I am honored to have my essay, My Subject Chose Me, published at Literary Mama.  I love so much of what Literary Mama stands for, most of all the power that is contained in commingling motherhood and writing.  The work that I’ve read there is without exception both beautifully-written and thought-provoking, intelligent and honest, suffused with love of both the written word and the small, noisy people who populate our days.

Please click over to read my piece and spend some time on the site.  You won’t be disappointed.  I’d love to hear what you think.

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The American Cancer Society believes that every birthday is a victory – another year that cancer has not won. Thanks in part to the Society’s cutting-edge scientific research, patient support, and prevention, education, and advocacy efforts, 11 million cancer survivors will celebrate another birthday this year.

Tiny Prints, the online stationary boutique, is fighting for more birthdays with an exclusive card collection on TinyPrints.com that is inspired by all of the ways the American Cancer Society saves lives.

From now until April 30, 2012, the Tiny Prints more birthdays card collection will be available here.  I love the cards, and in particular two.  These remind me of people I love whose lives have been touched by cancer.

Jessica is one of my very dearest friends, a true sister of the spirit and in the ways that matter.  We’ve known each other for most of our lives, and saw a day we’d both dreamed of come true in July when our daughters became bunk mates at the same camp where we met so many years ago.  Jessica’s family has been profoundly and irrevocably altered by cancer.  For some reason this card reminds me of her; like the image, she is composed of a million brilliantly-colored, uniquely-shaped layers which, together, create a beautiful whole.

The card reminds me of the famous Elisabeth Kubler-Ross quotation: “People are like stained-glass windows.  They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”  There’s nobody in my life who more surely embodies true beauty than Jessica, and I say this without reservation.  She manages to live with tremendous uncertainty and in the shadow of substantial loss, and she does so with joy, love, and passion.  Every single day.  In many ways, Jess is my hero.

I’m fortunate beyond words to have her in my life, and I hope fiercely to share another 60 years with her, to watch our girls grow up and have children of their own.  It is one of my devoutest wishes that Jess and I are able to keep up what has become a lifetime conversation about life and about books, about identity and about the sea, about love and about sorrow.  This conversation, this relationship, is a central cord that runs through my life and sometimes feels like one of the only things that anchors me to who I am and to what matters.

My maternal grandmother, Priscilla (Nana to me) died at the age of 78 of pancreatic cancer.    Nana was youthful and healthy when she was diagnosed, out of the blue, with pancreatic cancer.  Her battle was valiant but losing; she died six months to the day after her diagnosis.  This card reminds me of Nana and Ba’s house in Providence, the location of so many important childhood memories.  At Christmas they always put a single (electric) candle in each window of their house, so the glowing squares remind me of arriving to see them, tires squeaking on the gravel driveway, on dark December evenings.  Nana’s home was elegant and comfortable at the same time, and Hilary and I spent many happy weekends and weeks staying there during school breaks.  The card above represents home – and hope – powerfully for me, and there are few places I was more at home and hopeful than Nana’s house.

I wish, often, that Nana was here to know my children.  In particular Grace has certain facial expressions that can bring Nana to mind for me, and a similar tall, rangy stature and dark hair.  Nana was a talented athlete, graceful and coordinated, as well as a powerful intellect.  She was generous and gentle, kind and somewhat reserved, but loyal to her core.  From a very early age I remember simply loving talking to her.  She made me feel like the only place in the world she wanted to be was right there; she listened thoroughly and paid careful attention.

Nana’s birthday and mine were only five days apart we often celebrated them together.  I have several vivid memories of birthdays celebrated with Nana and Ba in August, on their screened-in porch at the back of their home in Providence or on their boat, Fleetwing, with a jug of cosmos from the garden perched in one of the bottle holders by the wheel.  I miss her all the time and wish that cancer hadn’t taken her from us so swiftly and so painfully.  I wish we could have shared many more birthdays.

Please go check out the Tiny Prints/American Cancer Society cards here.  Thank you!!

This sponsored post was written in conjunction with the American Cancer Society/Tiny Prints card collection launch. All content and opinions expressed here are my own.

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How’s this for imperfection … I could not figure out how to take a picture of myself and not have the writing be a mirror image of itself.  So I wrote it backwards. Dumb or resourceful?  You decide.  Either way, not at all perfect.  My post earlier today, about contradictions and complexity, could be read also as a celebration of imperfection.

I am thrilled to join in Brene Brown’s Perfect Protest.  I have long loved Brene’s blog (I wrote about one of my favorite of her posts here) and am reading her book right now.  I’m only about a third of the way through but already one of her sentences is haunting me:

we cannot give our children what we do not have

There’s no better reason to celebrate imperfection, to continue striving for authenticity, and to live as close as I possibly can to the core of who I am.  Thank you, Brene, for continuing to be such an inspiration.

