Dear One,
The mist was thick on the garden this morning. I could barely see the blackbirds except for the occasional crimson flash like a splash of blood on the tall grass. The rabbits have come back this year. They are impossible to miss. Some mama decided to keep her babies here and also to invite all her sisters to move in with their broods. I have seen the small brown one at the foot of the bending oak. I can’t imagine it is very comfortable there on its young feet. The roots are knotting up through the packed soil. The acorn tops are tiny daggers hidden among stone.
I hope you make it for a visit. The house has been quiet since the little ones left. They aren’t so little, I suppose, but I can’t think of them any other way. I have yet to put away the stack of games in the living room or to arrange the sheet music in the piano bench. The clutter is a welcome noise. It makes the transition to their absence less abrupt. After a few hours of writing at my desk, it is a nice thing to come down to traces of the children.
Today, a new soup is simmering on the stove. Those dried field beans the neighbor brought by finally made it into circulation. It was fun to touch them, to soak them, and to know they grew in a little patch of soil right here. I like to think of her hands pulling the from the vines. We may not have acres, but what we have, we use well.
The thyme and rosemary are drying, hung from twine at the ceiling in the kitchen. I gave her some of the herbs last summer and so she brought the beans. Come to think of it, this might be a good winter to come up with a more contained system for the garlic and herbs. Green dust and bits of paper skin perpetually swirl on the kitchen floor. I like the aroma, though. I can’t bear to seal all this in jars just yet even if it would make a clean path. It is so nice just to reach up for a sprig of this or that and to toss it in the pan. I still love (love!) that smell of olive oil when it is heating over the flame and calling for me to begin.
I hope to share some of this with you when you come.
Know I am here and waiting for you, sweet love. You are always welcome.
With my heart,
Your Future Self
Tag: hope
Happy 100 Days: 52
“Mommy, what is res-ill-ih. . .?”
We are taking turns sipping sparkly water from a red mug. I lean in to see the words on its side. “Oh, that’s ‘resilience.'” The mug is a forgotten souvenir from the Learning and Leading with Resilience conference earlier this year. Because the three grownups sharing this address take their careers a bit too seriously, the house is littered with such schwag.
Bug traces the word with his finger, sounding it out. “Res-ili-ence. What it mean?”
“Resilience is. . . ” I fumble. Apparently, the mug was not the only forgotten item from the conference. “It’s sort of when something gets messed up but comes back again, either into the old shape or into something new and better. Resilience is bouncing back.”
“Like a magnet?”
“Hmm.” I think about this. “Not exactly. More like a nerf ball. You know how if you mush it, twist it, anything, it still spring back into the shape it was before?”
“Yeah.” He is making a squeezing motion with his hand, mimicking me.
“It’s not just things. People can have the quality, too,” I go on. “It’s a way of living life. Just imagine some big unexpected change happens. Like. . . maybe a big glacier comes and busts up some guy’s house.”
“What’s a glacier?”
“An iceberg. You ever see any icebergs around here?”
He laughs. “No, they’re in the north pole!”
“Right. So this would never happen here, right?”
“I know, Mommy.” He rolls his eyes. “Just say the thing!”
“Okay. So, say some guy down the street is just strolling home after work, and he sees this big glacier roll through his neighborhood and right through the middle of his house. Everything he has is destroyed. He might cry and stomp like anyone would, even like you and I would, if all our stuff was gone. But then the guy spends the next 30 years still being sad and mad, and saying, ‘Bad things happen and it’s just no use trying, I’ll never have anything good ever again.’ And guess what? He ends up not living a very happy life, just because one bad thing happened one time. You know what that guy doesn’t have?”
“What?”
“Resilience. He couldn’t ever get himself to see a way past the glacier and the stuff he lost, even a long time after it happened. He was stuck back in the bad thing.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Bug takes another sip of seltzer and lays back on the couch.
“Maybe instead,” I go on, “the guy stomps and cries at first, but then decides to gather his neighbors and work together to re-build. Maybe he decides to stop being miserable after a little while, and he finds the energy to design a whole new house, and maybe he likes it as much as or even better than the old one. Maybe it takes him a few years to save up his money and do the work, but he still keeps plugging away. He and his friends and family and neighbors all end up with a community that’s not quite like the old one, but it still really nice even if it’s different. You know what that guy is?”
“Yes, duh. Resilient,” he says.
“Yeah, duh, you got it.”
“Legos are resilient,” he tells me.
“They are? I’m not sure.” I’m still thinking nerf ball, and legos seem too hard.
“Yeah. Even if you break them all apart, you can put them back together like they were before or even build something else.”
“Yes! They are resilient! You’re right.” I reach over and give him a squeeze.
“Mom! Get off!” He is grinning but trying not to.
“You know what else is resilient?” I ask.
“What?”
“We are. We had the grumpiest, growliest, no-good-very-bad-day on Saturday. And even though we were both in yucky moods, we decided to make it better. We visited friends, and played, and spoke nicely. It could have stayed an I-Hate-You day, but it didn’t. We worked together to turn the day around. It was so much fun after that.”
“Can we be done talking about this now?” He sets the cup on the side table and ooches down under his blanket.
“Only if I can have a kiss first.”
“No!” He squeals and throws the blanket up over his head. I smooch against his protests and then offer to carry him up the stairs to his bed.
