the quiet place

On the weekends, I am up before the sun. Most people my age think I'm nuts, but I look forward to the quiet solace Saturdays and Sundays bring. I get some of my best thinking done on the weekends while the house is still sleeping. I am totally content inside the confines of those early hours, just me and puppy breath and the smell of coffee brewing.

I have started trying to cultivate some version of this peace on my drive to work. I'm 20 days smoke-free, which means my focus is freed up a bit on that 45-minute commute. This morning I turned the off my podcast and drove to work-- in complete silence. I rolled down the windows and noticed the sunrise before me-- rays slicing through the clouds like the gunfire at the beginning of a horse race. Smoke billowed from box trucks, and has anyone ever noticed that people who drive Dodge Chargers don't feel the need to use turn signals when merging? Annoying, but I digress.

My mind began to wander, and before, I would have shut it up the second I saw it lacing up its boots... but these days, I usually give it permission to go wherever it wants without judgment.

I enjoy the quiet.
I enjoy mornings.
I enjoy the time to myself.
It is not selfish to admit that.

I wonder, though, if I treasure these quiet times so much as my sort of trade-off for not having children in my home to fight me when I try to put shoes on their feet. That's my grief process talking still, even after all these years. I've accepted my lot. I've accepted that my body cannot nurture tiny humans in the way that other bodies can. I've forgiven it for disappointing me, and embraced the things it CAN do instead, and still...

...still, here I am thinking about it.

I dreamed last night that I had a baby-- a son who we named Andrew. I remember my delight at being the person RECEIVING the congratulations from my aunts and cousins instead of being the person GIVING them for once. And he was beautiful. For a few hours last night I got to really FEEL that joy and my established place inside my family instead of just an accessory.

Everyone rushed in to see this human, swaddled in my arms. It was a gift, but it's left me feeling kind of lost in my feelings this morning.

It's fine.

Tomorrow brings another quiet morning with new mountains to climb.

the thing about deserts

underneath the paper mache
i'm thirsty and barren
and forgotten

and invisible
and tired
and empty

the thing about deserts
is they have no choice

in whether or not there are
footprints running through them

or rivers,
or scorpions,
or cacti full of sustenance,

or nothing at all

we created our own geography
and ripped the map to shreds
and the vultures ate the bread crumbs
we scattered
along the way

©2018

Elephants

The elephants have moved in.
I can smell the familiar cardboard
boxes of memories and secrets, reopening.
The floor creaks when they move
around in circles, the carpet must be worn
and ragged, and yet they pace

back and forth
back and forth
back and forth

in silence in
the same spot where you
once danced.

© 2016

Gratitude for another week with 11-year-old survivors.

You are flawless.

You are strong and courageous.

You are easily startled and perfectly bold.

You have fought the hardest battles.

You have stared your opponents in the face.

You lost all your hair.

You were scared to death.

You were weak but did not wither.

You have climbed walls.

You have flown over lakes.

You have walked tightropes between treetops.

You have cried until your cheeks burned.

You've laughed until your sides hurt.

You aren't bitter.

You aren't angry.

You're grateful.
You're joyful.
You're radiant.

You welcome the day's adventures.

I am a better person just for knowing you.

The Good Parts

I guess I'll
fill a box with our inside jokes
and that one time you held my hand

with every Sunday morning and
the sunglasses you lost when that wave hit you

and those minutes between 7 and 10
where your phone calls lived

your favorite doughnut
and the grease under your nails

I'll tape it shut
and put it by the curb because
there's no manual that tells you
what the fuck else to do
with the good parts

when it's over.

© 2015

The Girl under the Pew

I was raised under a steeple with the light from my church's stained glass windows spreading their colors across my skin. As the congregation's god-daughter, I spent much of my time at potlucks and revivals. I memorized verses and doctrine. I was told I should be a Republican (because that's what Jesus would want.) I attended-- and even participated in-- an anti-abortion protest before I knew where babies came from. My first memories of creating any kind of art happened underneath those pews. I'd draw in the blank spaces on church bulletins with broken crayons, my favorite doll next to me.

I was commanded to remain pure until marriage, as not to become "damaged goods" for the man I would one day call my husband. I was told that shot glasses were called "medicine glasses" because they held just enough water to wash down two aspirin! Every advent, every camp meeting, every dinner party, every Easter gathering. I was there.

