Well, sometimes mistakes repeat themselves. As in, think for a while, have an idea, pursue idea, and reap the wrath of presenting said idea. I don't think this is how it's supposed to work. I guess I've never had to explain in quite so much minutia what it means to feel creative. There...I said it. I don't think creative. I feel it. In my gut, like I need it to survive.
The same as I require food, a roof over my head that doesn't subject me or my loved ones to negativity and strife, and therefore a job. School is something I do on the side, because again I need to learn. I need to feel what it's like to learn from people who have been there, on the other side. I have some respect for my professors. Lifelong learning is for me. Lifelong schooling, probably not. But at this stage, continued education will help me in my job, and as I'm learning, in my life's work. It's taught me that I know very little, and yet I've learned so very much. It's a conundrum of sorts, as I think for me, recognizing my weaknesses helps me locate my strengths. And this leads to a whole lot of self-doubt, which can be crippling. But only if I let it.
I can say I'm wise, but this doesn't make it so. Not even if I say it one hundred more times. Wisdom, I think is something we obtain quietly, without much fuss. It typically comes on gracefully, but often enough it arrives painfully followed by a sort of sadness. Sadness that it took you so long to figure it out, sadness that the time in your life that was easy going and breezy has passed--even sadness that you don't even see it coming. It just eases its way into your bones; into the farthest reaches of your heart. It's acceptance and it is all of the things you've ever fought. Win or lose.
It may be easier to judge another person's plight. This kettle's been called out too many times not to recognize that it's easy to hate what you can't understand. Most of the time we spend looking at someone else and judging is simply a way to avoid introspection. I know this because I do it more regularly than I'd like. It's this fault in my process that makes me the most unhappy with myself. What I've learned to do is turn it around as often as I can and look at what I can do to make me the person I know I can be. As in the best version of me that I'm capable of becoming at the time. Because I can't "fix" someone else.
That's not to say I'm broken. Just bruised and tired. Still--a little self-awareness goes a long way.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Saturday, August 9, 2014
The Color Essay - an assignment
I thought after two months of writing classes, I'd post a little bit about what I've been doing in lieu of blogging. It's been busy, and even my final drafts need some tweaking, but I've enjoyed the exercise of writing more or less daily, even if it wasn't here.
Yellow. The color of two of my childhood homes. We moved from Massachusetts to Shreveport, Louisiana when I was three. My father had been transferred at work, so he left ahead of us and bought us a large ranch-style house with a carport and yellow siding from a writer and director of several B-rated horror movies. I don’t recall the move, but I do remember the house. It had a large kitchen with a bar overlooking the living room, a dining room, three bedrooms and a bath. It was 1977 and in the seventies, whatever wasn’t orange or yellow was brown. The living room was dark sometimes, as it was built toward the back of the house and had no windows. The other rooms were plenty sunny, and the grass grew as green as I’ve ever seen. My mother would sometimes make us picnic lunches to take outside and sit by the swing set to eat. Our neighbor, Rose, would often come to the chain-link fence that enclosed the backyard to chat with my mother.
For the most part, we enjoyed the house and the new location. We made new friends; my mother began a new part-time job as a real estate agent. Since both of my parents worked, we were occasionally left with a babysitter for several hours at a time. As many parents may know, teenaged babysitters often prefer to watch television or talk on the phone than play with bratty children. I took full advantage. By my mother’s account, I once “painted” the tub with bismuth because I wanted it to be pink. I shook baby powder across my brown bedroom rug because I wanted it to be white. I vaguely remember the latter act. I also recall feeding my sister and myself—one spoonful at a time—the entire contents of the grape cough medicine I’d found in the cabinet. That time, my father caught us and swooped us up into the bathroom. Panicked, he made us swallow a raw egg each, whole. If you’ve never swallowed a raw egg whole, I don’t recommend it. Unless, of course, you need urgently to throw up.
Most of all I remember tossing my yellow blanket over my head and into the bed of my mother’s friend’s pickup truck. When my mother retrieved it for me, we discovered that it had landed in a motor oil spill to be ruined for good. It was a sad day. Almost more sad than the day my mother turned to me at the side door, suitcase in hand and told me I couldn’t come with her where she was going.
