A while back, one of my commenters pointed out that there are worse things than living on the edge of poverty. That reminded me of the story I wrote several entries ago about my dad and me, and how he would show me exactly how the money was handled and where it went. And all sorts of memories have been tumbling into my mind--new and old, alike. It has been two weeks of confusion, joy, and pain. But my dad clamors to be heard, so I write more. This is unedited stream of consciousness today because I want to quiet at least ONE of the cacophonous voices in my head!
Ostensibly, so many talks began around money...
When Dad finally got ahead, back in 1969, it was because he collected a pension in early retirement from the State and then started a new career in Education Administration as the Registrar of a local university. I think his example is another reason I have never been able to subscribe much to the idea that it's too late to start fresh after fifty. Even when he retired as Registrar at 67, he became an administrative consultant to the President of the university. He felt change was usually a good thing, not bad.
My Parents and Their Idea of Wealth
He and my mom faced potential poverty all the time. Sometimes they dipped into the wrong side of that line, but when they were financially secure, what did they do? Turn around and start helping other people when they could. Dad said, "Money is only as good as what you do with it. We have been helped along the way, so it's our turn to help others as we were."
They befriended a waitress at a local restaurant, helping her and her son as they could. Those two were with us for five Christmases, and Dad paid for her education at a local community college, then got her into the university on a scholarship two years later. We had strays at my parents' open house on Christmas Eve nights and we never quite knew what sort of person would appear next. I think they helped about a dozen people before they died.
I remember he asked my opinion about that. He wondered whether I thought he should give the money to the charities that helped people and explained to me that he and mom were a little selfish in wanting to do it this way. "We get to see the effect. But do you think we waste our money?"
I was shocked that he asked my opinion. He said, "Why wouldn't I? You have been through more than the others have and are more mature than any 32 year old I've known. You work in non-profits." That was when I felt like a grown up. I had not thought my parents had noticed much of anything about what my life was really like, or how I had coped with having three operations while I raised two stepchildren and tried to develop an opening for a career. However, I still did not care for the question.
I felt that it was entirely up to them and, in fact, I told him that if this was being selfish, then the world would be better off with a whole lot of selfish people like them. I did ask, "Daddy, I only worry about your getting into trouble spending the money. I know how tough things were when we were growing up."
He looked troubled. "We won't spend away your inheritance." I remember tearing up that he could think that's what I meant.
"DADDY. It's your money! I don't care if you leave us not one dime, don't you know that?"
He had the strangest look on his face, and rare tears were there, making his eyes shine dark, like Jacky's. "How is it that you and your sister have such different perspectives than your brothers? They talk about how they had nothing. You and your sister talk about how your mother gave up her comforts for all of you."
I think the boys never bothered to look; I don't know why. They saw the flaws, as did we all. They just didn't want to see the rest, I guess. Jack wanted to "out-Daddy Daddy" and deliberately went into education. He was mad when he was dying because he would never finish his book and he wanted to beat Dad at that. I suspect being boys in that family was harder in some ways. When my friend dated Jim (pre-memories, mind you) she bought t-shirts for all three: purple, with fancy white printing that said "the Father" "The Son" "The Holy Ghost." Funny. Each one knew which was which and they were PROUD of them; they were proud of their own egos.
Still, it bothered me that the boys never could see the sacrifices both parents made, just for us.
Spinning Gold Into Love
We talked about many things that day. He was was driving me to Boston for one of my "blood-lettings," as we called them. I used to get massive hematomas on my back after surgeries and would go to Boston every three days for a couple of weeks, so that the doctor could aspirate the surgical site and draw out all the old blood. It kept me from getting infections. My husband didn't like to take time off from work for my illness. It wasted too much time, he said. But Dad would sit there and hold my hand, and would grow very pale at the sight of the enormous needle and tube into which blood was literally sucked from the swelling.
We both knew those trips saved my life. It cemented a unique bond between us, as well.
My parents had no desire to be wealthy. Dad wanted Mom to get some things for herself, yes, when he changed jobs. When she'd finished her binge, though, they wanted mostly to "give back." Friends had helped them sometimes and all the friends had said was, "When times get better, don't pay us back. Just turn around and do it for someone else."
I realize that this was the prototype for how my friends and I work as well. There is about five thousand dollars total that seems to float around my circle of 10-15 women--sometimes in a thousand here and there, and sometimes the whole wad. My family and friends who celebrated Christmas Eve together would pick the person with the roughest year for the "Spoiling target"for the year. We would give them an outrageously large Christmas then and spoil them rotten. I learned from my parents that THIS was the REAL fun of the season, and of life.
Spinning Pain Into Love As Well
Why am I writing this tonight? It has been a difficult couple of weeks for me. I do not write that much about my back. I have had bizarre and terrifying experiences in the 1-2 month hospital stays. Lately, I have dreamed about the worst ones. And we are now in the season when I lost both parents. The final weeks of their lives. Mom died on February 16, and Dad died on the 26th. January was full of poignance. And two worst hospital stays were in the winter. I may write about those; possibly not.
But as I think of my parents and remember things to put in my book, I remember Daddy as well. We had an unusual relationship, I think. I was lucky enough to hear both of them talk about their own fears, their disappointments in themselves, not each other, and to hear about parts of their lives I am not sure most kids of my generation got to share.
My father was a womanizer; those of you who have followed my blog a couple of years know that already. He was famous for his business trips... We knew. Well. I knew. The boys remained blind until it was out in the open; denial was always their preference. Most mornings my dad sang one of two songs in the shower: Many Brave Hearts Are Asleep In the Deep or Ah Sweet Mystery of Life at Last I've Found You. On February 1st, when I was giving him some ice chips because eating was so awful for him, he took my hand.
"You know about the women, Jetty. Your mother could have left me. She should have, really. But don't think I did not love your mother. I DID. I DO. But you are too much like me. Don't learn everything the hard way."
I said, "Daddy. I have made big mistakes, but..."