I was raised to be madly in love with-- and also terribly afraid of-- God. I was told I was a dirty, no good sinner over and over and over. I was told to "come as I was" but also that I would never be enough. How lucky I was that God would love me even though I'm a piece of crap!! But in order for him to love me, I had to acknowledge my nothingness.

So many mixed signals. So many scary nights. So much worrying about my eternal damnation and how hot the fires of hell would feel on my skin should I deviate from the righteous path.

Years later, I'm still a recovering Pentecostal-- a recovering Christian.

The pattern of I love you and I'm scared of you and I don't deserve you has replicated itself in my relationships with men. The patriarchal command of "submitting to my husband"-- while many people take this out of context-- was the reason I stayed in my abusive, unhealthy marriage as long as I did. When the fights got so severe, I was pretty sure it was my fault and began reading books about how marriage is meant to make you holy, not happy, because Jesus loves us and wants us to be like him and if that means being married to someone who harms you emotionally, so be it.

Enter God as the playground bully who hazes you and then congratulates you on your unwavering devotion having endured such a test, stage right.

----------

My Pentecostal roots run so deeply that in times of trouble I still have the knee-jerk reaction of whispering prayers into the void in the same way that an alcoholic unscrews the cap off a whiskey bottle. I am proud of having come from that broken, misled denomination, because it's my story, and it has shaped me. And while the girl under the pew is still a part of me, I have outgrown her.

One year at church camp, there was this skit that the youth put on about abstinence. There was a teenage girl holding a heart cut out of construction paper, and every time a new boy walked past her, she would tear him off a piece and hand it to him, until eventually she had nothing left to give her husband. "Girls, let this remind you," the pastor said, "that God wants you to remain whole for the man he has chosen for you." The boys were not addressed.

In retrospect, I can't even begin to tell you how damaging this message is for a girl to hear. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized how ingrained this "womanly shelf life" was hammered through my skull.

It taught me I was an object.

It taught me that I was finite and easily damaged.

It taught me that I could not have sex with more than one person without being considered broken and unworthy of love.

It taught me that others determined my value, and that I had no say in that at all except to keep my legs closed and pray for God to forgive me for being human and experiencing typical human emotions, like lust and loneliness and heartache.

And why did I experience those emotions? Because I was a meager young woman who needed Jesus. Jesus could fix me, if only I'd submit to Jesus in the same way I'd eventually submit to my husband! The message was crystal clear.

----------

To this day I struggle with my self-worth and identity outside of my faith. I feel judged and mishandled by the community that was supposed to have my best interests at heart. I feel misled by the people who were placed above me to lead and guide me through this world. I feel like I can finally openly experience this life fully, loving who I love without the fear of eternal damnation.

I feel challenged to raise my daughters and sons-- should I ever have living ones-- to treat themselves and others gently and with the utmost respect. I am still trying to learn this skill, because it's hard. It's hard to affirm others when we are still so rough with ourselves. I would want them to know that who they are is enough for this world, and that their worth is not defined by others, nor by a book, nor by their sexuality. I do not want to create another generation that grows up feeling inadequate, broken, worthless, and controlled.

They are enough.
I am enough.
You are enough.

If I were to die tomorrow, I hope that my legacy would be just that.

Jenny

I should have been busy
inventing new ways to piss off my mother.

Instead I spent all of seventh grade
breathing in the stagnant air of the room where
books go to die or possibly live forever.

Thank God I didn't have Google then
to confirm that five to seven years later
the woman with beehive hair that ran your city's switchboards
would retire (to Orlando, probably) and
all of the mail carriers would abandon their trucks
and we'd be eating Thanksgiving dinner without you.

© 2014

An open letter to those who mourn

It may have been only a few hours since you first got the news that someone you love is gone, permanently, from this earth. Your knees may still be weak and your hands still numb. You may have already cried the ugly cry, or you may still be waiting for it to hit you.

It may have been days by now, or weeks even. You've gone to the funeral or sent flowers from across the country in your stead. You've read the obituary online more than ten times, and you've left a comment on the online guestbook, and you've lit a virtual candle.

It may have been years now. You've navigated holidays and anniversaries somewhat successfully, trying to stay in the moment without getting caught in the tangled webs of "should bes" and "what ifs." But it's there, this gaping hole in your tradition, where that person once was but no longer is.

My advice to you is this: Cry those buffalo tears.

Mourning is the ultimate compliment you can give to someone who has affected your life so beautifully. It's the goal, if you think about it, to mean so much to someone in this life that they grieve your absence once you're gone. Allow yourself to give them that.

