More love than you can shake a stick at

I had a baby shower last Saturday. I say that this was my first baby shower, though technically I suppose I should count the small group of women who somewhat reluctantly gathered together for me in Austin as a shower. I’ve had this idea in my head since I was a kid, though, about what a baby shower looks like, and the small gathering of women I barely knew in Austin just didn’t cut it. Since then I’ve been to at least a dozen baby showers for friends I know through AA, and these showers have all been what I envisioned as the “archetypal” baby shower: a gajillion women, a table overflowing with presents including at least a couple of diaper genies, a giant cake decorated with plastic novelty diaper pins, and perhaps a few silly games. The main ingredient though was bodies. Lots and lots of bodies.

Over the years, I’ve been known to make snide comments about these kinds of baby showers, especially the “oohing” and “ahhing” that spontaneously erupts through the crowd when a cute outfit/blanket/burp rag has been opened. I’ve also been know to indulge in some feelings of superiority about the kinds of presents that are typically registered for and given at baby showers. I was a minimalist with my firstborn: all we needed were our cloth diapers, a few onesies, a sling and a few wooden toys, right? I parented the natural way and didn’t need all that silly gear and paraphernalia. What I could never really admit to myself and certainly not out loud was that I really REALLY wanted a big baby shower. Even once I realized I wanted one (probably sometime around pregnancy # 3), I still didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted, or to dare to allow myself to have one. For one thing, what if no one showed up? And really, wouldn’t all those baby outfits and diaper genies be wasted on me since we have perfectly good hand-me downs and use cloth diapers? Surely there were other women out there who deserved and needed a baby shower more than I did.

So, even though a friend actually offered to host a traditional baby shower for me when I was pregnant with Scout, I turned her down. And this actually worked out perfectly because Mara organized a lovely pre-natal baby blessing for me, which was exactly what I needed and was ready for at the time: a small, intimate gathering of close friends.

Enter pregnancy #4, and I was ready for a new experience. A lot of my crazy, self-defeating thinking had gotten a lot quieter in the interim and I was willing to put aside my pre-conceived ideas about what a baby shower is and who gets to have one long enough to ask my sponsor if she would be willing to host one for me. And then for two solid months I obsessed about who to invite and, of the women we invited, who would show up. In fact, right up until I was at the party and there was no longer standing room in the living room I worried about turn out. In the preceding weeks, I had realized that THIS was the real reason I had never had a conventional baby shower before. It wasn’t that I was a minimalist and didn’t want the latest gadget essential to parenting. It was that I was too afraid that nobody would show up. Or, conversely, that a lot of people would show up and that I would spontaneously combust from all that attention. I admitted this to the ladies at the meeting I went to before the shower and, in voicing my fears out loud, I was given a moment of clarity. This baby shower was going to unfold exactly the way it was supposed to; the people who were supposed to be there were going to be there, no more no less; and I was going to get out of this experience exactly what I needed, no matter what it turned out looking like.

And I’ll be damned if there weren’t 30+ people there! It was an extraordinary, beautiful, and overwhelming experience that filled a longing I didn’t even know I had. As I looked around the room at all these women who had shown up for me, I could literally feel old wounds being healed, like Lucy herself had come and administered her magic healing ointment. I could finally admit to myself that for all these years I had been jealous of my friends who had big baby showers and, because that feeling was so ugly, I had covered it up with the pretense that I didn’t need one. Ha! I did need one. Not for the oohs and ahhs, not for the generous collection of money that was taken up for a double jogging stroller, not for the adorably embellished burp rags, not even for the incredibly practical pocket diaper covers I received, though I am so grateful for all of the above. What I needed was the love and the support of all those amazing women surrounding me and filling me up, and apparently I needed it in volume.