"You are not happy with Mark. I see it all the time. He is not right for you. I know it. I just know it. Jetty, what are you going to do? Oh..." He was so agitated then, all I could do was stroke his forehead and the still thick and silky, silver hair.
He was quiet, but his cheeks were wet and his eyes were glossy, and almost black. "Why did it have to take me DYING Gawddamnit? Why couldn't I have listened to the Gawdamned WORDS, instead of my own voice? 'For tis love and love alone the world is seeking.' Jetty. Promise me you will hear those words. 'Tis the answer, 'tis the end and all of living.' I learned it all too late! Don't you, Jetty. Don't you."
Ah! Sweet Mystery Of Life
Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life
At last,I've found you.
Ah! At last I know the secret of it all.
For the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning,
The burning hopes,
The joy and idle tears that fall.
For 'tis love and love alone,
The world is seeking.
And 'tis love and love alone,
That can repay.
'Tis the answer, 'tis the end and all of living,
For it is love alone that rules for aye.
(LAST STANZA REPEATED AND CLOSES WITH);
For it is love alone
I hear his basso profundo still; or, as I preferred to call it, his basso buffoono. I see his face, the tears. I feel his hands on my face, and see him looking for an answer. I am not sure he knew who I was in that searching.
All I said was, "I know, Daddy. I know."
He smiled and nodded, let go of my face and he slept.
And the Question and the Answer Were the Same
He and my mother, both. In the dying, turning to me to give me something all the while begging for a promise. The telling. The listening. To me. I was the writer. Of course it was to me.
Regardless of what came from moving lips, the sound from their souls was simple: love.
What more could any parents leave?
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
On Writing My Memoir
I am finding that some truly beautiful experiences are coming back to me, the more I write. I find that my mother's sweetness knows no bounds, now that I remember the rest. That is such a gift, but I realize it is a gift I will need in order to address the worst of her. It was not liquor. It was psychotic breaks. And I am at a loss as to how to write of them, yet I will have to.
Writing ugly is not easy when you lived a life of oh-so-lovely denial. When I was in college I painted a picture of beauty about my home life, except for the fact that my mother drank. I did not speak of any dark times in childhood, however. My story with her always began in high school, out of thin air. All was beauty and magic, if you listened to me talk about my childhood. The only horrors were at school.
We do that. I also spoke of my relationship with my older brother as special and tragic. He was the whipping boy, the innocent too often blamed for everything. I was his defender. And I was, as it happens. Again, this is so often the case. I tutored him in French for all his high school years. He was fifteen and I was ten! It was after the rape, after he tried to sell me so he could by some "buck" shoes, like Pat Boone's. I had no memory of that. After all, by the time I was fifteen myself, I had turned instant burial into an artform. If the memory was not to my liking I simply denied its existence, like some reject factory part on an old-time conveyor belt. I was afraid for him, and bought into the family line when the New York police were looking for him on drug charges. He was framed, my parents said. They got him to hide out in New Hampshire.
Every holiday season for three or four years, the police would stop by. It got so I would be the one to answer the door and invite them in for coffee or cookies. A standing "joke." Finally, when my brother as married and wanted to come out of hiding, my parents took him with their lawyer to New York and the charges were dropped. He was terrific at posing as a good, reformed family man.
Only he was guilty. And years later, I found out that Jim's discharge from the army was dishonorable. All those bouts of illness when we had not heard from him? The brink. He was court-martialed for bribing an officer.
My family, like so many others, simply acted on the premise that if you say everything is perfect often enough, then everyone will believe it to be so. This was never clearer than the years I tried to tell the truth about my mother, during high school. She primed the school with the "fact" that I was a liar, prone to fantasy. While that was not entirely false, it was not the truth when I tried to get help to deal with Mom. By then her bouts were every morning, before I went to school, and by the time I got home, she was often so drunk that she was barely conscious. Then she would, for no apparent reason, have several months of sobriety, just long enough for me to hope, but short enough for me to be wary at the same time.
I could not begin to look at the whole truth as I knew it, until it impacted my own children. Until I had to, to keep from repeating the tale in my own life's story, too.
Ugliness and great pain is an underpinning for our love story that has to run through the whole. I have spent a great deal of time writing of the many gifts she gave me, and that's the truth. And you know she drank, but sometimes we have to show not tell, as the cliché goes. I know that, too. The funny thing about moving beyond the pain to the beauty is that sometimes I just do not WANT to remember what happened! While this is not a bad thing at ALL in how I lead my life, it's not as good for the writing of the tale.
Mom wouldn't want me to leave it out. I know that for sure. In my core. In my soul. How do you tell the story of a small child, too young to bathe on her own? How do I relate the moving blur of the NOT Mommy face as she tipped my head beneath the surface to rinse the shampoo out? I see her eyes go dead and cold just as the water closed over my own entirely. I see the moving glare of the light and feel myself struggle beneath her hands. I can feel the pain on my heel as I kicked and connected with porcelain, and feel the struggle not to breathe, feel the pain as the light grew dim.
Suddenly I am sitting and I hear the sucking as she pulls me out too quickly and she misjudges and my head just catches the faucet. I see the pink creep through the water as I cough and cough forever, and I hear my mother. "Oh, my GOD, oh NO, oh, NO! Oh, GOD. My Jetty, oh, NO! I'm so sorry!"
She is crying and pulls me to her, but I pull back just a little, to see her eyes, but she is there. Her sweet sky eyes full of tears and she holds me and we cry.
And later she is in her chair, unable to speak, the bottle of amber on her table. Jean Ellen puts me to bed. Mother will not rise until too late for church on Sunday. Daddy is away on a "quick business trip." I remember Jean Ellen tucks me in and she has her worried puppy face. Her brow would pucker instead of wrinkle. She reads a long story and already the horror has dimmed, and all I know is my mother's eyes when she held me close to her.
***
That is the story, too. And it is every bit as much our story as the elves and the drinking and the summers and Christmases of joy. It is my story with her, and my ultimate joy that we had our truths with one another at the end.
