I’m It!

Been tagged by another blogger whose blog I discovered a few months ago. I love her insights in parenting as well as just plain living and I never fail to feel gratitude when I read her posts. You can find her here.
According to the rules of the game, I’m supposed to write down seven things about myself and pass this along, so if you haven’t read some of these other blogs I like, I hope you discover the things about them that I love.
But first things first:
  1. Since my father died, I seem to have added his particular passion for the Oregon Ducks football team to mine and am completely, irrevocably rabid about watching their games every Saturday afternoon during football season.
  2. I harbor secret fantasies of being on American Idol. Not because I want to be on television, but because I can actually sing and I never had the cojones to do anything about it when I was young enough to show off.
  3. The only thing keeping me from going to culinary school and becoming a chef is the hours of the job. I don’t want to work weekends or evenings.
  4. I have spent so much of my life multitasking that I often wonder whether I have rendered myself ADHD because when I have the luxury of concentrating on just one thing at a time, I often lose my way in the task.
  5. I would love to travel around the world and immerse myself in other cultures, hiking and hanging out at bars with the locals.
  6. My favorite place on the planet is the Oregon Coast.
  7. If it weren’t for the litter boxes and shredded furniture, I would have half a dozen cats.
Okay, now that I’ve sufficiently frightened you with my oddities, the bloggers I’d like to introduce you to are:
Visit and enjoy!

Do You Smell That?


Have I mentioned that Lola is unusually perceptive? Among her most unique senses is the extraordinary sense of smell she has, which is often a trial to her. She can smell things most human beings can’t and she has a wonderful way of describing them to me – the mere mortal who doesn’t possess this ability.

This morning she informed me that every person has their own smell. This isn’t exactly a new idea, right? I can remember going in to my grandmother’s bedroom and being overwhelmed by her Estee Lauder perfume and the smell of mothballs. But what Lola is talking about is their very essence, their aura, if you will. Even if you switch from Estee Lauder to Calvin Klein’s Obsession, Lola will still suss out your scent and notice that it is the same.
“But,” she admonishes, “sometimes the smell changes a little bit. Like if you’re really upset. When Abigail is upset (Lola’s best friend) she smells a little bit sour on top of her normal sunflowers and clean laundry smell.”
Apparently the dog smells like fur and lemon kisses “which is a very good smell, almost the best,” my mother-in-law smells like light perfume and my mother has the essence of apple pie. It may sound ridiculous, but when Lola explains it, I can get the sense of it exactly. The way she experiences each of them, this is exactly what they feel like. I’m convinced she knows.
“Did Papa have his own smell, too?” I ask, hesitating. She only knew him for six years and he was pretty sick for the last year of that.
“Yup. He smelled like warm chocolate and blankets. And when he was sick it was still there, but with a little sad thrown in.”
She is absolutely right. That is what my dad smelled like as her grandfather. She is so dead-on with her assessments that I didn’t dare ask what she thinks her sister smells like. Or me, for that matter. I’m not sure I want to know…

Extended Metaphor


I have a little more work to do. For all my excavating and enlightening and understanding, there is still one little rip left to heal in regards to my experience of being molested as a child. Forgiveness. I need to forgive myself and I need to forgive him and until I do, I won’t be free. I love the idea, the notion of pure compassion for my abuser and most of me truly wants that, but all of me has to want it and I have to give it freely and purely.