White Girl Reads Cleaver

One of the books I read while in LA was Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. It’s been sitting on one of our bookcases gathering dust ever since we shared an apartment with Amy back in Austin (at least, I believe it was Amy who brought it home and encouraged us to read it… at any rate I’ve held onto it all this time, always meaning to read it eventually). It’s a fascinating book, the memoir of a civil rights leader written from prison. Several of my favorite passages are from his essay Rallying Round the Flag in which he writes about the post-civil rights era and the split within the country over the Vietnam war. He could just as easily have written these passages today, and what with all this blogging about improvement, self and otherwise, they seem timely. Prepare yourself though, for some good old-fashioned American hubris, albeit hubris with an ironic twist:

It is not an overestimate to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on the outcome of what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like the passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passle of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat. Whether America decisively moves to the right or to the left is the fundamental political problem in the world today; and the most serious question now before the American people is who now, in this post-civil rights era, are the true patriots, the new right or the new left?

… the right is able to manipulate the people by playing upon the have-gun-will-travel streak in America’s character, coupled with the narcissistic self-image as friend of the underdog. Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt. (queue the Team America theme song “America… fuck yeah!”)

It does not make sense to the American people to fight a war half-heartedly. If America is at war in Vietnam, then it makes sense to Americans when the right wing indignantly demands the application of more and more force, increased bombings, all effective weapons to kill and defeat the enemy and get it over with. Americans like to get a job done, and what they hate most of all is to drag out a job when they have the means in their hands of completing it.

The new right and the new left in America, each trying to lead the nation down the diverging branches of the fork, have between them the fate of the world and the hopes of a tortured, bleeding humanity – forever seeking life and almost always receiving betrayal and death from the outstretched hands of the seducer.

While his estimation of America’s importance is perhaps a little overstated, I love the image of us all as passengers in an airplane, watching helplessly as a bunch of maniacs fight for the controls. And he couldn’t be more right on about our “narcissistic self-image as friend of the underdog.” It’s a little freaky how he could just as easily have been writing about our presence in the Middle East as our involvement in Vietnam. I don’t buy all his rhetoric about the left and the right, but it’s still fascinating that, as a country, we seem to struggle with the same issues and wind up in the same predicaments over and over. Is the growth of a country like that of an individual? Do we keep having to peel back layers of the onion, revisiting the lessons we just can’t seem to grasp?

Then there’s this passage (in an earlier chapter) on the social dynamics of prison. I like to substitute “prison” with the words “middle school” or even “4th grade”:

I want to devote my time to reading and writing, with everything else secondary, but I can’t do that in prison. I have to keep my eyes open at all times or I won’t make it. There is always some madness going on, and whether you like it or not, you’re involved. There is no choice in the matter: you cannot sit and wait for things to come to you. So I engage in all kinds of petty intrigue which I’ve found necessary to survival. It consumes a lot of time and energy. But it is necessary.

And this on racism:

Many of us were shocked and outraged by these words from Malcolm X (when he wrote about breaking bread with “white” Muslims), who had been a major influence upon us all and the main factor in many of our conversions to the Black Muslims. But there were those of us who were glad to be liberated from a doctrine of hate and racial supremacy. The onus of teaching racial supremacy and hate, which is the white man’s burden, is pretty hard to bear.

There is also a brutally honest essay that explores his motivation to rape white women; how his whole moral structure seemed to collapse, and how writing eventually saved him. That essay should be read in its entirety, but he ends it with this simple sentiment:

“The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.”

I must have misunderstood myself

This was Georgia’s reasoning today when we got into a little disagreement over something I had said. I remembered saying one thing, she remembered me saying something completely different, and after arguing about it for a few minutes, she finally stated with some finality “You must have just misunderstood yourself.” Boy, ain’t that the truth?