And so I write it all for the first time. As I remember it. My truth, which I know was hers. Ironically, alcohol numbed her in a way that did not allow the psychotic breaks. She never raised a finger to us when she drank. She said most of her pain left her when she drank.
And what I feel at last is the pain I know as a mother myself, and how it must have felt when she snapped out of the break and saw what she had done. No one loved a daughter more than she loved me. She hated the monster she could not name, this illness no one could name back then. I know how hard she tried to fight it, to fight an illness over which she had no control at all. I know how much she hated herself.
As I move forward with the book, it is so hard to find the balance in the work. It hurts to write her dramatic and sometimes horrific failures. Yet without them, her magnificence and her strength are lessened. She succeeded more often than she failed, and I cannot under-value the strength she had, nor the toll her tortured life took on her most of all. So I try on the pain again, now strong enough so that it cannot stick any more. It cannot offer more pain, though it can scratch an old wound to discomfort. I hold all her beauty on the other scale, and its weight is ten times the pain. The wound will not open; only the love.
How I miss her still.
***** DIFFERENT Note, for now: Please check out Waystation One, for 1/23/20122's poem
Writing ugly is not easy when you lived a life of oh-so-lovely denial. When I was in college I painted a picture of beauty about my home life, except for the fact that my mother drank. I did not speak of any dark times in childhood, however. My story with her always began in high school, out of thin air. All was beauty and magic, if you listened to me talk about my childhood. The only horrors were at school.
We do that. I also spoke of my relationship with my older brother as special and tragic. He was the whipping boy, the innocent too often blamed for everything. I was his defender. And I was, as it happens. Again, this is so often the case. I tutored him in French for all his high school years. He was fifteen and I was ten! It was after the rape, after he tried to sell me so he could by some "buck" shoes, like Pat Boone's. I had no memory of that. After all, by the time I was fifteen myself, I had turned instant burial into an artform. If the memory was not to my liking I simply denied its existence, like some reject factory part on an old-time conveyor belt. I was afraid for him, and bought into the family line when the New York police were looking for him on drug charges. He was framed, my parents said. They got him to hide out in New Hampshire.
Every holiday season for three or four years, the police would stop by. It got so I would be the one to answer the door and invite them in for coffee or cookies. A standing "joke." Finally, when my brother as married and wanted to come out of hiding, my parents took him with their lawyer to New York and the charges were dropped. He was terrific at posing as a good, reformed family man.
Only he was guilty. And years later, I found out that Jim's discharge from the army was dishonorable. All those bouts of illness when we had not heard from him? The brink. He was court-martialed for bribing an officer.
My family, like so many others, simply acted on the premise that if you say everything is perfect often enough, then everyone will believe it to be so. This was never clearer than the years I tried to tell the truth about my mother, during high school. She primed the school with the "fact" that I was a liar, prone to fantasy. While that was not entirely false, it was not the truth when I tried to get help to deal with Mom. By then her bouts were every morning, before I went to school, and by the time I got home, she was often so drunk that she was barely conscious. Then she would, for no apparent reason, have several months of sobriety, just long enough for me to hope, but short enough for me to be wary at the same time.
I could not begin to look at the whole truth as I knew it, until it impacted my own children. Until I had to, to keep from repeating the tale in my own life's story, too.
Ugliness and great pain is an underpinning for our love story that has to run through the whole. I have spent a great deal of time writing of the many gifts she gave me, and that's the truth. And you know she drank, but sometimes we have to show not tell, as the cliché goes. I know that, too. The funny thing about moving beyond the pain to the beauty is that sometimes I just do not WANT to remember what happened! While this is not a bad thing at ALL in how I lead my life, it's not as good for the writing of the tale.
Mom wouldn't want me to leave it out. I know that for sure. In my core. In my soul. How do you tell the story of a small child, too young to bathe on her own? How do I relate the moving blur of the NOT Mommy face as she tipped my head beneath the surface to rinse the shampoo out? I see her eyes go dead and cold just as the water closed over my own entirely. I see the moving glare of the light and feel myself struggle beneath her hands. I can feel the pain on my heel as I kicked and connected with porcelain, and feel the struggle not to breathe, feel the pain as the light grew dim.
Suddenly I am sitting and I hear the sucking as she pulls me out too quickly and she misjudges and my head just catches the faucet. I see the pink creep through the water as I cough and cough forever, and I hear my mother. "Oh, my GOD, oh NO, oh, NO! Oh, GOD. My Jetty, oh, NO! I'm so sorry!"
She is crying and pulls me to her, but I pull back just a little, to see her eyes, but she is there. Her sweet sky eyes full of tears and she holds me and we cry.
And later she is in her chair, unable to speak, the bottle of amber on her table. Jean Ellen puts me to bed. Mother will not rise until too late for church on Sunday. Daddy is away on a "quick business trip." I remember Jean Ellen tucks me in and she has her worried puppy face. Her brow would pucker instead of wrinkle. She reads a long story and already the horror has dimmed, and all I know is my mother's eyes when she held me close to her.
***
That is the story, too. And it is every bit as much our story as the elves and the drinking and the summers and Christmases of joy. It is my story with her, and my ultimate joy that we had our truths with one another at the end.
And so I write it all for the first time. As I remember it. My truth, which I know was hers. Ironically, alcohol numbed her in a way that did not allow the psychotic breaks. She never raised a finger to us when she drank. She said most of her pain left her when she drank.
And what I feel at last is the pain I know as a mother myself, and how it must have felt when she snapped out of the break and saw what she had done. No one loved a daughter more than she loved me. She hated the monster she could not name, this illness no one could name back then. I know how hard she tried to fight it, to fight an illness over which she had no control at all. I know how much she hated herself.
As I move forward with the book, it is so hard to find the balance in the work. It hurts to write her dramatic and sometimes horrific failures. Yet without them, her magnificence and her strength are lessened. She succeeded more often than she failed, and I cannot under-value the strength she had, nor the toll her tortured life took on her most of all. So I try on the pain again, now strong enough so that it cannot stick any more. It cannot offer more pain, though it can scratch an old wound to discomfort. I hold all her beauty on the other scale, and its weight is ten times the pain. The wound will not open; only the love.
