Ramblings from THAT Place

I spend my days in that place right now—the place where I have a million ideas I want to write out, and no ability to actually write them. Whenever I’m on the roller-coaster of emotions this happens to me, and I like to think I’m not the only one; that many other authors have visited that place. Perhaps I’m lying to myself—perhaps it’s just me who goes to that place. 

The thoughts and story-lines fly through my mind so fast that I don’t even have the chance to jot them down in my journal. Instead of writing stories and blog posts and diary entries and book outlines, I write and rewrite the obituary, work emails apologizing for my delayed response, and bullet-point to-do lists filled with items that should each carry the ubiquitous “IF” in front of them.

If he’s alive tomorrow. If we’re not traveling back tomorrow. If I’m able to make it in to work tomorrow...

Dying is hard work. It’s hard work for the one who’s dying, and it’s hard work for the family surrounding and supporting them in their journey home. We are never left without something to be done. Sometimes I wonder if we, as a society, should talk about this more often—what dying is like; what is involved. Sometimes, I think I should write a book about it, but those thoughts lead me right back to my underlying frustration.

Plus, I don’t know who would actually read it. Those who have been through this before-- and would know the significance of placing those words on paper for the world to see-- are already in the know. They don’t need a book to tell them what they lived through. Those who have not witnessed this firsthand would have no reason to feel inclined to read it.

Digressions…

When I’m not trying to keep my head above water at work, and when I’m not coordinating new medicine schedules and updates from nurses and learning about comfort care, I’m keeping the house clean and the laundry going (let’s face it; it’s never actually ‘done’). Those are the worst times: when I’m washing dishes or folding laundry the thoughts race through my mind. I calm them by dreaming of taking two weeks off this summer for a writer’s retreat: just me, a hotel room in someplace that is not here, and room service. Do I want to be by the beach or do I want to be in the desert? Do I want to go to the mountains where’s it’s cool or someplace south, where it will be hot and sultry? I don’t know if it would matter, as long as I was holed up and doing nothing but writing. 

I know this will not last forever, and I’ve felt guilty for my selfishness many times in the past two months. My grandfather is not going to be here forever—hospice didn’t expect him to be here a week ago. The semester will end. The boys will be out of school. The house will sell and we’ll move to a house where J and I plan to spend the next eight to ten years. That house will finally have an office for me, and I—at the very least—will be able to escape there, on occasion.

And yet… I may not be the great American author, but writing is so very important to me. It’s a significant part of me. I realize I am not doing my best in other areas of my life if I deny myself this one outlet—it’s like I lose one dimension of myself, the whole framework becomes unstable, and the other dimensions of my life come crashing in to the finite point.

So, where is that place? What does it feel like? It feels as if I’m crossing over a barren land, searching for the source of the running water I swear I can hear in the distance. It feels like I’m lost in an overgrown corn field, looking for the end of the rows—just so I can get a glimpse of the horizon. It feels like I’m walking on a tightrope between two buildings, but I can no longer see the building I’m walking towards because of low-laying clouds. All I can keep doing is to keep walking, keep searching, keep balancing.

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Vignettes: Awkward

They're still here.... Staring creepily at us on the drive home...

Me: Ant? Why are you wearing those jeans? They are almost too small, and there’s a hole in the knee and you have, like, seven good pairs of jeans you could wear to school.

Ant: The weird stuff keeps happening. The deer have been waiting near the road all week. I’ve learned not to take any chances this week. It could be the jeans.

Me: WHAT?

Ant: Or if it’s not the jeans jinxing me, it’s better to have old ones on. Just in case.

***

Me: Oh! Oh, No! If 666 is bad, I can only assume 6666 is worse!

J: WHAT?

Me: I just got the score of 6666 on Doodle Jump before that text popped up and made me die, and I’m certain that’s a bad sign.

J: Well, now that you mention it—I rang a customer up at work today and their ticket was $66.66. I got the quad- six thing, too.

Me: A very, very bad sign!

J: How can any sign be worse than the Mark of the Beast, Sarah?

Me: I. Um. I don’t know. Have you listened to anything that’s happened to Ant and I this week? I don’t make the superstitions, I just follow them.

J: No, hon. You totally made this one up.

***

The after school teacher is standing at the door, awkwardly looking at me while holding another incident report. We just had an incident report after ‘resuscitation’ two days ago. Why the hell is there another one?

Me: What? Happened? This time?

Teach: Well, Ant was working on his classic physical comedy…

Ant: I stepped on a Rubbermaid tub lid, and it slid out from under me, and I landed on my butt. Again.

Me: Okay, kid, can we try to go more than two days without an accident/incident/or form to sign?

Ant: I wish I could promise you that, Mom, but I don’t feel comfortable saying something I don’t think is true.