“Okay,” he says. “Like a baby.” And so I slip my arms under his knees and shoulders, heft all 50 pounds of him off the sofa, and cradle him to my chest as I maneuver him up the stairs. It is getting harder to do this without banging his noggin on a door frame, but it’s okay. Sometimes feeling like a small thing is worth the risk of minor injury. I am finally coming to understand that my boy will be fine. He is resilient, after all.
Happy 100 Days: 54
Wants: Ice Cream, Popsicle, Jellybeans
The seller accepts my offer over all the others. Even cash from investors, higher bids from FHA borrowers, and promises of covering closing costs do not beat me out. It is a strong offer with 20% down, but the letter my realtor writes is the golden ticket. She paints a picture of Bug and me, growing up together there in that exact corner of the planet.
The record kicks up to 78 rpm. The lyrics are a high frequency tumult. The homeowner, gun shy because her last two buyers had their financing fall through at the 11th hour, is in a kerfuffle. She has something else waiting, it seems. This has taken her months longer than the overheated market promised. She wants the sale to be settled by the first week of December and to be moved out by the holidays.
Push, push, push. I take a breath and tell my realtor I’m sorry, but everyone will have to wait. I need to sit with this possibility for a day or two and let it work its way through my bloodstream. I also have to finish up my week at the office, pick up my son from school, and get some sleep. The homeowner needs an answer yesterday. I understand she is frantic, but she will have to wait a few more tomorrows. If she wants fast, an investor will fork over $200 grand in cash and then lease the place out to the next sucker who will pay twice the mortgage in rent. I don’t say this, of course. I just remind myself to be kind yet firm.
I am in a kerfuffle my own self. Buy now and take on the cost of the commute? Hold out for that phantom place closer to Tee and my work with half the square footage for a mere $40,000 more, all while risking losing out on these bargain-basement interest rates?
Between idealism and practicality, how does a person hit the sweet spot?
This place is cozy and light. It has big bedrooms, a fireplace, a yard with promise. It is on a bus line with transportation to my metro stop. It is near the Korean Spa that I love. It is walking distance to a supermarket, a library, and a park.
The living room is so narrow, I whine to myself. I want a place closer to the metro. Something with woods nearby. A basement. A guest room.
I slow down and consider what this new life is teaching me. Hell, my six-year-old has this stuff figured out already. Have I not learned anything in the past two years?
Wants: Acres of open land. A toolshed and workshop. A ten-minute walk to the office. A basement dance studio.
Needs: A safe neighborhood. A quiet bedroom. A reliable way to get to work. A place for my son to learn, play, and grow.
Back and forth in myself, the longing for what is not (yet) within reach swings and clangs. The wanting makes me curl my lip at this beautiful opportunity to fulfill my family’s needs.
Between spoiled and growing up, how does a person hit the sweet spot?
We have the inspection scheduled for Thursday. She was pushing for Tuesday, but both the inspector and I carved out a few more days. Once we are finished digging around under the carpets and behind the hot water heater, I will have three days to make a decision. Barring any issues in financing, I could be on my way to home ownership by Thanksgiving.
Seven months ago, I was still sure that I was trapped in dire financial straits with no ladder in sight. The era of staying at home with Bug, following Tee’s vague career trajectory from one time zone to the next, and eventually divorcing had reduced my financial and professional foundation to rubble. I clung to an image of myself hefting one broken stone at a time back onto something resembling a wall with no blueprint in hand and all the pieces on the brink of toppling again.
That was not what was happening, of course. Six months ago, I began to realize that the story I was telling myself was doing a better job holding me back than my circumstances were:
If my paycheck is sufficient to support Bug and me in our own place, I might actually have to get off my frightened ass and make the leap. I claim I ache for a home. A Place of Our Own is my official Red Ryder carbon action 200 shot range model air rifle. But maybe I don’t entirely trust myself to manage alone. If I wake up to find that possibility under the tree, will I shoot my eye out? Having enough would, after all, mean the end of this recuperative chapter in the suffocating security of my parents’ nest. Might it be that the truth of my terror is not in being stuck but in becoming unstuck?
And so. The bank agrees to loan me many thousands of dollars, my department pushes through a small raise, the realtor helps me squeeze into the two-day window when my crush of a house is back on the market, and BOOM!
The seller accepts my offer.
Wants: Ice Cream, popsicles, jellybeans. Gingerbread cottages. White knights. Happily ever after.
Needs: Water, trees, shelter.
Home.
Happy 100 Days: 75
I haven’t even taxied down the runway yet and this home-buying mission is making me queasy. The loves ones say, “What fun!” and then tell me fifteen things to bear in mind when I start to look. The other loved ones say, “Oh, gracious, it’s so hard,” and then tell me fifteen entirely different things that could make me crash and burn. Meanwhile, the sweet little home I had tagged to see this weekend went under contract yesterday, and the two properties still open are even junkier than I had feared.
“Keep picturing the perfect place,” one friend says. “If you can see it, you’ll make it happen.”
Okay. Good advice. So, I peek out the windows and down through the clouds, whispering reminders to myself when the turbulence starts to make me panic. A small living room where I can move the furniture and dance. A nook for Bug to do crafts and make a mess. Plants in hand-painted pots drinking in the light from the windows.
