Category: Writing A Book-ish

Homemaking

I am “homemaking.” That amuses me. I am homemaking now in the way I “normally” should have been doing in my twenties. But in my twenties, I didn’t have any semblance of a home to make.

I wonder why “homemaking” was and is so important to me. To actually “make” a home, I mean. A place on the planet that reflects my taste, my loves, my values, my accomplishments, me. For a childhood trauma survivor like me, both the dream and the leap to get here was huge.

What needed to change first in my adult thinking was the notion that I deserved a home. That may sound odd. Surely, everyone believes they need and deserve a home. But no.

When home was as unstable as mine was growing up, the biggest association I made with the concept of “home” was pain and instability. I honestly felt all I had to bring to the table as an adult was more pain and instability.

In my father’s world, a home was something a man bought for his wife and family. It was not common for women to have the financial or social wherewithal to own a home on her own in his generation. I learned the mandatory tasks of keeping a home well enough. Dad made sure of that.

While he worked at his day job, I went to school and then came home and worked some more. Normal household activities. Setting the table. Putting out the cutlery and napkins and glassware. On spaghetti dinner nights, Dad instructed us on the proper way to eat the long pasta twisted up into a ball with a fork and a spoon. It felt so sophisticated.

After supper, I’d clear away the dishes and wash and place them in the dish drain beside the sink. That way, they would be ready to use in the morning.

I remember one night being so carried away by TV sitcoms that I was too tired to do the dishes. The next morning, Dad was clattering about in the kitchen making breakfast and muttering about missing things he needed. He was decidedly unamused when he found the dirty dishes from last night’s supper “soaking” (my excuse) in a dishpan under the sink.

To say, Dad was uninvested in my life and any career ambitions I might have had would be an understatement. His parenting “style” reminded me of how my sister once described her own parenting: “If the kids are still alive by five, I’ve done my job.”

In Dad’s mind, the career and life ahead of me was wife and mother and housewife. My journalism and academic career aspirations were about as realistic to him as manufacturing fairy dust. It was the subtle undercurrent of these expectations that affected my day-to-day life.

I believe that undercurrent affected my view of “housewifery” but it never tamped down my desire for “a home of one’s own.” Never mind a simple, single room. I felt a strong and consistent call to interior decoration principles but it was never so strong that it became an occupation.

And now, I am turning my hand with more industry to homemaking. Once might even say “at last.” I fought through the souring of the homemaking experience due to the constant expectation of my father. My own mother’s deplorable housekeeping skills were her emblem and matter of pride for not caving into a life of domestic servitude.

She looked down her nose at the “house proud.” It became obvious that her disdain was a co ver for her own ineptitude in managing a household. It would appear I am a member of the “skip” generation. My grandmother kept a lovely home. Many of my fondest childhood memories were made there.

Nan’s house was immaculate. It always smelled of something freshly baked, like bread or cookies. She grew African violets that had fuzzy leaves which we were cautioned not to touch for fear of killing them. To combat the dry winter air, she placed empty soup cans full of water on radiators around the house. Nan knew stuff. I always felt safe and protected in her presence.

Maybe that is what I am going for in this “homemaking” journey. Safety and protection. I am finally building a physical and psychological fort of my own creation.

One day, this home, too, may be filled with the smell of baked goods and African violets and little people who gain a level of comfort from my presence as I once did from my own grandmother. That is incentive.

Putting This Out There

“Having perfected our disguise, we spend our whole lives looking for someone we don’t fool.” – Robert Brault https://rbrault.blogspot.com/

I have nothing to say about this that you can’t see for yourself. It’s that true.

Give it some thought. Draw your own conclusions.

Is this you? It was me. For a good long while.

Starting Over

When I was a manager in the civil service, the finance wonks set us off on an out of the norm budget exercise. It was called zero base budgeting.

The idea was to eradicate all the items in your existing budget and then start adding elements back in. In this way, we’d be forced to look at what we were spending money on in our division. A deeper look and closer consideration had us look at our priorities. What programs must stay? Which could go?

There weren’t many seasoned managers who took the exercise or the rationale for doing it seriously. Most budgets became even fatter when the numbers were submitted.

