As thick as butter

I’m feeling scared to write today. Scared of failing at yet one more thing. I feel so set up—so bombarded on every side about how shortly I’ve come up. I know. I know these are only feelings. But today and especially yesterday, they felt so true. Those voices I hear when I look at my messy house, or in the smudgy mirror at my not-enough-face and too-much-body. All the messages stuck on repeat in the messed up CD player of my mind: about how no one really likes me, and how I’ve never been anything except average and boring. Yes, I know… mental illness, much? It just feels extra hard to push back against these lies lately. I want to send them packing and replace them with truth but I’m struggling with where to begin.

And that’s where I am. For now.

Anyone out there stuck here with me? 

Is it raining with you?

Ah, the blank page. And quiet, except for the rain outside. It’s been so incredibly long, and I have to get the random jumble of thoughts scraped off the bottom before we can start adding new things to the pan. I have several emails to return as well as a new facebook group I was hoping to get going. It’s tempting right now to go on that site and just look at pics and read updates and I’m certainly seeing already that it was a good decision to swear it off for the week. I have to get back in this writing groove. Of course there are other grooves I’d like to find as well, like exercising and having the house in order and the groceries bought in a timely fashion, not to mention cooking a real meal most nights. Why is discipline and organization so hard for me?

Ack -- I don't know! Discipline is hard for everyone I guess, but some people can do hard things, huh? We bought  a domain for me a couple of months ago, but it's on wordpress and I still don't know how to work it as well as blogger. I'll let you know when I get it up and running. Hopefully it will look better than this one, and also have a bit more interactive functionality.(No, I don't really know what I'm talking about, and yes, this paragraph is rather disjointed) Anyhow, because of all the crummy weather we've been having here lately, I woke up and thought of this song:

One of the things I love about Annie is how she's able to sing about such sad, sad things, but her music still makes you wanna dance. It's a rare combination, and right now it reminds me of the meeting we had with our small group last night. Our wise, and brave, leader suggested we tackle prayer requests first. We're following along with something our church is doing this year called the Journey, and part of that is a commitment to read through the Bible chronologically this year. This week's readings were from Genesis, and mostly about Abraham. Everyone in our group was really familiar with the passages covered, so it was okay that we ran out of time to answer our discussion questions. 

Once we all got to talking, it was obvious that we needed to catch up on one another's lives. When we were headed home, I was remembering what everyone had shared and how most of us have some pretty tough situations we're dealing with in our lives right now. Sometimes, it seems like these things will never get better and it's easy to get discouraged. But during, and after, our time together, the overall feeling was relief. It's comforting to be able to unload your suitcase every now and then with your friends, and to know they won't run away from whatever's hiding in the smelly corners. They may not always know the best way to clean it out, but if they're able to help you carry it for awhile, well that makes it worth opening up.

Here's hoping we all start sharing more. See ya soon.

Midnight Rescue

This looks just like our kitty did last night. Except that it was an oak tree, in thirty degree weather, and it was close to midnight. But my husband was a hero. He shimmied up a thirty foot ladder, got clawed in the face and brought her down to safety. Can you believe he loves us that much? Well he must -- I'm pretty sure he didn't risk his life just for the sake of Joni the kitty. Thanks, honey. We love you!!

Re-run Mash-up

For today's entry I pulled a couple paragraphs from two different posts. Why? Because I can! No, it' s really because they're both from this time last year and they both share my thoughts from when I was first starting the poetry project. This year I do not have a specific goal set as to how many poems I'm going to write. Instead, I want to take a closer look at the better ones from last year and see if I can't turn them into their own best versions. I think new ideas and poems will come along with that work, so long as I'm faithful to exercise that poetry muscle on a regular basis. So, without further ado, here's what I said before. It's all still true.

I first started writing poems in junior high (isn't that when everyone does?) after moving away from a boy I thought I loved and hoped to one day marry. Though I hope you never see those particular poems, back then I thought they were pretty good. And the teachers I wrote some of them for told me I was a  pretty good writer. Then I went off to college, and I shared my poetry printouts with my freshman English professor, a man named Johnny Wink. He kindly advised me to put a little more "craft" into my craft. I kindly felt like a big dork, yet ended up taking his poetry class the next year. It was there, constantly exposed to wonderfully good poetry, some in books and many written by my fellow classmates, that I began to understand how I was coming up short, but I got so scared of failing that I rarely tried to write anything better. Instead I wrote the required number of assignments, passed the class and decided that perhaps I was better suited for another kind of writing.