The really disturbing thing is that I have these arguments with my children all the time. The conversation usually goes something like this (names have been withheld to protect the innocent):

Me: You’re not wearing your new swimsuit to swim team today?
Child: No.
Me: Shoot! I was hoping to see how it looks.
Child: It’s a little baggy, because I like how swimsuits fit when they’re a little bit big.
Me: Oh, I hope it’s not too big. I meant to remind you and Papa that the swimsuit is supposed to be a snug fit.
Child: It is a snug fit.
Me: How can it be a snug fit if it’s a little bit baggy?
Child: I never said it was baggy!
Me: Yes you did!
Child: No I didn’t! I said it’s just a little bit big.
Me: No, you said it was a little bit baggy and a little big.
Child: No I didn’t!
Me: Well, even if you just said that it was a little bit big, that would still mean it doesn’t fit snuggly.
Child: But I never said it was too big!
Me, after several more rounds of the same: big audible sigh

Please tell me I’m not the only parent who argues with their children like this! I always feel so stupid when I’m in the middle of it, like how did I get sucked into this again? Why am I arguing about who said what with my ten (or even worse) my five year old? This is ridiculous! And yet I’m right back at it the next time one of them verbalizes the slightest inconsistency.

I wish I had some keen insight into why this is, but all I can come up with is that it is the way I was raised. Woe to the person in my family who said something grammatically incorrect or logically questionable or that couldn’t be backed up with cold hard facts, as that error would be pounced upon and quickly corrected. I’m not sure it was my parents who did this so much, though, as it was my older sisters (shit does tend to run downhill). I can see this pattern repeating itself in my own family, as I hear Daryl correcting Georgia more and more often. I cringe every time I hear her do it, too, as it’s like hearing a little tape recorded version of myself played back. Do I really sound that patronizing and impatient when I correct her? Where’s the line between helping your child have high standards for the way they articulate themselves and being a know-it-all who must have the final word?

My First Tag!

As soon as I got home from LA, I was “memoirily” tagged by Laurel of Rue’s Daftique. Here are the rules:

1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who tagged you.
4. Tag 5 more blogs.

At this point my memoir would pretty much be a momoir, so the title I have to go with is “For Christ’s Sake, Not Another One?”

I also thought of one for John Cleese: “And Now For Something Completely Different”.

I wish I could add more, but I’m sure that the folks I’m about to tag will take this and run with it: Mara, Brandon (you in turn have to tag Virgie), Julie, Kelli (and you have to tag Jill!), and my love.

Californication

Tonight it will be a week since I got home from LA, and I am only now just starting to feel remotely caught-up or in the swing of things. I had a wonderful trip, in more ways than I had anticipated, and yet by the end I was aching to come home. I didn’t do a whole lot of planning before I left and so it was important to just kind of go with the flow while I was there and do the next right thing in front of me. (Oddly enough, the next right thing frequently happened to be taking a nap, which was lovely!) I saw old friends and new friends, visited family and old haunts. I took long walks, read three books and even made the time to do some visual journaling:

I’ve always wanted to use my boarding pass/luggage tags somehow. I have piles and piles of them in my boxes of memorabilia, and yet I never get around to doing anything with them. I decided that it was now or never with these ones, and so I finally dove in.

I got to have dinner with the lovely Laurel of Rue’s Daftique and fellow charmer Kara, whom I had not yet met. I am so glad I put Laurel up to having us over, as we had a really nice time together, and I got to have one of those amazing, small world experiences which I love so much. Actually, I got to have two of these experiences in one day, as earlier I had gone to a meeting and sitting across the table from me was a woman I had gone to intensive, in-patient treatment with when I was a senior in high school 18 years ago! I could hardly believe my eyes, let alone the fact that we both recognized each other and remembered all sorts of obscure details from each other’s lives. That was pretty darn cool.