***

EX-TER-MIN-ATE! Photo Source

Me: What does a Dalek do in the shower?

Ant: ???

Me: EX-FOL-I-ATE! K, what does a Dalek do in math class?

K: Um…hmmm…

Me: EX-TRA-POL-ATE!

Ant: Mom, what does a Dalek do on vacation?

Me: What?

Ant: EX-REST-I-ATE!

Me: Don’t you mean RE-CUP-ER-ATE?

Ant: No. Not at all.

***

I’ve only been at work for 30 minutes when the office line rings. I look over to the caller ID, see it’s a number from Ant’s school, and brace myself.

Me: Yes? What’s happened now?

Ant: Mom.

Me: Ant?

Ant: Chocolate milk explosion. It was spectacular.

Me: What articles of clothes are involved?

Ant: What isn’t involved is a better question.

Me: Okay, I’ll be right there.

Ant: Recess is in 30 minutes. Bring extras.

On Non-Resolutions and #OneHourforMe

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This year, I started joking around on Twitter that I planned to only make resolutions about things I know I can do. Well, I was only half joking. I’ve actually been doing this for years, and privately I call them non-resolutions.

I’ve often despised the true resolutions—especially New Year’s resolutions. There’s nothing like making a slightly drunk statement of all the grandiose things you plan to accomplish in the coming year in the presence of those friends and family who will take occasion to remember and mock you for not living up to your own magnificent expectations.

In other words, I think failure is written all over such things. And I know from personal experience. There was the great ‘stop smoking’ for New Year’s experiment for J and I and 2001, and that lasted about eleven hell-filled hours. Want to know what made me stop smoking in 2002? Morning sickness. Now that’s an incentive, folks. The turn of a calendar is just not incentive enough for most people. This blog was a New Year’s non-resolution, however, and it’s lasted nearly three years. I know that making a non-resolution, not on New Year’s Eve—but at the start of the New Year itself—is a much better way to go.

What is a non-resolution, you may ask? That’s complicated. Enter irrational Sarah-logic, stage right. For me, it means that instead of changing a bad behavior or breaking a habit (which, I think, is much easier to accomplish some other time during the year—like the summer, when things are slower and less people are watching you, and there are more things to distract you), you choose to take something that you’ve been relatively successful at and make it better.

That’s a non-resolution. When I started this blog, I had been writing, privately, for years. I took something I already did with some level of success (as in, I can often string sentences together, more often than not), and tried to make it better. And, you see, it worked. I’m certain that if you can follow this train of thought, you can make it work for you, too. Kindred spirits and all that.

So, my non-resolution this year (and I have given this quite a bit of thought) is to make sure I spend some time on me (who ISN’T good at that), but with the added bit of not feeling guilty about it. That’s going to be the important piece.

I’ve been working for quite a bit on spending more of my time on me. It’s easy for me (and for others, to be certain) to spend every waking moment on getting kids to school and practices and appointments, working 9 or 9 and a half hours straight at work, and then coming home and doing dinner, dishes, laundry, homework, grading, and all that… until you either fall asleep on the couch or crash into bed. So, it was important for me to make the decision to spend a bit of time doing something good for me—exercising, watching The Walking Dead, jumping on Twitter, writing, etc., and I’ve been able to make that happen, for the most part.

Now, I’m going to make it better. I am going to dedicate one hour of each day to me. I can do whatever strikes me. I can write. I can paint my toes. I can exercise. I can crash on the couch and watch television (and GOODNESS, there’s going to be so much good TV to watch this spring—I almost need a TV Guide, but that’s another post). I can do whatever strikes me in the moment. AND… I am not going to let the guilt creep in. I am not going to entertain thoughts of what I could be doing, how I could be more productive (answering emails, wiping down counters, you name it), what that one hour each day may ‘cost’ me later on. Let’s face it, there’s always more crap to be done. I’m never going to have a moment where I think to myself, “Well, everything’s done. I can relax now.” That just doesn’t happen.

But I can have that moment where I tell myself, “Take a break. Everything’s under control for the moment.” That’s something that I can make happen. And then I can take my hour of me-time, guilt-free.

What about you? Do you have trouble with resolutions? What would your non-resolution be? What do you do well, but could make better? Would you like to participate in #OneHourforMe?

Authenticity

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity this week, and wondering if other bloggers do the same.

There are several reasons for this (because serendipity seems to be a very large part of my life). One is that I recently struggled through J.K. Rowling’s new book. Authenticity comes into play for one of the main characters of the book. Do you have to be gritty to be real? Do you have to be crass, rude, or base to not be a hypocrite? Do you have to put on a good face? Is that the only way to get along with polite society?

