Mind Body Mama: A few things I learned from Momalom’s Half Drunk Challenge

Remember the Momalom Half Drunk Challenge? A week long period of blackout level stupidity and online overload just before Christmas? Here are some reflections.

1. When you write more, you have more to write. Even though writing every day in the week running up to Christmas was an idea singular in its insanity, the experience demonstrated beyond a doubt that when I write more I have more to write about. As my friend the Blunt Christian has put it, “I think in sentences again.” Writing every day, even briefly, turned my head into a tumbler of ideas and words and phrases that worked on its own between and during my domestic and workaday duties. This might be why Ellen Snortland and Kate Hopper and practically every writing teacher I’ve ever had or heard about endorses daily writing as necessary practice. Point taken.

2. I do not want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. I’ve always been clear that I didn’t want to be that kind of blogger—the product-endorsing, one-woman brand machine that’s about following and being followed, creating a scene, turning myself into a channel of new media.

But I have credited blogging with saving me from the lonely writer’s room, for making it possible for me as a middle-aged mom to write without desperate isolation. I’m grateful—so grateful—for the connections I made with other bloggers during Half Drunk. I am delighted to witness their writing, to consider my computer part of the energy and space that holds their creative process in the midst of their crazy mom real lives.

But my real mom life is crazy too, and I don’t want to spend much more of it sucked down the monitor. My life is enriched by holding an open heart for the other mama writers I’ve met online, but not more than it is enriched by driving up to the hilltowns to lunch with my new friend the brilliant and gifted writer Erin White. It is too easy for me to stay home thinking I am not isolated because I’m chatting with—or maybe not even chatting, just peering into the life of—another mama writer. I’ve got to put on my hat and go out in the cold, hear my own voice somewhere other than inside my own head.

The Half Drunk also showed me a dark side to the blogging adventure. Erin named it for me over soup and sandwiches: the pitfall of cheekiness. My voice changes insidiously when I write to an audience as I imagine them. I feel compelled to play a character, to alter my narrative to conform with a self that is bright and sarcastic, dark and quirky. My friends and family will be quick to tell you that I am actually bright, sarcastic, dark and quirky. But I don’t want to write myself into caricature. I want to be a careful, precise writer, I want a voice that is true and strong, not trying to please. I want to be an essayist, sometimes a humorist, occasionally a preacher. I want to be a writer.

3. Feminism saved my life. (I’ve got to credit Erin on this one too—it showed up in an email she sent me a few weeks back.) I find the mom-o-sphere—whether online or in real life—stunningly and surprisingly different from the women’s community in which I’ve lived my adult life. That community is overtly feminist, anti-violence, anti-racist, supportive of economic and social justice and—in the words of my first karate dojo, The School of Come-the-Revolution, “unapologetically pro-lesbian.”

Not so among the moms of my daughter’s contemporaries, which is why I often feel like a shadow of myself among them. In my real life, I am almost never the only lesbian in the room—unless I am hovering over the Cheetoes at a seven year old’s birthday party. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t shave or wear makeup or color her hair—unless I am at my daughter’s school. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t speak disparagingly of her body—unless I am waiting with other moms outside of a ballet class.

Online, I encounter moms writing from their hearts, so far past the cocktail party chatter of the playground that I almost want to weep with gratitude. But even here, the personal doesn’t leap to the political. For all the hand-wringing and heart ache we each experience—around our agonizing about how to balance childcare and paid employment, for example—most don’t see beyond ourselves to understand the condition of women—of mothers— as collective. "Motherhood is a labor issue" I want to whisper while slipping copies of Miriam Peskowitz’s The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars into diaper bags around the country.

Twenty years ago when I came out as a lesbian and feminist, a relative expressed his distaste for my political ilk because “they make themselves out as victims.” I didn’t have the chops to answer flippantly, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” I wish I had. I’ve aged, and mellowed, and gotten married and had a baby and seen my world shrink to a domesticity I could not have imagined in my rabble-rousing days. I’ve failed to keep up with the women’s movement and find my credentials challenged in new radical circles, as my politics on gender and disability and race and the environment and globalization are not sophisticated or embedded enough, stalled as they are in the 1990s of my youth.