Of course in government, this exercise was moot. There is a reason there are numerous short-term contracts available toward the end of any government’s budget year. Managers want to empty their coffers because that which isn’t spent gets subtracted from their budget in the following year.

I am finding moving is a lot like that zero-base budgeting exercise. But more to do with stuff than money. I visited our new house before we moved in several times. Each time I was in awe of the empty space. The lines of the house flowed from one room into the next. Our old house had been choppy and compartmentalized. This new house was the interior decorating equivalent of a blank canvas.

I knew it would eventually be filled with furniture and stuff to make it habitable. But the question for me was, with what? I knew what I was going for as a design concept. But achieving that vision was a lot less clear.

An analogy with my life occurred to me. With anybody’s life actually. We all arrive on the planet starting at a zero base. I know there are lots of other variables and wildly different birth circumstances. But as for you, newly deposited and still breathing through your mother’s umbilicus, you ain’t got much to begin with.

And so we land in life with a host of expectations that are inherent in the deal of whatever family you have landed in. And life evolves. You don’t get a whole lot of choices in those early years. As a young mother, I was taught the importance of offering my children “choices” in small matters to enhance their sense of personal autonomy.

So many of us stumble along like this in our young lives picking up life experiences: education, family values, friends, skills, likes and dislikes, nascent hobbies and passions that may form part a key part of our life path in adulthood.

Once we settle into a life path, that’s it for the duration for many. Not everybody, of course. But the road less travelled is an aberrant path, and not what the majority choose. Life presents us with stepping stones and goals and benchmarks that shape our path.

The person we marry will be a large part of our future experiences. The decision to have or not have children adds another wrinkle to our life. Whether you elect to study or pursue a trade or start your own business, you will learn and accumulate experiences that will stick.

The midlife crisis was once much ridiculed as self-indulgent and unrealistic. But the more benevolent interpretation is that the so-called “crisis” comes about when someone finds they are living a life, and maybe with a person, not entirely agreeable to them.

They may feel they have missed the mark somehow in making life choices to honor their own inner reality. And time is running out. It is often a time of great change. Marriages break down. And against the stereotype of the boss leaving for his secretary, it is often women who walk out on their marriages in mid-life.

A sense of urgency can arise when the realization hits that you have lived considerably more years on the planet then you will live in the future. It can sharpen the mind and the focus of your life. this is when we hear more people say things like “I lived my whole early life for my parents, my children and my husband. For the next few decades, I am going to live just for me.”

Sometimes the hand is forced as in case of death. I know more and more women now rethinking their future since they have become widows. What seemed impossible to imagine when they were were living life “coupled up” falls away. Life’s lessons rarely mollycoddle us.

So I’m giving some thought lately to “zero-based budgeting” exercise in this moving exercise. We are making choices about “what stays and what goes.” As stressful and disruptive as the move is, choices are being made to decide what is and isn’t important to keep in our lives.

Not a bad exercise which like much exercise, shapes us as the same time that it strains us. Guess that is all part of the birthing process. One we can frequently repeat throughout our lives to get us closer to the essence of who we really are and what is true for us.

Circle of Life

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.” 

I won’t dilute these magnificent words by J.R.R. Tolkien. Much.

In them, I read and am reminded not to take everything at face value, not to see loss as permanent and fixed. To find personal strength on this earth by grounding yourself from within, not without, and not to give in or be defined by “failure.”

Failure in life is not being knocked down.

Everyone gets knocked down.

You only fail if you don’t try to get up again.

Wholehearted Agreement

This opinion piece was published in The New York Times a couple of days ago.

Writer David Brooks is riding a familiar hobby horse.

As much as “therapy culture,” has risen in recent decades, it has plenty of legitimate critics.

I’m one of them.

I particularly like the issue taken by Brooks with what qualifies as “traumatic.” Where it once referred to extreme abuses in war or profound psychological damage from assaults such as rape, the word trauma is now thrown around like rice at a wedding. Similarly benign “damage” and the insults of living life are too often labeled “traumatic,” as well.