Then search your memories of them for what it is that they gave you in their time here-- courage? a love of classic cars/comic books/astronomy? an extremely long list of great advice that got you through some really dark times in your life? They inevitably instilled something in you that was meaningful. Find some way to continue on this legacy of theirs in your own way. Continue to go to car shows. Watch a meteor shower in the middle of the night with your favorite tiny human from a blanket in your driveway. Take the time to really listen to that friend who feels like this life is meaningless.

The truth is, most of us won't make it into the history books. Future generations likely won't know my name, or yours, or theirs. This is the best advice I can give for mourning: continue living, and don't allow their death to be the end of their mission.

Beyond the barricade, is there a world you long to see?

Kiev is in flames. Protesters are fighting-- and dying-- for a better Ukraine. The images look like a scene from Les Miserables and I find myself feeling thankful that photographers there are immortalizing this so that we don't forget what's happening. From across the globe, I watch these news reports and body counts and weeping mothers.  But I'll admit, it's hard to watch.

via

As a child of the '90s, I grew up painstakingly terrified of big, bad Russia (it wasn't quite the '70s, but the sentiment was still present thanks to cartoons with villains like Boris and Natasha.) I took European History in college and we read about the Hungarian Revolution, and I lived for a few months in former East Germany. Eventually I developed a real interest in Cold War Era history, but this! This is the continuous fallout of the Cold War playing out on the evening news while I silently chew my takeout shrimp fried rice (not paleo.)

In the future, students twenty years my junior will learn about Kiev, but to what degree? What are we learning from this?

These protesters that are dying, these daughters and sons, they're passionate and fighting and engaged and hungry for change within their borders. And it's not just them. It's the students in Venezuela, too. It's inspiring me from across the globe to be passionate about something. If not politically, socially. If not socially, philanthropically.

The world is watching in awe and in horror, the same way we rubberneck at car accidents on the highway. But for every minute I spend gawking at what's happening across the globe, I spend two looking inwardly and asking this hard question:

Do I believe in anything so strongly that I'd fight-- and possibly die-- to see it come to fruition?

The dock.

I found myself awe-struck as I watched the news a few years ago. An entire dock from Japan washed up on the coast of Oregon, a small memento of the huge tsunami that destroyed thousands of lives in 2011. How many miles it had traveled! My mouth hung slightly open, jealous of its journey as I stood there, still as still could be.

It didn't look spectacular by any means-- the trip across the ocean had weathered it greatly and it was covered in barnacles, seaweed and shells. Still, people came from far and wide to see it, not because it was beautiful, but because its story was so spectacularly horrific and the journey was so long, yet it had survived.

Poison and Wine and What I Remember

I still remember. There were days when we didn't get out of bed, because we didn't have to. We'd order a pizza and eat it in the bedroom while we watched specials on the History channel. We would walk to the sushi place across the street after work and talk about the news and about how tired we were while "Patrick" made us a Mt. Fuji roll. 

There were days when we didn't get out of bed, because there was literally no point. It was just too much to leave the apartment, so we didn't. We didn't talk about it. We didn't encourage each other. We just hid.

I remember planning our wedding. I changed our colors at the last minute because his mom couldn't seem to wrap her brain around the color yellow (gold? neon? NO, YELLOW.) I remember how he shaved his beard the way I liked it as a surprise. I remember seeing him the second I walked into the chapel and the way his mouth hung open and how I totally forgot that there were two hundred other people in the room with us.

I remember feeling hideous in everything I wore, and being told that I was being "too provocative" when I put on a black sweater-dress. I remember losing weight and how he hated it, because I finally was starting to feel like I was worthy of being seen.

I remember making plans. We were young, but we thought we knew what we were doing. We held hands and dreamed of rocking chairs on porches and kids in the yard and a little piece of land that we could call ours. We split up future chores. I'll garden if you'll mow the grass. We had a plan.

But we never had rocking chairs, not a single one. We never had a front porch or a little piece of land. We had kids-- dead ones-- over and over, and we were in too much debt to ever own anything. Our dreams didn't come true, and we turned on each other because there was nothing left to do. There was nothing left at all. I counted my losses and I ran.

I remember the day we finally saw those two pink lines for the first time and I prayed that this baby would make us feel more complete, or at least distract us enough so that we didn't realize how broken we really were. We had our names picked out, one for a girl and one for a boy. We were decorating the nursery in our heads.

