in it for the long haul (or we are scheduled to speak again next Sunday night or at Book Club or Small Group or at dinner tonight).

My friends all know what they are going to make for dinner, when they will clean the house and they call me. Sadly, I can't even tell you the last time I showered. I have to believe there is more for me in all of this, so I will keep writing and hope you will keep reading, because I want to believe in you and to experience our lives growing and expanding because of each other. If I don't call you back today, know that I just am not comfortable enough to be honest with you in person and hope I will be bigger tomorrow.

Writing for Today

I believe that it does not matter if I write or paint or run. What is essential is that I am doing anything that grounds me in this moment. My creative life appears in pauses between needy babies; spaces where I can hear myself think. Writing is my choice, but saying it makes me wonder why I am not creating forms and figures in clay. The answer is that I can't stomach the juggling of childcare and supplies. Honestly, clay drying and kilns to fiddle with has meant dragging chalky grey figures from my Senior Show 11 years ago, through four houses until they finally landed in the garbage. Somehow, just having my voice and words is easier.

The thing that makes it feel justified beyond personal sanity is that there might be one or two people reading these words right now. At my mom's memorial, an old friend said that she followed my blog. I couldn't believe it and it makes me want to connect with her through contemplation on this page.

The blockade to my writing lately has been fear about people's reactions regarding the guts of my stories.  Face to face I am suddenly shy, because I am publicly exposed and you are not. In my writing class, people say things like "I can relate" and "this happened to me," which makes me realize that going deeper is a blessing to myself and to others.

Some also want to know if all my writing is non-fiction. The truth is always grey, because I do write about my life in the form of other characters. My goal is to say something about envisioning what being fully alive looks like.

Want to Write something?

Here are quick and easy places you can submit your work right now!!!

- The Sun Readers Write: Topic for this Month is Authority
- Blood Orange: Low Budget WCC Monthly Journal
- Bathhouse: EMU E Journal
- This I Believe: Submissions to NPR

Happy Writing!!!

Remembering Mom

Close your eyes and imagine mom saying, “Chicka-dee-dee-dee,” as she watches the little black capped bird hop around the skinny glass feeder. See her sip hot water from a speckled blue mug and woosh mail and magazines around the butcher-block table to find the place she last remembers reading, where a word waits for her to catch it.

            Eat your blueberry pancakes, with homemade honey slathered over top and place the container of stickiness on the pile of letters.
            Say, “mom, I don’t have time to eat,” even though you know you are wasting precious seconds. Watch her pin her eyes on you and repeat her mantra, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  You are not allowed to leave until you have eaten everything on your plate.” She will turn back to World Magazine without blinking and you will never see her take a bite.

Arrive home from field hockey practice at five forty-six and find her talking on the phone to an adult sister, while NPR news chatters like another family member. See her fingers kneed dough and move it around in a restaurant sized mixing bowl. The paper selection in front of her shifts and now a book like The God of Small Things, Go Tell it on the Mountain or Lucy Shaw’s Poetry usurps their importance. She will ask you later if you have read one of these and you will have to say “no” over and over until you feel heavy with the burden of your disconnect. You will wish you had known the significance so you could talk about them. With her gone, wonder if reading them might give you language and word to hang on, feel close to. Imagine that she is her favorite character, Jane Eyre, and soak in her simple desire to be loved for her. Somehow dial her invisible phone and feel her voice wrap around you and rock you, because her own mother’s hardships made her to want to be available for her own children.

Say, “boy I am so thankful I had you as a mom.” Listen to her say, “oh honey,” in a faint breath. Feel your wet cheeks and hear her say, “what is it, honey?” Be the girl in the high school production of Our Town who watches her mom slip past, because she can no longer stay. Say, “good-bye” and then mouth the words “I am sorry.” Know that the two months of summer camp, then three in a college semester quickly slipped to six as you followed your spouse West all the way to the moment she forgot your name. Realize you have waited too long. 

Try to live in your mom’s brown kitchen as your three year old comes in to say, “Did Grandma Klauder give me this bear?” Then as he looks at a sister’s family calendar picture he will say, “look mom, it’s grandma Klauder.  She’s in this picture.” Then as the finale hear him describe a walk at the nursing home when he was two where he says, “Grandma Klauder fell, [pause] in the bushes.” Recall his twinkling eyes as he remembers how mom went barreling into the brush and sat down for a rest. Laugh the way you used to about his memory. 

Tell him that she died and went to be with Jesus and say now she has her voice back. Now she can tell all her stories. Watch his eyes shift toward the ceiling. Remember the fall evening at ten when you became aware that mom might die someday. How you lay on your bed sobbing into a pink pillow. She will come into your red wallpapered room and stroke your head and say, “Oh honey, I am not going to die for a long time.” Grab that hand and move it along your head the way you place your hand over your son’s, when he tells you he does not want to go to meet Jesus and he does not want you to either. Repeat back mom’s words to his sudden clouded eyes, “I am not going to die for a long time.” Hope for his sake, that you are telling the truth.

Know the power of your mom’s face. How she would tear up at anything inhuman in the world or your day. How she longed to be with you in your moments. She made those blueberry pancakes every morning, left the dishes to someone else and worked diligently to create warmth through her knitting needles. She loved a good walk, a good paddle in the canoe, a glide on the back of the tandem bicycle and dropped anything to take the van across the country to collect you from some adventure in growing older.

Her life hangs still in this moment when you whisper a love song back to her, decide what bits you will carry in the locket around your neck and what to say in your farewell for the longest amount of time you have ever been away from her.

“God, thank you for collecting her in your arms and stroking her head better than we ever could.”