I appreciated the caution in Christopher Lacsh’s 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism. He warned the perils of endless introspection would result in the very culture we live in today.

Self-absorption among younger people “rules” and “rocks” and smears itself across the planet on all manner of social platforms. My concern is how many young people are chasing fame and fortune before they can legally drink in some states.

And for those who can’t or don’t make it in a big way, well … teenage suicide rates are off the historical chart. It is not a coincidence.

Putting the cart before the horse comes to mind. Healing is hard work. I write about healing because of some big, frequent ugly events that no little girl should have to live through. Not “mom was mean to me when I was little” variety but that was an issue, too.

I feel I “paid my dues” in the healing community. I employed a lot of personal searching, soul-searching, and healing modalities (yoga, meditation, talk therapy, anti-depressants, sobriety).

But make no mistake. Arriving at a healing destination where I can look back on the journey with a mixture of self-compassion, compassion for the perpetrators, self-forgiveness, and wry sense of humor took decades.

Through it all, I raised children, worked in the world, and I lived without a partner. My recent status as a married woman is a great cherry comfort on the cake of my life and healing. Not the catalyst.

That determination came from me and my own personal actions. Some days I fell apart. On other days, I felt little and worthless. But I always managed to cling to the mast. It was no cakewalk but it was worth it.

So in the therapy-soaked social environment of today, sometimes just knowing the psychological lingo qualifies you in your own mind for respect and special management.

That isn’t working and the piece below deftly explores why. The question is, can the social Titanic we are currently sailing avoid the iceberg in time?

Good News, Bad News

One constant I’ve come to rely on in life is universal truth. Certain stories circulate and resurface regularly on our radar because they hold wisdom or guidance that all humans can relate to. Writers who tap into universal truths often present more resonant stories because there are nuggets of truth relevant to all human experience.

A universal truth is something that resonates with all humanity. It’s something that others can relate to and/or can be a lesson that we’ve learned. We may sometimes recognize something as a universal truth but are not always able to understand it initially. Thus the belief that time increases wisdom as we see a universal truth repeated in different contexts over our lifetimes.

Universal truths reflect something essential about the human condition or key events in people’s lives, including birth, death, emotions, aspirations, conflicts, and decision-making.

Universal truths help us understand life better and also help us deal with emotional and psychological challenges. We may come to realize that much of what we encounter in life is not entirely what it seems at first – good or bad.

When my friend Anrael Lovejoy recently published a post about an old Chinese proverb colloquially known as the “Good News, Bad News” story, I was happy to be reminded of it. https://anraellightheartedvoice.substack.com/chat/posts/a0da9da1-bc2f-4207-92d5-75eee44a4344

For more context into its Asian origins, I present the story below as I found it on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse

The story is about a Chinese farmer who loses a prized horse (bad news) but the horse returns to him with many other horses (good news). His son breaks his leg trying to break one of the new horses (bad news). Then war erupts, and due to his impairment, the son is passed over for conscription (good news). And so it goes, in perpetuity.

We might recognize the essence of this story in our own culture as the platitudes of “clouds with silver linings” or “blessings in disguise.” The story becomes relatable when you apply it to situations in your own life.

For example, we are mid-move. A heinous process as many transitions are. So much upheaval and stress and not being able to find things and disrupting routines accompanied by a general disintegration of one’s sunny and steady personality. Speaking personally.

This week, a fridge was delivered and meant to fit between two existing cupboards. The fridge was a half inch too wide to fit in the assigned space. The modifications required to make it fit would have been amateur and tacky looking. Accch! We gave the problem twenty-four hours. And voila. We decided to take out the dysfunctional existing cabinet and plan to replace it with one that will be much more useful to our needs.

Earlier in the move, our painter tipped over a full gallon of dark blue paint on a light brown carpet. Acccch! I watched in horror as the deliciously dark paint seeped across and into the carpet. The funniest part was me bolting in a huff to a hardware store to buy “cleaning” products to remove the stain. Ya. That’ll happen. I returned the unneeded products the next day.

The solution? The carpet was eventually taken up and replaced with laminate flooring. It is a much more hygienic and sensible long-term outcome for our health and comfort. Our lungs won’t be aggravated by dust whenever we walk into a room. The “disaster” became a gateway to a better solution.