But in my heart I still believe you can have the heart of a poet without actually writing rhyming stanzas; and I contend that a poet is exactly who I've been these past thirteen years. My verse may not rhyme or evoke startling imagery as it is most often shared in short essay form, but my soul has been in love with words since I first got to know them back in junior high. And that's all you really need to be a poet,some sort of longing love affair. Pay attention to the longing, the rest will sort itself out eventually. I'm just glad that when I had to move away from that boy, words and poetry came with me.

Five Days Later . . .

I've been advised to stop taking myself so seriously and just do what I can, to stop expecting perfection with every thing I do. I'm trying to take that advice to heart, but it's a scary thing sharing this new side of myself. I've always thought I was a pretty transparent writer, but adding poetry feels like I'm upping the ante somehow. It might have something to do with studying Emily Dickinson when I was a junior in high school, and  thereafter adopting her particular definition of poetry as my standard. There's only one ever been one person who was Emily though, so maybe I can just give myself a break.

I was able to work on my poem for a couple of hours on Saturday so I came up with a skeleton of sorts, then laid it aside until tonight. I've spent the last twenty minutes tweaking, and now I've just posted *it here. My original thought with this project was to take ideas from your comments every Monday. I'm not so sure that's going to work out as easily as I first pictured so I'm giving myself the freedom to break that rule. However, there is an allusion to one of my daughter's suggestions, which was to write a poem about Bigfoot. I guess the idea kinda stuck.

*I'll be taking a look at that first poem later on this week, so if you want to give it a read and have any ideas for its improvement, send me an e-mail with your suggestions. I'll take any help I can get. Thanks for paying attention, to me and to yourself. See ya soon.

RE-RUN #4

Here's a post from a year ago, when I first decided on the poetry challenge I mentioned just last week in a post at the Rabbit Room. There's one more re-run coming at you tomorrow, then next week I hope to be back to business as usual. Thanks so much for stopping by. It really does mean a lot to me -- you making the time to take in what I put out. Even when, especially when, it stinks.

Don’t you see, don’t you see – that the charade is over?

Today was going to be the big day, the one when I told you about my wonderful new idea for a project for my writing this year and direct you to a new address where you could find this new thing already in progress, but then I got up this morning and decided instead that it would be a good day to try boiling an egg in the microwave. Epic fail, as my eleven year old is so fond of saying these days. The egg exploded inside the Pyrex filled with water, knocking said Pyrex over and busting the microwave door open all while blowing a fuse. This led to a big, wet, stinky mess! My husband and I mainly laughed about it but I did feel rather stupid. After we got the mess cleaned up, which involved moving the cabinet the microwave sits on and scrubbing the egg juice out of the corner behind it, we reset the fuse so we could see if the microwave was still working. It seemed it was, until you opened the door and it continued making the noise and turning the glass plate just as if it were still cooking. It was rather scary to think about letting radioactive waves freely escape into the air of our home, so we unplugged it and called to see if John’s parents had a spare.

After all that, I took a shower and when I got out everyone was hungry for lunch so we had to warm up leftovers the old fashioned way. I really thought we were handling this all in good humor, but every now and then a temper would flare and all along I was thinking, “When am I ever going to get time to sit down and put this post out there? It is New Year’s after all and this is my new thing and I have to tell people and get started.” When I finally whined about it to my husband he told me to leave and go write. It was a nice thing for him to do, and I stalled a little because I felt guilty for leaving him with the kids and of course Benji woke up right before I left.

I was gone for about two hours and when I got home John had taken our bed apart. We’ve had problems with this bed for a few months now, but today was the day we discovered two out of the three slats were broken in two, so if we wanted a place to sleep tonight, we needed to go to Lowe’s. By now it was dinner time so we packed up the kids, bought the planks and dined in at Fuddrucker’s. Thirty dollars three burgers and two (only half –eaten?!) hot dogs later, we headed home, only to find that the worker who cut the wood made it one inch too long. Then John’s tummy started acting up and he got really tired, so we decided to put the boxsprings and mattress on the floor and wait until tomorrow to re-cut the wood.

“Fine.  Fine. This is all fine,” I tried to tell myself. It’s been a long week for all of us since there’s been no school, or work, or routine and the weather’s been either too wet or too cold to do anything fun. It sometimes feels like the only things we can all do together cost too much money, like eating out and going to movies. Surely I could let my husband go to bed early if he felt like he needed to, surely I could bring the dog in, get the kids in bed, finish up the dishes and laundry so he would be able to get up early for work in the morning without being overly tired.

