There are days when I feel that I am inexplicably Other. Other from other people. Friends, family, companions, peers. Other even from myself. It’s difficult to explain. It’s not a feeling of sadness or anger. It’s more a feeling of being off-center, of having slipped slightly to the left or something. Like I am standing beside my world rather than within it.
I feel like Alice, sometimes. That I am, somehow, not quite myself. Though, I suppose that might be true for many of us.
Not a great deal on deck today. It’s been a rainy, gloomy, blah sort of day. I was more active this evening than throughout the whole of the day. But, now, my daughter is abed, I am contemplating a cup of something before my own bedtime, and then, hopefully, some deep, good sleep.
Perhaps tomorrow, my dears. Perhaps tomorrow.
For a long while, I have had a blank document sitting in my Microsoft Word and it is entitled “Sacred Spaces”. I had an idea of what I wanted to write in it but could never quite find the words to express it. Also, what specific spaces would I write about? Then, this morning, it came to me. Well, the beginning did.
After our walk this morning, I took my daughter out to our backyard to play. I sat on the porch swing that is hung on our swing set frame beneath a large oak and made myself stay put while she ran to and fro between the swing set/slide and her playhouse just beyond our mulberry tree. This is one of my sacred spaces: my morning backyard. I love my backyard in the mornings. Overspread with deliciously cool shade,
only dappled by the sun, and a cool eastern breeze at my back. Heavenly! Now, sometimes, my backyard isn’t quite so pleasant. If it has been frequently rainy or muggy, the bugs are often out in force, which means nothing good for me. But, on an average morning, this is its norm. I spent our time in the backyard swaying placidly in the big swing, enjoying the breeze on my back and shoulders, my reverie only broken by Elizabeth’s request for me to help her into her swing and then swing in the “big girl” swing beside her. Later, I held her on my lap while she drank some water and, together, we listened in silence to the world. We heard the leaves rustling with the breeze, the birds chirping in branches nearby, the deep barking of dogs down the street, and the distant rumble of an oncoming train.
This is one of the places where my daughter learns about the world around her. It is where she is learning to play and climb and imagine. It is where she pulls bark off the oak to look at it more closely. It is where she strips the leaves off a fallen branch to make a sword. It is where she picks grass blades in order to “cook food” in her playhouse. It is where she picks a handful of “flowers” (weeds) and tosses them into the air with a joyful abandon. This is where she worships in her own toddler way.
This sacred space is where I am learning, too. I am learning to breathe, to inhale the quiet that can be found in the foreground of a moment and let the rest fade into the background. I am learning to release my fear and worry and to trust my child’s courage. I am learning to sit in silence and just be, to feel the heartbeat of the world and to find my soul reaching out to it. This is where I am remembering that God will be Who He will be. Remembering that God will be just what I need as I go through life. I have sat in this backyard time and again, sometimes in tears, sometimes in frustration, sometimes in so much pain that I can barely breathe. I have shared this pain with others and borne it alone. Other times, I have sat in this place and shared laughs and stories with family and friends, the fire casting golden glows over our faces or the moon its blue moonlight over our forms. Three years ago, I sat in the quiet around dying embers and marveled in awe at the truth that my husband and I would soon be parents. I have found my heart bursting with joy for the beauty and peace that can be found in so small and simple a place as I call home.
This is my sacred space. This is my holy ground.
Well, one of them anyway. As I said, this is the beginning.
On the way home from errands today, I was listening to Michael Buble’s Christmas album (hush, I can listen to music whenever I please, regardless of season) and he began to sing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”. I always smile when I hear that song, remembering the years that I would board two to three planes to wend my way to my home with my parents for the holidays. Now, more and often, I realize that I will be home for Christmas, without ever leaving.