I just might be ready. But first, I have to go to the grocery store. Tonight I am going to a book club gathering at the invitation of a woman that I haven’t seen in probably three or more years. Her idea for the meal was to make a “mashed potato bar” and have each of us bring toppings to add. I’ve decided to mash some yams and bring crispy prosciutto as my offering.
I walk into Whole Foods, thinking that yams ought to be easy to find this time of year, the morning sun rising despite the fog and pushing it away to clear, blue skies and a crisp scent of woodsmoke and cider in the air. I am confronted by rows and rows of potatoes – Yukon Gold, russet, nearly irresistible fingerlings, baby red potatoes nestled together in their red mesh bags – but I can’t seem to find yams. Finally, at the very end of the row my eyes fall on a few softball-sized, knobby red garnet yams, four of them that fell to the bottom of the display ramp with a yard of black shelf liner showing above them, and two tiny, white-skinned sweet potatoes up at the top. I grab them all and shove them into the plastic produce bag and one of the red garnets pokes its pencil-sized end through the plastic as I drop it in my basket.
At home, I hurry through lunch, pushing small sushi rolls in my mouth as I mentally prepare for the remainder of my day, all the time wondering when I will sit and meditate on the work I have yet to do in my heart. The potatoes have to get cooked soon if they will be ready for tonight. I smile as I picture the creamy orange puree in a transparent glass bowl, all of these new women swirling the colorful mash into their bland, white potatoes to give them some pizzazz.
It is a glorious autumn day and I am craving sunshine so I grab my stockpot, cutting board, paring knife and peeler and head out to the deck. Starting with the largest red garnet yam, I rake the peeler (my least favorite one in the house, but the only clean one for now) across the contours of the skin, listening for the satisfying cchcchcchcch sound that comes with the thin slice of skin peeling away. Inside, it is white. No bright orange flesh. Not what I expected. I continue to work away, peels releasing and falling to the cutting board in a mound, and I go back in a few places to get in the crevices and valleys where the peeler doesn’t move smoothly.
By the time I get to the second red garnet I realize that what I’m doing is my work. These paper-thin peels are all the hold my abuser still has on me. They look so solid and impenetrable from the outside. They are banged up and pocked with knots and dings, but they cover the whole of this potato and they are so simple to peel away. Four big, dark, solid ones – they are the men in my life whom I have allowed to hurt me and take my power away. I peel and peel and soon all I have is four smooth, pure objects. As I peeled, I wished for love and peace and hope and was so surprised not to find what I expected inside these potatoes.
I move to the two small, white sweet potatoes and know that they are my sister and me. Our skin is much thinner, but inside we are the same, substantial, dense grouping of cells that made those larger red-skinned ones potatoes. When all six of them are in the pot of boiling water, they will all cook at the same rate. I will drain them, mash them, mix them with butter and fresh cream and be thankful for the notion that I can make something good and nourishing of this. We are not so different, my abuser and me. We are imperfect humans. I don’t have to know why he is who he is or why he did what he did to my sister and me. That is not for me to know. I can acknowledge that I have allowed him to have power over me for far too long and thank the Universe for letting me learn to be strong and compassionate in the face of that.
I wonder what other culinary marvels await me on this journey.

It All Started With This…

If you can stand it, the most amazing part of this talk comes in the last two minutes (in my opinion). I get it if you can’t make it all the way through the eight minutes, but it’s pretty amazing. Essentially, he is talking about the way our brain uses its mirror neurons in concert with our sense of touch and how this leads to feelings of empathy. It is way more complex than that, so I would encourage you to find a time to sit and watch the video.


Since, however, good things come in threes, it only stands to reason that this morning I would open up my Facebook page and find this daily message from the Dalai Lama, “Ultimately, humanity is one, and this small planet is our only home. If we are to protect this home of ours, each of us needs to feel a vivid sense of universal altruism. It is only this feeling that can remove the self-centered motives that cause people to deceive and misuse one another. If you have a sincere and open heart, you naturally feel self-worth and confidence, and there is no need to be fearful of others.“

When I got in the car to drive Eve to her carpool, it just so happened that the Indigo Girls were playing on my iPod. The song? “Let it Be Me.” The central theme of the song is captured here: “…I’m among friends trying to see beyond the fences of our own backyard. I’ve seen kingdoms blow like ashes in the winds of change, but the power of truth is the fuel for the flame, so the darker the ages get there’s a stronger beacon yet. Let it be me…if the world is night, shine my life like a light.”

And the writing prompt for today? “Open House.” I think I’ll change it to “Open Heart, Open Mind” and call this a done deal.


Meet Me Halfway


I signed up to receive daily writing prompts from Lisa Romeo, one per day for the month of October as a way to keep myself honest and make sure that, even as I work on selling my manuscript, I am continuing to write every day.