Except that I couldn’t . Not without two major blow-ups on my part, where I banged things against the wall and huffed and puffed about how unfair it is for my children to expect me to be in two places at once. And one of those things I banged ended up being a framed, glass poem on my daughter’s nightstand which shattered by the third bang – one more bang than I originally intended, I tend to like multiples of two because they seem more rhythmic – but I don’t know, the satisfaction of two bangs just wasn’t enough for me that time.  So crash went the glass, followed by a prompt apology to my daughter and some very deep breaths that exhaled in tears. “I am so out of control,” I thought, just as my three year old came in to beg me to come and sleep with him and when I yelled at him to get out he returned to his room hollering that I was breaking his heart. He literally said that. I don’t know where he heard it and why exactly then was the first time he decided to unleash it but I guess he’s going to turn out to be a touchy, feely, kind-of -a- guy. Oh yeah, that felt really good to hear. Of course, my eight year old daughter was laughing and it did make me smile a little too. So much stinking emotion in such a short space of time!!

You can imagine John was not sleeping peacefully at this point, especially not when I opened the door to our room and stood in the hallway telling him I just couldn’t do all of this! He got up and told the older one to wait for me to deal with the younger one. Then he told the boy I would stay for one minute and he better not get up again or Daddy would come in and spank him.  And I calmed myself down enough to sit with him and hug him and ask if his heart was feeling better.  Yes, it was. He gave me lots of hugs and settled down so I went and lay down with my daughter again. ( I owed it to her because I forgot last night – we have this deal about Friday nights I keep hoping she’ll grow out of, but hey at least it’s only once a week).

It’s nice to have a kid old enough to talk to about your emotions and she graciously forgave me for the broken frame that I told her we would try and fix tomorrow.  Then I cried some more.

When I went to Borders earlier, I managed three or four paragraphs about my project and my tendency to never finish projects, loosely pulled together with a quote that was supposed to help explain why I had chosen what I had. But after all the drama and all the broken things today, I knew I could not sit down and edit that into anything decent.

Initially, I thought about doing nothing, except running away for a couple of weeks to the Carribean. Then I loaded the dishwasher and went downstairs to tuck in my oldest child and put up the animals for the night. When I got back upstairs I decided to turn on the dishwasher, remembering how I’d told John the other day that the sound of the dishwasher, in a quiet house, along with the smell of the soap and the feel of the steam, was just about the most relaxing feeling I knew. And that’s when I saw it.

Me sitting on the floor in the kitchen with my laptop and my re-warmed mug of orange spiced tea (war med the old fashioned way, on the stove top), admitting failure and defeat and the end of a long, long day. Me being honest with you about my crappy new years and hoping you would understand where I was coming from. Why do we put these expectations on certain days? How can I allow myself to think that a bad first day of 2011 means an entire bad year? Nothing could be crazier.

So here it is: with no real explanation and no exciting link for you to check out, though I do hope to work on that later next week. In 2011, I am going to attempt to write 52 poems. One poem a week, for an entire year. I do not currently think I am very good at poetry, but I hope to get better. And I hope for my readers to be involved. I’m asking them for topics on Monday and posting the finished product on Friday.

Guess what that sound is? Footsteps of a little one who’s still awake, and time for me to log off.  It’s going to be a messy undertaking trying to be a Mom and a wife and a poet. I am so unorganized and not good at running my house in such a way that I have structured free time to be creative. Here’s to old lang what’s-his-name – cheers! (Good Lord, I hope tomorrow is brighter.)

Back by Popular Demand

I just did something that depressed me a little. I scrolled through all 210 of  my posts to see which one had the most comments. I found a couple with eight or nine, a few with ten and one with fifteen. Guess what it's from, my son Sam's birthday,  three and a half years ago! That's right,  my most popular post is followed by fifteen whole comments, most of which say "Happy Birthday, Sam." Guess he's more popular than me. I don't seem to stir up much conversation around here but I'm not saying that to get you to feel sorry for me, dang it!. I'm just expressing my desire for this blog to be a two way street, y'all! That's what the comments are there for, right? Anyhow, I know I sound incredibly whiny right now. Let me get to the point. Here's the post from that day, randomly selected for its wealth of comments. Hope it reaches whomever it's supposed to.

This is my boy. My first born child. The oldest son. You have to know him to truly appreciate this story, but I'll share it here anyway. Sam often complains that we, his father and I, do not know what it's like to be the oldest --for I am a middle child and John is the youngest. Sam thinks his place in the family is the hardest, and I'm inclined to agree.