Of course, there’s another bit with OCD in there, and for whatever reason right now, whenever I see this disease discussed in any form of popular culture, my hackles raise and my ears lay back and I’m put on guard.

In case you missed it, struggle is the key word in that sentence five sentences back. I did not like the book much, but I can say this: She tried something new; something radically different than Harry Potter. And why can’t she? Just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean she (and others) can’t like it.

Which leads me to my second reason for musing on authenticity—that whole goings-on in the Dad-blogging community about Single Dad Laughing. I’m not giving my opinion, and I’m not going into detail. Everyone else is/was writing about it. Beta Dad wrote about it, Babble wrote more about it, then SDL wrote about it (and you can see the links to all of these on the first linked page), and best of all… Catherine of Her Bad Mother wrote about it, and that’s the post which really got me. It was her update, in italics at the bottom of the post, which really got to me. More on that in a moment.

Granted, this all took place a while back, and I am always late to the party… but it’s bringing brought back up in the circles I ‘roll’ in because SDL released a coming out, and then I linked to that post in my last post…

And now I feel like I’m on the seventh grade camping trip all over again, watching this drama which I worked so damn hard to leave behind in my life. I’ve literally cut people—including family—out of my life to avoid the psychodrama, and here it is, again.

Like I don’t have enough going on in my life already. Like we all don’t have enough going on already.

You see, like Catherine discusses, the third thing that brought me to thinking about this is someone admonished me to stop using my older son and his “diagnosis” to try and draw more page views to my blog. Because we all know I’m really here to make a big name for myself by dicking around, on occasion, on this blog. Now, I did ask people to share it, and I admitted that this was, in part, selfish of me, but wasn’t to get page views. I think that was to be truthful about the things going in my life; to feel less alone. Because I do want to be truthful. More on THAT one in a moment.

Don’t ask me about the comment. Don’t ask me to post it, don’t ask me to describe it, don’t ask me who said it, or anything else. Well, except for one thing: It called me to question my authenticity—the authenticity in our lives, and the authenticity in my online life. Especially if one’s authenticity is directly related to how much one is liked or disliked. Or what we like. Or dislike.

Did they not like reading about it? Or did I cut so much out (in respect to someone else’s story, i.e., my son’s) that it became inauthentic?

And is there any way to put yourself, naked and fully authentic, online? I don’t think so. I am the same person, but I have one way of acting with my husband, and one way for my kids and one for my employer and one way of talking here. I will talk about things with my family that I won’t talk about with you, and I’ll talk about things with you that I won’t talk about at work. I don’t think that means I’m fake, gaming the system, or a hypocrite. I think I am cautious, and a decently-rounded person. I think I have many voices, maybe, and a bit of decorum (only a bit) but I am the same person.

A person who oftentimes doesn’t want to share her full life on the interwebs. A person who does self-edit what she says. A person who made the conscious decision to post under her real name, and thereby, must also consciously decide what she will and won’t say online for all posterity’s sake. Does that make me smart? Or inauthentic? A poser? Not my whole self?

And what about the people who are in my life? I think they have a right to decide if they are featured here or not. So, if I know one of my friends doesn’t want to be on my blog, but is okay with me sharing a story as long as they are not involved, and I take them out of the story—and this requires a bit of smoothing over—does this mean that I’m fake? Should I not be worried about others who do not want to be all over my blog?

And what about retrospection? Are the only authentic blog posts the ones we write free-association style? Does just the act of reflection and introspection change what we say or how we position something? I think it does. So is everything I write untrue?

I want to be true to my readers, to myself, and to the world. The Bloggess (my hero, of course) was on Twitter asking if we were to all just share our secrets, and find out that they are the same secrets, would the world be a better place? I want to write about a lot of different things, but hold back—for one reason or another. I often think they are very good reasons. And some things I don’t want to write about, ever. Don’t we have the right to keep some things private—even if the stories don’t make quite as much sense to an outsider than they do to the people who know it all?

These are difficult questions to answer—for me, for anyone. How real is real? How scripted is scripted? I present what I want to present here, in the way I want to present it. We all do, every day, in every aspect of life. It’s not made up, but it’s my perspective and my perspective alone. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to like how I present myself and I don’t have to like how you present yourself and you don’t have to like that I have a secret and I don’t have to like that you have one as well, but seriously? Does it freaking matter?

And what is it that we want to know about one another that we don’t already share? Are you going to ask me about my sex life? Do you want to know what I’m eating? Do you want me to describe the color and consistency of my snot the last time I was sick? NO. You don’t. Does that make me less real?

Where does it all stop? Am I a real person? Are you? How authentic are you? How authentic should we all be? Is authenticity an unachievable ideal that can just be tossed in someone’s face when you just don’t like them?