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Fynn tip toes through the hallway of his grandparents house. Textured white walls, cool for the Florida summers, snapshots of his and his sisters babyhoods hung in every room. Only starting to become familiar with the rooms and space, he ducks into a dark, windowless bathroom. He’s looking for shadows…. for Monsters. Armed with a blue flashlight as big as his arm, and a grin, he looks behind the door.

“Monsters!!!”

I ask if he’s scarred. He’s not.

“They’re just shadows, Mommy. Now lets find that cave!”

And off we go down the hall to my parents bedroom, facing shadows turned Monsters turned back to shadows with the glare of a beam of white light. My three and a half year old walking with a bobbing head and dance in his step, full of courage as he tames fears and darkness.

We’ve seen the episode of Curious George at least a hundred times. Monsters in the dark, George frightened and the Man with the Yellow Hat saving the night with a flip of a switch. Shadows from every day objects brought Monsters to life for George. The power goes out at the house in the country, lights unavailable, flashlights found and turned on, George is able to take care his Monsters by himself. Or maybe the scene happened in a cave, or was an entirely different episode. They all blend together in my mind, watched during the pre-dinner rush of dishes and pans waltzing from counter to stove to sink.

The dark hours are the times I struggle. The strength and courage I face the day with dwindles as fatigue sets in. Shadows of memories turn to Monsters. Finding a safe flashlight, one with a clear beam, is the biggest challenge of my recovery from alcoholism {or is it with? It’s never going to disappear… over three months into sobriety I still have trouble with the lingo}

The old source of light came in the form of a bottle, smelling sweet and acidic. It only smudged the Monsters, leaving them blurry enough so they blended into the walls and I could sleep. Not comfortably but I slept, though they were always there.

Now I don’t sleep. I’m learning, slowly, how to face them with a new light, a new source of power and clarity. Perhaps a lighthouse beacon instead of just any old flashlight… Facing them with this new illumination is difficult. It takes patience to steady my shaking hand, to quiet the mind and see and listen and turn them back into shadows inch by inch. But it takes time, and many nights staring at the walls and ceiling, in silent prayer and mediation. Hoping for a miracle within myself, or for The Man with the Yellow Hat to come walking in and calmly turn on the light.

We spend twenty minutes giggling and looking for Monsters. Searching cave after cave. Breathless, I ask him where he learned to be so brave, where he found his courage.

“George, Mommy. George goes into the cave with a flashlight and he’s not scared anymore.”

I’m arming myself with a flashlight, shining a beam of three and a half year old courage and bravery, hope and acceptance, onto the dark walls that house the Monsters. Created by years of numbing and shoving elsewhere, they’re on their way to becoming shadows again. It’s about time.

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I’m thrilled to feature a post by Julie Roads of Writing Roads today. I have long admired Julie’s blog and we’ve recently corresponded, finding, to my delight, a zillion common threads in our lives and endless things to talk about. Julie is funny and straight forward, a writer and a runner, down-to-earth and tremendously warm. She is my age but as far as I can tell she looks much younger yet has much more wisdom.

I’m delighted to have met Julie, honored to host her words here, and excited to meet her in September.

This is one of my favorite of her posts (and that’s saying something, as I like them all, and love many, many of them). If you don’t know Julie, go check out her writing and thinking. You won’t be sorry.

Rapid Hearts

We were a Tupperware family. Pastel and tinted. Yellow, green, blue, pink and white containers of all sizes filled our shelves and fridge. The big, square one stored the gum and candy packed for the long drive to northern Wisconsin every summer for family camp – and then held the one of a kind smell of Big Red, Coffee Nibs and Minocqua Maple Fudge inside it’s rubbery plastic walls all year, no matter what else we put in it. I would lift its lid at will to remember my summer.

There was another container that didn’t carry such happy memories. It was the Mother Bowl. It was HUGE, yellow and I could have comfortably sat in it until age 8. (Go ahead, Leslie, make the short joke…).

My brother apparently had something wrong with his heart (he’s totally fine now, as far as I know). My old and addled mind only remembers that he went to my grandpa’s cardiologist to get it checked out – and he had to run on a treadmill. They found that he had something called WPW, which apparently translated to ‘rapid heartbeat’. It would go like this: he would be playing basketball in our driveway with his friends, and then suddenly, he’d run in to the kitchen, grab the Mother Bowl, fill it with ice and water and plunge his face into it. And then he’d stand on his head.

Apparently, shock therapy was the remedy du jour.

When I was in high school, I started getting anxiety attacks. I thought I was dying and I was too scared for a while to ask anyone if I was – scared that the answer was yes. My way out of them, when they hit me, was to move. I had to bust my body out of the terrifying static that was paralyzing my limbs, eyes, ears, brain.

And it recently occurred to me that I, and maybe you?, were taught that when things really got going, when our hearts were racing and our minds were burning and our bodies were firing with energy – that the thing to do was jump off the track, get out, make it stop at all costs.