How I miss her still.
***** DIFFERENT Note, for now: Please check out Waystation One, for 1/23/20122's poem
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Running too Fast and Forgetting to Breathe
I have been using this month to begin the process of developing some structure for myself. While I was a pretty disciplined and successful copy writer for more than a decade, I had a few regular clients and I knew their needs and schedules. My back had its own schedule and I knew it by heart, by feel, to my core. Everything fell apart three years ago.
Now, as I start my new life with new parameters, new brick walls to avoid, and free of anyone's deadlines but my own, well, I find myself a little unnerved. I have been reading some books on the new publishing world--on my Kindle, of course, which is only fitting. It would seem I must develop a platform; yes, I knew this already but I didn't know it, if you get my drift. This home blog of mine, this testing ground, this home base for some internet relationships that matter to me ... well, it won't cut it for a platform. Again, I know this in my mind, but it is unlikely I will abandon it. It serves a deeper purpose for me.
I just read an article in this month's Poet & Writers' Magazine about the Internet and how it can interfere with a writer's creativity. I could cite it more carefully, but what I read was more of a jumping off point that is combined with the three books I've read in the last two weeks about marketing a book in today's world. The message is clear in all of them; I must build a platform long before the book is even written. I must join networks of people who share my interests, who are likely readers of a memoir I would write. I must write SHORT.
Oh. My. God. Help me.
I have to re-enter the world of Twitter. I do not LIKE Twitter. This does not mean I don't appreciate its uses; it means simply that I hate Internet/text/chat speak. So much room for misunderstanding, for lazy communication. On the other hand, I know that I am often lazy in my meandering trips to nowhere on my blog. I am lucky that some of you enjoy the ride without particularly worrying about the side trips and the fact that there may not be a particular goal. But I have to start finding things to write about on a regular basis, things I can put into 500 words, or perhaps 750.
I have to tweet, post status updates, comment, write, connect. CONNECT. CONNECT.
And I have a wonderful compendium now of ways to do this, most of which I kind of understand, despite my protests to the contrary. I just don't know which of them will help my actual writing. Which will contribute to the act of getting the thing done? My blog right here does that. Reading the blogs I do help my writing. So I know I must keep this going and I have to incorporate reading YOUR words, thinking about them and commenting on them.
I have seen some of you do a fantastic job of building substantial followings and, when I think about it, I realize how you do it. Part of it is your frequency and the variety of your work. Or the fact that you connect with people who do what you do. Linda Lou is a marvel to me! And I watched Donna take off. I read blogs which have thousands of followers and I wonder how you all can write so often and so well, about so much. (Naturally, in this frame of mind, I see only my shortcomings. This ain't about logical thinking today!)
But my goal was never about how many followers I have had. My goal was to have followers who wanted to come back, even though I am sporadic here. My goal was to find my own voice and to use it; to learn how to write what is painful or horrific, without making people want to run away screaming into the night. It's cool to see the number grow, when I publish every week, when I explore new blogs and comment. But that's not the object for me.
The article I just read talked about how the social networking can also divert us from the very thing we started networking FOR! To create a welcoming platform for the book we want to write, or have begun to write. It talked about how we have to walk AWAY from all the networking and unplug ourselves in order to produce, to give our creativity time to percolate.
Well, then I hit my brick wall this week and got the shakes and put myself into a dither.
Visions of Hell
This is a talent I have; perhaps it is an artform for me. I'm not sure.
I have about four upright hours in every day. Occasionally I have as many as six, as long as they are spread out with many long breaks. By upright I mean sitting UP. I have to lie down a lot, and I DO mean lie down. I can one day perhaps get one of the Dragonspeak programs and do more. But for now it hit me that I have a great deal of work I must do online to lay the groundwork for being able to publish this book I am also working. And I have FIVE paintings in the works. Suddenly, it all became overwhelming to me.
How do I give time to it all, every day, and still have a life with the people I love, and do my laundry, and my grocery shopping, and, well, leave my apartment? Not to mention go to the gym nearby for about four hours a week so that I can KEEP WALKING?
I began to sob, not just cry. I threw an all out hissy fit. I got scared. I am sixty years old in June and I have only JUST adjusted to this new and frail body I do not like, to the point where I can consider starting the program to perhaps make it stronger and maybe add another half hour or hour to the productivity.
And then I began to laugh. How come AlAnon still helps me? ONE STEP AT A TIME. One DAY. One Hour. I let it all gang up in my mind. I must do all things on every day. I must build a network of thousands by next Tuesday? And I must start my hour and a quarter workouts THIS week THREE days a week immediately. And I must twitter, begin a new blog, write on this blog, read ALL the blogs I've missed, develop a webpage, compile a list of existing contacts, AND read the three memoirs waiting for me--in the coming week.
There is no time. I must also complete at least twelve paintings by 2013.
In four hours a day.
Or I am a failure.
It's good to be a grown up...
Step Back and Breathe
My brothers and sisters all called me in the same twenty-four hour period after one of my mom's most infamous binges after my dad died. I had almost the same conversation with each.
Sibling: Mother is drinking. Did you know she drank like this?
Me: No shit. [sorry. In this case, the word fit. I'd been screaming about it for twenty years.] I've told you she was an alcoholic for years.
Sibling: Well. Yes, but I never knew it was this bad.
Me: silence .... then, What's your point?
Sibling: What are you going to do about it?
Me: Get the hell to AlAnon.
I went to my first meeting that Wednesday and got me an ODAT book (One Day At A Time). I sat at that meeting and listened, then went home and read all 365 days that very night. Like so many before me, I figured if I did it all at once, I'd be cured real fast. They reminded me to slow down.
And so it has been as I've been doing my research, as I have been allowing myself to actually take my dreams seriously and lay the groundwork.
Mommy, I am telling them what we had. Honestly, I am. And I am shining as hard as I can for you.