I have lived in Indiana for the past fourteen years, the first six of which I was in undergrad and then graduate school. Ever since I first set foot in this state, I knew I was where I was supposed to be. It wasn’t for several years that I would come to call it home, however. When I left southern Indiana and headed north of Indy for graduate school, I was homesick for my world of the past four years something terrible. I promised myself that this new city would “never be home”. I have no problem admitting that I was terribly, terribly wrong. It is most definitely home. It is where I live with my husband, where my daughter was born, where my in-laws live, where I first started my teaching career. It is where I discovered myself and crafted my life as an adult. This is home. Amongst the fields, the woods, the cities, and the surprising little towns. That’s not to say that the place where I grew up isn’t home as well. It is. It keeps my family and my memories, but it is more ‘childhood home’, where I used to live. My bedroom in my parents’ house is a guest/craft room now, with only a few vestiges of it ever having belonged to a kid-teenager-young woman at one point. But that’s all right.
This is where my heart is. This is home. I will be home for Christmas, and that makes my heart swell.
My most recent article published by The Well Written Woman:
“My aging was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book.” – Marguerite Duras, The Lover
I have a few friends who have sometimes exclaimed to me that I haven’t changed my looks since I was seventeen. Heavens above, but I hope I have. And I think I have, too. Looking at myself in the mirror, I often have to push past the tendency to see myself at seventeen, the first major changing point in my life: when I went off to college. That image of me has stuck rather stubbornly over the past fourteen years. But, if I can look past it, I can study my reflection for quite a long time and find subtle differences.
I think back over the critical points of my life and how my body – my physical form – has changed and transformed with them. I gained eight pounds my freshman year of college and no one at home had the heart to tell me until I wore my favorite dress to my friends’ high school graduation. Afterward, I was told by a young man that I had known from my church’s youth group that I shouldn’t have worn it, that I “looked fat”. I don’t think I ever wore that dress again, nor spoke to him beyond what was polite. That dress, formerly beloved and the very same one that, only a year or two prior, I had been proclaimed “beautiful” in by another young man (can’t tell you how many times I read that email), the poor thing faded away into obscurity in my closet. Don’t know what happened to it to this day. What can I say? Words have power and the social movement for self-love in young women was at least another decade off.
In my first semester of graduate school, with the stress and a myriad of changes in my life, I lost almost twenty pounds in quick succession, my rapid weight loss finally slowing to pause around ninety-seven or ninety-eight pounds. It was corrected with a visit to the doctor, some meds, and conscious efforts to relax a bit more the following semester. However, that didn’t stop the comments of “You look great! You lost so much weight!” when I went home for the holidays. Unfortunately, they weren’t as much of a compliment as those giving them probably intended for them to be, as I knew that I was currently unhealthy. But, eventually, I found a happy and healthy place again.
I am a late bloomer as far as my looks and physique go, at least in my opinion. My skin has never been perfect but I can keep it fairly under control. My body never really settled into its shape until after I got married. As I entered my thirties last year, I found that I began to notice a more mature look to my eyes, the curve of my cheeks, and the turn of my mouth. If I tilt my head, I find the line of my jaw. I trace it with my fingers and find it still strong, still defined but without all the softness of my youth. A softness is still there but of a different sort, borne of a deeper understanding of love and life. Sometimes I hardly recognize myself. I see a new depth of experience in my eyes and wonder, “Where did that come from?” Smiles and laughter have begun to imprint themselves in the corners of my mouth, moments that I cherish and am thankful for hiding there along with Mrs. Darling’s kiss. I read, with my fingers, the slope of my neck into my shoulder and find it strong from burdens borne. The way I hold my hands is permanently influenced by my years in belly dance. I’ve lost a bit of my curve since having my daughter, my waist coming out to meet my hips a bit more. There’s more of a fullness here, a roundness there. A scar where there was none before. The landscape of my body has changed over the past fourteen years, and that’s all right.
I am finding that I am growing happier and happier with myself. I have managed to lose most of the baby weight after fourteen months and I am getting back into toning again, little by little. But, most of all, I am learning to appreciate myself for just that: myself. That is hard work in and of itself, an exercise of the mental and the emotional as well as the physical. I cannot pretend to tell you how it’s done; I don’t have a secret, I don’t have an answer. Just a fortunate turn in years of difficulty with self-esteem and body image. It catches me by surprise sometimes, me looking at myself and smiling. When did I become so chummy with myself? I don’t really know, but I like it.