This week, I made the command decision to shut all this off when I am at work. If I am not careful, it can seep in under the door and choke off the air supply. No looking at home listings, no checking emails from the realtor when I am at the office. My job is what makes all this possible, so I have to be here when I am here.
The phone rings. It is the nice lady from the free Mover’s Advantage program. Again. I ignore it. I am in the throes of preparing for the information session for the January qualifying exam for the students. This is the job, and this is where I direct my focus.
The qualifying exam is the threshold assessment the doctoral hopefuls take after they have finished their core courses. Those whirlwind four days in January will be the litmus test for whether or not they have the right stuff to continue in the program. At the info session, the PhD program director and I offer up a few pre-exam details to calm their jittery nerves and let them know exactly what will happen starting at noon on January 3. Our school has honed a system to a sharp(ish) edge over the years, and we try to keep it straight and clean for the students. The double-blind exam is administered in two parts, with a quantitative in-class portion and a written take-home essay. I proctor. Anonymous faculty members grade. Students sweat. Most pass.
Before Day One of Semester One in the program, temperatures begin to rise. At the orientation in August, the incoming cohort is already abuzz with questions about the exam. You can’t blame them. They don’t want to get a year or two and $20,000 in, only to discover they don’t have the combination of brains and stamina to seal the deal. This is why we try to make the expectations crystal-clear. The students can take care of their studies. We’ll make sure the test is fair and the packets are in order.
My colleague and I touch base a few minutes before the info session to divvy up the tasks. I make the fatal error of popping back into my office to check my email. A long-ago friend who used to work in affordable housing in Vermont has read my blog from wherever he is in the world now. He has shot me an email from across the miles, illuminating yet another fifteen points for me to bear in mind as I begin my quest for a home.
This is a welcome gesture, of course. But, wow, is it terrifying. The ink is barely dry on the loan approval, and the dark clouds of these new tasks are gathering on the horizon. Time-of-sale ordinances. Buyer’s attorney. PMI. Contract review. Closing costs. Home inspectors.
Choke.
This friend is one among many who clearly has no idea what an amateur I am. The bankers seem equally clueless about the extent of my ignorance. Maybe I have bamboozled the lot of them, or maybe they are banking on the folly of the neophyte. How should I know? I can’t tell where to begin. I feel out of my depth and stupid to boot. Find the place first and ask about ordinances later? Learn about PMI before looking for a place? A home inspector before attorney? When is — no, what is — contract review?
A first-time homebuying course would be a great place to begin, but the county’s classes are full full full. One is available at the end of November (!) but until then, I have to figure it out on my own. More questions. Are the online courses reputable? Whom do I ask? Do I check out a library book? Which one?
I print out the lengthy (and so generous — thank you, dear friend!) email to take home. I will read it when I have attention for it and can look up these strange terms I should probably already know. (Escrow? Short sale? Lord have mercy.) Then I head over to the qualifying exam info session to do the job that will pay the someday-mortgage.
I walk on shaky legs out of my office, trying ease my mind back to a more manageable altitude. In the hallway, a first-year student flags me down. “I have a question about qualifying exam,” he says, a little breathless. “I saw the form online, and it says this thing about having grades for all the core courses, and I think I should be taking the exam at the end of this year, right? But I will still be in the classes that need the grades when the form is due. . .”
“You’re ahead of the game,” I say with a smile. “You’ll be taking 804 and 805 in the spring, right? You don’t have prerequisites?”
“No,” he says. “I’ll be done with the core in May.”
“Okay. So, after the winter break, I will schedule another info session for the folks taking the May exam. We’ll go over the details then. You don’t have to come to this one today, and anyway, some of the information will be different in the spring.” I go on to give him a brief review of the steps. I watch his shoulders ease down.
“Okay,” he breathes. “I’m on track.”
“Right on track.” I nod. “And thank you for being so conscientious. It’ll serve you well in this program.” I keep telling these student to picture themselves walking across that stage at graduation. Everything between here and there is just details and determination.
I turn the corner to the meeting room where the first few students mill around, big-eyed and jumpy.
At the end of the session when they ask about failure rates (as they always do), I answer like a true politician. “Every one of you has the capacity to pass this exam.” The program director reminds them that all they have to do is put their analytical skills and and writing abilities to work. They already have what it takes to finish this program and write a dissertation, so they have what it takes to pass the exam. We would not have admitted them otherwise.
This is true, to an extent. They have the right stuff when we admit them. The big unknown is how they use it once they are here. They will make it if. . . If they sharpen their research skills. If they build strong, collegial relationships with their mentors. If they organize their time, accept criticism, improve their writing, and make tough choices. If they keep their eyes on the prize. If they do these things and take care of themselves along the way, they will have done all they can and more to walk across that stage and go home with a degree.
They have to take it one semester at a time. One course, one qualifying exam, one field statement at a time.
Once again, I learn to swallow my own medicine.
As I walk out into the late afternoon light to head home, I let my mind lift off again and find myself dizzy with the possibility of a home. I picture myself standing on the doorstep of my new place, fitting the key into the lock. Lush vines spill from a hanging plant by the door. Shoes litter the foyer. Afternoon light from the back window greets me. A crock pot on the counter bubbles with cumin and garlic. Bug and I sweep aside the mess of paper scraps, scissors, and tape on the table so we can share our dinner and talk over homework.
