the nature of nurture

On one of my last freedom days I head to Tryon Creek, a favorite spot in the woods. It's one of those places where you can forget urban surroundings. Forested ravines, covered in plants I can't name, drop sharply to the creek. I've been meaning to hike all week and the sun is so seductive. Can't stay inside one minute longer, so I leave the piles of paperwork and bills covering my floor. They've waited six weeks. They can hold for another day. Right?

The trails feel shorter without my girls, shorter than I remember. I've never been out here on my own. It's always been with the kids or with the dog or with the whole family. Never alone. I realize, not a revelation just an awareness, that I never go out into the woods alone. Even when I lived on 100 acres of rain forest, trails right out the door, I always walked with my dog, or Scott, or not at all.

But today I'm feeling easy about the whole thing. Comfortable by myself. Happy to be alone out here. Wow. I sit by the creek and wonder this: can upbringing coupled with temperament create trauma, trauma symptoms, without any remarkable, horrendous thing having occurred?

My startle reflex runs on hyper drive and has for as far back as I remember. I'm jumpy, skittish. The ever present something close on my heels, just behind the tree, poised to jump out and grab me. I am fear.

My parents, they're fearful people. In our house the glass was not just half-empty, it was cracked and leaking slowly. These are people who navigate life based on what could go wrong. Nevermind minor snafus. I'm talking about not being allowed to drive a couple miles across a suburban Ohio town to a friend's house at night because the car could break down. What if the car breaks down and you are alone on the road? Anyone could get you. And, I'm 17. For my mom and dad the world is a sensationalized news story waiting to happen.

In my early 20s I find the road. Before every trip I can count on the same two questions from my mom: "Why would you even want to go to that Godforsaken place?" and "What if some dies while your are gone? Because god forbid some one should die, in this religion they'd be in the ground before we figured out how to reach you." So, my stewards are people who decide based on "god forbid someone should die." That's just my mom. My dad is pacing the driveway, compulsively checking his watch, every time I visit from college three hours away in Columbus. I learn to tell him I'm leaving an hour later than I am, to save him the anxiety of me being on time, or god forbid, 10 minutes late.

But I don't escape their fears. I look in every window before climbing into the car at night. At five, I'm terrified of crossing the 20-foot gap to get to Hallie's house next door. In high school, I'm still locking my second-floor bedroom windows so no-one can scale the bricks and climb in. I lay in bed imagining super powers that let me disappear inside the mattress to hide. I Think about the girl a few streets over who was pulled out of her window(ground story), and found by her brother, dead in the woods, the next morning. Raped and beaten. That's the detail I catch. But that's not the whole story. She wasn't pulled out the window by a stranger. She climbed out to finish an argument with her psycho ex-boyfriend. He robbed a store and wanted her on the run with him. Details.

That's the thing about an ADD mind. Deficit is a misnomer. It's an over abundance of attention. Attention to everything all at once, all the time. It should be called Faulty Filter Disorder. An ADD mind takes the most stimulating detail, often the most frightening, and locks in. Fuck context.

When Scott and I are in our mid-20s and visiting my parents in Arizona, we tell them we're going out to hike in the desert. No destination. We need to get out of the city, out of their house, for the afternoon. It's a sanity thing. My mom panics. Says she doesn't like us just going off into the desert. People get lost out there all the time. Just the other day a woman was on her way to visit her daughter when her car broke down. She tried to cut less-than-a-mile across the desert to the daughter's house and she was lost out there for days. DAYS.

My sister laughs when I tell her this story. "That woman had alzheimers!" she tells me. Details. And all my mom heard was lost in the desert. DANGER, Wil Robbins, DANGER.

For better or for worse, our families leave us covered with marks. By nature and nurture, I am of these people.

So I sit by the creek wondering. Is it possible for this cocktail to leave me with every PTSD symptom? To fully mimick surviving trauma, without having come any closer to it than the evening news?

