The Balancing Act I Do

She came home from school in a mood the other day. She cried a little too easily, got a little too irritated with things, her feelings all on the outside. This is the flip side of that shiny coin of intensity that makes her so bright, so funny, so cheerful and magnanimous. These are the darker sides of those very same traits.

"What's wrong, baby? Why are you so sad? Did something happen at school today?"
"No. I'm fine." A stomp, and a swirl of skirts. Clearly she's fine.
"OK. Let me know if you want to talk about it." She doesn't want to talk about it. She's fine. I don't want to push it, I'm vigilant.

Another outburst. Screaming, sobbing over Legos. "Honey, take a  deep breath. This seems a little extreme."
Deep breath in, and on the exhale it all comes tumbling out: "Mama! Abby had such a rough day at school today and I felt so bad for her and there was nothing I could do about it. I felt bad. It made me grumpy and Hannah didn't care. I wanted Hannah to feel bad too, so I snapped at her. I know I shouldn't have done that and now I feel awful. I feel like she shouldn't even want to be my friend." This is between sobs and wails and deep breaths and nose blows. I hand her a tissue and wonder where to begin.

"Tell me about Abby's bad day." A tale of second grade woe: forgotten homework, a good student finding herself in a "bad" position, embarrassed. My jBird feels her pain keenly. These things are important. She knows how she would feel in the same spot and it bothers her.
"Is Abby OK now?" Abby got over it. She is, after all, seven. There are faeries to imagine, math problems to do, butterflies to chase. I choose my words carefully for once. It's a balancing act I do.

"One of the things I love best about you is your great big heart. You care about people. You understand that people are hurting and that bothers you. That's called empathy and it's a good thing to have." This prompts more wails from her.

We both take deep breaths and carry on. "Do you think Abby is still crying over her forgotten homework? But you are still crying for her. What do you think about that?" This is where it gets treacherous for me. One toe out of place, one false start... the balancing act I do.

"I think it's kind of silly." She heaves.
"Well, I don't know if I'd call it silly. It's not silly to care about people. That's important. It's also important to care about yourself, though."
"I do care about myself!" She does, too.
"I know you do, sweetie. But part of how we learn to care about ourselves is to not give too much of our hearts away." I can speak with authority on this subject. "It's nice that it touches you, but does it need to touch you that deeply for the rest of the day? Some things are worth all of this emotional energy, some things are not. For the things that are not, you need to take care of yourself by learning to guard your heart a little bit. You have to choose what will be a big deal, what will be sad, but not that big a deal." It is not my place to tell her what is a big deal and what isn't. The big deals of seven-year-olds frequently go unnoticed by adults. I remember this right now. There are many days that I don't remember this and dismiss her and tell her to stop yelling at her brother. This is the balancing act I do.

"How do I do it, Mom? How do I guard my heart? I can't help what I feel." Ahh. Busted. Therein lies the rub, doesn't it? How, indeed? I am still learning this. I fail at this miserably. But now I must explain what I know, but not what I always do. This is the balancing act I do.

"Well, your feelings come. They are automatic. They are essentially chemical reactions in your brain to a situation." I can talk like this to her. She's used to it. "We can't help those, they just happen. What we can help is what we do with them. It's up to you what labels you give them: anger, fear, sadness, love. Does that make sense?" It does. We've talked about this before.

"Oh! It's like the train coming into the station, right? I don't have to get on?" Yes, it's exactly like that. "But sometimes I forget and I'm on the train before I realize it." She loves a metaphor as much as her Mama does.

"Yes, that happens. We all do that. But you can choose to get off, apologize if you need to. Forgive yourself and move on." These are words that I say to her. I think she knows I don't fully understand them. I wait. She blows her nose.

"Sometimes I can't forgive myself." Her voice is small and tired and I blow my nose, because I know. This strange heredity that keeps me up at night. Did she just come that way? Something in my DNA that passed on to her like alcoholism or depression? Or have I taught her this through my actions? Both are terrifying and I find them unforgivable. You see why this is tricky for me. This is the balancing act I do.

She crawls on my lap, all long legs and angles where baby pudge used to be. She buries her head in my chest like she's done since her first hour on earth. We quietly sit and cry together over the things we can't forgive. I don't have practical answers for her. I have only my fear and my forgiveness and my love for her.

"We'll work on this together, OK?"

Exploding Unmentionables: An Intensely Personal Book Review (Sort of)

 If you've ever given birth, you'll understand what they mean when they say "the urge to push". Urge is putting it mildly. There is no wondering whether, perhaps, you may or may not be ready to push. There is no weighing the consequences. There is no sense in telling you not to push. There is no worrying about what people will think of your pushing. There is nothing in the world to do except push.