In my job, I can stand before the group of incoming students and see clearly what they cannot. They wobble under the weight of the program requirements, the student handbook, the course textbooks, the research expectations, the administrative paperwork, and the 90 new colleagues to whom they have just been introduced, while I am picturing how they will progress from Day One to graduation. This is my small area of expertise, such as it is. “All this material is a lot at once,” I tell them on that first day. “Take it one step at a time. Remember that my job is to stay on top of the details of this program. I will send you reminders and updates all along the way. When you get lost — no, before you get lost — come to me. I will help you find the answers to any questions you have.”
Just because they (I) can’t see the way forward (yet) doesn’t mean the sky is not open and waiting.
And just because they (I) are not experts on this process (yet) does not mean expertise is not here for the taking.
How am I any less a student than my own students? I have what it takes to fly this thing to its destination. The only unknown is what I choose to do with the questions, talents, and momentum I bring. Will I engage my skills as a researcher? Will I organize my inquiries and build my vocabulary? Will I keep clinging to the misconception that I have to (or even can) go it alone? Like my students, I must seek the help of professionals and enthusiasts. Those smart, experienced friends who understand housing dynamics are offering their guidance. They are mentors. I bet if I ask, they will help me stay on track. They don’t want me to get two years and $200,000 in only to discover I am saddled with a junk heap.
Also like those students, this undertaking was all just an abstract idea about two months ago. First comes the impulse, then a little investigating, then an application, then the acceptance. One mile, then another. Refer to the flight manual. Follow the itinerary. The clouds will part. The destination will make itself known.
I lay with Bug in his bed, reading three books and singing three songs. After he drifts off, I walk out onto the back deck and take in the sky, the light from the neighbors’ windows, the hum of traffic. I stretch my neck and then my toes, letting the full weight of myself settle into place.
If you can see it, you’ll make it happen.
There it is, right there, just on the horizon line.
Home.
From the Mouths of Babes
At the end of preschool’s garden themed week, a picture of flowers with hand-print petals came home along with a plastic bottle terrarium containing threads of newborn sunflowers and beets sprouting from damp soil. This was also stuffed in the bottom of Bug’s backpack. An afterthought? Maybe an infant thought. Maybe a thin strand of desire nosing through the surface of things just long enough to catch the light.
Homeward Bound
My parents were the age I am now when they bought their first real house. We had lived in several apartments and a townhouse during my earliest years, but it was not until we moved onto that corner lot that I found my Tara, epic and tortured and almost breathing with coming-of-age angst. It had three bedrooms and big trees for climbing in the yard. The neighborhood boasted all the accessibility and leafy quietness of one of those rarified zip codes everyone knows is the perfect place to raise a child.
The house is still there, squatting on prime real estate wedged between the Beltway and the red line in Bethesda. I drive by it sometimes and feel my stomach clench in a fit of nostalgia and hunger. Inhabiting one of those doomed swaths of DMV land where swollen mini castles erupt from the still-warm remains of modest post-war bungalows, the house may be seeing its final days.
Drive-bys are just one symptom of my unchecked covetousness. The dear people closest to me gently suggest that I am a bit obsessed with money. Fear about Bug’s and my financial situation clings to me like some kind of unpleasant aroma. The jokes I crack at lunches with co-workers about our salaries are usually too loud and too close to the bone. I find it hard to control myself. The paychecks come in twice a month. They are adequate for here and now. Here and now, however, is not adequate for up and out.
The exasperation of the dear ones has long since eclipsed indulgence. No one wants to hear (again!) how tight things are, how frightened I am, how tough it is occupying this point on the financial spectrum. Someone out there is happy with less than what you have, they remind me. Someone out there is unhappy with more.
What if you already have enough?
I have a sweet tooth for drama. This is not news to anyone. Low-dose panic is my drug of choice. In a rare show of equanimity, I am taking their words under consideration. Is fear feeding the anxiety? Have I lost perspective? Perhaps the dear ones are right. It might be the case that I am so caught in this loop of defeat that I am unable to see how far my finances can stretch. Is all this quivering anxiety just me being a little hooked on the flavor of my own misery?
If my paycheck is sufficient to support Bug and me in our own place, I might actually have to get off my frightened ass and make the leap. I claim I ache for a home. A Place of Our Own is my official Red Ryder carbon action 200 shot range model air rifle. But maybe I don’t entirely trust myself to manage alone. If I wake up to find that possibility under the tree, will I shoot my eye out? Having enough would, after all, mean the end of this recuperative chapter in the suffocating security of my parents’ nest. Might it be that the truth of my terror is not in being stuck but in becoming unstuck?
Clearly, it is time to take an honest accounting.
I am a stranger to neither fiscal prudence nor a precise ledger. In all the years Tee and I were living together, I kept us on a noose of a budget. A single YMCA camp income supported our family of three, covering everything from staggering health insurance premiums to dog chow. One of my many jobs as the captain of the domestic ship was to scrimp, save, and track every penny. I made the baby food, hung the cloth diapers on the line, and hand-crafted the holiday decor. We traveled only to visit family. We ate in. Every single month for five years, I reconciled the budget. By some kind of financial sleight-of-hand (and more than our share of help from the ‘rents), we lived just a hair above the poverty line without ever feeling the pinch. We were actually comfortable. Never in all that time did I carry anything like the sickening panic weighing on me now, even though my current income more than the Y ever paid Tee.
