November 30th, 2009
So if I still kept a memory book, there was a day a week or two ago when my teenaged (!)(*) son said something that would surely have gone in it. He uses Twitter, and told me that sometimes when he looks at Raven’s and my tweet-streams he feels like the luckiest kid he knows because his parents are so articulate and witty and smart. Which just shows how low his standards are, right? Only there are days when I think I can almost see the thoughts behind the impassive mask, the “Oh, if only I had a normal family!” Which. It might be half the intense recollection of that age, and half the flash one day of thinking how normal and right that thought is, because it means your family is okay enough that all of your energy isn’t invested in defensively insisting everything is great. An insight that must have followed, shortly, the catching of my breath when I watched the lovely movie Off the Map, to think how much you must take for granted in order to wish for things to be different.
And that movie, the current intense reading of the novel Juniper Tree Burning, the realization that there is a whole subgenre of hippie childhood memoirs, the running interest in the sort of history of the assumptions behind families that Stephanie Coontz writes about, has my journal all filled up with what the myth of the normal family means to me, and the way each generation gets to believe it is inventing a new way of doing things beyond the previous generation’s notion of normal, about the hubris of believing that I can intellectually, carefully select my own norms as the ones most rational, most conducive to health and well-being, shaving my legs but not wearing high heels (even beautiful two-toned strappy ones) forgetting to bother with makeup, but having fun with henna in my hair. I still carry hurt feelings that a friend looked at the clothing rack we put up in the bedroom to make up for the single solitary small closet we have and helpfully started telling me how to put drywall up and make a new closet in that corner (which two months later? I know I need to get over as I know no offense was intended, at all. Just. She couldn’t live as we do. Advice not the same as a referendum.) And still I dwell on the inscrutability of all our strange little domestic sine qua nons and the traditions we are able to shed without tears, the convictions behind such things as the proper way to load the dishwasher, toilet paper over vs. under, how the bed is made, and yet being able to joke about antimacassars or the plastic coverings on furniture in the homes of elderly relatives. This summer’s reading of Paul Fussell’s Class convinced me some of it is a class inheritance, but so insidious we don’t ever really get to free ourselves from it.
And then. There’s the whole family thing. I’m still feeling mellowed and grateful from a lovely visit with my parents over Thanksgiving. And the night before Thanksgiving we did a birthday dinner for Søren and got to introduce my parents to a handful of the people who are sort of my family of choice in Portland, the ones who love me, love my children, and show up when need them, and having all those people in a room was particularly sweet.
So I share with you, from my journal on Thanksgiving morning, my own private Thanksgiving fable, the persons in it resembling in no way any relative of mine by blood or marriage, living or dead:
Thanksgiving, the holiday for which my cynicism cannot bear to show its face, that to be thankful seems finally to be our best human state, our most human posture, the pausing for breath and appreciation, surcease from want, from fear, thanksgiving its own springboard into acceptance, things not as I planned them, but as they are, and this holiday as one in a string of a lifetime of Thanksgivings.
The earliest childhood family dinners were all wrapped in the joy of your cousins to play with and adoring adults paying attention to you, and maybe getting older there was creeping awareness of tensions and how much work the whole thing was and how brutal the boy cousins’ fights could seem, which, after a couple of years, yielded to a gentle fantasy of families like on television or in the movies, a mythical family in matching sweaters who all small nice and are nice to one another, belief that around other dining room tables gathered collections of even just normal people, not so flawed or idiosyncratic, without gaping flaws, insensitivity, dinners characterized by the complete absence of anyone talking too much, alcohol-induced oversharing, or hidden barbs. It occurs to you that even as a little kid you saw bluff heartiness like a neon sign, something missing here.
Perhaps in college there was a friend close enough that you got to spend Thanksgiving with them, and at first they seemed perfect, but maybe you suddenly catch her mother trying to embarrass her father or one of them cannot let got of little things, is too precise with the table settings. Maybe you even miss your own family. Maybe it’s the year you take Psych 101 and get excited about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and you slowly realize the the human fabric is woven with a pattern of warps and holes, and the gaping flaws, that if they aren’t universal in their expression, point to a universal underlying neediness, that the terse, purse-lipped aunt with the disapproval lines where other people have laugh lines and the uncle who works a little too hard to get everyone to like him (and pulling his finger is never going to work on that count) the odd collections of bragging or insisting on being an expert on everything that otherwise nice-seeming people will bring to the table, are all expressions of the need for love, security, approval.