But I sure do wish you were here the way you were when I'd run so fast I'd fall; to lightly tip my chin up toward your face and say, "Jetty, Jetty. Breathe. Life is not a race. Sweetie, catch your breath and try moving one foot at a time so you don't get all tangled up and keep falling down. You'll get there in your own time." And then kiss me on my nose.
I guess maybe I'll just breathe. And write. And get there in my own time now, one word at a time, so I don't get myself all tangled up and fall down.
OOOOHHHHHHHMMMMMM.... Oh. Wait. I'm not supposed to be saying that with clenched fists, huh.
Here's to those baby steps I was writing about!
Now, as I start my new life with new parameters, new brick walls to avoid, and free of anyone's deadlines but my own, well, I find myself a little unnerved. I have been reading some books on the new publishing world--on my Kindle, of course, which is only fitting. It would seem I must develop a platform; yes, I knew this already but I didn't know it, if you get my drift. This home blog of mine, this testing ground, this home base for some internet relationships that matter to me ... well, it won't cut it for a platform. Again, I know this in my mind, but it is unlikely I will abandon it. It serves a deeper purpose for me.
I just read an article in this month's Poet & Writers' Magazine about the Internet and how it can interfere with a writer's creativity. I could cite it more carefully, but what I read was more of a jumping off point that is combined with the three books I've read in the last two weeks about marketing a book in today's world. The message is clear in all of them; I must build a platform long before the book is even written. I must join networks of people who share my interests, who are likely readers of a memoir I would write. I must write SHORT.
Oh. My. God. Help me.
I have to re-enter the world of Twitter. I do not LIKE Twitter. This does not mean I don't appreciate its uses; it means simply that I hate Internet/text/chat speak. So much room for misunderstanding, for lazy communication. On the other hand, I know that I am often lazy in my meandering trips to nowhere on my blog. I am lucky that some of you enjoy the ride without particularly worrying about the side trips and the fact that there may not be a particular goal. But I have to start finding things to write about on a regular basis, things I can put into 500 words, or perhaps 750.
I have to tweet, post status updates, comment, write, connect. CONNECT. CONNECT.
And I have a wonderful compendium now of ways to do this, most of which I kind of understand, despite my protests to the contrary. I just don't know which of them will help my actual writing. Which will contribute to the act of getting the thing done? My blog right here does that. Reading the blogs I do help my writing. So I know I must keep this going and I have to incorporate reading YOUR words, thinking about them and commenting on them.
I have seen some of you do a fantastic job of building substantial followings and, when I think about it, I realize how you do it. Part of it is your frequency and the variety of your work. Or the fact that you connect with people who do what you do. Linda Lou is a marvel to me! And I watched Donna take off. I read blogs which have thousands of followers and I wonder how you all can write so often and so well, about so much. (Naturally, in this frame of mind, I see only my shortcomings. This ain't about logical thinking today!)
But my goal was never about how many followers I have had. My goal was to have followers who wanted to come back, even though I am sporadic here. My goal was to find my own voice and to use it; to learn how to write what is painful or horrific, without making people want to run away screaming into the night. It's cool to see the number grow, when I publish every week, when I explore new blogs and comment. But that's not the object for me.
The article I just read talked about how the social networking can also divert us from the very thing we started networking FOR! To create a welcoming platform for the book we want to write, or have begun to write. It talked about how we have to walk AWAY from all the networking and unplug ourselves in order to produce, to give our creativity time to percolate.
Well, then I hit my brick wall this week and got the shakes and put myself into a dither.
Visions of Hell
This is a talent I have; perhaps it is an artform for me. I'm not sure.
I have about four upright hours in every day. Occasionally I have as many as six, as long as they are spread out with many long breaks. By upright I mean sitting UP. I have to lie down a lot, and I DO mean lie down. I can one day perhaps get one of the Dragonspeak programs and do more. But for now it hit me that I have a great deal of work I must do online to lay the groundwork for being able to publish this book I am also working. And I have FIVE paintings in the works. Suddenly, it all became overwhelming to me.
How do I give time to it all, every day, and still have a life with the people I love, and do my laundry, and my grocery shopping, and, well, leave my apartment? Not to mention go to the gym nearby for about four hours a week so that I can KEEP WALKING?
I began to sob, not just cry. I threw an all out hissy fit. I got scared. I am sixty years old in June and I have only JUST adjusted to this new and frail body I do not like, to the point where I can consider starting the program to perhaps make it stronger and maybe add another half hour or hour to the productivity.
And then I began to laugh. How come AlAnon still helps me? ONE STEP AT A TIME. One DAY. One Hour. I let it all gang up in my mind. I must do all things on every day. I must build a network of thousands by next Tuesday? And I must start my hour and a quarter workouts THIS week THREE days a week immediately. And I must twitter, begin a new blog, write on this blog, read ALL the blogs I've missed, develop a webpage, compile a list of existing contacts, AND read the three memoirs waiting for me--in the coming week.
There is no time. I must also complete at least twelve paintings by 2013.
In four hours a day.
Or I am a failure.
It's good to be a grown up...
Step Back and Breathe
My brothers and sisters all called me in the same twenty-four hour period after one of my mom's most infamous binges after my dad died. I had almost the same conversation with each.
Sibling: Mother is drinking. Did you know she drank like this?
Me: No shit. [sorry. In this case, the word fit. I'd been screaming about it for twenty years.] I've told you she was an alcoholic for years.
Sibling: Well. Yes, but I never knew it was this bad.
Me: silence .... then, What's your point?
Sibling: What are you going to do about it?
Me: Get the hell to AlAnon.
I went to my first meeting that Wednesday and got me an ODAT book (One Day At A Time). I sat at that meeting and listened, then went home and read all 365 days that very night. Like so many before me, I figured if I did it all at once, I'd be cured real fast. They reminded me to slow down.
And so it has been as I've been doing my research, as I have been allowing myself to actually take my dreams seriously and lay the groundwork.
Mommy, I am telling them what we had. Honestly, I am. And I am shining as hard as I can for you.