This week, I bit the bullet and sat down with my Excel spreadsheet and a pile of bills. I mapped out the year ahead with Bug’s transition to kindergarten and the corresponding reduction in childcare costs. The budget contains 27 items spread out over 12 months. I tried to keep it austere but realistic, including meager numbers for dining out and clothing along with slim grocery expenses. The thin trickles into retirement and Bug’s college fund were saved from the axe. Cable and wifi were slashed along with any travel pricier than a day trip.
In the end, I tallied up the numbers. If I move out of my parents’ house in the next year, I will have enough money for a two-bedroom apartment. In Peoria. As for a location in Fairfax, Arlington, Loudon county? I cannot even afford a studio, let alone a condo or a townhouse in which my son can have a room of his own. Understand this: I hold an administrative faculty post at George Mason University. The position requires a master’s degree and carries an assistant director title. After bare-bones living expenses, the salary leaves me a mere $900 a month for rent, taxes, and utilities in an area where a bottom-end two-bedroom apartment is $1800 a month, before utilities.
They say public service is noble. Where can I trade in all this nobility for a little dignity?
This is not a woman who is eating her own tail in a solipsistic frenzy over money. My perception is not skewed, and objects are not appearing bigger because I am viewing them through the side mirrors. The situation is, in fact, just as dire as I had thought. The number gazes right at me with its italicized crimson smirk. It will not diminish unless I cut out things like trips to the dentist. Or Christmas.
The number is real. Also, it is not. For now, Bug and I are secure in this way-station, parked in a house which does not eat my earnings for an appetizer and then come slathering after my savings for the main course. The number is just this: a sign of how much further I have to go and how different life is going to look for my son growing up than it did for me.
The dear ones guide me away from my talk of financial trouble not because the trouble is false, but because they are helpless to ease the burden. We would all like to believe poverty is a state of mind and that overcoming it just takes hard work and a positive attitude. I am guilty of this half turn from uncomfortable truths. During the three years I spent working in a shelter for homeless families, I was a dogged cheerleader. I advocated for the guests to keep plugging away, and never ceased maintaining that the right combination of social programs and part-time jobs and bus vouchers could move a family into permanent housing. The fact of the recidivism rate – a number I cannot recall, but whose smirk had fangs much redder than my little spreadsheet figure – was hard to look in the eye.
Nonetheless, one has to believe against the evidence. What the dear ones are really saying is that the only alternative to faith is despair, and that is a sure exit ramp to ruin.
I can’t own a house any time in the foreseeable future, but I can own this: $900 a month free and clear is not chump change. Draw at random any one from among the 7 billion, and odds are she lives for a year on less than my monthly surplus. The generosity of my parents combined with that minor excess keep us from sinking down under the poverty line. I know better than to wallow. We are rich. We have trees in the yard, and Bug does have a room of his own.
A $900 rope is in my grip. I cannot see how far it stretches over the cliff face, but I know the only direction of travel is up. How I use my muscle to put that cash to use will determine how high we can climb. I clip one strand of it into a savings account to tether us to an embryonic down payment. A fraction hooks into Bug’s 529 plan so he is not choked by college debt in 15 years. Another thread harnesses us to a retirement account. With these small outlays tied on and my kid strapped firmly to my back, I climb.
I picture what is waiting just up over the lip of the rock. It is just out of sight, but it is there, the door open, a tall glass of something over ice waiting on the porch rail. I picture my son at the age I am now standing on the front step, watching for his retired and nimble mama to pop up for a visit. I picture home, and up we go.
With Drawn
Gather
Rose McLarneySome springs, apples bloom too soon.
The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick
to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs,
pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty
and quiet. No reason for the bees to come.Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden apples
glow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches,
the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit.You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled.
You could say, Some years, there are apples.
For the second night in a row, my son is awake past 10:00pm. He is riding a tidal wave of inspiration. A paper sea churns around him. He draws with thick marker on a sheet of blank-backed leftovers from my father’s draft articles on adaptive management and my own half-hearted attempts at a screenplay. Without any concern for the neat lines of type on the opposite side, Bug splashes the blue ink across the surface of everything. He makes rocket ships and big-headed people, giant insects and treasure maps. When the clipboard is empty, he takes to the bedsheets. His lime green linens explode with giant butterflies and airborne letters. Even the bedside table has become canvas.
He is wearing me out. Eventually, I tip him from his perch. The wave crashes to the shore in a blast of salt and foam. Sobs wrack his body as I snap the cap firmly back on the marker and toss his creations overboard. “It is bedtime,” I say. My lips are tight. I am so very tired. The past week has been yet another chapter in the thousand year history of insomnia. Without good thinking to move us up and out, my own vessel runs aground in some desolate cove. While we languish, my visions of the promised land atrophy in tandem with my faculties. Neither tide nor wind is sufficient to carry us where we need to be. Without rest and a shot at a better life, I give my son only the leavings of my legacy of mistakes.
