Everything and no one... like the

Three Rivers Village School - Many kids in my city need this...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:46:00 +0000

I went to the regular grocery store before sitting down to write. Every time I go to the grocery store, (not Trader Joes where all the cashiers and workers know my name and love my children and make me feel happy), the regular grocery store... I think of David Foster Wallace. (Have you seen the short film made from his speech?)

Anyway, there was a man in his seventies shuffling along in front of me, his back bent into a hump, his face pointed toward the ground. He was wearing an apron and a black, collared grocery store uniform shirt. He moved slowly. Painfully, like every footstep was like a little miracle. He shuffled across the hot black top, his apron hanging limply in front of him, and started to wrestle two stray carts together and push them toward the haphazard mess in the cart corral.

That man has lived for more than two of my lifetimes, he is bent and broken and gnarled, and they have him fetching stray carts from the parking lot. That is the way he spends his days.

Also, there is a group of college girls sitting near to me at the coffee shop. They are polite and sweet and young and pretty, talking about their parents and teachers; working on an assignment.

Two men are holding hands across a table a little further away from me, across the room.

If I'm not careful, this all will break my heart.

There is an amazing thing happening in my city. A new school is opening. It is a beautiful, democratic-free school in the burgeoning East End neighborhood. It is called the Three Rivers Village School, and I am so proud of its founders and the parents who are signing their children up to experience life and education in such a considerate, forward thinking way. I want to be one of those parents so very badly, even. I'm invested in this school getting off of the ground on a personal and sociological and emotional level. On an everything level. I believe in this school.

Let me tell you a story about somebody I love. He is a 6 year old little boy named Eliot, and he's brilliant and beautiful.

Here's a picture, so you can get an idea of the kind of adorable I'm talking about, here.

He knows the names of every actor in The Wizard of Oz. He writes comic books and builds robots. In preschool, when all of the other boys wanted to be firefighters and super heroes, he was obsessed with becoming a mad scientist. He talked early and A LOT. He has always excelled at reading and writing and drawing and creating. He is one of the most interesting conversationalists I've ever met, and often prefers sitting and joining into our mama conversations about marriage and money and the profundities of life. We think of him as an old man in a 6 year old's body. He's drawn to creepy things like zombies and Frankenstein, but he's also so afraid of them that sometimes you're not even allowed to mention them or you'll be in big trouble. I've always referred to him as a mad genius. His preschool teacher declared that he will be "the next Tim Burton."

His family are my wonderful friends. My lunch dates. The people who listen to me when I'm panicking and obsessing in a very long winded way about Scouty's health, about my life and raising girls in a world that disturbs me. They are the people we invite over to roast veggie dogs in the back yard. In short, they are awesome people. I love them.

Here's another picture, so you can get an idea of the kind of adorable I'm talking about here, again.

So, Eliot didn't love his first year of public school. He didn't love writing the letter t one thousand times per day, when he had mastered the entire alphabet, including sounding out words and writing entire stories, a least a year before. He didn't love not being allowed to talk and think about things that interested him like paintings and ninjas and science experiments and Captain Underpants books. He didn't love getting in trouble for drumming on his desk and singing the Adventure Time theme song.

In art class, when the teacher taught the kids, step by step, shape by shape, polka dot by polka dot, how to draw a cow, he drew this:

He was frustrated when the other kids told him that he drew it wrong, that it was "creepy" and "too messy."

Eliot is, quite simply, an exceptional, artistic, brilliant kid, and it's very easy to see how these qualities are going to have to be under-explored and discouraged on a daily basis, for the sake of maintaining the flow and structure of the learning environment of public school. It is very easy to see how he will continue to become disconnected and disengaged with his learning process; how he will feel squashed and boxed in and bored. It's easy to see that his natural gifts and persuasions are not the kinds of things that can be effectively nurtured in a traditional classroom. It isn't anybody's fault. It's just the way things are.

Teachers are given orders by the principal and she's given orders by a superintendent and he's given orders by the district and they are given orders by the government, and there simply isn't room or time or the freedom to allow each and every child to explore and cultivate their unique talents and interests, especially when we're talking about a very quick and imaginative learner who thinks very much outside of the box. It's not the fault of teachers or parents or the principal or anybody, that kids just happen to fall at the very bottom of the list of people who get to make decisions about how and what, and at what pace, they learn. It's a systemic problem. It's a political problem. It's a problem on a grander scale than being anybody's fault. (Allow me to acknowledge here that lots of kids thrive and blossom under a traditional model, and it's wonderful. My support of a free model isn't in any way an indictment on any other method of schooling.)

But, what I'm saying is that my friend, Eliot, needs this school to get off the ground or else he won't get to become the amazing person he really is. (It's not that public school doesn't want him to be himself, there just isn't room for him to get what he needs to be himself, in the structure. There are a lot of kids like Eliot, and a lot of kids who are nothing like Eliot, who are falling through the cracks and not getting what they need to become the amazing, dynamic, excited, multifaceted people they are meant to be.)

I want desperately for this school to get off of the ground. Many kids in my city need this opportunity to become the people they are. They need the chance to feel valued and safe and respected in their learning environment. Having another education model available will benefit kids who aren't fitting into the system and who feel stuck, like there isn't a way out. Kids who are different thinkers, kids who are bullied or outcasts, kids who are artistic and who want to learn, but aren't a perfect fit with public schooling. Lots of different kinds of kids need another option. The Three Rivers Village School brings diversity and a new point of view to the conversation about education in Pittsburgh. I hope, one day, to seriously weigh whether or not my children belong there.

The Three Rivers Village School is important for a lot of reasons. (You can read my interview with one of the school's founders here.) And they need help raising money to get off of the ground, so that they can open their doors in the fall. They are raising money to provide a scholarship fund for students from all backgrounds, who might not be able to pay the tuition. They also need to make necessary improvements to their new building to turn it into a safe and purposeful space to teach kids.

Anything you could give would be amazing. You can click on the photo above to donate. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, in advance.

If you can't donate anything, I understand.

Any way you can pass along word of this campaign would be amazing.

If you feel like you can't or don't want to do that, I understand that, too.

I'm grateful for you no matter what.

Thank you.

Pictures in a box on a high shelf

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:10:00 +0000

Kurt and I laid on our bellies, last night, looking through a box of pictures from my childhood.

I'm not sure what the truth of me, is.

There was a time when I was embarrassed of the girl in those photos. I don't feel that way, anymore. I don't know how I feel about her. I think probably broken-hearted and a little bit sorry.

Not just for me. For everybody.

I looked at my mom's face, holding a baby against her shoulder. She looks tired and sad in every picture.

I was mad for a long time. It started early. There were about a hundred pictures of me as a teenager, posing dramatically, my eyes mean and dark and shining.

My grandfather was a Marine. I feel like I own something of his story, because I loved him more than I loved anything, when I was a kid. He wore short sleeved button down shirts with almost all of the buttons undone and he drank whiskey with tiny ice cubes and smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes. He was so cool. As a five year old girl, all I wanted to do was grow up to drink whiskey and have arthritis.