You may even get just a tiny bit depressed at the futility of transcending the crazy family behaviors that are at once embarrassing and exasperating, especially when you realize it isn’t just your family. The loss of the mythical normal family is a little painful, because, then all you can aspire to, really, is a more benign form of crazy, right? You still love your family, that’s never really been in question, but the love is a sort of instinctual, habitual showing up at the ritualized occasions, and their very familiarity lies somewhere between comforting and constraining, especially when they refuse to see you as the person you really are, they keep wanting to remind you of your seven-year-old self, and at the end of weekends in childhood bedrooms or on fold-out couches you escape from their world back to your own with more relief than regret.
And then you meet someone, and you know he’s not perfect exactly, but you like who you are around him, and he makes you laugh. And he forgives you all the ways you’re not perfect. And he even likes your parents. And for not being perfect? He seems to have escaped many of the flaws that you see in the rest of humanity, has an attractive confidence, is kind and moral and would never cheat on his taxes, and the attention he gives you is flattering. Your infrequent quarrels are followed with a demonstration of a commitment to working it out, to honesty, to letting himself be vulnerable.
Then he gets a job offer far from where you’ve been living, and you must decide quickly, is this a person you can make a life with, and it occurs to you, really, that you cannot imagine life without him. You marry. You move. This is followed by a lonely Thanksgiving when it is just the two of you because you cannot afford to travel to your parents’ home or his, that year, and you are left trying to gamely establish a sort of tradition of your own. And you miss your childhood holidays, have a nostalgia for them, which surprises you. And then, out of nowhere, there are your own kids, and you are so busy being adequate to their needs that you scarcely notice that your traditions are busy growing up, right alongside your human offspring.
But then, one year, Thanksgiving comes again and you slow down enough somehow to notice everyone sitting around your table, your children, your parents, traveling to visit you, uncomplaining about the foldout couch bed you’ve made up for them, and normal is never even the question, nor do you spend time dwelling on how each person isn’t perfect, because you are so grateful for each person there, for the time you get to spend expressing your love for them, for the fact that they see your flaws and love you still.
Tofurkey and turkey, side-by-side then, I hope the feelings from Thanksgiving last longer than the leftovers. and I send my appreciation to everyone who keeps showing up and reading here.
* He is thirteen years and eight weeks tomorrow. Which means I ought to be getting used to this word soon, but it’s sort of like practicing saying “my husband” or writing your married name, which, actually, no wait, I didn’t change my name. But you know what I mean. It still feels new and strange.
November 17th, 2009
So you don’t need to be in a twelve step program or even have the number of people in your life that are in such programs that I have in mine to have bumped into Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
I excerpt from an email to a the unreliable narrator yesterday:
I couldn’t remember the stupid first line of the serenity prayer — what is it we ask for in order to help us to accept what we cannot change? And if we’re asking for serenity, for courage and for wisdom, why do we call it the serenity prayer and not the courage prayer or the wisdom prayer? Is one of the three more important than the others? And why do I keep finding myself frustrated, wanting to change everything, and bewildered at it all?
And I steal a little bit of her answer:
So I was thinking last night, It’s called the serenity prayer because anyway for Westerners/North Americans, serenity/acceptance is a lot harder than “courage” (or anyway the desire to change everything within arm’s reach) and “wisdom” (or anyway our belief that we’re right about what we know and should have our way)?
One of the wisdoms of DBT is that you can’t even change anything until you first accept it the way it is. I.e. how can you change your situation until you accept that every time your husband comes home drunk he will hit you? How could Rosa Parks refuse to give up her seat unless she fully accepted what was going on, what it meant, what the consequences were going to be? So I think of it sometimes as, God grant me the serenity to accept the situation exactly the way it is, and the courage to get myself out of the situation when I need to do so for my safety and sanity, even though it is going to cause all KINDS of problems and be terribly inconvenient and oh, I’m not even WORTH making such a big fuss, I should probably just hush and suck it up for a while longer, it’s not that bad….