After all, I know first hand all the mistakes we've made and all the ways he's been the guinea pig. And all I can say in our defense is . . . nothing. I mean, we were pretty young when he came along and we've had to grow up quite a bit along the way. In so many ways, Laney and Benjamin are growing up with a different Mom than Sam did. He was there for my first steps, the unsure, wobbly baby steps of a new, young mother.

Thing about it is, I don't believe Sam truly feels slighted. When he says stuff like that, I think it's more about sibling rivalry -- although I wish there were another name for it. He doesn't exactly rival his brother and sister. In fact, he really loves them. It's more a numbers game than anything else; three of them and one of me, just doesn't equal man to man coverage. But beyond that, it's about the need, the one we all have, to feel most important, most loved, and most special by someone. And I guess when you're a kid, that someone is Mom and Dad.

So today, he was playing online, just after he'd blown out the number nine candle I had to hold in place on his too small cupcake. (Me trying to create my own moment with just the two of us -- think Gilbert Grape and "shimmering armor.") I walked over to him, without really planning out what I would say, and told him, "I know you think it's hard being the oldest, but I'm glad you were my first baby."

"Why?" he asked me.

"Well," I told him, biding my time, searching for the right answer. "You'll always have a special place in my heart because of that," and then it came to me, "You made me a Mom," I said, feeling, as my mouth spoke, the overflow of my heart.

And my genius boy, now nine years old --too old for the Happy Birthday song, still young enough to hold my hand walking through the mall-- turned away from his computer screen, searched my eyes for a moment, and smiled.

rx for the long, cold, lonely winter: re-runs

Now that my kids are back in school, I must learn how to write again. I hope to get going by the end of the week. Until then, I'll be posting a few slightly edited re-runs, like this one for my husband, from 2010:

Dear Darling, (Because "dear" rather than "little" is what I hear at the beginning of that old Beatles song)

I must confess, though surely it comes as no surprise to you, that there are moments -- late at night, when I’m watching some movie on Lifetime, or midday when I'm cleaning up the house, or early morning when I wake feeling all alone in the world -- when I wish for more. Or maybe less, depending on just how sorry I’m feeling for myself at the time. Then there are other more specific moments, like the one when Keanu --or whoever the doe-eyed leading man happens to be-- leans in for the first slow motion kiss, that take my breath away and stir up feelings of wistfulness, first in my tummy, then on my own dry lips. And in those moments I wonder what it might be like to fall in love, again. For the first time, as it were. Is there perhaps, I think to myself, some soul-mate out there whom I've missed out on because of this gold ring I wear? The lie that only new love is fresh love presses through the cracked open door of my mind, and if I don’t watch out, that powerful killer can steal away to my heart, rending it vein from pulsing ventricle.

I know the way to stop it in its tracks, but I don't always choose to, and for that I am sorry.

     
However, the times I do see the farce for what he is, the times I forbid him passage to the weakness below my collarbone, those are the times I watch the wistful moments flee, dear darling. For soon you return from your nightly distractions or daily duties, and you look at me the way you always have when you truly look at me. Or I myself walk down the hall, past the picture of you holding me aloft in that fluorescent hallway where first we fell head over heel; and I remember how good and true is the story we live together. It's then I find myself asking, as well as answering, if it’s not complete sacrilege to borrow and reinterpret words from old St. Peter: Darling, to whom would I go? You have the words of my life. I believe and know that you are the one God has chosen for me.

    
All the logos you've shared with me through the years, John, are too numerous to count . . . words scribbled on cases for mix tapes; words passed on notepads in British Lit; words written in fingertip, across open palms; words, obviously, whispered in darkness, stolen in secret, launched in anger, and pronounced in truth. There were words shared in books and poems and songs, but it’s the words that hovered, floating above our laughter, those words became flesh and still dwell among us, everyday in the bodies of our children. All these words we carry around in the treasure chest of our hearts, they tell the story of us. And some words we may never let out, while some escape only through hushed sleeping sighs to fill up non-listening ears. Yet they are not robbed of their power, for our words have life and this life can be a light. Not because of you, not because of me, and not because of our perfect faithfulness to each other. Rather it is because of the Light our words bear witness to, a Love which shines in the darkness of our mistakes and shortcomings.

    
Thank you for loving me this way, full of grace and truth, reflecting the glory of the One and Only. Thanks for forgiving me of all those stolen moments, as if they cost you nothing at all. But mostly, thank you for your words of kindness, love and encouragement, in all our years together. I celebrate you today and all the new words of the year to come. I love you more than any of them can say.