“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
“And so much more.”
Velma Kelly to the Officer of the Court: ChicagoI have a problem I’ve lived with all of my life. I don’t feel legitimate. I’m not talking about my birth circumstance, but the backdrop of my life. Some times are worse than others, but often I feel like a dog scrounging for the bones of affection and approval. Who knows the cause? Some say nature, some say nurture, some say a mixture of both. The spiritual pilgrims among us say it’s the god shaped hole in my psyche. Its origins don’t matter to me. What matters is, no matter what my good intentions are, I constantly stumble over other people’s opinions.
What matters is I have lived parallel lives. In one, the one you would see if you met me, I have been the dutiful: daughter, wife, mother, friend. I have been steadfast. I have faced gales and landslides, the first one at the barricade, the last one off the ship. I have been good in emergencies and hostage-of-life situations.
People say I am a good cook, but perhaps that’s because I do actually cook. I am recipe-impaired and do not know if I can follow instructions. Sometimes my husband asks if a certain dish has come to me by vision. He is not expressing gratitude. I have never been a citizen in the land of cooking…all of my successes are those of a beginner desperately seizing what’s at hand. And if someone else does not care for the results, suddenly neither do I.
I have not been good at term papers, housekeeping, yard work, and long term maintenance problems. Here I am sloppy, easily distracted, and quick to surrender.
This is the life you would see, the one I’ve lived as if I were trapped behind a bubble of clear acrylic, muffled and anxious, and often numb.
Then there is my other life…my unlived life. In this life I’ve known I wanted to be a writer since I was eight-years-old, but bewildered by my acrylic bubbled existence, I not only did not know the writing rules, I didn’t know what to write. It seemed to me everyone else was in on a secret I could not fathom.In this unlived life, this life of unrealized dreams, I’ve had flashes of awakenings.
I took up photography once. Like cooking, I could not comprehend the basic elements. For a while it seemed as if everything I saw was The Picture. I quit when I realized the camera was always between me and what was happening, and I wasn’t making progress with fstops and shutter speeds. Two years later, my husband created a website, honing in on the bizarre customs of the area where we’ve lived most of our lives. He called it Euclid, after a town in my unfinished novel. He looted my pictures. “You have the Euclid eye,” he said. I smiled, and felt I had missed some undefined opportunity.
I briefly took up clay, but when I discovered myself not setting, but making platters on the dining room table, and was still as lousy at vacuuming as I ever was, I decided I might be a trifle insane. Anyway, clay and I had not become one. It held its secrets and I could not quite decipher even its most basic nature. I was depleting clay deposits of the earth, and making dust-catchers Chinese factory workers could make better. Last month at a local discount store, I ran into an artist I admire, a potter with an essential eye. “Did you ever go back to potting?” she asked. She mentioned one of my pieces hanging on her mother’s wall. I said I didn’t have time, and I didn’t feel I was very accomplished at it. “I thought you really captured the expressiveness of clay,” she said, whatever that meant. “It’s a shame you didn’t keep it up.” Under the florescent lights I looked back at a path I had left, to glimpse something I’d lost I would never return to claim.
Though I wanted to write, always, but also figured I didn’t know enough to write, it was easier to pick up something else which would garner me someone else’s approval. Either that, or lie down with a good book. But I returned to writing over and over again.
At thirty-one, I took my first ‘writing class.’ “Why do you want to write,” was our first essay. Why do I want to write? Why do I want to breathe? I got slightly tipsy and let her rip. When I read my claim aloud in class, by the time I got near my closing line, borrowed from Bob Dylan, “Whoo-we, are we gonna fly…” my fellow students were drumming on their desks, and the teacher’s eye had a proprietary gleam….he had a star.
What he hadn’t anticipated was my penchant for getting stuck and falling down. Over the years I’ve spent less time falling down, because I’ve spent so much more time stuck…didn’t I mention that novel about Euclid? And my husband would ask when I was going to: weed my one flower bed, sweep the floor, clean the bathroom. This friend would need a little helping hand, or one of the children would have a small dire need. Throw in three parents (his and mine) with terminal illnesses. And the fact I did not know what I was doing when I was trying to fashion a novel, had no guarantee it would be good in the end, and was probably, no, most certainly was wasting my time…STOP.