But I know that my experience as a woman and a mother in this time and country are not just an expression of my rugged American individuality. I know that my life is an expression of my time and culture, that my path is forged as much by my privilege and limitations; as much by my race and class and gender and sexuality and ability as by my abundant creativity and will. I might not always have a cogent analysis, I might not be at the forefront of today’s radicalism, but I don’t imagine myself the only architect of my condition. I know my life reflects my world as much as it reflects me. When we don't talk about that, I feel a part of myself left in the shadows.

Mind Body Mama: Pay Attention

I had an opportunity to see Mary Oliver read a few weeks ago. The venerable poet visited our women’s college for the first time in a decade. Her last visit was scheduled for the small and comfortable subterranean auditorium next to the library. But an hour before she was scheduled to speak there were 600 people in their seats and public safety sent us on a pilgrimage across campus to the larger hall to appease the fire marshall.

It was an early introduction for me to this odd pocket of America where I live. It is a place where, when I go to the grocery store on the eve of a blizzard, they will have sold out of kale. It is a place where an eagle release at the wildlife sanctuary attracts more viewers than the parking lot can accommodate. It is a place where there are a seemingly equal number of churches and lesbians.

It is a place where a Mary Oliver reading now goes nearly unpublicized, so that only 2,000 people will show up. There is no bigger hall on campus to which we might move.

Among the two thousand were many from Our House of Worship and many others from The School of Love. But I sat alone, as I like to do at readings, and felt the healing balm of words and introspection, inspiration and presence roll over me.

Oliver told us in person—as she tells us in her poetry over and over again—that her job is to pay attention. “My work,” she says in the poem Messenger, the first she read that night, “which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”

And she told us to pay attention. This may have been a quote from an essay, or it may have been her answer to a question, or both. I lapped up the light she brought but lost track of some of the details of attribution.

I know that she said, “Pay attention.” And also, “Tell someone.”

I thought of the many lives that might have been lived by a Mary Oliver. She could have been a mother, paying attention to the natural world she loves and telling her children what she noticed. She could have been a minister sharing insight with a small flock. Instead, here she was speaking this one night to two thousand, who in the morning would mention to thousands of others where they had spent the evening, and their friends would groan to have missed it. Instead of a small life of reflection she has had a huge life of words and books upon books, prize upon prize, honor upon honor.

Her reach is extraordinary; it was noted in the introduction how many times any of us will hear a Mary Oliver poem as part of a sermon or memorial or other ceremony. But she made me believe that any of us can do this; and isn’t this what we mean by ministry anyway? The ways that we pay attention and witness that which is holy to us; the ways that we share that spark with others.

I read Catherine Newman’s latest article in Brain, Child the same week.

(It is starting to feel creepy to venerate Catherine here, as she actually resides in our odd little outpost. She lives across the big water as Dusty likes to say, but we do have kids the same age and know people in common. For example, Dusty knows her. I have even had occasion to say “hello” to her, although it was hard to do so without melting into a steaming puddle of hero worship. Eventually I know I’ll have to get over it, both for social expediency and because hero-worship, even when so well deserved, is an insidous way of counting oneself out. “She is great!” says the happy angel of hero worship. “Therefore you suck!” says her evil twin.)

Catherine’s essay about “conjoined twins and other lessons in sharing”—just read it, it is brilliant—made me think about the fact that the writer’s task, in addition to paying attention, is making connections between the the things that she observes and the things that she thinks. And this drive to connection—to meaning-making, as we call it at Our House of Worship—is to me an essentially spiritual activity.

My writing teacher Kate Hopper encouraged us to relax into association to create humor. I love to write that way, to unwind my mind and let my thoughts wander to the absurd. I love to teach movement that way, and sometimes I am blessed to find an image that helps my students understand the principles behind what we are doing. Sometimes that is the only way to enter a new experience: we must make sense of what something is by describing what it is like.

It is how we learn, connecting the dots between what we already know and the unfolding mystery of what comes next. It is also the bedrock of faith: how we come to trust that our small experience reflects the greater mystery that holds it. “Fluency in the use of metaphor,” the Rev. Kendyl Gibbons calls it, this mark of spiritual intelligence.

Not all of us can be a Mary Oliver, but isn’t she right when she tells us all to pay attention? Each of us can love the natural world, if that is where we find the divine—but we can also pay attention to a kiss, to gratitude, to love, to a dog, to a child. We can find the wonder, the meaning, the bigger picture. Isn't the work of all our lives?

Mind Body Mama: Why Not Me?

Did you ever watch Pinky and the Brain?

