Writing. Life.

Ree & Me & You

Ree, of the one-of-a-kind, laugh-out-loud blog, thepioneerwoman.com , posted a wonderful review of our memoir. It's not a typical review, in that she doesn't provide a synopsis of the plot, etc.; instead she tells us what the book meant to her, followed by a list of who should read this book and why. The photos of ranch life alone make her site worth bookmarking, much less her photo contests, which have me up laughing late into the night.

Ree added that she and her mom, with whom she's close, kept swiping the book from one another (this sounds really self-serving to write, but bear with me) which elicited comments from women who share that kind of relationship with their mom. Legions of other women, however, long for such closeness with their mom. I've gotten probably over a thousand emails from such women - young women still in active combat with their moms, women who still yearn for a mother's love decades after estrangement, women still wounded long after their mom's death. It's a raw nerve, this pain, always just beneath the surface. The face of even the most confident, funny, successful woman will change completely when the subject, and the feelings, come up. You've seen it, we know that look.

Many write about this with great poignance and courage, like Nita, on her witty blog advancedmaternalage.com. Karen Rani, of vodkarella.com, has a whole category called Motherless.

What's amazing to me is how women without the validation of a mother's love find their way to happiness, by their own bootstraps, by their stubborn determination to claim what should have been given them unconditionally, by mothering their children with a joy and care for which they have no blueprint. And by using that raw nerve like a divining rod to seek out and bask in  the love of good men. I got a lovely email from a woman, Susan L, who shared her poetry with me; perfect, delicate lines that illuminate this so beautifully. Thank you, Sue.

Glow

Not that my life

has ever been normal

like toast on Sundays

I thought it was

silly me

playing in the half-lit

dusk of summer

catching fireflies

cool grass underfoot.

Not that my life

has ever been tidy

like crisp white sheets.

I thought it was

no messes

too big or small

for my cleaning

thoroughly you see

without a trace.

Not that my life

has ever been shared

like wine at Communion.

I thought it was

being passed

with intimate reverence

each tart swallow

bitter reminder

of failed redemption.

Not that my life

has ever been predictable

like lilies on Easter

I thought it was

‘til I discovered

you were waiting

all along

to feed me toast and wine

on lily-white sheets

and in the dusk of redemption

you light my way

as if you’ve always known

I’d follow fireflies.

sml

If You Could See Yourself - Now

I'm on a train with a book. I don't care about the scenery outside, beautiful though it is, or about any of the more intersting travelers seated around me. I live, for the moment, in the alternate reality of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, hovering in the gray ash sky above the hapless father and son. It is the first book I can ever remember calling a masterpiece and really meaning it. The train tracks bend and the sun angles into the car, lighting up the dust motes, the silver luggage rack rails, the seat backs and my eyes, rudely. I tend to be volatile, instantly irritated, instantly soothed. Right now I am instantly irritated because the sunlight has broken the book's spell, I can't see the page. There's nowhere else to sit and lowering my eyelids to block the sun is useless.

I close my eyes to the sun, shut the book and it hits me equally instantly, and sharply - I am hating a moment in my life simply because the sun has cast her rays upon me. My life, all I have, this moment, all I have. To hate it? To hate anything about it? Decades from now, looking back before I go, that I hated any of it, even a single tiny moment?

They're weightless, gossamer, these moments, when something shifts and you look down upon yourself with tenderness and sudden pleasure.

The first time this happened was Mia's first tantrum, in the university cafeteria food line, with ten football players behind me and a hundred other students behind them, all in a hurry. I was frustrated, angry - and then something shot through me and I was suddenly, miraculously it seemed, elated. This creature of mine yowling on the floor and the mommy beside her was suddenly the most beautiful thing in the world. I let out a laugh and cried at the same time, picked her up over my shoulder, let her wail and flail away as I got my tray. It was one of those defining moments, that shift.

It happened last summer in Bratislava: I'm running like mad for a train, missing it because I didn't understand a track change announcement. It's boiling hot, my sister will be waiting in Budapest, worried, my cell doesn't work here, no one at the station speaks English, I'm breathing so hard I'm practically in tears, I'm being stared at, blah,blah,blah and suddenly the shift, the consciousness, again: my life my life right now this second my life, my hands gripping a red purse, a ticket, my hands with their big blue veins, my arms shining with sweat, my hair swept across my eyes, my blood throbbing in my ears, my sandals on stone laid by Slovaks in my grandmother's time, my little self beneath an electronic schedule board clacketing with flipping times and destinations. A lacewing moment. Myself suddenly smiling, my life exactly as it was and could only ever be, precious. A masterpiece.

Regret nothing.

It's All About We

A lovely young woman in pink stood to ask why she couldn't write about others in an unflattering way if what what she wrote was true. I was on a storytelling panel at the BlogHer conference. It was a good question, but I left feeling I hadn't given her a good enough answer.