Generally, the things I write about are very much present in my daily life and they come to the forefront of my consciousness when I walk the dog or shower in the morning or meditate. But sometimes, I find myself in need of some new inspiration and since I’ve also signed up to take a writing class from Lisa, I decided that maybe this would be fun.
When I checked my email this morning before dashing off to yoga, I saw that today’s prompt was “past the halfway point.” Instantly, my mind went to thoughts of traveling a difficult road and the relief that comes when you know you’re more than halfway there, but I was having trouble crystallizing a moment from my life that felt compelling enough to write about. I closed down my inbox and gathered my yoga things, figuring something would either come to me or it wouldn’t.
Much to my chagrin, but not altogether unexpected, in the few quiet moments before class started when the instructor asks that we focus our attention away from the mind and into our bodies, letting ourselves come squarely into the yoga practice, my mind honed in on the writing prompt like a laser targeting device.
I’ve been struggling with anxiety over the past couple of days and I asked myself whether I could safely say that I felt as though I was more than half of the way back from that to my “normal” self. Nope. But this anxiety is different. Not because of its nature – it still has that impending doom flavor to it and it threatens to swipe the rug out from under me – but because of what exists in its void.
Thanks in large part to the Positive Intentions class I took in September with Kristine Leon, the bulk of my recent days have been spent in a state of quiet calm and happiness. I have found myself smiling spontaneously for no good reason at all multiple times per day. Really, authentically smiling – the kind that leads to crow’s feet around your eyes and accentuates your cheekbones until friends begin to wonder if you have had some sort of plastic surgery. I am able to shrug off most of the small annoyances that pelt into my skin on a daily basis and spend a few minutes bookending my days by experiencing one quiet, intentional moment and grounding myself.
As I closed my eyes and waited for class to begin, the picture in my mind was of myself sitting in the middle. Half in and half out. Straddling a balance beam with one leg immersed in Anxiety Soup and the other bathed in the golden glow of peace. From time to time over the past several days, I have certainly found myself “past the halfway point,” leaning much farther into one realm or the other and I found it interesting to note that my goal seemed to be on the side of peace. There was a huge part of me that really wanted to hop off that beam, turn my back on the feelings I don’t like and sprint for the finish line. I suppose that isn’t surprising, but I think I need to spend a little longer sitting here and examining this dichotomy.
Generally, when I think of a mid-point, the words that come to my mind are ‘medium,’ and ‘middle.’ Neither here nor there. The dead point in the swing of a pendulum where it hits the bottom of the curve and is centered. Not exciting, not extreme, just existing. This is a new kind of “halfway” for me. Existing between and simultaneously in two extremes. I’m fairly certain that this isn’t exactly what Lisa had in mind when she came up with this prompt, but then, neither did I when I first saw it. I guess I owe her a big THANK YOU!

Split Shift


Graveyard shift – aka the “night shift.” Most often seen when children are under the age of two and require night feedings and diaper changes, but can stretch in to the toddler years if a child is prone to night terrors or has other special needs. Can be revisited multiple times during childhood colds and fevers.

Swing shift – Can be employed during the same time as the graveyard shift if a child’s parent is lucky enough to have a partner who is willing to help out on a regular basis. Stretches from birth through adolescence.
Split shift – Welcome to my world.
It has taken me the first month of the school year to work this out. Well, the first month of the school year plus the previous four years of school where I occasionally found myself with several “free” hours during the day while the girls went to school. This is another “re-inventing the wheel” moment for me as a parent.
Since I left my part-time job in June, after getting the girls off to school in the mornings, I am most often faced with six or more hours that stretch in front of me where I can do pretty much whatever I want. My plan was to use the bulk of these hours to write and work on selling my book, knowing full well that I would also go grocery shopping, do laundry, take the dog to the vet, prepare meals, exercise, garden…you get the idea.
Since September 1st, my days start at 6:00 AM in the way millions of other parents begin their day: waking children, getting breakfast, packing lunches and locating desired items before we run out the door. I figured out a system last year to do most of these things without losing my mind and more often than not, I pat myself on the back for a job well done when nobody leaves in tears or tells me they hate me.
Several times in the past few weeks, I have hit the mid-day mark and realized that, even though I could probably find other household things to do, I don’t want to. What I really want to do is sit down on the couch with a handful of dark chocolate covered raisins and a book and read for an hour or so. Last week, I finally succumbed to that temptation, but I kept wondering when I was going to get busted. I was paranoid that a neighbor would stop by, Bubba would come home to get something he forgot, or someone would call and ask what I was doing and I would have to admit that I wasn’t. Doing. Anything.
Yesterday it hit me. I work a split shift. I don’t get the opportunity to sit on the couch with a book at night like some other people. I don’t usually have hours of free time on the weekends to indulge myself in relaxing. The first part of my workday starts at 6AM and ends around 9:30, and the second part begins at 3PM when I leave to get the girls from school and help with homework, shuttle to after school activities, talk about difficult issues, cook our main meal, clean up the kitchen, and shepherd the girls through their bedtime routine.
So maybe it is okay to take a couple of hours in the middle of the day to do “nothing.” Even if there is laundry or shopping to do or the dog “ought” to be walked, I need to start treating my mid-day free time as a much needed break. A way to recharge before I ramp up again at 3:00.
This may be a total “DUH” moment for most of you, but for me, it’s one of those things that I needed to be hit over the head with before I realized it. For now, I’m working the split shift. It may not always be like this, but I made it through the graveyard shift and I’m lucky enough to have the swing shift when Bubba is in town. I’m taking my breaks when they come so don’t be surprised if one day you walk past my house and see me lounging on the couch with a smile and a book. And if I’m under a blanket taking a wee nap, leave a note and I’ll call you when I’m up.