I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have someone grab my little scared hand, or better yet – for a magnificent voice deep inside me to grab my attention, and say, “Don’t go. Stay with it, ride it. Because this is the road to the next thing. This is the good part.”

Image credit: EraPhernalia Vintage

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I am delighted to be posting at Tracey Clark’s remarkable I Am Enough collaborative today. I adore what Tracey’s project represents and am thrilled to participate. As anyone who visits this space knows, I write mostly about my efforts – sometimes frantic, sometimes futile, sometimes fruitful – to realize that my very own ordinary life is enough. To accept that my spirit, as full of confused yearning as it is, is enough.

Thank you, Tracey, for the privilege of sharing my thoughts in your beautiful space. Please visit here to read my story, and read some of the other gorgeous, honest testimonials that Tracey has featured. Some of my favorite writers have participated in Tracey’s project, and to be included among them is an honor indeed.

I am enough.

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It is my distinct honor to be guest posting today at Karen Maezen Miller’s beautiful site, Cheerio Road. Karen’s book, Hand Wash Cold, is among those that have most moved and touched me in the last few years, and I’ve come to think of her as one of my teachers, one of my shepherds.

What a week it’s been for me with these women whose words and thinking shepherds me (even though they never asked for the job): I was fortunate to meet Katrina Kenison last week, I am going to hear Dani Shapiro tonight (thank you, Aidan!) and here I am reading my own humble words in Karen’s extraordinary space.

If you don’t know Karen’s work, you have an enormous gift in store. Run, don’t walk, to buy Hand Wash Cold. And please click over and read my post, Cloudy With a Chance, and then spend some time immersing yourself in Karen’s world. You won’t want to leave. I never do.

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So, I read a lot of blogs.  We’ve established that.  Still, I have my very favorites, those that I treasure and hold dear, whose words routinely speak straight to my heart.  Heather’s blog, The Extraordinary Ordinary, is one of those very favorites.  It has been such a joy to get to know her in the past year, to have her insightful answers to Present Tense, and to call her my friend.  I feel very much as though I’ve met a kindred spirit in Heather, and look forward to reading many more of her magical words.

I’m honored to share one of her posts with you today.  I adored this post when I first read it, and I’ve returned to it more than once.  I’m sure it will touch you as it did me.

One Way or the Other

There are dust bunnies. So many. They are under the bed and in me, scurrying across the wooden floors of my home and my heart. They are moving much too fast through the empty, bumping into toys and crayons and dried up play-doh, then coming to a weary stop.

It seems no matter how we try to keep up with them, they are winning. So we sweep up only the ones that are out in the open and then we leave the house, coming and going with the living of everyday life.

We could hold them out in the palms of our hands to show that we have them, but the bunnies float and they spin and we can’t seem to catch them. We push them under the rugs to hold them still.

We ignore them.

We force them to unnoticed parts of our cluttered minds, and move on to do the easier, the more manageable and mundane things. We go through the motions.

This thinking I’m doing about dust bunnies and life began the other day when Ryan was playing with the boys on our bed, wrestling. Arms and legs were flailing and there were giggles and shrieks.

Then Ryan’s coffee mug was knocked to the floor by one of those flailing feet or hands. It fell with a crash, shattering off the nightstand and splashing into a large puddle under our bed. Coffee covered the floor and chased the bunnies.

So we stopped the easier things we were doing and lifted the bedside table, we wiped clean the unseen places, sliding as far as we could across the wood floor under the bed, on our bellies, reaching. It seemed like a gallon of coffee under there, dripping down the walls and oozing into the floorboards.

I sighed and sat back as I saw all the other things that needed cleaning while I was there. Something sticky, dog hair, and those dreaded dust bunnies.

The more I look, the less I want to do this, I thought.

We did not rot the floorboards by leaving that mess that seemed too big. Instead, we were knees to the floor, uncovering the darkest places so long ignored. And then the stubborn bunnies rose in protest, making it even harder. Oh, how they hurried and hunkered with each reach of the broom or rag. They fought to find their way back to the darkest corners, annoyed at being forced out and up.

So we tried harder, we took to chasing them down and wiping them out.

We were cleaning up the dark places, together.

It needed to be done.

It’s much easier to walk away from those same kind of ignored places between us, the ones that itch at the subconscious and tug at the heart, the ones swept under rugs. But even when that goes on too long, unexpectedly but certainly, a destructive wind of change will blow in. The kind of blast that forces us to look under the bed and into the dark corners, because of all that shattered glass.

Then we lift up the rugs, letting up the dusty air, revealing what we’ve told ourselves is just fine the way it is when it’s not.

It breaks the quiet that’s not really peace after all.

It pulls the bunnies from under the rug and puts them in the palms of our hands where we cannot deny them, where we have to grasp them and then take them away from our home, from ourselves.