He married my grandmother when she was 17. He saved her from a dirt road and a corn field and a monster.

I don't own anybody else's story, not even my parents. I've been telling their story all my life, like it was mine. I took things too much to heart, that was a problem I had. I took everything too hard and life seemed like a dismal thing, when I was a child.

So then, I've come all this way and the only thing I can really own is that my experience has been like a clot in a vein. It bulges and it strains, and all the while, a thin trickle of warmth and life escapes and travels the length of a lifetime towards my heart.

The sad, soft animal in you...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:58:00 +0000

One time, when I was young, a therapist told me that I didn't know who I was.

I rolled my eyes.

"Well then, who are you?" she asked.

I didn't have an answer. "Who are YOU?" I shot back at her.

She laughed. "I asked you, first," she said.

So, I'm much older, now, and I still think it's a stupid question.

Who are you?

I'm not sure I have an answer. I have a bunch of labels and characteristics I could give you.

I'm a woman. I'm in my thirties. I grew up poor in a revival church. I am a mother. An atheist. A loud mouth. I'm funny. I'm intense, or something like that. I believe in science. I'm a writer, right? I'm prone to bouts of desperation. I used to be reckless, and now I'm restrained. I like swimming. I'm a water person. I'm an outdoors type of person. I think too much. I talk too much. I like eating food.

Is that who I am?

It seems like maybe those are the things I build up around myself because the world seems to need to define me. The world seems comfortable with me if they can say, "I know who she is. She's liberal and fat and dramatic."

That's who I am to some people.

To my kids, I am hilarious and soft and amazing. To them, I represent boundaries and love and a big, strong, beautiful body that gives them comfort.

Is that who I am?

The thing about who we are, is that we're really all the same.

I'm big and bold and full of worries, and there is a quiet one inside of me that watches everything I do, and everything that happens around me. That quiet one is who I believe I am. And I believe you have a quiet one inside of you, too.

Our quiet ones are sad and hopeful. Our quiet ones believe in good, and they also believe in pain. They get buried by our minds, our thoughts, our commentary on everything. They get buried in the definitions of us, in the way the world needs to see us. They stand silently behind all of the ways we judge ourselves, grieving softly for the injury it causes.

Who we are isn't woman and mom and good cook and grew up in a trailer park.

Who we are is an animal, inside.

Behind what we think and the judgements we make, behind the labels and characteristics we gather and pile up around ourselves to define who we are, we are a stone and a shadow and the branch of a tree. We are glowing and tentative and ancient. Behind who we really aren't, we are a gentle animal inside, watching and waiting and grieving and loving.

We all want the same things, in the blood and breath of what we are. We are all the same creature. We don't really hate who we hate. We don't really feel mad about the things that trigger our tempers. We aren't really us and them. We don't really believe in the quick judgements we make about the choices of other people. We don't really like to make one another feel bad. We do, though. We make one another feel bad, because we don't respect the animals, inside. We don't warm ourselves by the heat of the stone at the pit of our being. And we don't recognize the quiet ones in the people around us.

We see other people as being a list of labels, and we believe we know who they are, and all the while, a soft, quiet animal waits behind what we allow ourselves to see. We pretend the quiet ones aren't there with our minds, but we feel them with our hearts. Every time we say an unkind word, we justify it with our thoughts and commentary, but we feel the heat and wrongness of it, in our gut. Some people get so far away from their soft, sad animals that they almost can't feel the wrongness of it, anymore. Sometimes we are all that way, a little bit.

I want to be more of who I am, and less of the list of things that people need to define me. I want to get closer to the quiet one, inside of me, and to allow myself to get closer to the animal in you.

Marriage Is Hard, Because Everything Is Hard

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:51:00 +0000

Things we do in life are hard.

I think it's probably what it means to grow up, to realize that committing to something means that it will be hard.

People are always saying marriage is hard, parenting is hard, getting healthy is hard, meditation is hard, following your dreams is hard work.

Everything that you commit yourself to, is hard. Its being hard is kind of the way you know that you've committed yourself to it.

Marriages fail, fathers run away, it's uncomfortably cold for running, your first manuscript doesn't get published, so you stop trying, or whatever... because, at some point, the thing that felt good, stops feeling good, to you.

It stops feeling exciting and hopeful and fresh and new, so we perceive that, since it's not actively providing us with pleasure, it's actually causing us pain, and we want to get away. We want to commit ourselves to things that feel good, and it feels good when things are easy and new.

It's like we only have two settings: active pleasure vs. active pain. There is nothing in between.

When newness starts to subside, we start to resist. We say to ourselves, "This used to make me feel so good, and now it's boring and irritating and mundane. If I can't get back to the way I felt before, I'm finished with this thing."

Our habitual pleasure seeking, which is probably a very American thing, keeps us from being able to be truly and deeply committed to our endeavors in life. Our idea that we deserve to feel good all the time, and that anything that isn't actively making us feel good is bad and wrong and scary, makes it so we inevitably begin to resist the things we have committed to.

When we're resisting, we handle our relationships and responsibilities halfheartedly, purposefully pointing out to ourselves how awful things are. Every moment that doesn't feel explicitly good becomes evidence that this this thing is WRONG and BAD and not worth it. We're so attached to the way things were, because everything was new, at one point, and newness feels exciting and fills us with hope is so obviously good.

When something isn't new anymore; that is where we find out what we're really made of.

The realization that things aren't so much fun anymore leads to resistance to the way things are, in the present moment. And that resistance either leads to quitting, giving up, running away, closing off and hardening towards... or it leads to softening, opening, beauty and meaning.

We see articles all the time about how statistics show that people who choose not to have kids are happier than people who do, and we, as parents, feel a little confused... because we can understand this statistic. It's true that parenting doesn't always feel good. It often feels really bad, in fact. Even at the best of times, it's scary and we worry and doubt ourselves and feel afraid of the world. So, why then, when asked about what we love the most, and what the best choice we've ever made was... do we always say, "My children are the best thing that has ever happened to me?"

It's because we've committed to them so that they are a part of who we are, and we understand that feeling good isn't the point of life. The meat of life happens in the places beyond novelty and fun and excitement. It happens when you choose staying, instead of fleeing. It happens when you choose to open yourself where you have the impulse to close. It happens where your commitment becomes like a part of your body. It becomes as vital to you as your organs and your skin. It happens where you've released your children or your partner or your practices and missions and dreams from the responsibility of making you happy, and have allowed them to become a part of you, in the way that they are able.

I don't mean to alienate people who don't have children. This same thing applies to all kinds of commitments, whether you're a marathon runner, or have been married for 25 years or are sober or are meditating through the pain, or whatever it is in your life that you love, but isn't new, anymore.

New love is beautiful, it's true. The first day of a baby's life is like a dream. Beginning something and believing in it is a wonderful feeling.