Stop Cyberbullying: speak up, speak loud

There is no room for threats. Speak up.
There is no room for intimidation. Speak up.
There is no room for harassment. Speak up!
There is no room for violence. Speak up.
Boycott equals silence.
There is no room for silence. Speak up.
There is no room for hatred. Speak up.
Speak your mind. Speak it loud.
Let the ideas flow, let the words flow.
SPEAK UP.
Shout it.
Tolerate only love.

There is only room for positive here. Speak up.
There is only room for intelligent discussion here. Know it.
There is only room for thoughtful interaction here. Be it.
Boycott equals silence.
Speak love. Speak UP!

gratitude

I'm back to work this afternoon. Rested and realized and ready to face the rigors of daily life again. I started to write a post about gratitude, but realized I already wrote it.

Five other stories are fighting to make it from my mind to the page. Instead of re-hashing I invite you who haven't read it (and you who have) to step back a few months with me.

Last month in workshop, Sunday morning, I said I hadn't done my re-write. That I had blogged that morning but wasn't reading that either. I was reading an older piece instead (I wanted to do happy). Jennifer asked for the fresher work, a rant about my brain, and I'm glad that I delivered it.

Still, I want to share my gratitude. On days like that, and days like this, I know. I have everything I need.

Comment here or comment there, because I LOVE your comments!

Love

learning to see: part 3 (take 2)

Raaiiiin, I don’t mind. Shiiiiine, the weather’s fine.

I know precisley how this day should look. For months I built this vision, ached for the sea. The salt-air.

It looks like this: me on the cliffs following the ocean to where it flattens out and runs into the horizon. Big ship in the distance, a few kite-boards in the foreground. It’s not crowded. The beach is low-tide deep, left to the seagulls, the driftwood and me. Then I'm down in the sand - dry sand - with a book, a journal, a pen. Staring down the waves, eye level, as they come at me head on. Unceasing, endless flow of swells. It's not sunny nor is the sky solid, blue-gray textures and the truth of in-betweens. I've come here to know something. But, what? I've come here following voices inside and out, "Go to the coast," Jennifer says. "You'll find clarity at the ocean." This is my picture and I hold it. Attached to my mind's sketch of what will be.

It's pissing down rain, high-tide, almost no beach. Haystack Rock is way out there, surrounded by water. No point in hiking the slippery cliffs; height will not expand the view. One, two, three, four, five lines of white-cap breakers with the last row spitting mist back into the fog as it rolls over. Then nothing but fog. It's clear. I get it.

Doesn't matter what I can't see beyond the waves, it's all there anyway.

Follow through the mist to the southern most point I've been on this water. Oaxaca coast. Now it's called Mar Pacifico the water is peligroso. Dangerous. Playa Zipolite, 1996. That's me on the beach. Scott and me wearing nothing but brown borrowed from the sun. We sleep in hamocks, lay on blankets reading The Fellowship of The Ring to each other in the sun. Forever passing time with a journey: On The Road, Watership Down, The Hobbit. The days are books and joints and harsh Mexican cigarettes wrapped in sweet rice paper. We hike over the ridge to a secluded spot and lie down in the surf. Edge of the water.

Then on the water. Four months later we're on the water, same water way up north. Now it's called Kachemak Bay, Cooke Inlet, Alaska. My wedding day. White fisherman's sweater worn inside out to hide the dirt. We bring a Nalgene bottle stuffed with wild blueberries picked yesterday for the cake. No rings. Hersheys bar in pieces that say "HERS" and "HEYS" exchanged through laughter before a few friends. Gentle roll of the boat, glaciers baring witness from the peaks around Bear Cove. I believe my life's enchanted. I believe a bond built across thousands of miles alone together is indistructible. I believe the voice calling out "STOP" from the hollows of my belly is full of shit. What the hell does she know about me? Lean back into Scott, my husband, and watch orange billed Puffins bounce along the water.
It's all there.

********

Out of the car, into the rain. We park next to Mo's - the only restaurant at Cannon Beach where we can be inside and right on the water.

“Should we walk first and then go inside?” Jess asks. Pulls-up the zipper of a green rain shell.