Book Reviews Have Moved

Feminist Review, an organization that provides reviews on all sorts of things – books, movies, music, and theatre to name a few – has moved their website here. My latest book review for them can be found here<.

If you like it, please comment at the site. They like to know people are reading the reviews (and so do I).
Thanks!

Untitled Post

The image above is the Abraham Hicks Emotional Scale. This is a concept put forth by Esther and Jerry Hicks that essentially says that different emotions have different vibrations and the closer we can get to the top of the scale where joy, love, and appreciation reside, the closer we are to being in touch with our true selves and in touch with the source of all energy and love.

Whether or not you believe in the vibrational scale, we can probably all agree that spending our days in the top two portions of the list looks pretty good. The trick is supposed to be finding ways to jump up one or two “feelings” at a time when you are dealing with a difficult situation. So if you are feeling a lot of fear about a particular incident, you would do well to find some anger about it. If you’re angry, see if there is a way you can simply be frustrated or irritated with it, with the hope of eventually becoming bored with the situation altogether.
One of the things I find most intriguing about this scale is that anger is higher up than fear and despair. As women and girls, we are taught that being angry is generally unacceptable. Guilt is a better alternative to lashing out, as is sadness about something. As a teenager, I actually sought out situations where I could be justifiably angry because it felt so good. When it was clear that I had been wronged and I didn’t need to explain away my rage to anyone, I felt powerful and righteous. Maturing brought me back around to thinking that anger, even if it feels good to me, is not a useful tool and I ought to find less volatile ways to express myself.
Watching my girls argue with such passion on a regular basis, I have come to realize (and point out to them on many annoying occasions) that their disagreements generally focus around two things: power and misunderstandings. Whether or not they’re buying my logic, I don’t know, but it hasn’t seemed to change their behavior much. On Sunday, Eve was particularly cranky and sensitive, crying one moment and railing at the unfairness of her life the next, and Lola was at her wit’s end. As we sat at the dinner table and Eve spat out yet another snarky comment across the table, Lola crumpled into a ball on her chair, hair dangling over one side and toes poking out the other. She gasped and choked and dripped tears on the floor beneath us, her back rising and falling dramatically.
Lola is particularly sensitive to her older sister’s bad moods and Eve knows it. She rolled her eyes and asked to be excused from the table. Bubba and I waved her away, both of us too irritated with her to risk opening our lips to speak. When Bubba had moved into the kitchen to stack the dishes in the sink, Lola scooted over into my lap like a giant tortoise and gradually rose up until her face was right in front of mine.
“You know, I never get angry, Mom. Sometimes it might seem like I am, but underneath I’m really just sad or confused. I don’t think I can remember a time in my life where I was truly mad at anyone. It’s just really sad.” I smelled the milk on her breath and felt my heart stop. This sweet, sensitive, little girl who leads with her heart says the most profound things and sometimes I just don’t know what to do with them.
I hate the thought of encouraging her to turn her sadness into anger, especially if it has to be directed at her sister. I don’t know enough about this model to have a truly enlightened conversation about it, but I think that my discomfort with the anger vibration is that it is outward – directed into the universe. Not that I want Lola to direct it inward. I want her to be happy and joyful, and I truly believe she has a handle on her own feelings, more than most adults I know.
We sat together, holding the weight of her sadness until she could release it. By bedtime she was just slightly melancholy and insisted on giving this message to everyone in the house: “Goodnight, I love you, I’ll see you in the morning.” And with a salute, she went off to her room.