Perhaps those moments are special things and should be allowed to exist with space and freedom inside the timeline of our lives. Perhaps clinging to them strangles them, stunts them and turns them into something other than what they could have been, if they were allowed to exist freely for their moment in the sun.

Maybe, every time we say to our partner, "We need to get back to the way we were," we aren't at all honoring the way we were, which was new and shining and like a dream. When we feel resentment and resistance because things don't feel that way anymore, we're robbing those special things of their sweetness. We turn them into something negative, something that must not have been real and can be used as evidence that everything is wrong.

You don't love me, anymore, because we don't spend hours in bed, talking and laughing. Since being with you after so many years, doesn't feel the way our new love did, and I'm choosing to believe that I'm entitled to that new, good feeling and that you're obligated to provide it for me always because you provided it for me then... I'm going to use those good times against us. I'm going to cling to the time we were young and made love next to an open window and the sound of thunder crashed all around us, and I'll strangle it, and hold its limp corpse up for you to see, shaking it while it gasps and dies. "You don't love me anymore, because you couldn't keep giving me this," you'll say.

New love is beautiful, but it isn't the point of life. Honoring it and allowing it to be, to flare and flourish and light up the sky and then to fade in its own time, like everything does... and staying with it, consuming it, taking it into ourselves, letting it become us, to become as vital to us as our lungs and heart and tongue, might be the point of life. Finding the deeper meaning and beauty beyond the flashier, temporary kind that comes with newness, might be the point.

And most of all, acknowledging that maybe happiness doesn't mean what we've always thought it did. Maybe happiness doesn't mean feeling good.

That's what I think it means to grow up.

A big thank you... Una Biologicals

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:59:00 +0000

I had my wisdom teeth removed.

And it sucked.

A lot.

photo credit: Una Biologicals

I want to take a minute to send a big THANK YOU to Jessica at Una Biologicals, for taking care of me. She sent a care package over, with a friend, full of wonderful things from her shop that, (along with the help of a painkiller or two,) made my recovery almost pleasant at times. Despite bleeding from the gums and not being able to open my mouth and sporting cheeks as big as tennis balls, it was like being at a mini-spa.

photo credit: Una Biologicals

All of the Una products I have tried are my favorites. They're organic and locally sourced, and made in my beautiful city, Pittsburgh, by the most beautiful, kind, marvelous girl in town.

photo credit: Una Biologicals

Jessica was kind enough to send me everything in my favorite scents, (which are lavender and peppermint, by the way, in case you're ever in a gift giving mood.) The Lavender Body Butter is AMAZING. You can ask all of the people who visit The Strip District in Pittsburgh on Saturdays, because they're like... addicted to it.

photo credit: Una Biologicals

And she gave me a Headache Relief roll-on, some Bruise Balm and Wound Wonder, which were absolute lifesavers, since I was majorly suffering from all of those things. (Have you ever cared for a 2 year old and a 6 year old while bleeding from the gums and carrying around cheeks that each weigh about four swollen pounds and are covered in bruises? Well, it blows.) I especially loved the Bruise Balm, which helped my discoloration go away quickly. We're a big fan of herbal remedies, and Arnica and Calendula are some of my favorites for inflammation and infection.

I can't express my gratitude enough. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Una Biologicals, for doing such a wonderfully kind thing for me, and for doing responsible, creative, wonderful and admirable things with your time and talents and life. You're the best.

I was supposed to be a spider, I guess.

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 05 May 2013 01:13:00 +0000

When I was young, I looked like a candy wrapper.

One day, a little girl said to me, while we waited to cross a street,

"Excuse me. Are you supposed to be a spider?"

She was holding her mother's hand. I wasn't holding anybody's hand.

I smiled at her and she smiled back at me.

"I guess so," I said.

I didn't know what I was supposed to be.

We all have something to give

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:25:00 +0000

When I was younger, I think I must have believed that I didn't have anything to give. Or that, I had to be secure on my feet before I could think about helping anybody else on to theirs.

I had to be happy to spread happiness.

I had to be well to bandage the wounds of another person.

I had to have something, to give something.

The truth of life is that we'll never be so secure, so happy and so well that we'll feel ready to give away what we have.

The truth is that we won't even be able to find security, out there all alone. The way to be well is to help someone else to heal. The way to stand tall is to provide balance for someone shakier. The truth is that we all have something to give.

I've become a great lover of tiny, kind acts. It's true that I don't have a lot of time, I'm not boiling over with energy and resources. I'm poor, I don't have any money. I'm not anything special. I can't change anybody's life in grand, sweeping ways.

But, I have my thoughts and my mouth. I have my hands and my intentions. I can be kind. I can say I'm sorry. I can look into someone's eyes and thank them. I can remember birthdays. I can bring over a meal. I can volunteer to help with a fundraiser. I can send little packages full of surprises. I can tell you when I'm thinking about how much I like you. I can carry boxes. I can help you to your car.

I don't have a lot of money or possessions or time. I never wake up feeling secure that I have enough, that I am enough. I do have an infinite supply of things people need, though. We all do. I have my choices and my voice. I'm not bigger or better than anyone else. I've been the lowest of things. We can't afford brake pads for our car. I have an infinite supply of things people need.

There has always been beauty in the flesh of you

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:37:00 +0000

me, circa 2007-ish

You’ve all gotten me thinking so much and feel very awake and smart about beauty. Can we talk about it some more?

An immature perception of beauty scans something for its flaws and rejects it. An intelligent, thoughtful, wise, interesting person finds beauty in many different things. It finds beauty not only in spite of flaws, but contained in the perceived flaws, themselves.

I am not a typical example of beauty. I weigh over 200 pounds, I am 35 years old, my hair is graying. The people admire me might be tempted to say, “But she is a beautiful person. Don't look at all of her physical flaws, just focus on how beautiful she is as a person.” And that is okay, but it's not really what I’m talking about.

What I would like to suggest is that I am not beautiful in spite of my flaws, but that there is beauty in the shape of me, the lines of me, the heft of me, the flesh of me. There is beauty in the marks on me, the dents on me, in the crooked things about me.

If we say beauty is only skin deep, or it’s what’s inside that counts… it is like we are agreeing with the uninteresting definition of beauty we are presented with by our corrupt, spiritually bankrupt society.

Where would the beauty on the inside be, if there weren’t a body to carry it? Where would the beauty on the inside be, if we had no eyes and hands and tongues and skin and hair and bones and faces?

I believe that who we are is important, all on its own, and how we look, isn’t. I also believe that who we are shines out at the world through our bodies. Our bodies are us, just like our personalities and our laughs and our interests and our ideas and our everything. It’s all amazing, when we’re amazing. It’s all beautiful, because we are.

How can you separate the beauty of someone’s laugh from the beauty of their eyes and teeth and hands and face?
When you really see someone, and appreciate them for who they are, how can you not love the shape of them?