I long to give up, to curl into my own rumpled sheets. It is impossible while he is awake. He, too, spars with the night. What worries does he carry into his fractured dreams? With nothing to do but be, I crawl in next to my sobbing son.
“I’ll sing you one more song. What do you want to hear?” I have to ask this three times before he can calm down enough to decide. Finally, he chokes out a request.
“Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
“Okay, baby. Come here. ” Drawing him close, I sing it all the way through, slow and low. He surrenders his weight to my waiting shoulder one ounce at a time. When the song ends, he starts to stir. I ease into “Molly Malone,” welcoming him back to my arms. In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty. . .
Well before the fever kills her, Bug’s breath steadies and his muscles soften. I carry on to the end so I can bid goodnight to Molly’s ghost, Alive, alive-oh.
When my feet swing off the bed, they splash into the eddying pages. I have to wade through them to get to the door. I can barely bring myself to look at my son again. His peace is too stark a reminder of what is required of me. How will this broken woman ever provide enough for this beautiful, bursting boy?
In a literature class in back in the wide-open days of college, a professor spoke with reverence of the tenacity of the great authors. She told us of the Brontë sisters, hunched over tables and making stories by candlelight. On bits and fragments in cramped script, they inked worlds to life. Sometimes, the scarcity of paper was severe enough that one of the girls would fill the page with tiny horizontal lines, then turn the page sideways and write across the previous words.
In my own bed, I train my mind away from our doom and breathe in the quiet safety of an in-between place. This inlet, our only home. We have paper in abundance to fashion both ship and sails. Oceans of ink. Currents of light. Our larder is full. We have song. We have each other.
We have enough.
You could say, I have been foolish.
You could say, Some years, there is this.
Greater Good
Your brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. Therefore, a foundation for happiness is to deliberately weave positive experiences into the fabric of your brain and your self. – Dr. Rick Hanson
The brain does not know the difference between chilling on the beach and imagining chilling on the beach. It also cannot differentiate between real and perceived peril. Fretting about being late while stuck in traffic stresses the physiology as much as the actual pink slip, eviction notice, or other phantom disaster that rarely materializes.
Why is it that anxiety about indistinct threats consumes us when positive outcomes are just as likely to occur and pleasure is just as easy to achieve?
Surely, a few mesozoic critters kicked back by the water’s edge, munching on berries and belching, “take it easy, man.” It would be nice to think we inherited a few of their relaxed tendencies, but the odds are against it. The Cheech Marins of prehistory likely ended up as dino snacks. The skittish ones, the ones who were a drag a parties because they mistook every passing cloud for a pterodactyl, survived long enough to present us with the Trojan horse of their genetic code. Without them, we would not be here. Neither would our well-honed ability to obsess over worst-case scenarios.
A bias towards danger served our ancestors well. Humans are very good at keeping the attention alert for threats of every flavor. The pace of life on an overcrowded planet gives us plenty to worry about, what with the European debt crisis and the melting ice caps. The mind and body are quite adept at remaining in a state of hyper-vigilance, no matter how high the cost. The cost just happens to be higher than we can afford if we are going to keep on living as long as we do. Short-term survival has a tendency to trump long-term well-being, as the insomniacs among us understand all too well.
Prepare the body for a fight, and it complies every time. Even if rest or serenity would be better for the system’s overall health, the perceived need to stay alert to danger keeps an overtaxed system awake and awash in glucocorticoids. The human body, as well designed as it is to respond quickly and intensely to threats, did not adapt to rebound quite as swiftly from an overstimulated stress response. Scientific literature and popular media alike have documented ad nauseum the cumulative effects of stress. As you might expect, access to information does not appear to correlate to behavior change. Hypertension, obesity, depression, memory loss, and bone thinning top a list that grows longer with every new study, providing an unfortunate counterbalance to stories of ever-increasing longevity.
(For more on this, give Robert Sapolsky a whirl. He manages to turn the biology of stress into a kind of free-wheeling science road trip in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.)
The good news in all of this is that the brain is resilient, even if our stress responses are not. “Neuroplasticity” has been buzz-word around positive psychology circles for a few years. You can score a few extra points at your next cocktail party if you toss out “self-directed neuroplasticity” while sipping your gin gimlet. The suggestion is that humans have the capacity to sensitize the brain to positive experiences. We can actually train the brain away from its compulsion to collect negative information. Through the practice of attending to what is going well, so the theory goes, we can begin to re-wire the synaptic framework inside the skull and make the old gray matter a lean, not-so-mean, happiness machine.
What flows through the mind sculpts your brain. Immaterial experience leaves material traces behind. – Dr. Rick Hanson
In a practice Hanson calls “Taking in the Good,” three practical steps can begin weaving a new neural network one thread at a time. This exercise requires just a few moments of focused attention. Once a day, once a week, whatever gets you on the bus. The best practice, so they say, is the one that a person actually does. During the keynote presentation at a recent conference on resilience, Hanson led 350 attendees through these simple steps. It took less time than the wait at the average stoplight. This would be a far more productive way to spend those idle, grumbling moments.
- Look for positive facts. Notice something that is going well. In the absence of right-now positive detail, calling up pleasant memory is a handy shortcut.