Something that surprised me about this trip was that I felt almost no emotional attachment to the city anymore. Driving past certain landmarks provoked nostalgia, but nothing like the feeling of home that I used to experience whenever I was back in LA. It had been something like 8 years since I was there last, and I’ve done a lot of home-making and root-sending here in Dallas in those years. It was great fun to walk around Kelli’s neighborhood, though, both into the city and up to Griffith Park (she lives in a great part of town). All sorts of memories came flooding back, especially memories of running around South Hollywood with my friend Michelle Galindo and a boy I knew from church, Patrick. It seems unthinkable to me now that I was allowed to run so free in the streets of inner-city Hollywood, but I am so grateful for that freedom we had and those memories. Truth be told, I was probably safer in South Hollywood than I was around our house in N. Hollywood. Seeing the LAPD helicopters shining their floodlights down into Eagle Rock as we drove home from the desert, I was reminded of so many nights when those familiar lights would shine into my barred bedroom window, the nights when I would turn onto our street only to find the entire block cordoned off with yellow tape. It scares the crap out of me to think that by the time I was 13, I was sneaking out of the house with my friends at night, walking down to the local elementary school and smoking cigarettes and drinking wine coolers (Bartles & James!) until dawn. Ah, the memories…

This page is for Kelli. Thank you for a lovely visit! I feel certain that our hearts are in the same unexpected and yet infinitely capable hands.

Pattern and Design

Georgia brought me her etch ‘n sketch, er, make that her Magna Doodle this morning with this beautiful design on it - G for Georgia and M for mama. I find myself constantly inspired by her sense of pattern and composition, ever since she started to put pen to paper, really. There’s something really cool about the way she organizes design elements. For instance, it had never occurred to me that a capital “G” looks like a spiral:

gotta get some art up…

… or I’m afraid I’ll loose my “blog of beauty” status on owl farmer!

I’ve been trying to work in my visual journal a little more regularly, and to update the journals I keep for the girls. I hadn’t worked in the girls’ journals since last summer (ugh, the guilt). Maybe the idea of scanning in pages will motivate me?

This is the last of my by the sea collages.

Damn Onion

There are so many topics I’ve thought about writing this week: the end of the year picnic for the co-op, my latest foray into Richardson high-society (that really does need an entry of its own), the latest fluctuations in my obsession with moving, perhaps a few ideas for naming the baby. All fascinating topics to be sure, but here’s the thing that’s really on my mind: Why is it that every darn thing I undertake has to become another fucking opportunity for spiritual growth?

When I started this blog, I was both wary and skeptical. I knew what a potential landmine a personal blog could be for an egomaniac with an inferiority complex like myself. So when I finally created one, I had this understanding with myself that it was going to be for me. No expectations about other people reading it, about people liking my art, or leaving comments, etc. I wanted to write the stuff I needed to hear, the things I couldn’t find written anywhere else. Once I started writing though, the connections started happening, and I got excited. Maybe there was something to this blogging stuff after all! Could this really be a way to maintain old connections and even possibly make new ones? Ever so slowly, ever so subtly, expectations started to work their way in.

A friend of mine, having gone down the list on my blogroll and realizing that most of the people on it are my family members, sent me an e-mail entitled “the family that blogs together…” She thought it was so cool that my sisters and my husband all have blogs and that we comment on each other’s blogs and keep in contact that way. Yes, I thought, it is cool, isn’t it? I love it that I’m able to connect with my family in this way! And then one day I looked around and realized that the only person reading every entry and leaving comments regularly was me. (well, and Patrick, but if I write about what a wonderful way this has been for the two of us to connect with each other, it will interfere with my whining.)

I’m “the listener” in just about every close friendship I’ve ever had, family or otherwise, and while I’m getting better at talking, it’s still hard for me to find my voice and make it heard. In group settings especially, I have such an overworked internal editor that conversations have usually long moved on before I ever get around to being ready to say something. I realized tonight that this is the rub for me. I’m sure I’m not the only person who neurotically checks for comments and gets resentful when there are none (though it’s certainly not something other bloggers talk about, so maybe I am). I’m probably not the only person who feels lonely sometimes and like they’re whistling in the dark. The reason I’m so bothered by this, though, is that I had started to think that blogging was going to give me more of a voice in my relationships, and I had some expectations built up about what that was going to look like. Frankly, I think I’m lazy. I hoped that blogging would be a short cut to get me out of the work of having to learn to be more vocal in my friendships, and damn if doesn’t look like I’m going to have to do the work after all!