When we can say, there is beauty in these scars, there is beauty in this shape, there is beauty in these lines, these wrinkles, this skin, these marks... That is where we've begun to see things with truth. That is where our eyes are opening, and we're shedding the years of empty lies that have been perpetrated against us.

Someone commented the other day, “Beauty exists. It is our perception of it that changes.”

Even if you're only discovering it now, even if there are only hints of it somewhere in the rebellious parts of your mind, even if you never find it, there has always been beauty in the flesh of you, there always will be beauty in the flesh of you.

There is nothing wrong with recognizing and celebrating the beauty of a young pretty girl with long eyelashes and pink cheeks. Just like there isn't anything wrong with celebrating the beauty of me, a mother with a sagging stomach and blue veins like a trail of tears down the back of my calf.

Shine, shine, shine

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:36:00 +0000

At the gym today, there was a 60 year old man wearing a pair of tiny red shorts and a belly shirt with a racer back, that he cut himself out of a bigger shirt. The woman on the treadmill next to him was running. A wide sweat mark was spreading across the small of her back. It was shaped exactly like a heart.

I felt a crooked little sense of hope for us all.

Last night, a few friends and I volunteered to make dinner for the families of very sick children. There were hushed conversations around little tables. I felt very lucky for the health of my own children. Sometimes it's hard for me to think of our life that way, as bursting with sound and health, but it is. And when it isn't, if it isn't, it is still a life, and it's very beautiful and we're all very lucky for the time we have to be people and to know our babies and our friends and take lovers and watch our parents grow old and die. And to love them.

They have something shining inside of them, and it's all ours. It is a look that passes over their faces and we're the people who understand that it's the beautiful thing inside them. It is the magic of their being, peering out at us.

I want to live in a way that helps other people. It's taken me my life to get here, and I want to help, finally.

I took this picture on my way to the hospital, last night.

An answer to a common criticism of I Am Beautiful, Girls... or I Am Beautiful, Girls, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 16:48:00 +0000

Once upon a time, I wrote an article called, I Am Beautiful, Girls. (You may have read it here or here or here or here.) Daily, I still get letters trickling in from people, women mostly, who can relate or want to share their experiences with me. Overall, the response to the article was overwhelming and overwhelmingly positive.

There is one argument, or counterpoint, that is brought up over and over again, though. I'd like to talk about it, because I believe it to be something worth talking about. Most recently, a very kind and thoughtful mama writer at Pittsburgh Rules, presented it here. The argument goes something like this: Why do we have to talk about physical beauty at all? Why is it important? Why do we need to praise our children for being beautiful? Can't we just praise our daughters for being smart and creative and capable and kind and strong and all of the other things that matter? Why does it matter whether or not our girls feel beautiful, when we know that physical beauty is just a trick and a lie? Why are we still going on and on about beauty, when the topic of beauty has torn us apart? Isn't telling our girls that we are beautiful just another form of vanity, or of focusing on the surface, on things that don't matter?

If you'd like to take a moment to read Naima from Pittsburgh Rules' thoughts on I Am Beautiful, Girls, go ahead. I'll wait.

So, the thing about this argument is that I agree with it. I believe in it. I believe that the kind of mother who would say to me, "Why can't we just shut up about beauty, and praise our girls for being smart," is a mindful, aware, intelligent, awesome kind of mother.

Naima asked, in her post, won't someone PLEASE PLEASE write an essay called I Can Make My Own Destiny, Because I Am Super Fucking Capable, Girls?

My answer to that is: We have been writing this exact essay for a long time, now. (One that immediately comes to mind is JK Rowling's quote about weight vs accomplishments. It can be found here.) There are millions of smart, thoughtful, mindful, incredible women who have been writing and talking about and living I Can Make My Own Destiny, Because I Am Super Fucking Capable, Girls.

A problem with it, is that it is a respectable ideal that doesn't actually address the reality of sending our girls out into the world. We can refuse to talk about beauty in our households, but, the truth of our daily lives is that our daughters are navigating a world that not only talks about beauty, but is outright obsessed with it. The worst part is that the world is obsessed with a disgusting, unfair and rigid idea of what it means to be beautiful.

I totally get the impulse to want to shun the topic, because the topic brings a lot of people a lot of pain. But, not talking about it doesn't prepare our girls for reality. If you spend your daughter's first years of life never telling her she is beautiful, never making a big deal out of her physicality, because you rightfully recognize that it falls absolutely dead last on the list of things that is important about her... what will happen when she gets out into the world without you, and absolutely everybody and everything thing around her, ever piece of sensory and social input she receives will be telling her, "You are nothing, if you're not beautiful?"

I believe that helping to shape her ideas of beauty, by exposing her to all kinds of beautiful things, including the beauty in our own varied shapes, in our own bodies as mothers, as the biggest role model our girls will ever have, is a better idea than not talking about beauty at all.

This is some of what I wrote, in response to Naima's article about my piece:

This I Am Beautiful, Girls thing was something I just sat down and wrote on my personal blog, never dreaming that over half a million people would read it, so it’s been crazy. I think that different people get different things out of it, and maybe lots of people read it differently than I meant it. Or something.

But, my point wasn’t ever about needing my girls to feel beautiful, according to the way we define beauty. It wasn’t about how I’m not really beautiful, but that I’ll tell my girls that I am, hoping to trick them into feeling beautiful, even when they’re not… like when the boob thing happens or if they get fat, or whatever.

It’s important to feel beautiful because we are a nuanced species obsessed with beauty. We’re obsessed with the boring trick-biological kind that society sells us, the kind that likes youth and breedablility. We’re also obsessed with art and music and color and light and photography and I don’t know… artifacts and pottery and city sky lines (of which ours is the best, by the way) and literature and interior design and pink radishes, or whatever. Being surrounded by beauty makes us saner and happier. It makes us better people. It is why we build community flower gardens in collapsing neighborhoods. It is why we go out on Earth Day and clean up the Monongahela Trail.

(Stick with me. I’m about to bring this all around to an actual point.)

We find beauty all over the place. We surround ourselves with it. Seek it out. Long for it. Some people die for it. It’s important. It is important that we understand that we are a part of the tradition of beauty on this planet. That we are marvels, too, as beings, as people, as bodies, as composites of mutated Hydrogen molecules, as little creatures evolved from the stuff in the belly of a dead star.
It is not important, however, that we feel like princesses. It is not important that we feel like we look good in jeans. It is not important that we feel like we have nice butts, or that our skin is smooth enough and our waists are small enough. It isn’t important for me to teach my children to feel physically beautiful. I am not trying to teach them that, even if they end up a little funny looking or something, they should still hold their heads high, and believe they are pretty, somehow. (My children aren’t funny looking, just as a disclaimer.)