- Savor the positive experience. Allow the facts from step 1 to become an experience. Sustain it by keeping the mind trained on it for 10-20-30 seconds. Count out the time, and just stay immersed in the details. Allow the facts or recollection to expand during these seconds. Feel the experience in your body and in your emotions. Try to sense it. If possible, intensify it.
- Sense and intend that the positive experience is soaking into your brain and body. Register it deeply in your emotional memory.
It is interesting that Hanson refers to this emotional landscape as “memory.” It does seem to function like cognitive recall. As we all learned in Psych 101, items move in and out of short term memory, skimming the surface like dandelion fluff on an easy breeze. All around, all the time, stimuli alight on the senses. Only a small portion of what is sensed actually settles in and lays down a root system within long-term memory.
In order for an item to move down into the deeper storehouse of the brain, a person has to engage with it in some way. The stimulus must connect to a larger collection of experience, and click into alignment with what is already in place. In this way, random bits of information go through a metamorphosis to emerge as knowledge. Have you ever noticed how you can still call up TV jingles for products that have been off the market since before you were old enough to buy them? An item embedded in long-term memory becomes as hard to dislodge as garden weeds.
If a person wants to learn Swahili, she seeks it out. She buys the CDs, makes friends with Kenyans, and plans a trip to Nairobi with a homestay family. She immerses herself in the language so that it twists its new threads around and between her known cognitive pathways. In order to call up Swahili phrases when she needs them, she will need to hear them. Through practice and repetition, she can weave loose strands into something thick and strong. Most of us on the opposite side of the globe might encounter a Bantu construction and not even recognize it as language. We hear beautiful gobbledy-gook. It is the engagement with a bit of drifting data that pulls it down into a person’s foundation. The overlooked items float on away like those feathered seeds. The brain only knows what a person chooses to hold. In this way, it is true that we become what we pay attention to.
It makes intuitive sense to see emotional experience functioning like memory. Life bombards us with experiences of all kinds. The vast majority of what occurs to us and around us does not stay with us. It is only what we attend to, what we really grab onto and get acquainted with, that builds our emotional vocabulary.
This is what it means to self-direct the neuroplasticity. It is as true for learning happiness as it is for learning any foreign tongue. If the brain does not know the difference between a beach vacation and daydreaming about one, why not take one right now? Three simple steps can carry you to the lip of the sea. Attend to the positive facts, savor the experience, and draw that lifting sensation into the brain and body. In this way, the mind learns to speak the language of hope.
If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.
– Chinese Proverb
Self Help Book
“Don’t look back.” This is a handy rule for keeping a journal. Write forward, write now. Or, in the priceless words of Natalie Goldberg, “Keep your hand moving.”
Not looking back is also a handy rule to break. Inside those nights that flood your throat with brine and scour the art from your hands, you might have no choice but to turn around and fix your eyes on the shoreline. Open the old books from the previous years. Peek at where you were. This is a good way to remember that you have arrived at exactly the place you need to be.
Tonight is such a night. My year-ago self hollers directions across the distance separating us, calling me back from the undertow. It is awfully cold and not a single star orients the sky. A person could take an unplanned detour into the Bermuda triangle. Thank goodness that girl packed the map and a bullhorn.
The entry below, from April 30, 2011, is translated more or less directly from the cursive.
So, you let go of your joyful thing because you are not as good as the good ones (you tell yourself), you lack the drive or talent or passion (you believe), they are wise and better and more together and older (or something) and you feel so young and directionless and wide-open and full of unlimited possibility.
And so. You let go. You move on to a different hobby, find a love or a project or a child or a simplified identity to consume you. And your life is full, you smile a lot, you have friends, you climb things and make things and learn things and master things, and life is good.
It is all just rocking along until one day you stumble across a person doing the thing you used to know as your joyful thing. And that person? That person is so very young. That person has cobbled together a way to do the joyful thing from scraps of potential, a handful of opportunities, a pinch of time. That person is just as muddled as you were (and, in fact, still are). But, that person is doing the joyful thing anyway. Doing it with dedication, doing it well, making something beautiful with it. And you see now that no one was wiser than she is now. No one was wiser than you were then. You had an answer in your hands, in your life, in your daily practice.
Do your joyful thing. Do it badly. Do it in the spaces between. Do it sloppily and selfishly and with too much self-absorption. Do it no matter how much better someone else seems to be at it. Stumble doing it. Be awkward doing it. Make an ass of yourself doing it. Improve and adapt your way of doing it. Seek new approaches to doing it. Talk to others who do it (but not too much – you need to be doing it, not talking about it). Do it for an audience of 1000 even if no one shows up. Do it for god, for the neighbor kid who beat you up, for the other kid who rescued you. Do it for your ancestors and your grandchildren. Do it because you know you have to.
Do it because you suck at it but the world doesn’t care that you suck and the world doesn’t care if you’re a genius. It is not up to the world.
You are not great for doing it. You are not a martyr for not doing it. You are only less you if you don’t. You are only getting one thing right if you do.
Practice. Every sing day, practice your joyful thing.