When my birth parents decided to divorce, my little sister and I moved back North with my Dad. This was best. The fighting between my mother and father back in Louisiana had caused my sister to be ill; later, it made me ill as well. I recall that my father was a wreck. He had two little girls, and he didn’t even know how to style their hair, let alone feed them and dress them. Two months after we arrived in Massachusetts, my now step-mother then father’s girlfriend Cindy moved to Massachusetts to be with us. I was just glad that we didn’t have to eat cereal for dinner anymore. I can only imagine how relieved my father was. She was only 26, but she had helped raise three of her four brothers. My father was eight years her senior, and we were five and three. Thankfully, she was wise beyond her years.
About a year later, we moved from the small garden-style apartment where we had been living into a yellow cape with dormers and brown shutters. They married after a year and held the reception at the house. My sister loved Cindy dearly from the start. I regret that I appreciated her presence much less. It took me nearly 12 years to call her Mum. It took 20 years for my sister and me to start calling my birth mother, “the mother.” I don’t know why we do this, except that it helps us differentiate between two. Perhaps after that many years apart, your mother is your friend and a mother—just not your mother. I still feel badly if when talking to the mother I refer to Cindy as “Mum.”
Neither the mother nor my Mum would have guessed that my father would turn out to be an alcoholic. How my Mum has remained married to him is beyond what I can yet comprehend. Three years in therapy, and when it comes to my Dad’s illness, I got nothing’. None of us recognized it or saw it coming. When I recall our days in the yellow cape house, I remember his large brown ashtray full of butts next to a glass of gin and tonic (no rocks) sitting on the coffee table next to his recliner. And I remember he loved us very much. Sometimes, when we were riding in his little Datsun, he’d turn to me and ask, “How come you’re so cute?” I called him “Daddy” until I left home.
By all appearances, we led a charmed family life. Our house was huge compared to our friends’ houses, and my father built us a pool. He wasn’t a muscular man, nor was he handy; instead rather tall and lanky, like me. But he was dedicated and determined. We all watched “The Muppet Show” every week as a family. My father and I watched “Creature Double Feature” together on Saturday mornings—just the two of us, as my sister was terrified of the shows. On Saturday mornings he either made us elephant-shaped pancakes, or picked up doughnuts on his way home from work. He was the production manager at a tool and die company, and worked as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone work. He had been there 35 years when according to him, without as much as a warning they laid him off. I don’t think he’ll ever recover from the shock.
Everything he did, he either for us, or for work. Nothing else mattered to him. Whenever I went somewhere I shouldn’t, he found me. When my softball coach insisted I play right field, or often enough, not at all for an entire season, my father insisted the coach move me to where there would be more action. Win or lose, he warned the coach that I was there to play softball, and that I would play softball. When the kids started to make fun of me and my lanky and four-eyed appearance, he gave me the best fatherly advice ever. “When the kids give you shit, punch them in the face,” he said. “They won’t bother you again.” So when my neighbor looked me in the eye and said, “At least I don’t have to go to a psychiatrist,” I slapped her right across the mouth. He was right; she never bothered me again.
My sister and I got bikes for Christmas, and dad took us a street over to the dead end to teach us how to ride. Every time he told my sister to just keep pedaling, she would whine and answer, “I can’t.” His patience wore thin, and he threw my sister’s bike in the bushes. “Now you can’t,” he said. I remember her, terrified and crying in the road, and I remember pulling her bike out of the bushes and walking it home for her. He was always infuriated when I was late home from the movies. Or anywhere. He was worse when I started getting C’s instead of A’s and B’s. Don’t get me started about the F. My sister cried a lot. My father yelled a lot, and so did I.
Eventually, my parents sold the house we grew up in. Maybe we grew out of it. We got a new house in a new town, where we went to a new school. The house was blue. It was on a cul-de-sack with a long, paved driveway and a two car garage. It was nearly 2000 square feet with a wraparound porch. As large as it was, it wasn’t big enough for the four of us. My father threw me out over and over again. I had two years of high school to go. During my senior year, he threw my bed down the stairs, out the front door, and over the porch onto the lawn. I didn’t know what to else to do, so I called a friend’s mother to pick me up and moved out for good. I was 17.
I’m 39 now, and my father is still on the sauce, so they say. He has the early stages of liver disease, but he doesn’t know that “fatty liver” test results mean he has sustained damage from the years of alcohol abuse. He doesn’t yet know that the color yellow is coming for him, but I do. He tells me that he’s sorry he wasn’t a better father. The thing is, he was. I tell him so, but his wires are crossed—he doesn’t receive the message. I tell him he can be a better father now, because now is what really counts. But he’s sad and lonely no matter what anyone says, even his first daughter. This, because his only friend is Smirnoff. I don’t much care for that guy.