The whole point of the I Am Beautiful piece that blew up and exploded and went around the world, is that… by putting myself down in front of children, I was teaching them that the rigid, unfair and totally moronic standard of human beauty that we’re being sold, (and eating up with a spoon,) is valid. That it is what human female beauty really means. In the whole rest of existence, weird and imperfect things can be beautiful and we pay money to look at them in art museums and hear them live in concert, but in being a woman, only this ONE THING equals beauty. And, since I wasn’t beautiful because I was too fat and old and lumpy and saggy, and I’m the biggest role model to my children and we live in a gross society, one day, they will suddenly decide that, unless they are thin and young and pretty, they aren’t beautiful. And from then on, they won’t exist within the longstanding and heartbreakingly important tradition of loving and revering beautiful things that is pretty much the meat of our existence.

My deal isn’t that I’m not beautiful, but that I want to trick my kids into thinking that I am. My deal is that beauty doesn’t mean what we think it does, what I think it does, after existing for a lifetime in a world that sells me my insecurities and laughs all the way to the bank.

We are WIRED to love beauty. Meant to love it. We are TAUGHT (and bought and sold) to love pretty, and dresses, and feeling attractive. Feeling beautiful, for me and in the spirit in of my article, doesn’t have anything to do with feeling attractive (or even the slightest bit appetizing.) It’s the art installation kind of beauty, only in human form. The kind that, when it’s done right, is powerful and sexy and religious without being the slightest bit pretty.

I guess what it all boils down to is that I don't believe in treating beauty like it isn't important. It is astoundingly important to me. Earthshaking-ly important to me, and to the world. I also believe that we aren't doing our daughters any favors by attempting to squash their thoughts and feelings about beauty, to lock it all away in a cupboard and brush it under the rug, expecting that they will know what to do when they inevitably come face to face with a world that is obsessed with something they were denied and hidden away from.

What about if we praised our daughters for being smart, and also celebrated how beautiful they are? What about if we did those things in an environment that embraced all sorts of beauty - the kind with pretty eyes, and the kind with scars on their sagging stomachs? The kind of beauty with a flower in her hair, and the kind with a tooth missing in front. The kind that is willowy and the kind that is earth? The kind that sparkles and the kind the oozes and spreads. The kind that sings and the kind that stains? What if we didn't try to deny our primal, almost instinctive obsession with beautiful things, (beauty means survival, it is meaning and love and growth and food and art and sex and life), but if we celebrated it, instead...using our intellect and artistry and power and resilience and strength and humility and experience and grit and teeth as women, to blast apart society's stupid, poisonous idea of beauty and allow ourselves and our children to be who they are, which is gut-wrenching, pure and obvious beauty incarnate?

That's what I meant when I said that I've started telling my daughters I am beautiful. That's my (radically) practical answer to the idealistic question of why we can't just shut up about beauty and let our girls be smart and strong and capable. We can't do that because they are all of these things, and every part of who they are deserves to be acknowledged. We can't shut up about it because they are beautiful beyond measure, and that matters.

Open spaces

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 01:24:00 +0000

This spring has settled in around us, slowly.

Writing work articles is infinitely more enjoyable on the front porch. I love the people who walk by, talking too loud to one another about private things, not noticing me huddled on the swing.

I need space like this. Space and air make all the difference to me.

I'm sure it's the light and the vitamin d and the germs and the cold, too, but the thing that kills me about winter mostly is the smallness. I wake up on a morning in February, every year, frenzied to find a way out. I pour over our budget, call for the balances on our credit cards. I obsessively browse rental listings on the coast, calling Kurt at work to ask him if we can go to Georgia for the week.

We decided to put a big jar on the desk in the dining room. We'll put money in it, here and there, and maybe next February, there will be enough that I can empty it onto the table, making stack of coins and counting under my breath, for a trip to Savannah or New Orleans or somewhere else where there is still an outside and a sky and air to breath that doesn't hurt my teeth.

It's funny that I'm seeing our neighbors all of a sudden. I haven't seen them in months. We're all emerging with little, blinking eyes. It is adorable, that we are all animals and we have these homes where someone else used to live. We come outside when the ground thaws and wave to one another and poke around in the hedges.

It wasn't warm, this weekend, but we went to a little lake outside the city. We brought extra clothes for the girls, because we knew that telling them to stay out of the water wasn't going to mean anything.

It didn't mean anything.

It took about ten minutes for them to be soaked up to their waists in muddy water. Kurt and I huddled together against a chilly wind and watched them run and dance and dig in the sand. I talked about reading Lord of the Flies, as a child; how all I wanted was to be a feral thing.

We aren't any different from children, except that we're slower to get up and our bones ache. If you give us a wide open space, we will fill it with joy and life.

Two wild things, they own my heart.

eShakti Dress Review and how I love women.

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:24:00 +0000

I love women. I'm very much feeling that, right now. I love the blood and guts and bravery and humiliation and triumph of our experiences. I love getting letters from other c-section mommies who cried in line at the grocery store buying their first can of formula. I love touching the vintage fabric at Loom and having our hands brush together, your nails painted red and my hands all raw and blistered from gardening and the winter. Laughing and sitting on a blanket in the sun with our dresses hiked up. How I don't care if you see my underwear or the hair on my legs. Holding babies against us. We're really something.

Sometime it gets lost to me, what a wonder we are, with what we've all been through, but not today. We're pure amazement and beauty, today.

So, I got a dress in a mail from eShakti for free, in exchange for writing a review, and it's funny to me... modeling a dress while my girls dig in the vegetable bed with spoons, looking for worms. Kurt standing on his tip-toes at the edge of the yard while I bark at him, "Don't take the picture from that angle. It will highlight my double chin! Wait, I was smiling too much. Try standing over there."

So, I'm sure he highlighted my double chin. So, I'm not exactly a model kind of girl. So, this dress is adorable and how I feel about myself in general, and while I'm wearing it, is mostly uncomfortable, with moments of pride and wonder and for-realness. It's a really pretty dress. I like both of the dresses eShakti has given me so much, and the fact that I can enter my own measurements, that I just paid my own money and ordered my bridesmaid's dress for my sweet friend's upcoming wedding from them. I'll take a picture of it when it gets here, if you want to see. (I love weddings. Being in a wedding is the thing that makes me cry the most, with happiness.)

We even went out for a day on the town to Chuck E Cheese, so that I could wear my new dress somewhere special. (This is only mostly a joke. We really did go there, and it really did kind of feel like a special day.)

Into something I am not recognizing

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:12:00 +0000

Sometimes, I feel like I cannot take it. Not one more second of pain and pressure, like the blood inside of me is boiling, my skin is peeling, and I will emerge as something solid, born in space. A diamond with teeth and a halo of light on my head.

Sometimes I feel like I have a thousand hands, and they are all plunging into the muck of the world, the slime and matter of living. I am feeling blind, reaching until my shoulders are submerged, and my throat. My face will be the last thing to go, and there isn't any air under everything.

Under everything, the sun has forgotten what lies there. A bone that bears the marks of a hatchet. A sword with a broken hilt. A cracked rib. A breath of life. The sun hasn't touched these things, and they make up my life.