My journals since 2000, minus the most recent one.
One of the most interesting things that I will bequeath to Elizabeth (and other children we might have, if we decide to) is my stack of journals. I have ever journal that I have kept since entering college in 2000. I had one when I was a kid but destroyed for reasons I can no longer remember. I love writing here but it will never replace a paper journal. Which leads me to other thoughts.
Why do I need this? Why do I have the need, the compulsion to physically write down my thoughts?
I like writing. I like seeing the words flow out of my pen. Sometimes I don’t know my own thoughts until they are voice and, at the same time, I’m not comfortable voicing them to another living soul. My journals are the reliquaries for my emotions, for my thoughts, my failures, my joys, my despairs, my memories.
I write things down so I can remember them, remember that feeling in that moment for that reason. I wrote down the progression from theatre goer to script contributor for the American College Theatre Festival back in 2001 (though it’s not nearly as glamorous as it seems) because I wanted to remember every step. Every important date of mine and Ben’s beginning relationship is written down and my students were stunned to see that I could recite them all, which even on which date (first date, first kiss, officially a couple, engagement). I wrote down the date I first felt my daughter kick in the wee hours of the morning, the date that we found out that we were indeed going to have an Elizabeth and not a Jeremiah. I write these things down because they are important to me and so that, in my old age and inevitable senility, I can read back and, even if I don’t remember it, I can relive the warmth of it all just a little bit.
I write to hide. Like a friend wrote for his character not too long ago, “I know we’re supposed to feel, but feelings and actions are two different things…” he says. “Isn’t it better, sometimes, with some emotions, to stuff them away til later? Not forever… just til later?” I write to stuff those feelings and thoughts away so I can put on a happy face to the world or least one that doesn’t provoke questions and uncomfortable confrontation. (Oh, but I hate confrontation.) My journal holds those feelings, locked away from anyone else’s eyes. I’m a private person anyway and, though I am way past the journal-with-a-lock days, it is rare to never that I will offer you a peek at my journal. I always keep it near me and my mom was very good about reminding me to take it with me when I left the TV room and put it away. In my journals, My journal serves no other purpose than to keep my secrets and those parts of me that I wish to remain secret and private, ie, the perfect place to hide. Then, with the release valve hit, I can face the world with at least some bit of a lighter heart, maybe.
I write to know myself. Like I said, I sometimes don’t even know my own mind until I start writing it out. Sometimes I don’t like what I am thinking but it’s still does me good to find out just what that is. And giving myself the space to admit that I don’t like the way I am thinking or feeling is helpful; there’s no one there to contradict me and I am able to be brutally honest with myself about myself. I may not always be able to be so with people but my journal allows me a place to at least try to be honest about myself and learn about myself.
I’m not saying that there is feasibly no other way that I could gain a depth to myself without my journals but, for me, I think that this has been one of the best ways over the past 13 years. One that I don’t think I’m going to give up any time soon.
There are moment. Stark, quiet, beautiful moments. Moments that make no sense and are all the more beautiful for not. Moments that change your world in an instant, only for that instant. I had one such moment today.
Sitting in the vestibule by the gym entrance today after lunch, as it is a spot with benches and some early afternoon sun, I had just finished reading a chapter in Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and my mind still whirred with color and whispered words and touches and kisses so real that I could feel them on my own fingertips and neck. I found myself looking through the glassed doors and walls to the sunny world outside and it was as though the world stopped for a moment. I was in a fishbowl, looking out and observing a sun-washed tableau of the world. It was a profound, confusing, quiet moment.
And then it was gone. I picked up my Kindle again and kept reading, tumbling into the world of the circus and its performers and the challenge that surrounds it again. But that moment was so poignant in its…whatever it was, that I couldn’t sit still again and had to hurry back to my classroom to get paper and pencil to jot it down, which I have now transcribed here.
There are moments. We should cherish them.
MWGS: Mom, Writer, Geek, Superwoman 