But I sure do wish you were here the way you were when I'd run so fast I'd fall; to lightly tip my chin up toward your face and say, "Jetty, Jetty. Breathe. Life is not a race. Sweetie, catch your breath and try moving one foot at a time so you don't get all tangled up and keep falling down. You'll get there in your own time." And then kiss me on my nose.
I guess maybe I'll just breathe. And write. And get there in my own time now, one word at a time, so I don't get myself all tangled up and fall down.
OOOOHHHHHHHMMMMMM.... Oh. Wait. I'm not supposed to be saying that with clenched fists, huh.
Here's to those baby steps I was writing about!
Monday, January 2, 2012
Just for fun...
SLOWLY but surely I am getting into this decade. I'd made it into the millennium, yes. I won't put myself down that much, but I really am avoiding texting; I LOATHE Twittering, which I think they should call Squawking; and I do not own a computer game of any kind. None. Zero. Nada. I spend my writing time on here every day, and sometimes I do do digital image manipulation, as well as some graphics commercial stuff. The last thing I want to do is spend more time online. But I am going to have to learn how to market a blog or website, and interconnect my work and, well, lots of other things. That is the part that will be tough for me; I am expected to have a market long before I try to publish a book! Some of it will be fun, but some of it will not. C'est la vie. I think I'll live.
Anyway, no one has grabbed good digital images of my artwork, and no one has ever taken decent close ups of my Christmas trees, so the gang decided to get me a camera already. Now, to those of you who are professional photographers, or who simply are wonderful, please be kind. Yes, Carl, that means you! Baby steps, baby steps. I need to remember what I just wrote yesterday, don't I ...I have already read two books on Kindle. That was a snap. The camera, however... I dove in today just to show myself I would not break anything, and I took a few detail shots of my tree, imported them, and played with them in PhotoShop to make up for the overexposure problems with taking pictures in dim light of a lighted tree.
This won't count this as one of my fifty-two entries, but that's fine. Yesterday's counts. As I said, today's is just for fun. Am I not the luckiest princess on the block? My son gave me a huge Amazon gift certificate so that I could get things for my Kindle as well. They all plotted and schemed behind my back. Life is good, but my pictures can use some work! I'm leaving my tree up until February. It took five hours to put up and decorate, so I'm leaving it up one week for every hour, and an extra because I wanna!
Sunday, January 1, 2012
New Year's Path; Old Year's Victories
I think I have written before about what I try to do every New Year's Eve, but what the heck. I will write about it again...
Last Year Is Done: Let Go of Missteps, Keep the Grace
I take a serious, long look at the year that is ending, reading the goals to move toward a more desirable path, and trying to honestly see how far along I have moved in that path and whether or not it remains a valid guide for what comes next. I also write down every single misstep I believe I have taken with somewhat brutal honesty at times.
Then I read those missteps aloud, pausing after each and I systematically tear up the list into as tiny pieces as I can and I throw them away. Sometimes I put the day's coffee grounds on top of them, just so that I feel I have thoroughly obliterated them.
Finally, I write what I feel I have accomplished on the left side of a piece of paper, as well as all the good things that I feel have happened TO me--the serendipitous gifts, or points of grace. Some years I have had a terrible time finding either, but more often I find that it's easier to list points of grace than accomplishments. I tend to minimize my role in anything good. I have noticed this in the last three years, most particularly; I had far less trouble finding my flawed acts than giving myself credit for anything.
Bit by bit, though, I got better at that. In 2010 I managed not to blame the house not selling on me. I gave myself credit for readying the house for market, for making some progress in some self-destructive obsessive behaviors, and for forgiving myself. Never before had I listed that as a positive accomplishment, but I finally saw that I would have appreciated this in other people--why not myself? But enough about 2010. It was a terrifying and painful and difficult year.
2011 began differently. The list of graces was enormous, but I saw that I felt I had accomplished a lot as well. I had returned to my blog, exceeding my target of 26 entries for the year. I had finished two more paintings and have five in the works. I let go of worrying about how much money I would have after paying off all my debts if the house sold. I changed the dynamic of a relationship that was truly codependent. I found the core and the structure for my book. I began to exercise again, if somewhat sporadically so far. All of my baby steps had added up to something.
Baby Steps Matter! From Broad Strokes to Filling In the Details...
I have overlooked the baby steps so often in my life, not recognizing that they added up to moving along a path I valued. The path? To live more creatively and closer to the bone of Jeannette. Who I am, rather than someone I think other people will approve of or like. Living my life out of loving rather than being loved. (That's a kicker, and I cannot say that I come close to living that way, but it's a pretty worthy goal I think.) That little girl who kept company with the mice in the traps, who talked to them and loved them who somehow got it that loving things was an answer to something scary ... she was only three and understood how to do that. In some ways, the path I wrote down to work toward in 2012 is hers. The path is the elementary school girl who wrote her first poems in free verse. The girl who saw a foster child with scanty clothing and asked her mother whether they could do something to help, and then helped her. My path is the same as the middle school girl who completed her first "real painting" of three faces of women, crying out for help in her art, crying out through the false smile, the anger, the scream--but no one heard. They saw the skill but ignored the voice. My path is to write and to paint my soul, to do my best to be felt and seen and heard--but to do it for the act of the doing.
Those were the broad strokes I wrote for moving forward. I do tend to find writing some specific steps helps me to get started in every year, though I don't label them resolutions. While I put the broad strokes as the start of the right side of my paper, I always follow it with specific actions. That's all I call them, rather than telling myself they are resolutions.
I recognize that taking care of my health issues must be included, or I won't be able to do a damned thing. I start with them because they are the least interesting to me--this year, just getting to the apartment gym once a week and to ride my own recumbent bike at least an hour a week are enough for someone who has been bedridden for so many hours a day.
I want to have at least 52 blog entries this year. I don't say once a week, since that would set me up for failure if there is a week I don't get to it. But this year I DID get ambitious, for once. I simply put WRITE THE BOOK, yes, in BIG lettering. I did not put write the finished product, nor publish it. I just have to write it now. (Bruce, you are so right. Most of it is written in my head or in my blog, but I have to put it in a compelling, readable form. The whole thing. Period.)