Me. A child. Everything is small and God will rip the sky with his giant, capable hands. He will gather us all, like a bear pulling a honeycomb from a hole in a tree. We will swarm all over his sweet skin like bees.

Me. A child. My pap drinks whiskey and he is Popeye the Sailor Man and I love him.

Me. A child. My clothes are all too tight. I want new things. Navy pea coats that flare around the hems. Shoes with a buckle. My hair won't calm down. I want smooth black hair with a red ribbon.

Me. All of these things. The sun doesn't touch them.

I'm afraid a lot. I like to say it out loud. Other people get scared, too, only they tell me, "Everything will be okay. We'll take care of it." I hate them for it. I want us all to fall on our knees and eat the dirt and draw on our skin with blood and sharp rocks and cry out and beg to the darkening sky.

I would draw the shape of you, dear ones. The way you hovered inside of me. Your tiny lips and long eyelashes. The sun sees you, now, but once you were half formed in the dark and silence. You were a beating heart and a spine and a pair of eyes and I was with you. You were filled with my blood, and I was filled with you. You stirred and only I knew. You stirred and I knew you in my guts. I would carve the shape of you into my skin.

You are the only thing I know, sometimes. Everything else stirs and your hands are so small and still. Your breath is so light. You are what I know and everything is love. The sun is on my face, at least. You are the sun.

The best day

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:29:00 +0000

-I'm getting my wisdom teeth pulled on Kurt's birthday. While I waited on my xrays, a girl in the room next to me recovered from anesthesia. She laughed for a few seconds and then started bawling. Her parents ran into the hallway, afraid that something was wrong. The dentist just told them, "She's just a little intoxicated and emotional. It's okay to be emotional." Then he said to the girl, "You just let it on out."

-It was sunny today. I went to The Strip with my wonderful friend, Lori and ate vegetarian Pho, and got to meet Jessica from Una Biologicals. She was beautiful. And Lori was beautiful. It absolutely never escapes me that the world is full of beautiful people. I'm not sure what that makes me... but I think I feel okay with whatever it is.

Later, we went to the park and the girls ran and ran and ran with their arms spread out wide. Louisey kept saying, in her funny, lispy 2-year old voice, "This is the best day of my life!"

I love how many best days my girls have.

-I want to do something special with my life. Isn't that funny? We all want to do something special and we'll all die. I think maybe I would like to look people in the eye, and to be kind.

The man ahead of me in the grocery line today was so rude. The cashier asked him if his bags were okay to carry, if the weight was distributed evenly, and the man rolled his eyes and said, "I don't know. Isn't that YOUR job?" I saw that the cashier's hands were shaking after that, as he counted out the man's change and wished him a nice day.

There are so many times you just have to take it.

I told him, the cashier, "I'm sorry that just happened. I'm sorry that somebody would treat you that way." He looked sad.

There are lots of times that you just feel small, and like all you're worth is putting other people's things into bags.

It doesn't mean anything. You're still inside, and you can still move mountains.

Foothills

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:32:00 +0000

While I've been struggling with anxiety all winter, and I'm still struggling... I'm in this new place where I feel, in some ways, grateful for what I've been going through, because it has brought me to the foothills of mountains of beauty.

I've been learning about physics and the quantum world. About what time means, and how valuable and rare we are, as little living things in a unending and frozen expanse of darkness, where terrible, burning suns race to their deaths.

I've been feeling around in the cavity of oblivion, trying to feel what I'm feeling, without thinking too much about it.

I've been reading sad books.

I've been trying to let my heart be broken, instead of struggling against what might hurt me.

I've been learning about ancient ways of dealing with fear, and how fearlessness doesn't mean being free of fear, but rather being open to experience fear, so that it doesn't hook me and drag me down to the bottom of a well.

I've been trying to allow things to be, without needing them to be good or bad, without clinging or avoiding.

I freaked out because spring just wasn't coming to Pittsburgh, and the girls and I traveled to a new city and saw new things. We went to the circus and rode dragon paddle boats around a harbor. We ate candy and slept in a faded, downtown hotel with peeling grandeur. We saw dolphins.

I've been on an edge where I'm amazed and I'm scared. I'm right in between, and seeing that all of my struggles are helping me to wriggle free of something; a casing that couldn't be torn and I'm raw and straining and human, calling out and confused, but I'll also find my way.

Greenhouse, over time.

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:39:00 +0000

We go to the same farm every year for an egg hunt, and every year, the green house makes me feel like everything will be okay. The colors of those little flowers just glow, and I want to gather them all up into my arms and whisper to them. I love them. I love the hazy light and the rows and rows of things that are alive. Yesterday was the first day of my life, again. I'm dreaming of spring like a girl with a braid, sitting in a window, worrying over a loose strand of hair. She is watching the road.

(Here is our greenhouse day in 2011, and here is 2012. I almost thought to find it embarrassing, the things I used to think and write about. But then, I thought about it this way... Just two years ago, I sat down and wrote about how I don't have time for my husband or makeup, anymore. How I had two babies and I wore yoga pants all the time. Things are a lot different for me, now. I'm not sure if I've grown or if the pit of me has gotten deeper, down a well, but I no longer feel the need to beat myself up for not looking presentable. I kind of feel like I'm not even that person, anymore. Actually, I am astoundingly grateful that I was so rudely ripped away from things like makeup and actual clothes and being cute and feeling like I either needed to be attractive, or apologize. I am infinitely more attractive, now, naked and raw and wrist deep in the mud of my life and person-hood, and I feel like I'll only keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, splitting and tearing, and then my beauty will be as old and swollen as the sun.)

Also, in case you couldn't tell from the one thousand pictures that are going to follow this sentence... this is one of those posts where you're obligated to gush over the beauty of my family. Because, I mean... we are pretty fucking adorable.


It was morning, and I won't tell you that it was warm, but it was sunny and I wore my scarf from Chelsea and breathed the air and almost felt sane, like a person.

We headed to the farm.

Happy spring. Hang in there, please.

I just know it...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:20:00 +0000

I am sitting alone, in a corner of the library where I have pulled a leather easy chair across the room so that I may look out of the floor to ceiling windows. It is newly dark, and cars are passing on the street below me. Hateful, dancing snowflakes are illuminated in their lights.

This winter was made for me. It was made to break me.

I'm taking a class where a famous Buddhist teacher is talking about death. Some of the women sitting on the cushions around me break into tears over the topic. All I feel is relief.

Everything changes. This is the thing that is supposed to scare me, but I panic because I'm always sure that I've come to the last place that I will come... that everything will be just like this, forever and ever. I've been getting headaches. That is my thing, now. I will have a headache every day for the rest of my life and I'll be one of those women with a heating pad on her neck and a cabinet full of muscle relaxers and a vague diagnosis having to do with improper pain management. I just know it, and it feels bleak.

I always feel like I just know it, about everything.

I am thirty four years old.
Some people have called me beautiful, in my life.
Everything changes, always.
These headaches will be something that I remember, one day.