Let’s do something different tonight. Let’s take over the world.

But first: the backstory.

A decade ago, I worked at the Big State University up as a mid-level administrator. A position became available in Marketing and Communications which was a departure from what was on my resume. I was really intrigued by the job. I didn’t have the qualifications, but I instinctively knew that I would be good at it. I knew I’d be genuinely curious, and therefore I’d seek out whatever information I needed to be successful. I knew I’d have a sense of purpose, and therefore I’d be driven to work hard.

I went to the Assistant Vice President of Marketing to ask if she thought I should apply. She acknowledged that it would be a stretch, but then she said,

“In situations like this, I always choose to think, ‘Why not me?’”

This would be a sweet story if I got the job. Instead, I got promoted to a different position for which my qualifications were a stretch. Unfortunately it was a job about which I was neither curious nor purposeful. Sweetie and I banked my raise and half my base salary; the other half we used to put a giant down-payment on this cheap old heap of a house. A year later I got laid off and knocked up in the same month.

But that’s another post entirely.

The advice has been coming back to me recently as I ponder the possibility of being successful in the thing that most stokes my curiousity and purpose now: writing. Yes, my friends, I have heard the mommy bloggers on NPR and seen the mommy bloggers on the morning talk shows. I have even checked out their famous blogs. In many cases, I’ve thought, “What was she thinking?” In no case have I thought, “Let me run out and purchase a case of that purportedly healthy pre-packaged snack product that cute mommy blogger likes so much.” But maybe that’s just me and my aversion to capitalism.

I’ve even had moments of soaring ambition and hope when I realized: it is possible to become famous for being a snarky, self-doubting and neurotic mother. OK, in the specific case I’m thinking of the author happens to also be a brilliantly talented writer. But still, you cannot deny that the life force behind Alice Bradley’s finslippy is dark snark. Are you denying it? Read this. This is the kind of dark snark that makes my heart sing with validation and wonder. This is the kind of dark snark that makes me laugh so hard I want to punch BirthPie. This is the kind of dark snark that makes me wonder if Alice Bradley would be my friend. If she wasn’t so famous and brilliant and everything.

Sometimes I’ve checked out the website of someone having wild success in the blogosphere and as a writer and I’ve had had to admit, in some tiny shimmering corner of my own self-doubting, neurotic little mind, “I’m that good. I might even be better.”

I started this blog on the kind advice of Martha Brockenbrough, who is generous and funny and genuine and has awesome taste in baby names. She blogs at cozi now and she is obsessed about grammar, which I think is an excellent trait in a writer and a human being. Martha suggested blogging as a way to practice writing. It didn’t occur to me to practice writing parenting advice, product endorsements or marketing contests, so I’ve been practicing writing essays. One decent first- (or perhaps first-and-a-half)-draft essay, nearly every week since February.

It’s exciting to be writing so much and to like what I’m producing. It’s even more exciting to reflect on the writing I most deeply admire—the sermons of SpecK and Victoria Safford; the essays of David Sedaris and Catherine Newman; the spiritual memoir of Anne Lamott and Mary Rose O’Reilly—and to think, “I’m not that good yet, but I think I can, I think I can.” It’s like being a color belt in the thrall of the black belts. It keeps you at the practice.

My book coach, the aforementioned Ellen Snortland, thinks I’m further along than I realize in the development of not one but three books. She turned my left brained, Virgo self on its head by suggesting that my essays might not be as unfinished as I think—after all, I’m letting all of you read them, week by week.

Which gave me the butt kick I needed to make this request: Help me take over the world.

What else are you doing tonight? And, why not me?

I promise to keep practicing. I’ll do all of Ellen’s assignments, and all of Kate Hopper’s too. I’ll submit my work to magazines real and virtual, and I’ll write that book proposal. In the meantime, why not grow this blog bigger and better? Why not me on the Today Show worrying about my bra showing?

OK, how about just attracting a few more readers then?

Here’s how you can help my evil plot:

Subscribe. My web designer tells me that if you click the RSS feed button at the top of your screen, your computer will notify you every time the blog is updated. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how it works, and I can’t help you if it doesn’t. (If you are very, very confused and you ask me very, very nicely, I may ask my oldest and bestest computer tech friend, The Nectarine, to explain it to you. )

Share. Well, not this entry. This one is all nervy and self-centered and it keeps linking you to blogs I think are better than mine in a sort of creepy, sycophant way. But maybe you could share the one about getting to the church on time. Or the one about the mice. Or the one about swim lessons and the sea smell of newborns. What if each of you forwarded it to one friend? Maybe two friends? Do you think we could start a mindbodymama movement?