You may be thinking those changes cost money. You would be right. But here is another universal truth. Anything that makes your living space more comfortable and practical is an investment worth making over the long run. These changes add value. That is a win in my view.

In the case of both the ripped-out carpet and the dysfunctional pantry cabinet, the replacement will serve us much better. Our initial bad news became good news longer term.

Writer Rudyard Kipling summed up this phenomenon in our culture in his legendary poem, If, published in 1913. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94 “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same.”

One element of learning necessary lessons to achieve maturity, Kipling suggests. I most heartily agree with him.

Auld Lang Syne

I think of what I might say to my friend from long, long ago.

When I see her again.

I think of what it will take to get to where she is now. Winging my way back to visit someone I have not spoken with in person for … ever.

The journey-to-be plays out in my head: first getting to the airport, arriving, navigating the checkin counter, the security line, the waiting lounge, the flight to her current there, arriving.

She’ll order a soda with lemon. I’ll have a tonic water with lemon, too. We both turned our backs on mead and the grape some time ago.

I imagine we will gently jog down memory lane.

Trying to look at life and our life as it was then through the microscope of hindsight to recall – inaccurately – what once was and will never come again.

I struggle to remember what it was that tore us asunder all those years ago. What words did I say? How did I act? I writhe internally with discomfort as I recall all the possible friendship-fracturing infractions. I was a troubled child.

Why did she matter so damned much? What was it that created such an impassable gulf between us until now, all those years ago, to arrive back at where we are now: a place of truce and reconciliation?

Age, maybe. Curiosity likely, too. Two friends who knew each other when they were young nobodies. Perhaps we want to test each other and ourselves to see if one or the other of us remembers anything from back then in exactly the same way. Unlikely.

She became a superstar. Her god given talents fully explored in this lifetime and her contributions globally recognized and lauded. It is fair to say, our paths diverged.

Yet, here we are making a conscious choice to reconnect. And to what end, I wonder? For my part, I loved her much. Banishment from her life ate away at my soul for my whole adult life.

So maybe, our reunion is simply that. To be able to tell her how much I missed her. How much less my life was without her to share it as we once had without even touching base occasionally. To give simple thanks for the gift of grace and forgiveness she is giving me for sins which neither of us remembers now with any clarity.

To sit at her fire and hoist a mug again. It truly is only that I seek. To let her know how much she meant to me and how affecting the loss of her presence was. And to tell her how happy I am to see her. One more time.

Up we’ll both stand in whatever social venue we mutually selected and agreed upon to share this ritual of reunion. We’ll hug likely, and share pleasantries and reaffirm that yes, there once was something of substance that mattered between us as friends.

She’ll turn and leave to go back to her there. I’ll turn and leave and head back to my temporary lodgings and start planning the steps needed to eventually fly home.

After that meeting, I expect I will never meet with her in person again. We will leave each other along the way as we once did so many years ago. But we’ll leave each other this time … differently.

No Wasted Words

“No words are wasted. Everything you get down on the page can be considered practice. This means you’re sharpening your skills every time you write, even if you ultimately end up shelving that work.

Today’s Writing Challenge:
Set a timer for 10-15 minutes. Now, write without pressing backspace. Keep your eyes closed if you think you can pull it off. Resist the urge to fix typos!

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The passage above popped up as a daily prompt from one of my writing groups. I often wonder why writing – as opposed to other vocations – is so riddled with angst and insecurities. Perhaps because writing is the activity most capable of getting inside our hearts and minds. Scary stuff.

Of course, we all know “the power of the pen” being “mightier than the sword.” Writing has started and sustained revolutions, after all. Writers and intellectuals are often the first to be shut down and imprisoned by dictators trying to control a population to deflect dissent. One thing is clear: what people think and believe is important.

I am inclined to ask why writing is generally viewed at the same time as commonplace and unimportant. Everyone with a basic education can read and write – up to a point. It rarely pays well. There is no well-defined formula for how to “make it in writing” like there might be, say, buying real estate and using the magic of compound interest to get rich.