She tucks a camera into her coat pocket.

"Yeah. Doesn't look it's going stop. So we might as well get wet first and dry off inside."

A flock of gulls collects and lands in the narrow strip of beach between the water and the pavement, the last of them holding a foot above the sand then slow-motion dropping.

The air is more deep-fried shrimp than raw brine. Neither of us has a change of clothes. (So intoxicating is the freedom of traveling without three sets of dry kid’s clothes, jogging stroller, toys, crayons and enough snacks to survive a month stranded in the backcountry, that grabbing a sweatshirt and rain shell is a lucky afterthought.) I have a journal, pen and two books - Monica's book and Creating Money - in one bag. In the other is my computer. I wanted to leave the laptop at home but, obviously, I have a problem. Are there meetings for this?

My shoes are soaked through before we've walked 10-feet. Let the rain come down. It's all fine. It hits from behind so the drops wick across my jeans until they're soaked too. Wet denim pasted to cold legs.

Jess talks, but I've lost track of the words. Rain drips from the tip of her nose and I watch, feeling how my head tilts to the right to keep focus.

Yesterday I'm sitting at a big gray desk connecting all the O's hidden in a jumble of letters. Letters cover a whole page, my face gets closer and closer while I scan and trace. The therapist keeps trying to put me at ease, but she doesn't seem at ease herself.

This is round two of Vision Therapy evaluation, a bunch of sensory-motor stuff - following scrambled lines and staring at beads to see how close to my face they come before they split into two. You're not supposed to see double when things get too close?

It's startling. I've been through this stuff a half-dozen times in 30 years. I have labels and explanations, definitions for why visual-perceptual disorder means the philospohy of logic makes no sense and why 10 percent of everything I mail is returned with mixed-up numbers in the address. Why reading puts me to sleep. Why it's so tedious I can finish and not know a thing about the content. Why spelling is a riddle and punctuation is impossible (you can't hear semi-colons.) None of this is news to me. And it's startling that still, as I work a pencil across the page, I swallow a lump and hope the tears stay down with it. The grief cycle doesn't end. It cycles.

There is something new though. She explains how I tilt my head right to compensate for my left eye. The ocular muscle is weak. It can't pull-in tight to my nose to focus so I help it by moving my whole head. My eyes don't work together, so when it needs to, my brain shuts down the left to keep me from seeing double. If I could eradicate one word from this language it would be compensate. Not enough can be made of how much I despise that word in this moment.

So I feel myself tilting right to watch one drop drip from the tip of Jess's nose then left to see the wide scope of the water in the distance.

"My butt is completely soaked," she says. And we laugh in the rain. Turn back toward the restaurant to be evenly drenched in the front. It's good, this Oregon wind and rain.

When it's wet like this the beach appears whole. You can't see how it's made of a billion tiny grains. Crunched up branches pile along the rocks, deposited peices of what was, breaking down into pieces of what will be.

Inside the restuarant I wrap both hands around a glass mug of hot chocolate and Baileys so the heat seeps into my skin. Jess talks about how she doesn't understand why it's so hard to make decisions. How she'll remain in something long after she knows it's not working just to avoid choosing. Wonders what the root is.

"Maybe I just need to learn to make a decision without needing to understand everything first," she says. Flips the pen around in her hand.

A gull flys straight at the glass, banks and turns back toward the water.

The therepist - the second vision therapist - said the same thing. She said maybe I could trust in the excercises to retrain my eyes - teach my left to work in stereo with the right - without having to understand the whole of how my brain works.

Let go of my ideas about the outcome. Try it just to see the results.

"Could you look at it as a great journey?" she asks. This experiment in reshaping parts of my brain by teaching my left eye to see. There is more than one way of seeing?

This day is not at all what I envisioned. And, it's perfect. Silverware clatter over breaking waves. Rain splattered glass and great conversation. There's no room for new vision where don't you release the old.

"Should we write postcards," Jess asks. Sucks the last of her second Mo-Mocha through a thin green straw.