And how lucky am I that I get to have conversations like this via email? And I keep thinking about this and keep thinking about it, and finally decide that what I love most about her response is that it points for me towards this notion that maybe wisdom and courage and acceptance/serenity aren’t all that distinct from one another. That sometimes it takes courage to squeeze your eyes open a little and un-flinch your shoulders and realize that the situation you’re in hasn’t left you on the floor half dead, which might be a first step towards accepting it. As much as we’d like to think that wisdom sits back in reserve picking out the situations for changing, the situations for accepting, but I have yet to meet native wisdom like that, and it occurs to me that even if God is granting you the wisdom, it generally comes not as a lightning bolt, but from experience, from trying to change some situation that it turns out you can only accept, from trying to accept some situation you really need to change, and oh, but it takes courage to make a mistake, dust yourself off, and turn it into wisdom. Courage is sometimes the willingness to keep trying and maybe be wiser the next time. Or the time after. If you can accept that, what can’t you accept? And then the way acceptance is a part of courage, that willingness to be seen fallible and imperfect, to accept yourself as fallible and imperfect so that you can take a risk.
My sister and I were having a conversation about how differently my various children go about music lessons and practicing, and how my six year old right now doesn’t like making mistakes at all, and doesn’t take risks — if something is challenging and new he does this little retreat, “I’m much too exhausted to do this right now, I had such a long hard day” and this sometimes requires all of my patience to keep coaxing him, to keep emphasizing how much he is doing right. But it’s good for me to see this because I think it’s familiar, that this particular form of risk taking is awfully hard for me too.
(Synchronistically? My friend Patrick just posted this on the idea of artistic risk. Great minds and all, right?)
And I think this underlying idea of risk has been nagging at me a lot lately, that I will fall into doing what I know I can do okay and doing it over and over and over again, and I think it has something to do with my perception of feeling stuck, and even though the things I do with love all involve this element of risk, of laying bits of myself open to the world, whether it’s parenting or music or writing, I’ve wondered how to become more okay with risk. Maybe today it starts with the serenity prayer.
November 16th, 2009
I walk Rainer to school past some graffiti every day, OAT, like that, giant block, all-caps letters and my brain turns it into mirror writing of TAO and this becomes my answer in my head to this friend’s voice in my head poking me with her favorite 12 step program refrain about how we are “human beings not human doings.” That somehow the sense of ‘way’ splits the difference for me between being and doing, between static and dynamic. And story lives in the way, always changing, always the same. Of course there’s stuckness, that’s part of what a way looks like, it’s the friction necessary to moving forward.
[The funny side effect of all these thoughts is that 'oatmeal' is transformed in my head to 'tao meal', and my stupid pun-loving brain turns it to eating curds of way.]
I’ve spent so much time this fall feeling stuck. I wrote so diligently, got so much done in September and in October I crashed. November’s come and I see people on Twitter talking about doing NaNoWriMo and I feel angsty and lost, and that would have at least been a direction, given me a mission for every day, meeting the word count. I worry about my value as a person getting nothing done and probably need that reminder about human beings and human doings even more frequently. And the thing about the stuck state is you cannot remember a time not being in the stuck state nor imagine a time to come after it. It feels like you’ve chosen the wrong way and you cast about eagerly for other paths that might be more productive. I think about resumes and job listings online, investigate what I would need to get certified to teach even though I don’t want to teach.
But there is maybe this other solace of stuckness, that I still adore words. Music is fine and breaks something loose in that wordless place in me, dismantles dammed up feelings when my plains are parched and cracking. I spend too much time creating playlists or obsessively listening to the same album over and over again. Visual stuff I want to hoard and collect, my camera on my phone is cluttered with images of the different colors of leaves I see on those morning walks, the pretty colored bottles in the window of the sake bar around the corner, these strappy two-tone high heels in a little boutique two doors down from that, green and black and suggestive and nothing I could imagine wearing, but I have a crush on them anyway, the rain drops strung on spider web, the texture of the cloud cover racing across my skylight and I joyfully spin in my spinny office chair staring up at it when I am at my worst stuckness.