I have what they call “generalized anxiety disorder.” Maybe it’s hereditary, and maybe it’s just life. All I know for sure is that the little yellow pills I take make it better. I struggled with the idea of medication for a long time. I knew I had been o.k. once, but the longer I fought it, the farther from o.k. I drifted. I thought I must be able to manage on my own, and I held out for two years. I couldn’t travel, I hated crowds, and every time I ate it felt like I was choking. When I couldn’t breathe anymore and I could no longer tell the difference between happy and anxious, I took the script and filled it. I wanted to drive again. I wanted to work. Most of all I wanted to live fearlessly and fiercely again. Yellow to me is home. It is fear, and it is disease. And yellow is for Paroxetine Hydrochloride. I know now that sometimes good people fall on terrible times. That we can’t judge a person’s character by their illness, as humans are so prone to do. I try to remember this every day. What would you do?
Take One of These
Yellow. The color of two of my childhood homes. We moved from Massachusetts to Shreveport, Louisiana when I was three. My father had been transferred at work, so he left ahead of us and bought us a large ranch-style house with a carport and yellow siding from a writer and director of several B-rated horror movies. I don’t recall the move, but I do remember the house. It had a large kitchen with a bar overlooking the living room, a dining room, three bedrooms and a bath. It was 1977 and in the seventies, whatever wasn’t orange or yellow was brown. The living room was dark sometimes, as it was built toward the back of the house and had no windows. The other rooms were plenty sunny, and the grass grew as green as I’ve ever seen. My mother would sometimes make us picnic lunches to take outside and sit by the swing set to eat. Our neighbor, Rose, would often come to the chain-link fence that enclosed the backyard to chat with my mother.
For the most part, we enjoyed the house and the new location. We made new friends; my mother began a new part-time job as a real estate agent. Since both of my parents worked, we were occasionally left with a babysitter for several hours at a time. As many parents may know, teenaged babysitters often prefer to watch television or talk on the phone than play with bratty children. I took full advantage. By my mother’s account, I once “painted” the tub with bismuth because I wanted it to be pink. I shook baby powder across my brown bedroom rug because I wanted it to be white. I vaguely remember the latter act. I also recall feeding my sister and myself—one spoonful at a time—the entire contents of the grape cough medicine I’d found in the cabinet. That time, my father caught us and swooped us up into the bathroom. Panicked, he made us swallow a raw egg each, whole. If you’ve never swallowed a raw egg whole, I don’t recommend it. Unless, of course, you need urgently to throw up.
Most of all I remember tossing my yellow blanket over my head and into the bed of my mother’s friend’s pickup truck. When my mother retrieved it for me, we discovered that it had landed in a motor oil spill to be ruined for good. It was a sad day. Almost more sad than the day my mother turned to me at the side door, suitcase in hand and told me I couldn’t come with her where she was going.
When my birth parents decided to divorce, my little sister and I moved back North with my Dad. This was best. The fighting between my mother and father back in Louisiana had caused my sister to be ill; later, it made me ill as well. I recall that my father was a wreck. He had two little girls, and he didn’t even know how to style their hair, let alone feed them and dress them. Two months after we arrived in Massachusetts, my now step-mother then father’s girlfriend Cindy moved to Massachusetts to be with us. I was just glad that we didn’t have to eat cereal for dinner anymore. I can only imagine how relieved my father was. She was only 26, but she had helped raise three of her four brothers. My father was eight years her senior, and we were five and three. Thankfully, she was wise beyond her years.
About a year later, we moved from the small garden-style apartment where we had been living into a yellow cape with dormers and brown shutters. They married after a year and held the reception at the house. My sister loved Cindy dearly from the start. I regret that I appreciated her presence much less. It took me nearly 12 years to call her Mum. It took 20 years for my sister and me to start calling my birth mother, “the mother.” I don’t know why we do this, except that it helps us differentiate between two. Perhaps after that many years apart, your mother is your friend and a mother—just not your mother. I still feel badly if when talking to the mother I refer to Cindy as “Mum.”