Link. If you love me, link to me. Link to me on your big sexy blog or the tiny little one that only your mom reads. (Maybe she will love me too.) Link to me on facebook. Comment on other people’s big sexy blogs and refer them to relevant posts of mine.

Comment. One of the reasons I quit writing the first time was that I knew I would go crazy alone in a room. (I went crazy anyway, but I think that was made easier by not trying to be a writer at the same time.) I love to hear from you. It’s like getting up and doing a reading every single week, without ever having to get dressed or leave the house. Keep me going.

I’ll be doing my part: writing my fool head off, and spending long evenings squinting at the blog networking sites trying to find the virtual community of “feminist mamas aspiring to be great writers who are widely read and fairly paid.” Those spots are hard to find amongst all the other sites for “people who want to shill for major corporations” and "people who like the sounds of their own voices," but I feel confident that I’ll find support somewhere.

We can do it. Are you with me? Let’s take over the world.

Publications: Cribsheet

I'm thrilled to be featured in the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Cribsheet blog along with colleagues from Kate Hopper's fabulous Mother Words writing class. Please take a moment to read the essays by these fabulous women. I hope you will be reading their memoirs in a local bookstore soon!

Cribsheet selected a free-writing exercise I wrote for Kate that begins:

"My daughter’s death is with me all the time."

Click the title of this post to be immediately directed to the rest of my essay about irrational mama fear.

Mind Body Mama: Warm Brains

One of the most incredible gifts to come to me from karate camp was the opportunity to meet Ellen Snortland. Even more amazing: at the silent auction, I bid on Ellen’s services as a non-fiction book coach. And I won.

Apparently, now I have to write a book. Or two or three.

But that’s not what this post is about.

If you don’t know Ellen yet, check out her blog on the Huffington Post. It is always ravingly feminist and is often focussed on issues of self-defense and violence prevention.

If you are or have a mother, you should not miss any opportunity to see Ellen’s Pulitzer-nominated one-woman show, Now That She’s Gone. It’s the kind of performance that will have you stomping your feet, doubled-over with laughter, while tears of sadness stream down your face.

BirthPie and I saw it together and she said, “It was so funny I wanted to punch you!”

If you are a writer, you should consider hiring Ellen as a coach. She is incredibly gifted at this work: her passion, creativity, and deep love for writers is apparent in every exchange. Among her many brilliant exercises is a writer’s warm-up she calls a Brain Warmer. I usually bristle at writing exercises, but when Ellen says something like, “See how amazing writing is! A whole world that never before existed can come into being just by you typing at your keyboard for five minutes!” I begin to soften.

Brain Warmers take five minutes—just five minutes!—and start with three words. (That’s all I’m going to tell you—if you want to learn the secret of this and other terrific writing exercises, you need to call Ellen.)

I will share one of my recent favorite results, though:

Aluminum foil, if it is crafted properly around a toilet paper tube, can apparently help you see the future. That’s what Small tells me about Super Future, her recycled invention. It’s on the staircase next to a pink tulle tutu and a green hoodie, a veritable trail of breadcrumbs leading to a life sized tiger, a week’s worth of dirty underpants and a disaster scene complete with rescue vehicle and Life Flight helicopter.

Why does everything I write have something to do with underpants?

How did my life come to be like this? I want to be the hipster in the Ikea ad, with my ebony desk and silver foil computer, sitting beneath a poster-sized picture of my little darling rockin’ out.

But the reality is me hopped up on too much coffee while workmen track sawdust all over my house, pollen dusts the shining ebony surfaces, and the debris replicates itself if I look away for a moment. In a closed loop, I bend to pick up the same library book and gently replace it on the shelf. Over and over through the weekend, until I come to Monday screaming for an escape.

How long is this five minutes anyway?

And then I anchor my ass at the computer and strap in, shoulder to the grindstone to plow through the day’s to do list, domestic detrius be damned.

Mind Body Mama: Updates and Shout Outs

On the injury front

This morning I had Mimi, the masochist's massage therapist, work on my shoulder. I recommend Mimi most highly; she is a crucial member of Team Lynne Marie, the various body-workers and healers who keep my dilapidated body viable. Her treatments are incredibly effective, if not entirely enjoyable.