Breathe, Relax, Align


This summer in Hawaii I made a promise to myself to get up and go to the yoga classes offered on the beach every morning. Bubba hung out with the girls, playing in the sand, and jumping over waves while, 50 yards away, a group of 20 or so of us stood on hotel towels in the soft, dry sand and followed a yoga instructor.

Because of the mix of abilities, the class itself was pretty low-key and, while it wasn’t the sweaty, intense hour and a half I’m used to at home, even at 7:30am it was 80 degrees outside and the instructors each brought their own flair.
The first morning, our leader was a man somewhere in his 50s or 60s who peppered his poses with anecdotes about boxing (seems he was a boxer in the military), ballet (took classes as a teen), and meditation. Truly a renaissance man, he had moved to Maui to semi-retire and find a new relationship with the natural world. Many of his quips were groan inducing and I rolled my eyes more than once, but some of the things he said were so simple and true that I find myself recalling them often.
“The word yoga literally means ‘union.’ This is the union of your body and mind. That doesn’t mean your mind dictates and your body follows – that’s not union. Your mind listens to what your body is saying. Not judges or bosses. Just listens.”
“Breathe. Relax. Align. Do this over and over again. Yoga is more about breath and feeling than movement and exercise. Start from the base and build up. Build a strong foundation. Breathe. Relax. Align.”
He wasn’t kidding. Yoga on soft sand is all about alignment and having a strong foundation. It turns out it isn’t about pushing yourself to stay up when you think you will surely collapse. It is about listening to your ankles to see if your feet are aligned before you move up to your knees. I found myself setting and re-setting my foundation, seeking a strong, solid base and looking in my mind’s eye to make sure that both feet were pointed forward, my hips were on equal planes, my knees weren’t twisted. I can’t say that my body was pushed much during these classes, but the calm grounding that comes from truly listening to my body and making sure it has what it needs was more than I thought I would get.
I think about how often I expect my body to put itself into positions that aren’t comfortable in order to accomplish something on my mind’s agenda. The years I wore high heels to work (not a chance you’ll find me in them now) punished my hips and lower back. The hour or so I sit working at my laptop in the front seat of the car without enough room to rest my wrists because it doesn’t make sense to go home and come back to get the girls from school mean sore shoulders and tingling fingers at bedtime.
Since that class I find myself occasionally closing my eyes to check in with my body. Breathe. Relax. Align. Hips? You okay? Feet? Where are you now? Shoulders? Do you need to let go? It doesn’t happen as often as it should, but I’m certainly more aware that my body has spent an awful lot of time catering to the whims of my mind and I’m trying to even the score a little.

That Hollow Sound


“When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is it always from the book?” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Not when it’s my head. The trouble with learning to be present and mindful is that it illustrates just how often I am not present and mindful in my daily life. When I find my mind wandering as I slice carrots for the curry and sip my glass of wine or when I arrive home after driving the six-girl carpool on Wednesday afternoons and don’t really recall any details of the drive itself, it is pretty clear to me that my head was the one thumping hollow.
I am truly in awe of how many tasks I can perform without really thinking about them. I often find myself disappointed in my girls for choosing the path of least resistance in their daily lives (doing a quick, sloppy job on their homework, dropping their plates into the dishwasher without rinsing them and tossing clothes in the laundry bin without removing the notes and rocks and house keys from their pockets first), but it occurs to me that my brain does the same thing. It has become so attuned to taking the same path time after time that I don’t even have to be aware in a conscious way to put a salad together or drive home from the supermarket or fold the laundry. Our brains are wired to be efficient and effective which is why it is hard work to stay present sometimes. I am so accustomed to typing and petting the dog and listening for the UPS man simultaneously that to try and focus on just sitting with the dog and giving him my undivided attention takes real effort.
I’m pretty sure that I would not get much done if I tried to remain present in everything I do, but I am trying to find a few moments every day to stop and truly immerse myself in one activity at a time. Even if it is just smacking myself in the forehead with a book and listening for the hollow sound…