My humble conclusion is that people are both intrigued and terrified about what they really feel and think about themselves and a lot of other things. To settle into a groove in life, most people adopt and accept certain assumptions and beliefs – usually ones passed on to them by their parents or culture.

Once made, people usually become quite comfortable with their choices. And once made, people are hard-pressed to alter their thinking. Too disruptive. To gain admission to and survive in a marriage, community or profession, there are unspoken rules to follow to maintain full membership.

But writers? We are often lone wolves. Our writing style and areas of expertise can be very specialized and divergent. Other writers might more often be seen as competition for scarce assignments rather than people to bond with as a group.

That is not to say that writers are not collegial. Of course they are. But discussing the basics of medicine is far less open to interpretation than who the greatest writers were and why. To say nothing about the proper time and place to use a semi-colon.

I remember once being part of a unionizing effort by magazine writers in Canada. We were nearly laughed out of the building by editors and magazine management with our demands for contracts and equal wages and reasonable kill fees if our stories didn’t run.

I was stunned to read in a recent Psychology Today article that facts don’t do much to alter people’s established beliefs anyway. Not to wander too deeply into political territory, the 45th US President freely committed crimes “in plain sight” through much of, and after, his administration. This behavior was clearly old hat and pro forma to him. He was, and remains, unchastened.

That may be the allure and terror of writing. No one wants to tell the emperor he is wearing no clothes. It will be left to future writers to dig into the facts and analyze their context to create an accurate account of all that has transpired in American politics in recent decades. Sure glad I won’t be one of them. Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

I write about healing and the human condition and my musings about making the best use of our time here on planet earth. That exploration and the people and stories it has exposed me to have always been infinitely more interesting to me.

Politicians, in order to survive at their profession, sadly seem to play the same old games and sing the same old songs. In perpetuity it would seem. The unspoken rules of their community.

So, This Happened

The draft post I’d originally written for today was eaten. I changed a page before the text was saved and voila! The post vanished. Unrecoverable. Unsaved you see.

So this is an event I suspected might happen long before this. And it is telling.

My post was about how my nerves are bowstring taut with the incessant demands of moving house. A process that started in earnest several months ago is now in process in earnest. If you catch my drift.

So this type of mistake was inevitable. Annoying as hell and time-consuming. But it is the very thing that happens when the mind and body are overloaded. The message is that it is time for a time out.

I have a small, handmade banner in front of me while I work on this blog every day. It asks: “What do I need right now?” It is more helpful than I thought it would be when I taped it on my bookshelf.

Reading it forces me to check in with myself and take a minute. Make a cup of tea, maybe. Pop outside for a breath of fresh air. Basically, anything to move and change my position.

Stress always did a number on my body. My shoulders would creep up to somewhere just below my ears. My back muscles would become tight. I remember an exam period bursitis that cropped up as regular as rain under my scapula.

The bursitis presented as a hot and painful spot midway down my right scapula after sitting in exam rooms for days. That likely seems quaint. Writing exams in the days when we actually “wrote exams.” No multiple choice tests or computers allowed. Take-home exams always amused me but they were not as easy to muster as I originally thought.

The research problem I always had was “”When is enough?” If that wasn’t enough pressure when writing papers, it was hydraulic trying to cram all you knew into an exam you had to hand in 72 hours after receiving the questions.

I was about 6 or 7 when my Nanny tried to teach me knitting. After working away at knitting and purling on her scrap balls of yarn, the stitches would get so tight, I couldn’t continue my square. Nanny would have to take the needles away from me to loosen the tension so I could start again.

An early symptom of the what I’d later come to understand was post-traumatic stress. Stress management has been a lifelong obsession. Years of yoga, meditation, deep breathing exercises and talk therapy have helped. Somewhat.

But like most humans, I have limits and I am encountering them full-on lately. Part of a healthy stress response is knowing what to let go of and then learning to let that go. That is so much easier written than done.

So what I need right now is to chill. Have that cup of tea. Maybe go for a short walk. Bye bye for now. The next few weeks are going to be a bit of an uphill slog. As I’ve done countless times before, I’m going to hold on and see where this adventure in moving lands me.