"Remember that winter when I had all of those headaches? How it was the second day of spring, and I sat under the lights in the evening at the library, watching snowflakes dance under the streetlamp outside?"

Space and freedom and shelves full of jars

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 22:03:00 +0000

What are we to do about it all, except let it break our hearts?

There is a lot of freedom in sadness, there is a lot of space inside of a heart that's been broken into pieces. There is blood and the air and all of it flows and spreads and it's darker and wetter than you could have known. It gets everywhere, and you'll never gather it all. It won't fit in a jar on your shelf. Your hands are buried in it. The corners of your mouth are caked in it.

This can be a beautiful thing, for me... the place where I finally let it all go, covering my skin and hair in great, muddy clumps of sadness.

Because, instead of sadness, I have panic.

I have an idea that my panic is about existing in a room lined with rickety, uneven shelving. There is a howling wind outside and the earth is splitting open, and on all of the splintered, wooden shelves are the glass jars that contain all of me.

There is one that contains a baby with brown eyes, and one with a bible. There is a jar full of fireflies, one with fine, plucked hairs, so full that the lid won't screw on properly. One hair for each of the people I have loved. My grandfather is this gray hair, my daughters, red and yellow. My sister is a strawberry thread, her son is deep brown. There is a little nest, made of all of them. I will find it in the litter of broken glass and thunder, if I'm not careful.

Careful, is what I am, the most. So careful that my thoughts contain themselves, talk to themselves, keep themselves company in the night. I am so careful that I haven't seen the sunlight in a long time. I haven't actually been to the surface of what I am, for as long as I can remember. I paste strips of paper and string, pages from books and scraps of my clothing onto the windows. They're stubborn and are always falling away. I'm holding one in place with my outstretched toes, as I smooth another to the pane above my head.

Nothing must fall. Something will break.

Things are always breaking. I cover my ears and squeeze shut my eyes. Water and blood and embalming fluid leave stains on the hard wood of the floor. I mop it up, quickly with the hems of my skirts, peering nervously at the rattling menagerie around me. If I look away, another one might fall, or the light might get in, or worse. Something of me might get out.

Sometimes, it will happen that mountains are forming outside, and jar after jar topple from their tenuous places on my shelves. I have to press my palms very hard over my ears, and close my eyes very tightly. I grasp at the ones that hold the things that are most dear to me. There aren't very many of them, but they are spun from a glass so fine; it is threaded through with a spider web of cracks. Sometimes I hold them so tightly, they burst in my arms.

They burst and the glass gets in my eyes and it's stuck in my palms and the skin of my face. It is all I can do then to let go of the slippery life inside them, to let go of being careful.

I cry a river of pink tears, then, and all of the paper in the windows falls silently, peeling itself sweetly away and floating to the floor through dusty beams of golden light, like little dream feathers. The feathers fall with such love, and there is such grace to the light that touches me. It sparkles against all of the broken things. I am covered in diamonds, the world is, too, and I am full of sadness, at last.

It scares me, I think, all the space and freedom. It must, because I kneel in the rubble, and start to place pieces against pieces, fitting everything painstakingly back together like a puzzle. I might wait until morning.

The quiet one

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:35:00 +0000

If we are all there is of god, some people ask, isn't that an awfully lonely and hopeless way to live? Isn't there something comforting about the idea that someone giant, with giant hands that are big enough to hold the whole world, loves us and wants to care for us?

I feel lonely when I think of things in terms of heaven and earth. I feel lonley when I picture a man on a hill who doesn't have little fingers dexterous enough to hold together the hearts of all of his breaking creations.

If we are all there is of god, then isn't god everything? And isn't everything vast? Isn't everything a whirring collection of electricity and magic with no end?

Isn't there something comforting about believing our prayers are heard?

Our prayers are heard.

We aren't set apart from one another. We aren't the things we think and see and believe. We aren't the racing pattern of dialogue in our heads. We aren't a girl from Western Pennsylvania who likes tea and honey and television.

Our prayers are heard, because we are in here, somewhere, silent and loving and watching and listening to everything. We are a marvelous thing, a human being. We are the soft, watchful one inside. We are a glowing ember in the belly of a machine that projects thoughts and feelings and reactions, like a slowing rotating light show full of stars on the nursery wall. We are in there, somewhere. The quiet one who sees all that we do, and we are older and wider and more capable and wise than we could even imagine, with all of our thoughts and feelings and ideas.

We are not our thoughts. We watch our thoughts go by. Our prayers are heard, because we are not our prayers, and we hear them. We are quiet. We are love. We are all in this together. We are all the watchful thing, inside. We will all die the same.

My writing at Huff Po Parents

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:14:00 +0000

I have a new piece up at The Huffington Post, today. I don't know if I've written much here about writing there, but it's always a kind of scary but totally awesome experience to write for such a widely read publication. If you have a moment, I'd love your support, over there. Thank you.

What We Mean When We Say We Need a Break

Coming back

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:25:00 +0000

I'm not sure how to do this, to come back, so forgive me while I stumble.

We saw a specialist that had some very good ideas and was able to give us answers that made sense, after years and years of getting answers and hearing explanations that could only partly be possible, or that weren't pertinent at all. It turns out that we just weren't talking to the right people, and the wrong people weren't directing us to the right people, because everybody had the wrong idea about what was happening.

It was beyond frustrating, for a very long time.

I am trying very hard not to be bitter with the doctors who tried, and failed, to help us over so much time. I am trying not to seek someone to blame for the years of fear and worry. I like to have someone to blame, I think. I must. I like to have an answer for everything, to be able to identify the place where things started to fall apart. If I have someone, or something, to blame, I can know them, burn them into the deepest parts of myself, and know who and what to avoid to stay safe, in the future.

Reality is that we're unsafe all the time, while we're talking on these terms. We will never figure things out to a point that we can keep our children from getting hurt or sick. We will never have danger under our thumbs. We can't know enough or have enough blame to make so we don't decline and die.

It is certain that we will decline and die. It is certain that our children will be sick and injured. Those things can't be handled and prevented. Sometimes my panic looks stupidly, obviously like a prayer that I might live forever.

I'm starting to learn that life is just a thing like this, though. You don't have any answers and you keep seeking, keep suffering, keep trusting, and one day you do have an answer. Or, even, all of your days goes by and you don't... but that isn't anybody's fault. It wasn't anybody's fault the whole time, as long as everyone was trying to help, as long as everyone was good, and as long as they listened.

You just have to look in all the places.

The other thing that is certain is that we will be happy. We will have days where there isn't a cloud in the sky. Our children will laugh and play at the edge of the water. They will crawl into bed with us and the sun will be shining through the curtains and it will be summer and we'll barely remember this dark February when we were so lost and scared.

They are both such big deals, both of these times. That's the key to life, I think... to be able to say, this fear and sickness are no big deal, and neither are the sunlit mornings at the ocean side. Everything is, and everything is and everything is and everything will be.

Let me know if you're still hanging around. I've missed you.