"But, it's my truth" is something I hear a lot from bloggers and writers who've hired me to edit or consult. My answer addressed primarly the legal issues. It's going to take a few more precedent-setting lawsuits for bloggers to get that libel is libel, online or in print. And invasion of privacy is just as nasty, and expensive, a court battle. The truth may, may, be a defense, but, unless the person you're writing about is well-known, they're entitled, in varying degrees, to rights of privacy.

I also addressed the karma thing, asking if any of them would like to be publicly humiliated. Though I later realized that no one need worry about invinting karma with a denigrating or cruel post. If you've hit the save button, karma's already paid a little visit - you've just made yourself the kind of person who would publicly shame another human being not there to defend themselves.

What I most wanted to say, however, is that it doesn't matter what your ex or your sibling or boss or mother-in-law did or said. Ever. "Your truth" is never about them, or the government or all those Other Mommies on the opposite side of the so-called battlefield, any more than "their truth" is about you. If you want to write stories, of any length, that actually mean something, to you or anyone else, passages that resonate, touch a nerve, illuminate, and remain with a reader after they leave their laptop, you have to turn your gimlet eye on yourself.

Trouble is, we are blind to no one more than to ourselves. My experience has been that it is a willed blindness, sometimes unconscious, usually not. We are all very good at pretending not to know all kinds of things about ourselves. It's so much easier to make it about someone or something else. Things over which you have absolutely no control and are thus pretty boring to a reader. Because we already know all about making it about the other guy, we're all just as good at it as you are. What you do have control over, i.e. your reactions and/or responses to the the above-mentioned offenders and morons, ARE interesting, in fact, damn irresistible. Because now you're talking about Us. If you think you're a species unto yourself, brimming with perecptions, realizations and cute quirks unique to you, you and only you, think again.

If you're willing to pull the blindfold off and take a good hard look in the mirror, pen in hand, you'll offer to us our own reflection in yours. We love this kind of vicarious self-examination. It's like getting to rubberneck our own car wreck - we just can't take our eyes off of our bloody, frightened selves.

You'll have us eating out of your hands.

You Put 800 Women in a Room...

And it's kinda like the dog park. All a dog really wants is to be with other dogs. Even timid little Fifi cuts loose, squealing with joy, chattering from one pooch to another. They just talk and talk and talk. And talk. Women don't bond in duck blinds or on the golf course. We bond verbally, from the moment we can (ask any woman who's had a son and a daughter.) Which means we get to do it anywhere, with strangers in the ladies room (Love your shoes! Aren't they great! I got them last week at...) and, thank God for technology, online. We can yak with a woman in India about film theory or a gal in Vancouver about diapers or menopause. Or politics. Fertility. Iraq. Sex. Shoes and makeup. Wine. Arctic travel. Ricotta cheese.

I mean, where else would I find the only other woman I have ever met who loves military history as much as I do? When Sheila and I realized we'd found a kindred spirit, we did the sqeally, "Really? Me, too!!" wiggling in our seats like dogs wagged by their own happy thumpy tails. At least I felt wiggly with excitement - if she didn't, I'm going to be really embarrassed when she reads this. From her, I learned that the largest WWI museum is in Kansas City. What's always (like back to third grade always) held me in thrall about war is how it boils us down to our very essence. Human nature is what gets blown out of cannons and dropped from planes. I posted about this here.

I got to meet bloggers that speak to my two biggest passions aside from writing and history (military and otherwise) - food and travel. Pam of Nerdseyeview.com (is that a great name for a travel writer or what,) food columnist Allana, herb and culinary maven Kalyn, Shuna, a pastry chef who had the good sense to weep, a little, over the unfair closing of promising restaurants owing to cocky, uninformed bloggers, reminding everyone of how powerful our words can be and the damage they can do. As an author, this is something I've learned a thing or two about this year (doooon't get me started.) Shuna's writing is clever, sharp, moving - what she wrote about her time Chicago could go in the NYTimes travel section.

Three days of joyful racket at Chicago's Navy Pier has left me energized and inspired. It's also reminded me of how important it is to stay centered and conscious of your purpose. I thought our panel started fifteen minutes later than it did, so while the audience was seated at the right time, I was...on the potty, if you must know. I blew into the room discombobulated, was further ruffled by having no mike wrangler for another ten minutes, and proceeded to forget to share the most important thing I could have offered. I'll share it in my next post.

For those who attended our panel, I've just demonstrated a post that is not a "story," i.e. a well-structured beginning, middle and end, in which a character, me in this case, has changed, came to a new realization, etc., been "arc-ed" if you will, in a way that resonates in some way with the reader. A lot of my posts are carefully crafted, stories that I hope send readers off knowing a bit more about themselves, which, to my mind, is the point of any story. But, as all three of us heading the panel shared, that kind of crafting can take a lot of time, which is in short supply today. It's been difficult for me, as a professional writer, to get that it's just fine if a post isn't a story. The great thing about a blog is that it is just as happy to be part of a conversation.

Which brings us back to why women are like dogs, always wanting to be in conversation and connection with each other. A concluding sentence which, if I had a more time, has some story potential.