Sometimes we remember to keep working at a clean house, belly crawling and then grasping and releasing before it all gets out of hand.

At other times, we find ourselves strangely thankful for spilled coffee and broken glass, for the overwhelming messes that pull us down to the dark places, to take a look and make a change.

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I was flattered when Lauren from Embracing the Detour asked me to share the story of my life’s big detour.  The detour that began one Friday morning when, wearing my Madonna-in-concert headset and on a conference call about recruiting plans for the next year, I glanced down at a pregnancy test and saw two pink lines.  I did a double take, finished my sentence about how we should hire more engineers, and then stared at the test, mouth agape in full-blown shock.

That morning changed everything.  Everything about my life but, more importantly, everything about how I see myself and, fundamentally, who I am.

Please go read my story here.  And please stay a while to explore Lauren’s wonderful blog about her own detour.  She inspires me with her commitment to enjoying the journey even as she heads towards a destination that is generally though not specifically clear.  Thanks, Lauren, for hosting my words today.  It is an honor.

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Grace was a colicky baby. I was a colicky new mother. Those first few weeks and months involved far more crying than they did sleep. First, I was lost in the 24 hour tilt-a-whirl cycle of newborn-ness where day and night blend into each other in an endless wash of tears, milk, and a general soggy grayness. As a routine slowly, awkward emerged from this murk I started trying to put Grace to bed around the same time every night. This was no small feat. And it was so scary to me that I remember feeling full-blown dread as night approached, feeling each afternoon as the sun went down as though my anxiety, which started in the pit of my stomach, would eat me alive.

I started playing a Martha Stewart lullabye CD at bedtime. I don’t remember where this came from, but I chose it basically at random and put it into the CD player in Grace’s room. The dulcet tones of “Baby Mine” and “Blackbird” accompanied those early evenings when I would rock her in the ivory rocker, nursing her to a calm but not asleep state. I was obsessed with her learning to put herself to sleep. I’d burp her, swaying with her over my shoulder in the darkened room, humming along to the familiar tunes that got even more well known because I was hearing them every single night. Then – oh, careful, oh careful – I would put her on her back in her crib, standing over her as though she was a grenade about to go off. Well, let’s face it, she sort of was. I’d gradually inch backwards out of the room, freezing in my tracks as though caught in a bad act when she turned to watch me. At the beginning of this enterprise my success rate was low but it climbed over time and she eventually became a great sleeper.

I remember so many nights my anxiousness to get on with my evening. Two feelings, truly, coursed through my veins in those evenings: I wanted to have some time by myself, and I wanted my baby to damn well do what I wanted her to do. I wanted her to just obey and go to sleep. I also wanted a couple of precious hours where I could be nobody’s mother. I hate now knowing that I had both of those feelings. Why was I rushing those minutes past? And why did I care so much about her doing what I wanted? I guess it’s normal that I wanted to get some rest – but, still. I wish I had not wished those evenings away. I wish, now, that I could have those baby-drenched evenings back. Every single one of them.

And that CD still sings her to sleep. To this day, she listens to it going to sleep. Her bedroom is next to mine, and every time she goes to the bathroom or anything in the night she turns it on again. In many ways this CD is the soundtrack of my life. I’ve had to replace it twice. I can sing every single song from that CD, though the ones that come to mind most viscerally are Come Away to Sea and Home. I imagine a day when I am walking down the street – or being wheeled – at 80 years old, and I hear an acoustic version of one of those songs. I will be, instantly and powerfully, back in a darkened nursery suffused with the powder smell of baby, a dark-haired infant scrunched up against my chest, rocking her back and forth.

When I think back to that 28 year old woman I feel flickers of empathy for her but mostly I feel frustrated at her, even angry. I wish I could shake her – myself! – by the shoulders and let her know that she would spend the rest of her life wishing she could reach back to live these minutes again. There’s things I’d like to tell her … but I can’t. Of course I could not know that then.  Isn’t this, in fact, the struggle of our lives?

Come Away to Sea (David Wilcox)

The wind is right for sailing
The tide is right to go
So come away to sea with me
There’s things that you should know

There’s things I’d like to tell you
That words can’t seem to say
Unless we’re on this simple craft
Sailing far away

Sail around this sound
Far away from shore
Come away to sea with me
Sail your heart once more

Join me in this simple craft
Welcome to my home
The things I’d like to say to you
Are better said alone

So let your heart sail with me
We’ll cast away from town
And we’ll sail away on music
Inside this simple sound

This simple craft I play upon
Is made from wooden parts
Its never sailed an ocean
But is sure can sail my heart

And if you feel the music
Then we’ve raised another sail
The ocean wraps this world around
The wind will never fail

Inspired by Jo’s Flashback Friday prompt at Mylestones. Thank you Jo!

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