Go piddle.
Along the way I participated in a few writing groups. And took writing courses, where, always (visualize the coy smile, the slight nod of the head, so ingratiating) I was the star. Not hard to do after twenty years of being a beginner.
Then Allyn Evans came along with her Queen Power book. On the recommendation of one of my writing teachers, she asked if I might help her edit it. Might I? What a plum. Good material, a gracious client, and a goal not my own. What better reason not to dust today?
My every-day friend took to parting with, “Get busy. Go write.” She was ready for me to be done already, and back into our regular schedule. Every time she encouraged me, I heard admonishment. I would feel bile rise in my stomach. I got the sudden urge to fall asleep. “Tell me to have fun,” I said. She did. Each time I heard, “Have fun,” I was surprised. And happy. “Yes,” I would say, hurrying off so the fun could start.
My husband gave me space, and started vacuuming his own room again. This was not our agreed upon arrangement. “Next week,” I would promise him. “This will be over soon.” I felt as if I were running a marathon, sprinting toward the finish line, praying to finish before his patience ended in an explosion of my guilt, the kind of explosion he never requires. Before my what-the-heck-are-you-doing-this-time switch flipped, and I came to my customary screeching halt.Finish I did. Fun it was.
Did I forget to mention this? Toward the end of the editing process, I called an English professor for some copyright advice. “What are you writing?” she said. “I’ve had your essay on my desk for nearly three years. Some people write well. Some people write to be entertaining. Your writing is life changing. It’s not yours to keep. Send it out.”
I had been instructed. I finished the editing, and once again could turn to my own writing.
Did I?
Uh-uh.
Not only that, it took me nearly two weeks to wash all the clothes I’d ignored during my joyfully chosen marathon. And there are still some areas of the house it’s best not to let venture without security by your side.Back to piddling…doing nothing wholly, nothing really getting done.
Then Allyn and I began pitching ideas about my next step. Critiquing, writing, a couple of Queen projects. Meanwhile, a friend flew home to check on her dad. I give her a rides to and from the big city airport—a 250 mile round trip, one we use to catch up on each other’s lives. On the way to fetch her, I remembered I hadn’t taken my blood pressure medication. Could this be terminal? No. But I thought about fatality, about all my small accouterments of skill and interest dissipating, dissolving like a wave into the sea.
On the way to her father’s house, my friend wanted to know about my work with Allyn. She mentioned my years of study, of my intense interest in writing.
Suddenly I knew what I have, what I have been given, I want to pass on, from mind to mind, from hand to hand. When I leave this world, I want to be clutching nothing. I want to die with my heart emptied, all my treasures fallen like seeds on the earth that nourished me.
I returned home, eager to work with Allyn, eager to follow the path of my own words.
As soon I checked the e-mail, went to lunch with a friend, dusted, made spinach lasagna, told my husband.
Told my husband?Why is this hard? He has always agreed for me to do what I choose to do…he would like not to go to work and do all the housework, too, but rarely complains if the bathtub has a film along the water edges.
When I finished the editing marathon, I emerged as if I were newly hatched to this world…tenuous, shaky, curious, glad.
I took the dogs out for a walk. The world seemed as new as I did. Trees hinted of furled leaves. Sparrows and sky formed kaleidoscopic patterns, complete with a fluting symphony. The new tips of branches shot outward from limbs as slivers of light. And what words can describe jonquils and narcissus on a sunny February day, the yellow and white almost an explosion among the dancing petals? If you do not remember, run quickly now out of doors. See what ever is growing or has grown, all the light and energy alive and pulsating, singing to you, singing with you.
Back now?
On this particular day in February I met my every-day friend. “I’m done,” I said. I almost sang it with the release of this wild spring day at the end of winter.
“Guess what I’ve been doing?” she said.
My brain was trying to fathom being alive, how in all that excitement to put one foot in front of the other. I knew her name and my name, but more than that was beyond my grasp.“Tell me,” I said.
“You haven’t been paying attention to anything I say,” she said.