I feel like a real chump posting this today. It’s taken a day or two to write it (and to debate over whether I really want to reveal my pettiness in such a public forum) and in that time, several people have left me very thoughtful comments. I recognize that I’m one of those people who, in a room of 100 people, will find the one person in the room who doesn’t like me and focus all my attention on making them like me. Clearly it’s time to stop focusing on the one person who doesn’t like me.

Community

I had the most lovely morning/afternoon yesterday, made all the more so by the unexpectedness of it. Creative was having it’s spring garage sale, and I felt like it was important for us to show up and help, especially since there is such a small group of us this year. What I wanted to do that morning was to drive back up to the historic district in McKinney and fantasize about buying a house there, but instead I suited up and showed up at the co-op at 8am, Georgia and Scout in tow. Four hours later, I honestly didn’t want to leave, I was having so much fun. It was this beautiful morning of sharing conversation and food and childcare (all the other moms had their kids as well and several of them brought yummy food to share) and all of us pitching in to be part of something bigger than ourselves, something that we all believe in.

Fundraising events never sound like fun to me, but the truth is, I have enjoyed every single one of them this year. I love feeling part of a community, especially one where it is comfortable and natural to share discipline with other moms - where I can feel totally at ease letting another mom handle a situation that involves one of my kids, and I can just as easily step in to handle a situation with someone else’s kids that erupts in front of me. It was great to be able to get lost in conversation with another adult and know that my kids were safe, that several other pairs of eyes were keeping track of them. I think that dynamic is hard to find in our society and it’s one of the things I love most about the co-op because it fosters that kind of trust and community naturally.

Or at least it does when I’m open to it. I missed out on that feeling of community the two years we were at the co-op with Daryl. I’m sure it’s not because the community wasn’t there for the having, I just didn’t know how to access it, and I don’t think I knew how much I craved it. I was so defensive about my parenting then and so insecure, which of course I tried to cover up by acting aloof and superior. I dodged every responsibility I could and never allowed myself to feel “a part of.” I know the co-op isn’t for everyone. Some people are fine without that sense of community and others find it in other areas of their lives, but for someone who clearly craves community and thrives on it as much as I do, it’s kind of sad to realize how long I did without it.

Working the garage sale also gave me a view into the larger community that I am a part of. I knew several of the people that happened by the sale, a friend from church and then a group of moms that I knew from Daryl’s kindergarten class. We talked with the total strangers who came by, we listened to people’s stories, and some of us dusted off our rusty Spanish. There were three of us there who are pregnant, and I felt part of that community, too. That’s an area of growth for me for sure, as I used to be kind of resentful of women who were pregnant at the same time I was, even total strangers. How dare they encroach my spotlight?!

I still sometimes cheat myself out of community because of fear or because of “grass is always greener” thinking. For years I have honestly believed that if we could just move to the right place, then we would magically be part of a wonderful community of like-minded people and our lives would become wholesome, sweet and idyllic. My latest fantasy involves moving to the historic district in McKinney, like somehow we would start eating more nutritious meals and biking to the library just because of the neighborhood. What I’ve finally realized though, is that I am surrounded by community right where I’m at, that I’ve been slowly creating community around me and our family, sometimes in spite of myself. I don’t have to move anywhere, I can bloom right where I’m planted and enjoy my surroundings. It may not be the place I would have chosen for myself and my family, but time and time again it has been proven to me that my chooser is broken, and so maybe it’s just as well. For today, I’m going to trust that I am right where God wants me to be, and that the community I desire is happening all around me - I just have to tap into it.

By The Sea Collage

Here’s the collage I created in my journal with some of the by the sea tags that came with the charms. I can’t believe I actually did it instead of just talking about it!