"Good idea. You decide," I say. Jeans still wet around my thighs. "You pick them."

The tideline creeps toward the restraunt.

She returns with 11 cards and we quiet down to write. None are like the scene outside. Doesn't match the pictures. So what?

Back through the mountains same way we came. Rhythm of the road moving to Tracy's voice, violin. Into the warm, dry Portland evening. Blossom perfumed air. No-one cares that Jess is late for a show with Lisa and I am skipping dinner with the in-laws.

No one in this car anyway.

breakfast of champions

Just spent hour, HOURS, finsihing part three of this epic journey-to-the-ocean post and guess what my computer had for breakfast this morning? F*&%ing machine. Who says this is more effecient than typing in triplicate? So what if the carbon leaves your hands a little messy.

stay tuned ....

learning to see: part 2

I am attached to my plan. Clinging to my plan. Bear-hold, death-grip, white-knuckled holding on to this vision of me and the big blue sea. It's going to go my way. First there is struggle, damn this mama bear instinct, this ocean dream dissipating into the want of snuggling my baby on couch. Wrapping her in the security of her blue dragonfly quilt and settling in for another screening of ScoobyDoo meets The Wherewolf. Unt-uh. No. She is with her grandmother. What's more comforting than a Grammy? I push aside the hesitation left by my mother-in-law's question: "Should I take her to school?" asked while Amelia is vomiting.

First I dial Prema, where I know I'll find wisdom, another mama's opinion. Then Jess. Digits are flipping, numbers getting larger. If I spend too much time agonzing over this decision, the clock will make it for me. It will be too late to go.

"Come over," I tell Jess, still typing quotes from the Honda spokesman into my story as we talk. "Just come, and I'll decide while you're on the way. If it gets much later, it's going to be pointless." Wheels turning. Decision made.

Portland is all blossoms, pink and white and purple. Colors on the trees, on the ground; Camillas and daffodils and tulips. Colors that blur in streaks behind us as we climb into the green of the Coast Range, far-off gauzy ridgelines coming sharp into focus. I'm holding a spicy black bean burger in one hand and letting go of my guilt with the other. Before leaving town we stop at Scott's brother's to check on Amelia, and say hello to her visiting grandparents. The whole thing is awkward, Scott's mom and I trying too hard to be business as usual while his dad sits stone-faced on the couch. Amelia clings to my leg. "Pleeeeaaaaase mommy. Please can you change your plan? I want to go home. They said you'd come take me home."

We work it out, Amelia and me. I lay on my back, in the guest room, bed beneath me, Amelia on my belly. We talk, nose to nose, and I explain. "You're safe with Grammy, Sweetie. I would never leave you if it didn't feel ok to me. If you still feel sick tomorrow you can come home to mama's. We'll snuggle under blankets and watch movies and eat popsicles."

"Nooooooo. Today," she whines, turning to lay her check on my shoulder. "I want you today."

"I know sweetie. And, today Grammy is taking care of you. She'll take good care of you," my hand over her hair, to her back (not fever-warm.) "Today I need to do something for me. So I can be a better mom for you. I need to take care of me, to take care of you."

Maybe she understands. Maybe she doesn't. But she accepts it. And I let go of the judgments projected onto her grammy, but spoken from my head: "How selfish. How cold. Only a monster leaves her sick child so she can go play."

And in the car Jess reminds me what they think of me is none of my business. What I know about thier opinions of me is only in my head anyway.

Conversation carries us through the mountains, winding two-lanes through dense green to the open end of the sky. Don't notice the stereo, same CD repeating too low to hear. Don't notice the changes in the sky unill there, on the western slopes, it narrows into mist. Then drizzle all around.

to be continued ...

learning to see: part 1

I wake up attached to my plan this morning. The ocean is pulling, pulling so hard, it's all I can do to finish the last third of this hybrid article and get out of the city. I am going to the coast. The weeks I was MIA from this space are a blur of deadlines and birthdays and posts that never got written. Amelia turned five. Scott turned 37. All of it turned into too much time as a foursome. But there, in the middle of everything, with one deep breath, two steps back, three minutes of clarity I take a turn toward myself. I take a 10-day leave from work to coincide with spring break and the in-laws' visit, when I can punch the clock, off duty. (I take advice!) It may be brief, but it's something. I am finding rest. Last time I had a day to do nothing was a January snow storm, before that October, September? I don't even know. All I know is the force of the tide carrying me west to the end of the continent, to wide, wide space.