I tumbled out of the ecstatic air, slammed against the term paper wall. Shamed.Trying to remember my lessons, ask for what I needed, not to automatically assume the mantle of guilt, I said, “I just finished the book. I can’t think. Tell me.”
“No,” she answered. “You’ll have to remember on your own.”
As she walked down the street, I was eight years old, just returned from riding the wind in Never Land, and found all the clothes my mother had dumped from my messy drawers out onto the floor for me to fold, edges neat.
My every-day friend is a good friend. She later said she was teasing. She later said she didn’t mean for me to be sad. She said she had missed me.
“I’ve finished,” I told my husband.
“I guess this is another of those things you’ve thrown yourself into that’ll never lead to anything," he said.
“It’s good,” I said. “I learned so much from doing it. I think other people will get a lot from reading it.” I stumbled over all the good things that had already occurred. And I was going to clean the house the next day. Then I realized…. “You mean money…..?” I was talking to the man who told me not to go back to work after my father died, to stay home…well, and put in a few hours a week cleaning the house. I was talking to the man I am sure has been my companion for eons, time immeasurable, who agreed at some moment when existence began to help me learn what I need to know.I was talking to the man four years away from early retirement, who felt he is living a prison sentence.
“Yes,” he said.
So how can I tell him…I am taking on this project, and this project, and this project? Writing never guarantees your next insurance payment. It’s always the crazy leap without the net. On the other hand, a clean toilet is a sure bet.
Soon after my daughter came over for a visit. She told us of a disagreement she had recently. “I hate feeling this way. I feel like a bad person. On one hand, I’m okay with the resolution, on the other I want revenge.”
“Those are just thoughts,” my husband said. “When you bring them to light, they aren’t really scary at all. They just go away. It’s when you try to hide them they become viscous, foul you up.”
“When I tell you these terrible things,” she said, “the next day they do seem to have gone away.”
“Think of thoughts as shadows,” he said.
Already I could see all my little secrets, black forms with no details, lurking in dark corners and darting behind pillars in my mind. Usually my husband stops with one statement, but this time he continued . He was telling me what I needed to hear. I knew he was telling a profound truth, and I could sense the well spring of great joy.
“When shadows are brought into the sunlight, they simply disappear.”
“Holy Spirit,” I said. This is the name we call when we recognize a truth unfolding from a friend, a mechanic, a bum on the street, a husband. I was laughing. “Aren’t we orating tonight!” The words clunked as I said them.
Later we played with the dogs before we went to bed. He asked me why I had told him to shut up.
I didn’t understand.
“When I was talking about thoughts coming to light,” he said. “You said I was orating. It’s the same thing.”
I started crying, unexpectedly, unstoppably.Of course there is more here. More ‘he said,’ ‘I said,’ but I knew enough to know I was crying because in some way I had hurt myself. And I knew what it was. I wanted to do new things. Take on projects which just interested me, which would not buy him one day out of work. I wanted to leap off the cliff yet again. Was I silly? Wasting my time? Selfish?
I couldn’t tell him because I couldn’t believe in myself. I couldn’t risk he would not only not believe in me…he would think I should do something a trifle less insane.
Years ago I would have thought my pain was his fault. That somehow what he thought was toxic to me, was denying me my gifts.
Today I know if I am allowing some part of my life to wither, I am the one who has made the choice.If I take up my pen and paper…or rather, my computer…if I choose to come to the edge of the cliff, breathe deep, plunge…
What will happen? Will I wake up? Will I call to my unlived life to wildly bloom like the jonquils in winter? Will I squander my time, be a fool? I know this. I couldn’t be worse at cleaning house.
So I am trying it one more time. I will write an essay, create a pamphlet, and clean a toilet. I will look at what it takes to follow a dream. Really follow a dream. I will be a citizen of my own country. I may squander my life, but I will not waste it.
I will share my path with you. I ask you to share yours with me. Tell me what you know. Tell me the dangers, and what eases the way.
And before I die, if I don’t ever feel legitimate, it won’t be because I never took up my own life. It won’t be because I never really lived.
Camellia
2005 by Donna Warnerall rights reservedhttp://www.queenpower.comdisclaimer