But finally it does come back to words.That they have sound and meaning and subtlety, that we can be pensive or wistful or contemplative. Conflagration! I love conflagration this week. And cerulean and celadon and cerise are all so much more vivid than the actual colors they describe. When I cannot write anything else word lists suffice. I think of the six weeks between my sophomore and junior years of high school spent doing trail construction in the White Mountains and living out of a backpack and the greatest hardship not being the absence of a mattress or a hot shower, but missing having a dictionary.
So if my way has to include a stuck-feeling patch, I may not have a lot of faith in myself to keep on this way, but I do have faith in words, that they matter, that they manage to cross the impossible boundaries that keep us all separate and apart. That the words want to be written, stories want to be told, and it’s not all about me.
November 12th, 2009
All of this solitude and greyness and the fear my voice has rusted shut.
It isn’t protective silence, or withholding silence, or shamed silence. It’s just silence.
I mean, it feels more like a gathering up of the voices in my head, sorting them. Sometimes in silence. Sometimes in music. Only if I put on music time seems to disappear at an alarming rate.
Silence the great luxury of the six brief hours the boys are in school.
Truth being lately this terribly fluid thing, my truth one moment being the conviction the world is ending, a truth I can wait out, and it gets replaced with a new truth, with hopefulness, like a tree growing out of my chest.
Trees arbitrarily becoming musical instruments (if they’re spruce) and sheafs of gloriously blank paper and fuel for the fire in the woodburning stove in the studio. Smoke pouring out the chimney alarming some anonymous neighbor yesterday so that firemen knocked at the door, and I had to say, no, no, everything’s fine, it’s just doing what fires in woodburning stoves do. I still feel a little guilty about the bother, the alarm, the smoke.
My truths misplaced. I try to remember what I was thinking, what it was I needed to tell you.
My hours misplaced. My voice misplaced.
Both seem to land in hours where I guiltily practice the violin, benefitting no one, the doing it for the love of it itself when it will never be for performance or money, and the feeling that this time is stolen from the housework, from the helping with homework, from the practicing with the boys, from writing, and from the employment I haven’t sought. The things that I cannot get into words that are in my fingers when I get the notes right. The love it takes to do something imperfectly because, helplessly, I cannot help it. If I sneak away and practice by myself then when it is time for the boys to practice I can empty myself to really listen to them.
Silence creeps in to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I don’t know how to have a voice light and casual and fitting in 140 characters and still truthful. But tentatively, I want to reassert that voice, to say, no wait, I’m still here. I continue reading your updates, and it would feel creepy skulky-stalkerish or shy wall-flowerish not to at least have the courtesy to say, yes, I’m listening.
The maternal mmm-hmmm. Keep talking.
The brilliant feminist mother blog blue milk had this talking back to the story of the Little Mermaid, and especially the giving up her voice to keep her man aspect of it, and I think about the struggling we do in silence as well as the struggling we do against silence, and how privacy morphs into shame and I decide I’d better see if I still have any voice at all. And the thing about the mermaid story is that when I found after years of immersion in the hard isolation of caring for tiny babies that I needed to write again, first in journals and slowly in the first version of the blog, it felt to me like I was reclaiming my selkie skin. Which is maybe the grown-up version of the Little Mermaid when she tries to reclaim what was lost? This divided self thing makes truth more complicated, surely. But a voice is too high a price to pay.
I am woken by absences and reach reassuringly out; I am still here. And I break the silence, carefully, not wanting to be alarming. I am right where I need to be.
Thanksgiving, the holiday for which my cynicism cannot bear to show its face, that to be thankful seems finally to be our best human state, our most human posture, the pausing for breath and appreciation, surcease from want, from fear, thanksgiving its own springboard into acceptance, things not as I planned them, but as they are, and this holiday as one in a string of a lifetime of Thanksgivings.