To get a taste of what I went through, dig your index finger in above your collarbone and pinch with your thumb from underneath. Continue to pinch yourself as hard as you can for the next hour. Take a few breaks from the pinching to poke yourself in the throat.

As a result of this therapy, once again, I am a hurtin’ pup. I’ve worked with Mimi enough to know that this is a good sign, but in the short term I’m all tingly hands and aching chest again. So I’m going to keep this post brief and give a few updates and shout-outs.

With the exception of Mimi and Dr. Pat—the core members of Team Lynne Marie—and Dr. Henre—the emergency pinch hitter who kept me from going mad with pain before I could reach Dr. Pat— no one really understands or believes the cause of this injury. This is the incredible, true story:

Once upon a time, when I was pregnant, I ate a bowl of soup at the Greenfield Coop. While lifting a spoonful of cream-of-carrot to my lips, something in my right shoulder shifted. Suddenly, I could not turn my head. Subsequently, I have reinjured something on the right side every year or so: a pulled latissimus, an inability to turn my head, a rearrangement of my ribs.

I received brilliant physical therapy for this syndrome from the crazy geniuses at Advance Therapeutics (the final third of Team Lynne Marie.) And when the pain finally went away, I stopped doing my exercises. And even when the pain started threatening to return, I did not do my exercises. And when I noticed activities that exacerbated the pain, such as typing, I neither curtailed the activity nor did my exercises. And when my arm and chest began aching from a marathon weekend of typing, not only did I not do my exercises, I taught karate and did several hundred punches. And somewhere in those hundred punches one of my ribs decided that enough was enough, and it started stabbing me from the inside to get my attention.

There you have the recipe for pain and suffering: underlying cause, coupled with stupidity, denial and lack of self care. Voila!

I recently ran into my old training buddy Seamus and updated her on my benched status.

“How did you get this injury again?” she asked.

“Typing.” I said.

For this I got a long look of silent pity and deep skepticism. Finally,

“Typing? Aren’t you tougher than that? I mean, I’ve kicked you and you seemed a lot tougher than that.”

The women in my Wednesday muscle conditioning class say I need to make up a better story. Something that involves slaying bad guys and rescuing old ladies where I come off really heroic. Not like someone who is bested by keyboards and soup spoons.

Wish I thought of it first

I wish there was an award for the best use of fitness jargon so I could nominate Kara at Mama Sweat for the term she coined this week: kegel fartlek. Even—or maybe especially—if you don’t know what either of those words mean, you have to admit they sound fantastic together. Read them out loud: kegel fartlek. Say it three times fast. Say it to your sweet darling, just to make him or her giggle. Then read Kara’s post on kegel exercises and send it to all the postpartum mamas you know.


Excellence in teaching

I set a pretty high bar for teachers. I demand a lot more than knowledge of their subject matter—though I do expect that too. I want a teacher who walks with her students, who is present to their inquiry and discovery, who nurtures the teacher within each student and fosters a community of learners. I am thrilled to say that I am receiving this and so much more from my new writing teacher, the incomparable Kate Hopper. I expect every one of you to run out and buy her book when it comes out. (If you’re wondering how you’ll know when her book comes out, don’t worry—I’ll let you know.) Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll come out to our coast for a book tour.

Since my keyboard time is rationed tonight I want to close by sharing a character sketch of Charlie Dada—my father, otherwise known as Grampy. I wrote it for Kate’s class and it filled me with fondness for the old guy:

"My father reads at the picnic table on the porch after dinner. He sits on the bench, leaning against the plastic-coated tablecloth, in a pool of light from a cheap white overhead fixture. His ashtray rests to his right, cigarette smoke curling towards the light and pooling around him. Across the dark yard, behind the stand of evergreens, the highway speeds through. The constant roar is like the ocean in a shell, dull and unchanging. The cars’ tiny headlights fly through the night and flicker through his trees.

The New York Times is piled on the bench beside him. His book is open in his hands. He is too big for the table, the bench, but his body is at ease in its bulk. His head nearly reaches the light. His legs are stretched out, ankles folded under the table legs. He never really has enough room for them so he’s not uncomfortable here. His hands are enormous and dark and scarred, his fingernails permanently stained from engine grease and diesel oil. He is completely still but for turning the pages, lifting the cigarette to his mouth and laying it down again."