Neither the mother nor my Mum would have guessed that my father would turn out to be an alcoholic. How my Mum has remained married to him is beyond what I can yet comprehend. Three years in therapy, and when it comes to my Dad’s illness, I got nothing’. None of us recognized it or saw it coming. When I recall our days in the yellow cape house, I remember his large brown ashtray full of butts next to a glass of gin and tonic (no rocks) sitting on the coffee table next to his recliner. And I remember he loved us very much. Sometimes, when we were riding in his little Datsun, he’d turn to me and ask, “How come you’re so cute?” I called him “Daddy” until I left home.
By all appearances, we led a charmed family life. Our house was huge compared to our friends’ houses, and my father built us a pool. He wasn’t a muscular man, nor was he handy; instead rather tall and lanky, like me. But he was dedicated and determined. We all watched “The Muppet Show” every week as a family. My father and I watched “Creature Double Feature” together on Saturday mornings—just the two of us, as my sister was terrified of the shows. On Saturday mornings he either made us elephant-shaped pancakes, or picked up doughnuts on his way home from work. He was the production manager at a tool and die company, and worked as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone work. He had been there 35 years when according to him, without as much as a warning they laid him off. I don’t think he’ll ever recover from the shock.
Everything he did, he either for us, or for work. Nothing else mattered to him. Whenever I went somewhere I shouldn’t, he found me. When my softball coach insisted I play right field, or often enough, not at all for an entire season, my father insisted the coach move me to where there would be more action. Win or lose, he warned the coach that I was there to play softball, and that I would play softball. When the kids started to make fun of me and my lanky and four-eyed appearance, he gave me the best fatherly advice ever. “When the kids give you shit, punch them in the face,” he said. “They won’t bother you again.” So when my neighbor looked me in the eye and said, “At least I don’t have to go to a psychiatrist,” I slapped her right across the mouth. He was right; she never bothered me again.
My sister and I got bikes for Christmas, and dad took us a street over to the dead end to teach us how to ride. Every time he told my sister to just keep pedaling, she would whine and answer, “I can’t.” His patience wore thin, and he threw my sister’s bike in the bushes. “Now you can’t,” he said. I remember her, terrified and crying in the road, and I remember pulling her bike out of the bushes and walking it home for her. He was always infuriated when I was late home from the movies. Or anywhere. He was worse when I started getting C’s instead of A’s and B’s. Don’t get me started about the F. My sister cried a lot. My father yelled a lot, and so did I.
Eventually, my parents sold the house we grew up in. Maybe we grew out of it. We got a new house in a new town, where we went to a new school. The house was blue. It was on a cul-de-sack with a long, paved driveway and a two car garage. It was nearly 2000 square feet with a wraparound porch. As large as it was, it wasn’t big enough for the four of us. My father threw me out over and over again. I had two years of high school to go. During my senior year, he threw my bed down the stairs, out the front door, and over the porch onto the lawn. I didn’t know what to else to do, so I called a friend’s mother to pick me up and moved out for good. I was 17.
I’m 39 now, and my father is still on the sauce, so they say. He has the early stages of liver disease, but he doesn’t know that “fatty liver” test results mean he has sustained damage from the years of alcohol abuse. He doesn’t yet know that the color yellow is coming for him, but I do. He tells me that he’s sorry he wasn’t a better father. The thing is, he was. I tell him so, but his wires are crossed—he doesn’t receive the message. I tell him he can be a better father now, because now is what really counts. But he’s sad and lonely no matter what anyone says, even his first daughter. This, because his only friend is Smirnoff. I don’t much care for that guy.
I have what they call “generalized anxiety disorder.” Maybe it’s hereditary, and maybe it’s just life. All I know for sure is that the little yellow pills I take make it better. I struggled with the idea of medication for a long time. I knew I had been o.k. once, but the longer I fought it, the farther from o.k. I drifted. I thought I must be able to manage on my own, and I held out for two years. I couldn’t travel, I hated crowds, and every time I ate it felt like I was choking. When I couldn’t breathe anymore and I could no longer tell the difference between happy and anxious, I took the script and filled it. I wanted to drive again. I wanted to work. Most of all I wanted to live fearlessly and fiercely again. Yellow to me is home. It is fear, and it is disease. And yellow is for Paroxetine Hydrochloride. I know now that sometimes good people fall on terrible times. That we can’t judge a person’s character by their illness, as humans are so prone to do. I try to remember this every day. What would you do?
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