David Foster Wallace's description of a work in progress: “a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floors of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.”

There's no way to know what truckload of mental suitcases the reader brings to any bit of writing at any given time. As a compulsive writer and an avid reader, the most gratifying experience for me is when I read something that collides with me and has me screeching on the brakes and sending that mental baggage flying: exploding unmentionables in a colorful, embarrassing mess all over the place.

Mrs. Hagstrand was my 6th grade teacher. She was so beautiful to me with her flowing skirts, nubbly sweaters and thick ankles. She was Jewish, and therefore exotic in our small Vermont town. She wore chunky, ethnic jewelry and a sleek bob. I wanted so much to be her. I tried to dress like her, write like her, talk like her. I wanted so much for her to see the potential "her-ness" in me. I wrote a book of poems for a creative writing project. I barely remember the poems - a vague recollection of one about a unicorn - but I remember working and reworking them to make them sound just right. Earlier that year I had won a state-wide creative writing contest and had my story displayed outside the governor's office. Full of 11-year-old anxious excitement, I awaited my turn for a private conference for the teacher; for the praise of my latest literary endeavor. Shattered and sick to my stomach, I listened to her explain meter, rhyme scheme, feet, stanzas, all a blur of her red pen and the tears I tried to swallow. "Well Suzanne, I've seen you do a lot of things well, but this isn't one of them."

At some point, the diary I have kept since I was 6 years old became less a record of events and more a blank space for experimentation. Fragments of thoughts, poems, I'm sure a lot of angsty feelings, ideas about things outside my small existence, quotes from songs, books, conversations, magazine articles that resonated with me. I wrote frequently and abundantly, a place I could not only be wholly myself, but also to try out who I might want to be, how I might want to think. When I was 14, my whole family moved to China. Rather than fly out of New York or Montreal, we drove from Vermont to Los Angeles, stopping all across the country to say goodbye to family and friends along the way. A month in the minivan with my parents and siblings, drifting farther and farther away from my childhood home toward what might as well have been another planet. I kept myself busy with Aerosmith and my journal. My older brother kept himself busy reading my journal while I was asleep and repeating parts of it back in conversation while I was awake with a gentle, mocking smile.

The year I dropped out of college, my roommate and I spent all of our time in a coffee house. Writing and letting each other read it. We met some other aspiring writers (who wasn't an aspiring writer? Perhaps the aspiring rock stars?) and spent many a caffeine fueled night - bleary eyed, half-starved, electric - talking, writing, creating with the pretension that only 21-year-olds or established writers can pull off. That roommate remains one of my closest friends. In a recent email, she told me "Your words have kept me afloat this year."

I have the skeletons of short stories littered throughout my journals. Ideas I wanted to explore tangled and left to die in the brambles of poorly developed fictional characters, stilted dialogue, and broken plot lines. I stopped writing much because I didn't like to write fiction. I had stories to tell, but I wasn't famous enough for an autobiography, "important" enough for a memoir, but I got bored with fictionalizing it all. I started this blog as an outlet for that pent up writing. Every time I go to press "publish", my inner censor says: "Why are you publishing that? So much navel-gazing twaddle. Who would want to read that?"

In a prose creative writing class in college, my professor told me I could write tone very well. He told me I could make the reader really feel something, but that my plots went nowhere. I said wasn't it enough to make the reader feel? "Well no!" [pregnant pause in which his ruddy, jowled face seemed to reconsider] "No. No it's not." [quietly, as if to convince himself].

A few months ago, I said "screw it" and started this blog.

I read Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields when it first came out. I had never heard of him before but I read a review by accident as I was stuffing the newspaper into the wood stove and I was intrigued. In part, the book explores how the literary vehicle of the novel somewhat outmoded and tedious. Our current culture craves reality because it seems to be in such short supply. The literature we crave is the real or seemingly real. He speaks of elevating non-fiction from mere memoir or scholarly pursuit to the lyrical essay, the literary collage. I read it all in one night and couldn't sleep for the fire it started. A writer, a good writer, a published writer had defied genre and the literary world with this manifesto, this justification for my journals. It was as if, like my brother, he'd read my journals while I was sleeping and was repeating my thoughts back to me. Except instead of mocking, he returned my thoughts to me in this amazing, eloquent, intelligent, resonant collage. Serendipitously, he sent me a signed copy of the book which is now dog-eared, annotated, underlined and full of coffee stains. "For Suzanne - Good luck with your own writing - Glad to hear this book pushed you in interesting directions."

I went to hear him speak the other night at the library. I shook his hand afterward and told him thank you.
"Your book has liberated my writing. Thank you."
"You're welcome. You're the person I wrote that book for."