I remember how we felt like we'd never get pregnant. Between the doctors' visits and lab results, we felt like obedient robots, not lovers, and the magic between us quickly evaporated. I remember the intense fear that came when I started to bleed eight weeks later, and the excruciating pain that came with each contraction, and the relief of the morphine when I didn't have to feel anything for a few hours. I remember I forced him to pray for me before surgery and how he protested despite my tears, and how he walked next to me all the way to the double doors as they wheeled me into the operating room where they'd cut our dead firstborn out of me. This was the first of the three dead children I'd come to know. We named him Evan. I have a memory chest in my room that holds the shoes he never grew into and the blanket my mother knitted that we never got to wrap him in. 

It's so easy to remember the good, and even easier to convince you that the hardest moments were trivial, like bickering over who got to watch their favorite show first. It wasn't that. It was quiet. It was oppressive. It was at times terrifying to love him. It was easier to compromise who I was and fold into him. It was excruciating to fake a smile at social gatherings, until I finally started telling the truth when friends asked about married life.

"It's terrible," I'd say. "I wouldn't wish this on anyone."

Words to chew on:

"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."  

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Living a life you're proud of is really. hard. work.

Glory days and ashes and such

I just want to tell peoples' stories.

I want to talk to people at bars about their glory days and let them remember them. I want to know about that moment when they felt like they were on the top of the world and that moment when they woke up hugging the cobblestone. There's something about whiskey-gingers and a cigarettes that can take a person back to those places of triumph and those times of total desperation. They find those memories in their pockets like crumpled up dollar bills. 

Mine do, anyway.

Can I tell you a secret?

I'm a little tired of telling my story. I have sucked it dry of its victory over the years, and I'm in that strange period of my life where I'm trying to recreate it.

In every story I hear, there's a little piece of my own story that peeks around the corner and taps me on the shoulder.

"You're alive," it whispers. "This is why."

How do you ignore a calling like that?    

Here and Now

via

"If only you lived in the 1950s, your body type would be perfect." 

I think she meant it as a compliment. I remember the look on that woman's face when she realized what she had said, and the shock that went through my body when I finally understood what she had implied-- that my body type was unacceptable now.

I was eleven years old. Fifteen years later I still remember-- the words, the shock, the humiliation.

I had thick thighs and a curvy waist that had been passed down to me from my mother (and my mother's mother and my mother's mother's mother.) A girl on my school bus once pointed out that, from the side, my silhouette looks like a crescent moon, sharp and harsh and stony. My hair was curly and had a mind of its own.

My breasts have always been large and round, and while you'd think this were a blessing, you'd be surprised to learn that quite the opposite is true when you're in high school and a boy asks you to hide his cigarettes in your bra during an unannounced classroom search.

So I hid. I called it "modesty" but it was really just embarrassment. I was embarrassed that God would create such an ugly vessel and force me to wear it. I was angry that He didn't place me smack dab in the middle of the 1950s where I (apparently) belonged. I was angry that I was here and it was now and I felt the need to constantly justify my hips, my hair, my thighs.

I've been hesitant to write a post on body image, because self-love is not something I've mastered. I still trash-talk myself in the mirror occasionally when I'm disappointed in what I see. I also was nervous that any post on self-love would end up sounding more like an excuse for my weight or my emotional eating, and that's not what I want either.

I once read in an issue of O Magazine that "real transformation can't come when you hate who you are now." That's what I'm working on these days.

All Heart, No Pitch: 00/00

via

The heart is a fickle muscle. I watched one stop the other day. Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep... The alerts echoed off the tile floors until the nurse turned down the volume. We had done everything we could do for this patient, but it didn't make the conclusion any easier. 

I have worked with patients that later died, but this was the first time I was in the room when the doctor called the time of death. I watched the nurses, who were exhausted from performing CPR, step back from the bed and wipe their foreheads with their arms. Everyone was quiet, except for the occasional exasperated retracing of steps.

This is medicine. This is the nature of the beast.

There is something magical and terrifying about the Emergency Room. I felt the intense desire to escape that room-- it felt irreverent to stay. But I felt a responsibility to stand there and take in the gravity and intensity of that moment. I felt that the patient deserved that minute of our time, just to look at him, to remember that this is not a game and what we're doing matters. Lives are precious, and this patient was more than his medical history or his list of allergies.

Whatever I become, whether it's a nurse or a doctor or a PA or an NP, I will be a better medical professional because of that patient. I doubt I will ever forget his name.

And that's what's on my heart this Friday.