Bear & Honey

Hello you,

I looked at this photo today and was nearly brought to tears.

You have no idea how precious you are, and how little that has to do with your appearance.

I know you think a size 8 is “huge” compared to your girlfriends, but you’re almost a foot taller than most of them and your frame is made of bones, not of fat that needs to be worked off. One day you will be so proud of your height.  Stop slouching.

Your brother wants you to be an athlete, not necessarily to lose weight.  Every time he tells you that you need to “get in shape,” you hear, “You’re fat.”  That’s not what he means, but he doesn’t know how to say it another way.  You will develop anxiety around working out and believe that you can’t be both an artist and an athlete.  Others will reinforce that belief.

In a decade, you will weigh a full hundred pounds more than you do now.  It is only then that you’ll realize your health and your strength are completely in your hands.  You will finally begin to “get in shape”…because you want to, not because you think you have to. I know that sounds far away, but it will sneak up on you as suddenly as a midterm.  Soon you will be looking back at yourself and wishing you could make that girl believe she was beautiful.

You will measure your progress in pounds lifted, not pounds lost.  You will measure your worth by the space you can shift, not by taking up as little space as possible.  I promise.

I had this bag once.  It was pink, with my name monogrammed on the side.  I used it for sleepovers and for carting around stuffed animals.  It was  possibly one of the girliest-looking things I would ever own.

maybe not quite this girly.

When I wasn’t using the bag for a trip (real or imagined) it would serve as my “emergency kit.”   In it, I stored things that I would absolutely have to have with me if we had to leave the house or the country in a hurry.  I would sometimes pretend that my parents were secretly CIA agents and we’d have to flee at a moment’s notice,  or that I would be required to fulfill a special mission all on my own and would need to leave them behind.  I wanted to be prepared.

The contents changed over time, with different items cycling in and out.  Some of the items that I considered essential at one point included:

• A large gray stuffed bear
• A set of travel soaps & “beauty kit” items an aunt gave me as a gift
• Winnie the Pooh BandAids
• A diary with a tiny lock and key, which mostly chronicled arguments with my brother.
• A small yellow pillow with a daisy on it.
• My purple footie pajamas.
• As many books as I could fit and still zip up the bag.

I suppose I was just planning to wear the same clothes all the time (maybe my new bosses would provide me with adequate clothing)  or parade around the world in my purple footie pajamas.  And clearly, BandAids were a more important supply to have on hand than a toothbrush.   In any case, I felt ready for anything.

Did you have a list of things you didn’t think you could do without as a kid?

What would have been in your little pink suitcase?

We placed the order for our invitation design last week.

As I read over the wording we had chosen with my parents before sending off the final draft to the designer, that prickly feeling started building behind my eyes.  Sitting at my desk at the office, a few tears came.  This is one of the things that gets me.

Weddings are obviously full of emotion, and planning one will often bring out a whole range of human emotions you never thought you’d tie to one event.   There are so many rituals and details involved that everyone probably feels attached to something different.

Food and flowers and clothing are fun, but I have not felt particularly like a “bride” when thinking about those items.  As the wedding day gets closer and we start to select music, readings, and vows, I am overcome with emotion. For me, it is always the words.

As I drive home from work and listen to the lyrics of our processional song and imagine our friends standing up with us, I cry.

As I think about the speech I would like to give all of our gathered friends & family at our reception, I cry.

As I look over my books of poetry and books that have fed me spiritually, finding quotes and passages that speak to our idea of marriage, I cry.

And yes, as I click “send” on an email that contains the final draft for the words we will use to invite people to the formation of our new family, I cry a little bit.

These are tears of love and anticipation and sorrow and utter, unmitigated joy.  I think I am trying to get some of them out now so that when the day comes I will be able to laugh and smile and not mess up my makeup…but I’m sure there will be plenty to spare then, too.