That, this hybrid story (days past deadline) and the steeping tea in my red LOVE mug.

The phone rings too early for anything good to come of answering it. Caller ID shows my mother-in-law(I guess I still call her that becuase what else do I to call her?) and I relax. She probably wants to double check directions to Amelia's school, right? Wrong. Amelia is coughing and puking at the breakfast table, crying in the background. "I just want to go home. I just want my Mommy." FUCK. I just want to run.

It's right there in front of me, tumbling in on itself. My plan sucked down in the undertow.

"Mommy. I just want youuuuuuuu. I just want to come home. I want youuuuuuuuuu. I want my mommy," hoarse, pathetic words. Plees, rasped out desperately small between coughs. "I just want my mommy."

I don't want to be a mommy anymore. Not now anyway. It's not even my day. The quick flow of my hybrid story stops. Lay my head across the laptop - keys pressing into my forehead, feet on the floor, elbows on the table, so my face makes this: "gtyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" on the screen. What kind of horrible mother doesn't let her sick five-year-old come home? What kind of selfish bitch says "sorry baby, I'm going to the beach?" Me. This child is with her Grammy and I've been trying since November to get myself to the water. If I sacrifice my unpaid leave, this time salvaged to keep my head from splintering into a million jagged pieces, nobody wins. Nobody.

I'm going.

to
be
continued
(today. i swear. this will have an ending. panicked a little when i saw jess linked to this story, but i hadn't posted yet - so this is the preface. story to be posted later today. REALLY. not sleeping until it's up. wait. not sleeping? that kind of defeats the purpose of resting. ok, so - up soon. with sleep.)

prepositions

Over
Under
Around
About

With so many lovely prepositions
from which there are
to choose
Why must the one way out
be limited to
THROUGH

blogger's remorse

All thanks to everyone for the supportive comments and concern, the love here is stunning. So many people stepping up to say: “I’ve been down that road.”

And, all apologies for any worry caused by the last post. It’s tricky to write about dark places in real time and sometimes I’m not sure where the boundaries should lie. I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with that last post, but not because of the content. I’m OK with raw honesty. My remorse lies in the context, in posting it as a part one instead of waiting until it was complete so you could have the whole picture. It is only a beginning, a true moment experienced as its written, but still not the whole truth. The rest of the story (here are the Cliff Notes, because I’m not sure when I’ll have time to finish) is me reaching an understanding: I can either keep going at this pace, meltdown and get help afterwards or chose to seek support (with child care, time off, whatever), to get rest to avoid coming undone. I choose the later. And it’s a hard lesson.

Please know as long as I’m lucid enough to write it out and post, I’m fundamentally OK. Even within the moments of terror, I know I’ll come out of this OK.

And, in the hours of post-posting neurosis – I’ve been equally bummed that the start of the story (which has a kind of circular ending) just drops off without coming back around. That my biggest worry is about the quality of the writing (considering the content). I’m not sure if that makes me more or less crazy!

All love!

Anyway, I chose Attics of My Life as one of my songs for the workshop disc because it best defines what this circle is to me. The version is from Autzen Stadium, Eugene, OR: June 17, 1994 – a show I was at, my first trip to Oregon. I went back to Ohio after that trip and immediately put notice in at The Columbus Dispatch – where I was working as a reporter. There is a whole other story about Scott and synchronicity at those Eugene shows but that is for another time. And this is for you:

Attics of My Life
~Robert Hunter

In the Attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me

I have spent my life
Seeking all that’s still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me

In the book of love’s own dream
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old
When I had no wings to fly
You flew to me