Finally, I wrote "start and complete at least three new paintings." That may not seem like many, but since I also put "Finish partly done paintings," that means I would wind up with ten completed paintings, at least. I keep finding partly done paintings that I had forgotten about entirely, from 2009 and early 2010. I had had to dismantle my studio early in 2010 because I was readying the place to sell. They remained packed up and hidden until I moved. When I put up my Christmas tree, I found another nest of them!
Age, Schmage (or Old, Schmold, if You Like)
I had begun this year's list with the intention of giving myself a schedule, but I cut to the chase instead. I may have the same list next year, or I may not. But in reading the list of accomplishments and graces of last year aloud, I realized that I felt like having myself shoot for the stars. Why dream little?
I will be sixty this year. I did not think of my parents as old at sixty. My mom hit that age when I was twenty-five, so it was not unreasonable for my friends to think it was old. What I saw in my parents, though, was that they both had minds like steel traps and, when she was sober, my mom had an insatiable curiosity about just about everything--except things that had to do with popular culture. Dad became Registrar of a university when he was sixty, after changing careers five years before. They were not over. When my health took such a terrifying turn in January of 2009, and so many dreams blew up in my face, I had started to let those thoughts of "getting old" and being "washed up" creep in through the cracks where my soul had been bleeding.
I allowed myself to start to believe that the best years of my life were behind me. Why? Because I was in acute pain? Because an old love had been used my heart then thrown it and me away, like garbage? Because I was poor? Because I had lost my career or any hope of regaining that particular career I'd built over ten years? Because I had to go through the humiliating process of applying for Disability? Because I knew I had to lose my home? Because my son had become increasingly withdrawn and depressed, and there was not a thing I could do? Well, yeah! Because of all those things.
Fine. I had reasons to be depressed, to be fearful, to be stuck. So what? I realized at the end of 2010 that none of those things had anything to do with being old, or being done. I have no idea what snapped me to attention, but I do know that something practical and tangible--winning my disability hearing and having the judge lambast the board that denied me turned me around. How crass, one might say. Well, when you are penniless and have to rely on a credit card and the kindness of your friends to put food on the table, having an independent income, no matter how meager, changes your life.
I got unstuck in 2011. I made reachable, small goals for myself last year. I met every single one of them, and have you any idea how good that made me feel last night?
Why Dream Little? My Mantra, Perhaps...
So I am dreaming BIG this year. And I actually yelled at a friend who talked about our being old and how we had to accept that from here on opportunity is for the young. It made me angry because I feel as if, once again, I am just getting started. I had to start from scratch when my husband took off when I was forty. I was on disability and had been for almost a decade. I had to start to build a career from almost NOTHING. I did it. And here I am, twenty years later, having to start from scratch in a different way, so I will do it.
It isn't about the poverty; it's about having a sense of purpose. I have that now, and I have some financial security for a couple of years, at least. Who could ask for more than that? I am a lucky woman; I keep writing that, I know. But I feel it all the way through, and I think it is a healthy way to feel. It's up to me not to squander this opportunity I have.
An old friend, told me that all he wanted for me was to be able to get up each day and choose whether I wanted to write or to paint, or whether I needed to simply rest because of my back. He said he wanted me to be able to choose how I lived my days without having to be so worried all the time. Well, his wish for me has come true, and I did not think it would.
I have an exciting year ahead to look forward to. I find the thought of being sixty kind of freeing. I am not sure why yet, but undoubtedly I'll babble about it at some point. My "other big sister," Nancy will be seventy. She's not old, either. She volunteers in two organizations, works part-time because she wants to, travels to marvelous places--in another year, she's going to go to the Polar Bear town in Alaska... My Aunt in Alaska's 97. Yes, she IS old, but I love listening to the wanderings of her mind when we talk.
She begins on one topic about a friend, then skips all over the place, but if I wait long enough, she always returns to the place she started... and it's always a marvelous ride along the way. Hmmm... I think that's the whole point to living creatively, perhaps. The ride's as important as the destination, maybe more so.
END of this ramble. Happy New Year! (I may revise this three or four times after I publish, but I just want to put it out there and start on my goals NOW.)
Last Year Is Done: Let Go of Missteps, Keep the Grace
I take a serious, long look at the year that is ending, reading the goals to move toward a more desirable path, and trying to honestly see how far along I have moved in that path and whether or not it remains a valid guide for what comes next. I also write down every single misstep I believe I have taken with somewhat brutal honesty at times.
Then I read those missteps aloud, pausing after each and I systematically tear up the list into as tiny pieces as I can and I throw them away. Sometimes I put the day's coffee grounds on top of them, just so that I feel I have thoroughly obliterated them.
Finally, I write what I feel I have accomplished on the left side of a piece of paper, as well as all the good things that I feel have happened TO me--the serendipitous gifts, or points of grace. Some years I have had a terrible time finding either, but more often I find that it's easier to list points of grace than accomplishments. I tend to minimize my role in anything good. I have noticed this in the last three years, most particularly; I had far less trouble finding my flawed acts than giving myself credit for anything.
Bit by bit, though, I got better at that. In 2010 I managed not to blame the house not selling on me. I gave myself credit for readying the house for market, for making some progress in some self-destructive obsessive behaviors, and for forgiving myself. Never before had I listed that as a positive accomplishment, but I finally saw that I would have appreciated this in other people--why not myself? But enough about 2010. It was a terrifying and painful and difficult year.
2011 began differently. The list of graces was enormous, but I saw that I felt I had accomplished a lot as well. I had returned to my blog, exceeding my target of 26 entries for the year. I had finished two more paintings and have five in the works. I let go of worrying about how much money I would have after paying off all my debts if the house sold. I changed the dynamic of a relationship that was truly codependent. I found the core and the structure for my book. I began to exercise again, if somewhat sporadically so far. All of my baby steps had added up to something.
Baby Steps Matter! From Broad Strokes to Filling In the Details...