We build our rituals, make our vows, speak our promises and express our gratitude with words.  So while for others it might be wearing their mother’s dress, or sharing a special dish, or dancing to a certain song, for me it will always be the words.

What part of a wedding always “gets” you?

It’s Girl Talk Thursday!  Today we are writing about our favorite teachers.

Many people do not have fond memories of high school.  Many people cannot wait to graduate, and never look back. The idea of a high school reunion makes them cringe.  I am not one of those people.

I was so lucky to go to a school that was perfectly suited to who I am, that allowed me to blossom and learn and do wacky things, and most of all, meet amazing people.    When I walked across the auditorium stage at my graduation, I was crying.

When this topic was announced, I realized I would never be able to choose just one person who taught me to be my “favorite”.   So, in the tradition of my old high school principle, who used to address us at graduations with a series of “images” of the senior class, I present to you, my captains:

• A principle who gave me an elaborate bubble wand as a gift, because she had noticed that I often blew bubbles in the hallways just to make people laugh and encourage silliness.
• A science teacher who, when I had missed an entire semester and could not catch up, taught me a year of Chemistry in two weeks in tutoring sessions at her house.  I got a 99.8% on the final.
• A history/sociology teacher, raised Jewish and converted to Buddhism, who noticed me reading about Beat Poets in the cafeteria and sat down to talk about it.  Later, he would sing along with me in the car to the soundtrack to “The Point” and make me a tape of Ravi Shankar’s “Concert for Peace.”
• An English teacher who, instead of sending me to the counselor for filling a huge journal full of chapters of a vampire novel, wrote in the margins, “I can’t wait to see where this goes!”
• A Theater teacher who treated us like professionals, because we could handle it — even when we didn’t think we could handle it, and who brought in some stellar guest artists to do workshops.  I still think some of our shows were better than some pro productions in town.   She taught me to take a compliment.
• A German teacher who would chase me down the hall before lunch and remind me that a paper was due at 2pm…because she knew I would then need to go to the library to write it over my lunch period.
• Another English teacher, who arranged our desks in a circle, made us debate and talk it out, made us look deeper, made us READ, dammit, and like it.  She pushed, pushed, and loved the spark in our eyes.   She recently sent me a message on Facebook and I was so glad to hear from her.  She asked me to send her a poem, and I cried with joy.

For a brief time, I courted the idea of becoming a teacher.  I know now that the desire was there only because I was taught by such a crew of dedicated teachers, given such gifts by their presence, that I thought I could give it  back somehow.   Now I know I don’t really want to work in a traditional school setting, but I hope I can give back even a fraction of what they gave me one day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about women lately.  I’m working on forming a retreat for creative women specifically (through write. play. repeat.) and so femininity, creativity, womanhood, feminism, all that stuff has been twirling around in my brain non-stop.

If you’ve been reading for more than a week or so, you know that I am…a bit of a tomboy.

Growing up, I did not have a ton of girlfriends.  I always had one or two good friends, who happened to be girls, but most of my friends were boys.  This extended into my teens and early twenties, for reasons complex and varied, and has only recently changed.

As a kid, it was mostly because I didn’t care much for wearing dresses or being a princess.  I mutilated my Barbie dolls ( I’m serious though, that one doll looked really good with a mohawk) and treasured my books.   The one time I remember “playing house” with our next door neighbor boy, we spent most of the afternoon building a house out of sticks and blankets and toy blocks, and then I instructed him to protect the house while I went into the “haunted forest” to “hunt for dinner”.   Clearly, I had my priorities all set.

In my teens, I honestly just did not understand most of the girls around me.  Gossip was fun to a certain extent, but it stopped being fun when it descended into meanness.

Shopping… well, shopping was a particular form of torture inflicted upon me by my mother twice a year, which always ended in headaches and crying fits (sometimes for both of us.)

And sporting events were not simply a way for me to ogle a sweaty, if cute, boy for a couple of hours while pretending to have school spirit.