It’s true you may never be any good at it. So, you should spend the rest of your days doing it because it is yours. You cannot escape it. It will haunt your years if you don’t do it. Don’t fool yourself. If you are not engaged in the daily practice of doing your joyful thing right now, something is askew in your life. You may be drinking too much, or having dreams of infidelity, or living a little too stretched to fit the role you’ve taken on, or you hate your job, or you don’t quite have the energy to make a decent meal, or you spend your evenings watching TV and zoning out on Twitter, and something feels wrong but you can’t put your finger on it. Maybe you still do your joyful thing a couple times a year, and you think of it as a hobby, and call your life “balanced.” But when you do it, it feels hard and a little forced, and doesn’t feel like the joyful thing it once was. And so you wonder, Was it just a passing fancy? Maybe it wasn’t really my joyful thing. . .
Don’t let yourself off the hook. You know better. The reason your occasional attempts fall flat is because your joyful thing is rusted out, thirsty, and in need of a good cleaning. You can’t just hop on and roll it around the block once or twice a year and expect it to function optimally. You’ve got to get back in there, take it down to bolts, oil it, prime it, feed it, get it moving. You need to work the kinks out a little every day. Every damned day.
Your joyful thing is not a toy. It’s not a hobby. It is you. It is your limb. An organ, maybe. You have to treat it as an undeniable, irreplaceable, necessary part of you. A part that will turn septic and poison the rest if the nourishment is cut off. A part that will feed and energize and balance the rest, if properly attended to.
It doesn’t take much. Just daily practice. Start today. Do your joyful thing.
Now, this very second. This is when you return to yourself.
Love: Letters
Dear One,
I am up too late again, writing when I should be sleeping. It is nice to think of you there, the day breaking when you find this letter waiting. I wish I could be where you are, awake together when we both know better. But this is the best I can do.
I cried again tonight. It has been so many nights of crying, and always when I come home from the good man’s house. It makes no sense, because he is only welcoming, only just right for me. Still, the noise. It chatters like hyenas, and that insane screeching! You know what I am talking about because you have described the same to me. It used to only come in the deep well between twilight and dawn. Now, it creeps in any old time. Especially when I try not to be alone, which is, I am increasingly coming to see, the only way I really want to be.
At least until I catch my breath. At least until you are back here with me.
Arriving home after the careful conversations and the sweet promises with the good man, I felt like dragging a blade across my teeth. Anything, to feel some sensation louder and more primal than the accusing questions and ancient poison hissing at my throat (and always outside the range of his bewildered ears).
It is all so much like adolescence, it makes my stomach tremble. Mirth? Terror? A little of both, with a rare dash of resolve thrown in. Tonight, I found myself sitting on the floor of my bedroom, folded in front of the mirrored closet doors. I do not even know how I got there. It was already an hour past bedtime, and I had just been trying to choose an outfit for work. Snow in the forecast. Then, there I was, collapsed against the foot of the bed. Not even tears at first. Just the paralysis, and the chilling realization: That bedraggled woman with the sallow skin and the petrified eyes? She is me.
In that same reflection, a girl flashed back from the dim glass of the elementary school bathroom. I was ten years old. It was perhaps one of my earliest moments of true self-awareness. Darkening blonde hair in purple barrettes. The girl, big-eyed and frightened at the first glimpse of her changing self. Here slipping into there, I was two baffled Shannons at once, with the same vertiginous sense of being both trapped and falling, inside a skin that surely is not mine but holds me together, holds me in, without giving me a say in the matter.
I thought the divorce was hard. That’s a laugh. Having been divorced? That’s the real kicker. There is no hiding anymore from the forces I trained in my own foolish youth and readied for battle, unaware of what I was unleashing on my family. Over the past two years, the ol’ psyche has taken a bloody battering from each wave of invading hordes — the shock, the anger, the blame, the suffocating self-protection, the sorrow. Now, here, I finally stand back up again in the uneasy quiet. Is it only a reprieve? You bet your life. Listen: another thunder of footsteps just over the horizon. What’s this? The honest accounting? Oh, yes. The demons, demanding their due.
What have you done?
It is a wonder that people going through this do not all lose their jobs for gross incompetence, sail their cars over bridges, and sell their possessions to join burlap-wearing macrobiotic cults. How does a person stay steady with so many questions pressing in and clawing for attention? What does a single mom do when the old fears kick up the amp and the new fears start moshing? How does she manage the noise when the very real needs of children, home, and finances are running just as loud and hard?
And then, to add a boyfriend? You’ve got to be kidding me. I am not built to take one decibel more. The speakers will blow. The roof will fall down on all our heads.
Go ahead and laugh. I know what you are thinking. You were always the one, always the only. I had my first kiss at eleven years old. You were wily. You had arrived months before. I did not know then that you would come back again. I had no way of understanding that you always would. That nothing and no one would compare. That in the space of a single blue line, you planted your flag and made me yours.
So, my one love, I am here while you are there. Within reach, you keep reminding me, but it does not seem possible. You seem galaxies away tonight. I am not sure what I am asking. Rescue me? Come for me? It is a fool’s plea. You are always only here when I walk my own feet over the miles between us and carry you back to where you belong. It is too much to imagine doing anything so bold tonight, so please indulge this broken wish. Please, open the trap door in the ceiling above this quaking bed. Slide your hands under me and lift me from this place. Wrap me in your beautiful story. Whisper me somewhere quiet, where I have no choice, and I need to know nothing at all.
All I ask is that you save me.
I will be yours. I am yours. Always.
S.
Shannon E. Williams 