I have overlooked the baby steps so often in my life, not recognizing that they added up to moving along a path I valued. The path? To live more creatively and closer to the bone of Jeannette. Who I am, rather than someone I think other people will approve of or like. Living my life out of loving rather than being loved. (That's a kicker, and I cannot say that I come close to living that way, but it's a pretty worthy goal I think.) That little girl who kept company with the mice in the traps, who talked to them and loved them who somehow got it that loving things was an answer to something scary ... she was only three and understood how to do that. In some ways, the path I wrote down to work toward in 2012 is hers. The path is the elementary school girl who wrote her first poems in free verse. The girl who saw a foster child with scanty clothing and asked her mother whether they could do something to help, and then helped her. My path is the same as the middle school girl who completed her first "real painting" of three faces of women, crying out for help in her art, crying out through the false smile, the anger, the scream--but no one heard. They saw the skill but ignored the voice. My path is to write and to paint my soul, to do my best to be felt and seen and heard--but to do it for the act of the doing.
Those were the broad strokes I wrote for moving forward. I do tend to find writing some specific steps helps me to get started in every year, though I don't label them resolutions. While I put the broad strokes as the start of the right side of my paper, I always follow it with specific actions. That's all I call them, rather than telling myself they are resolutions.
I recognize that taking care of my health issues must be included, or I won't be able to do a damned thing. I start with them because they are the least interesting to me--this year, just getting to the apartment gym once a week and to ride my own recumbent bike at least an hour a week are enough for someone who has been bedridden for so many hours a day.
I want to have at least 52 blog entries this year. I don't say once a week, since that would set me up for failure if there is a week I don't get to it. But this year I DID get ambitious, for once. I simply put WRITE THE BOOK, yes, in BIG lettering. I did not put write the finished product, nor publish it. I just have to write it now. (Bruce, you are so right. Most of it is written in my head or in my blog, but I have to put it in a compelling, readable form. The whole thing. Period.)
Finally, I wrote "start and complete at least three new paintings." That may not seem like many, but since I also put "Finish partly done paintings," that means I would wind up with ten completed paintings, at least. I keep finding partly done paintings that I had forgotten about entirely, from 2009 and early 2010. I had had to dismantle my studio early in 2010 because I was readying the place to sell. They remained packed up and hidden until I moved. When I put up my Christmas tree, I found another nest of them!
Age, Schmage (or Old, Schmold, if You Like)
I had begun this year's list with the intention of giving myself a schedule, but I cut to the chase instead. I may have the same list next year, or I may not. But in reading the list of accomplishments and graces of last year aloud, I realized that I felt like having myself shoot for the stars. Why dream little?
I will be sixty this year. I did not think of my parents as old at sixty. My mom hit that age when I was twenty-five, so it was not unreasonable for my friends to think it was old. What I saw in my parents, though, was that they both had minds like steel traps and, when she was sober, my mom had an insatiable curiosity about just about everything--except things that had to do with popular culture. Dad became Registrar of a university when he was sixty, after changing careers five years before. They were not over. When my health took such a terrifying turn in January of 2009, and so many dreams blew up in my face, I had started to let those thoughts of "getting old" and being "washed up" creep in through the cracks where my soul had been bleeding.
I allowed myself to start to believe that the best years of my life were behind me. Why? Because I was in acute pain? Because an old love had been used my heart then thrown it and me away, like garbage? Because I was poor? Because I had lost my career or any hope of regaining that particular career I'd built over ten years? Because I had to go through the humiliating process of applying for Disability? Because I knew I had to lose my home? Because my son had become increasingly withdrawn and depressed, and there was not a thing I could do? Well, yeah! Because of all those things.
Fine. I had reasons to be depressed, to be fearful, to be stuck. So what? I realized at the end of 2010 that none of those things had anything to do with being old, or being done. I have no idea what snapped me to attention, but I do know that something practical and tangible--winning my disability hearing and having the judge lambast the board that denied me turned me around. How crass, one might say. Well, when you are penniless and have to rely on a credit card and the kindness of your friends to put food on the table, having an independent income, no matter how meager, changes your life.
I got unstuck in 2011. I made reachable, small goals for myself last year. I met every single one of them, and have you any idea how good that made me feel last night?
Why Dream Little? My Mantra, Perhaps...
So I am dreaming BIG this year. And I actually yelled at a friend who talked about our being old and how we had to accept that from here on opportunity is for the young. It made me angry because I feel as if, once again, I am just getting started. I had to start from scratch when my husband took off when I was forty. I was on disability and had been for almost a decade. I had to start to build a career from almost NOTHING. I did it. And here I am, twenty years later, having to start from scratch in a different way, so I will do it.
It isn't about the poverty; it's about having a sense of purpose. I have that now, and I have some financial security for a couple of years, at least. Who could ask for more than that? I am a lucky woman; I keep writing that, I know. But I feel it all the way through, and I think it is a healthy way to feel. It's up to me not to squander this opportunity I have.
An old friend, told me that all he wanted for me was to be able to get up each day and choose whether I wanted to write or to paint, or whether I needed to simply rest because of my back. He said he wanted me to be able to choose how I lived my days without having to be so worried all the time. Well, his wish for me has come true, and I did not think it would.
I have an exciting year ahead to look forward to. I find the thought of being sixty kind of freeing. I am not sure why yet, but undoubtedly I'll babble about it at some point. My "other big sister," Nancy will be seventy. She's not old, either. She volunteers in two organizations, works part-time because she wants to, travels to marvelous places--in another year, she's going to go to the Polar Bear town in Alaska... My Aunt in Alaska's 97. Yes, she IS old, but I love listening to the wanderings of her mind when we talk.
She begins on one topic about a friend, then skips all over the place, but if I wait long enough, she always returns to the place she started... and it's always a marvelous ride along the way. Hmmm... I think that's the whole point to living creatively, perhaps. The ride's as important as the destination, maybe more so.
END of this ramble. Happy New Year! (I may revise this three or four times after I publish, but I just want to put it out there and start on my goals NOW.)
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