Also, I still loved to read books and be outside.

I actually wondered, once or twice, if Those Girls were another species, or if I had missed some sort of Girly School in between middle and high school.  Don’t get me wrong here — I have no disdain for Those Girls, and didn’t even really back then.  Part of me wanted to be like them, to fit in, to be a girl easily and effortlessly.   (Looking back, I know now that no girl “had it easy” growing up, and there was probably nothing effortless about their social interactions.)   I just couldn’t figure out how to approach their tight circles from the outside, or what we could possibly have in common aside from going to the same school.  So I didn’t really try.  I worked on music and theater and being a nerd.   I was happy to be one of the Other Girls.

Now I’m an adult (no seriously, stop laughing) and I have friends who are, too.  In the last few years, I have slowly but surely cultivated friendships with some incredible women.  When I think about what changed, how I altered my perception of women, I realize that I haven’t.  Not really. It just took me a really long time to find women I felt comfortable and safe with.  I’m sure I’ll explore this further with other posts, but I just felt like I had to get it out there while I was thinking about it.

Every woman I feel close to has her own thing, her own passions.  They are brave and vulnerable, strong and sensitive, in need of healing and capable of helping others.   They have all helped heal me, whether through their words,  their art, their business savvy, a marathon conversation punctuated by cups of tea, or a well-timed karaoke night.

Looking at all of my intelligent, hilarious, fun, brilliant, and inspiring woman friends, I realize that we were all the Other Girls.   It just took us a little longer to find each other, since we thought we were alone all this time.

Hey, kids! Today is Girl Talk Thursday!

Today’s topic is What’d you wanna be when YOU grew up?

A few years ago, as I was packing or unpacking or in some sort of possession-shuffling process between the many places I lived, I found a book.

It was Dr. Seuss’  My Book About Me.

This book is cool as heck.  

It’s basically a fill-in-the-blank autobiography for little kids, with pages to color and draw your family and pets, how many teeth you have (top and bottom rows), etc. …I had apparently filled it out when I was six.  I have zero memory of doing it, but the evidence was there.

When  I found the book, I had just started playing shows and getting more serious about writing and performing.   When I was a kid, I was interested in music but honestly had no intention of being a performer.   As far as I remember, I wanted to be  a witch or a zookeeper, possibly both.   So imagine my surprise when, after the page about how many teeth I had and what color my hair and eyes were, I noticed a page that asked “What are you going to be when you grow up?”

In my six-year-old scrawl I had written:

A writer or a singer

(I mean the “g” was backward but that’s basically what it said!)

This blew my mind.  I guess six-year-old me knew way more about 26-year-old me than I could have imagined. I’ve noticed that as I get older and more in touch with my authentic self, I have a lot more in common with that six year old girl than the person I was trying to be in my early twenties.

So I guess I’m still “growing up”, but I’m also growing in….growing into myself and learning to love that little weirdo who stuck her hands in the dirt, talked to animals, and did Elvis impersonations at family gatherings.

What did you want to be?  Who do you want to be now?

Today, my parents have been married for 40 years. They’ve been together for about 42 years.  In a row, even! They have been parents for 35 years,  have survived parenting me for almost 28 years, have seen one child married for 1 year so far,  and have been grandparents for 1 month.

All I can think of is this card from someecards:

Up until recently, my longest relationships lasted just shy of a year, so the thought of adding 41 years to that totally blows my mind.

I look at my parents and I know that marriage is not easy, but it is worth it.   Every day, they compromise, they talk, they do things together, they check up on each other, and still manage to be affectionate to one another.

As a child, I assumed my parents would always be together because that’s just how things were. The older I get, and the closer I get to creating my own marriage, I realize just how much they have done for each other and how hard they have worked to build their family.

I appreciate their example so much, and while there are a lot of things that will be different about our marriage, there are many more things that I will carry with me as reminders of how to keep it together…things they probably have no idea they taught me.