You
Flew
To me

In the secret space of dreams
Where I dreaming lay amazed
When the secrets all are told
And the petals all unfold
When there was no dream of mine
You dreamed of me


LOVE.

finding rest: part one

Sometimes it’s easy to forget the mountains all around. I’m in the car with Josie after dropping Amelia at school. What I can see of her when I find the right spot in the rear rear view mirror is blond curls and cereal bar extras stuck around her month. Closed eyes, head slumped into the side of her car seat. What I can see outside is gray solid to the horizon, the sky and the pavement, until they merge. After weeks of opaque skies the mountains just stop being there.

Amelia is at preschool for a couple hours. I am running errands with Josie. Where though? I can’t remember where I am going, or why. The rain doesn’t look real. Nothing does. My body can’t hold the weight of itself. Feels like it can’t maintain the weight of anything. Won’t produce anything but water and salt. A deluge. I stop at the light, shifting down to neutral and admiring the way my hand trembles as it lifts from the stick. There is a white mini-van in front of me, the light, then space. All the empty space ahead and I am terrified. Pull the other hand from the steering wheel to compare, the pair shake in unison. All week it’s been this way with the tears and tremors. A drug I haven’t taken and can’t come down from. I forget things.

I know something now. I need help. Such a simple sentence, and the hardest thing to say. I need rest and I need help and if I don’t find both soon, I will find them in a hospital bed. It’s not what I say. Instead, it’s hard but fine. I’m doing fine, busy but O.K. is how I tell it. I lie. And, I need help. Three words, so simple. So impossible. Anything but that. It comes in waves, this sanity tide, and recedes to negatives in the night. Those middle of the night knowings. It’s coming. It’s coming.

I don’t know how I old I was when I understood I’d go crazy one day. Small. For sure they would haul me to the Funny Farm and lock me there forever. Didn’t know what that meant, crazy. Didn’t know how it rises up from the body, overtaking the mind. A slow root rot invisible in the earth until the tree begins to topple. And is it too late then? Can any amount of nutrients right it?

I’m five or six-years-old cowered in the tiled shower in the bathroom that connects my parents’ bedroom to mine. My sister laughs above the sirens outside, “They’re coming to get you. They’re coming to take you away … Haha. Hoho. Hehe … They’re coming to take you away.”

She’s 13 or 14 and I know she’s teasing, trying to scare me the way she does in the dark. Leans her head over the top bunk above me, cackling: “I’ll get you my pretty. And your little dog too.” Cackling until I scream.

I pull the glass door closed, make myself tiny in the corner. Hold my face to the cool tiles until the sirens pass. She is right. She thinks she’s teasing. She’s right. I know what crazy is. It surges from my center - an energy I can’t hold, building until I scream at nothing. Only crazy people scream for no reason.


Sometimes it’s like watching. Not me. Watching someone else fall apart, but feeling it, too. It’s fascinating. Visceral. Who knew that falling apart comes as much from the body as it does the brain? Nervous breakdown. Breakdown of the nervous system. Duh!. Nerves. It’s a physical thing, these trembles.

Breakdown. Overwhelmed until I can’t do anything. Can’t write a check. Can’t check my messages. Can’t make a phone call. All this stuff that always needs doing and I can’t. So I don’t. And it doesn’t get done, keeps growing and piling. I lay in bed feeling my nerve endings unwrap one by one. I want to stop it and I don’t. I’m terrified and comforted all at once. When this melt comes I will have rest. I will have help.

to be continued

fare thee well, linksys

It's a sad sunny day at the casita. A moment of silence for my WiFi connection please. Linksys has moved on, leaving me no good signal to steal.

Didn't see it coming. We've had our ups and downs, Linksys and me, over the winter holiday's we didn't speak for weeks. But my Linksys always returned, rebooted and renewed our connection.

Oh, my lost love. Thursday the screen went silent. When I refreshed, my Linksys was nowhere. Out the window, crossing the green, trip after trip with boxes and bags. I watched them haul away my Linksys forever.