Happy 40th Anniversary, Mom & Dad. Thank You.

This week we’re talking about the stuff that irritates you, even though it’s irrational to let something so small get to you.

I’ve actually been doing a lot of work on myself to be less annoyed at the general population, so this list is shorter than it would have been a few years ago.  Despite that, there are still some things that get my panties in a wad.

1. Corporate-ese.

This is the big one, folks.  I work in a day job where I email back and forth with business types all the time, and have to see/hear tons of this made up, meaningless jargon on a regular basis. “Sphere of influence”?  “Leveraging multi-level infrastructures” ?  “Optimize cross-platform functionalities” ?   Give me a break and speak English, please.   You probably don’t even know what you’re saying, so I can guarantee the dozens of folks working below you won’t know how to “implement next-generation architecture strategies.”

2. Drivers

Just in general. I am convinced that most people have no clue what the traffic laws actually are, or don’t believe they apply to them.  They also forget they are operating a very heavy machine that could easily kill someone, themselves included.  I err on the side of caution, so I probably annoy other drivers myself, but I’d rather be annoying than dead.

3.  People who order food or check out at a store while talking on their cell phones.

When I was a barista, I would wait for someone to finish their conversation before acknowledging that they wanted to order something.  I think it’s too easy for us to forget that service people are just that — people.   They are not Food Robots, they are not lesser beings, they are humans with thoughts and emotions.  Tell the person on the line you will call them back.  If it’s an important call, don’t get in line until you’re finished.    If you stay on the phone and dismissively order with one ear facing the person at the register, don’t be surprised if your order is wrong or contains faint traces of human saliva.

Those are my main peeves.  What are yours?   Join us over at Girl Talk Thursday!

My dad’s family is from a very rural area of Kentucky.  Even though we lived in suburban Atlanta, he would sometimes speak fondly of keeping chickens or wanting a goat, which my mom would quickly veto.   Mostly, he was joking, but I think that some part of him missed the self-sufficiency of country life.

Growing up in a large metro area, recycling, composting, and home gardening were things that only “out there” hippies did.  I got the impression that it was really difficult and inconvenient, and indicated something about my lifestyle or political standing.  Despite all that, I would often daydream about picking vegetables from the garden for lunch, planting bulbs, and finding uses for all the things we regularly threw away.

In the country, these activities were not political statements, they were just a way of life.  It was practical and necessary to re-use whatever you could, to feed the plants with coffee grounds and to do as much as you could on your own just in case the power went out or the money stopped coming in.  Gardening wasn’t for hippies, it was for people who had any lick of sense.

My Uncle Jim had a great vegetable garden that I wish I had spent more time in.   When we were up in Kentucky I had lots of outside space to run around in, tomato plants to look at and touch, and dirt to wiggle my fingers in…but back in Atlanta, when vacation was over, it seemed like a faraway concept.   Our condominium had about 3 square feet of “yard” and planting anything edible was not allowed by the homeowner’s association.

Needless to say, when we talked about moving up to the Little Green House, one of the very first things out of my mouth was “We can have a GARDEN!”

Last weekend, we took the first step toward that dream of picking our lunch from the backyard.   We decided to create a compost container out of an old trash bin that was not being used.  It is a variant on the “tumbler” model of composter, but much cheaper and pretty darn easy to do.      In the next post I will describe how we did it in case you want to try it for your own yard!

My ideal lunch date is an all-day affair.   It includes lots of friends, family, a few dogs, a giant grill, endless margaritas, and a backyard.

The ideal lunch in my head is a late Summer day when most of the renovations on the house are finished, at least to the point where we can throw a kickass party.   We’ve got our hot tub installed, the new deck looks awesome, and everyone is having a great time.

Nobody has to be anywhere in the next few hours, and no-one is worried that they are missing anything on Reality TV.    Oh, and someone else gets to clean up.