It stings my eyes and hurts

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:37:00 +0000

I walked into her makeshift bedroom, in my dying grandmother's house. I had a newborn baby girl in my arms and my three year old daughter ran down the hallway, ahead of me. On the night stand, there were prescription bottles, vitamins, supplements, a full spectrum light for treating seasonal affective disorder, and all sorts of tubes of creams and canisters of salves for sore body parts.

I thought to myself, this is the legacy of my women. This is what we pass down to one another.

Winter is the worst. I'll see people on the television, living in Hawaii, fishing for a living. They play tiny instruments in the sand and watch the sun set while children run, all around. They have so much space and so much sun. I am a dark tanner. I turn as brown as a chestnut, given the chance. I say to Kurt, "These people must live until they are one hundred and three."

He is sleeping, of course, pale and limp in the armchair. Going to work every day is harder when there is no sun, no warmth. Everything is.

Sometimes I long for sleep at three in the afternoon. I fantasize that I will stretch out and luxuriate under the comforter as soon as my husband is home from work. I never do, though. When it's late, and it's finally time to lie down and sleep, I hum with dark energy, worrying and staring through the separation in the curtains at the streetlight outside my window. Freezing air radiates from the walls. My bed is pushed into a corner and I feel like a fine fish with a wide, glassy eye. Someone has opened the freezer door, looking for something other than me.

The winter in my heart causes sickness. I get headaches if I read for too long. I read entire books over a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes I just sit and watch the cars out of the picture window in our little, dark living room. Everything is the same, in winter. We do the same things every day, we brush against the same doorways. We walk the same footsteps to the car and back. We've seen all of the exhibits at the museums a thousand times. We don't even really look, anymore. We just go there because we need to move our legs. The air is recycled and dry. It stings my eyes and hurts my throat. There are no great adventures.

I memorize the lilt of the light through the tiny, stained glass window at the very top of the front door.

The way it wavers on the stairs like water. Red and orange and yellow, like a keyhole looking into somewhere warm and dead, somewhere tea is served at noon in mismatched saucers. There are cakes and fine linens and there is grass growing all around.

It's always with me.

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 19:37:00 +0000

I think I might be ready to make something, again, for real. I might be ready to get back to the book I was writing. I might be ready to say, "I don't want to write the truth about my life. I want to write stories."

Do I say that every spring? Because I could swear to you, through this snow and wind, that spring is coming.

The people sitting next to me in the coffee shop smell like cigarettes. It makes me remember things, remember when things were going to be terrible, or they were going to be magical, but they were certainly going to be weird.

My worry is dying like a flame with a shortening wick. My girl is feeling better. We weathered a stomach virus, too. I didn't wake up with a thudding heart and a pit in my belly, this morning.
Someone scolded me, recently. She said that I don't respect her opinions, because she doesn't have children.

I think a lot of things about that.

I think it isn't true. I also kind of think that I am alone on an island when I am with people like that. Some people have lives, and other people have a space where they feel like a life should be. Some people have news from doctors, and some people have dating and cold apartment buildings. Everybody looks like a jury, when you think you should be something other than what you are, even if there's only an inkling of doubt.

I would have many inklings of doubt, if I'd never had children. Lots of people don't, but some people do, and that doubt colors inside the lines of everything. It wasn't me, saying those things.

We all want to be loved and to be seen.

I wake up sure that I should be what I am, for now. Maybe the trouble looks something like that, something like I'm a saint in my own head because I know that there is nothing more important than this basket of nightgowns and tiny socks. There is nothing more real than the imaginary cries I hear in the hallway after my babies are asleep, and how will anyone who hasn't bolted awake in the night because of an imaginary cry know me, anymore? Maybe the trouble is with me. Maybe it's always with me.

I believe.

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:42:00 +0000

I am digging myself out of this winter, little by little. I feel like I might escape it, every year, but February is just too cold and lonesome. Our house is too small and too dark.

My baby girl lost her front tooth, and I feel like I've always wanted a little girl with this smile.

We are okay. I've been wound too tightly to write. But we are okay.

I remember that there were sunny days in March of last year. We fanned ourselves with our hands and laughed and pretended to complain about the heat. I believe that could happen again.

I believe in our little rented beach house, still standing, at the edge of the world. I believe that June will come. I believe that, if it were summer, these illnesses and things wouldn't worry me so. These illnesses and things wouldn't rattle me until my teeth are chipped.

We're taking care of each other. I've been meditating at a center in the city. I've been forgetting to eat. I've been doing something like praying, quietly begging against the vastness. I've been trying to open my heart to the space in everything. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, all containing hundred of billions of suns, in the universe. One of Jupiter's moons has an atmosphere similar to Earth's atmosphere. Methane flows there, like water. Observing it is like observing the earth, billions of years ago. I've been trying to grasp the tiny enormity of being a human being.

I've always felt something like this, but I thought it was just me, just how I am. I've always felt like everything and nothing. Like a wonder of hydrogen and evolution and also, just an infinitesimal speck on a glowing blue pinprick, lost in an unending and frozen sea of darkness. I've always felt like the most beautiful thing alive, and also like a complete meaningless failure. I'm coming to see that this is just what it feels like to be alive. We spend so much time trying to define ourselves, trying to stand out, to be ourselves... only to realize, over and over, that we're not really separate from anything. We're all made from the same 12 particles of matter, even the stars, even Jupiter's moons. Even the ocean and the air. We're all going to die.

For now, I'll wake up next to a sweet little girl with a missing front tooth, and know the face of God.

Worry, worry, worry.

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 22:18:00 +0000

My daughter has an ongoing health issue. I don't write about it here. You might be surprised to know, given my compulsive over-sharing, that there are things that are just private. If she wants to write about her body someday, she can.

It's nothing fatal or devastatingly serious, so don't worry. It is nothing that will change the course of her life in giant strikes. She is, with a little perspective, really very okay. It is, in a cosmic sense, even something of an annoyance, rather than a crisis.

It is enough to kill me, though.

Every time she gets sick, I turn into a machine. My pistons pump and my electrical connections fire. I say, in a very calm voice, "Sit down by your sister, My Love. I'm just going to get dressed and call daddy, and we'll head to the doctor. I don't want you to worry, because everything is awesome and we will take such good care of you." I ask her to give me a hi-five, and hope that she doesn't notice how much my hands are shaking.

I tremble and my head spins, but I make it up the stairs without falling apart. I call Kurt at work and whisper-breathe to him, "I'm so worried. Oh, I'm so worried." I sob violently for a moment into a fist of blankets. He tries to talk, to undoubtedly tell me that she'll be fine, but I cut him off. I hate him, sitting at work under the air vents telling me that she will be fine. I know that. I KNOW THAT. I do. "I have to go," I snap at him.

He begs me for updates. I know I will be too worried to remember him, to have the capacity to pull my phone from my purse and type the tiny words.

IN WAITING ROOM.

WAITING FOR DOCTOR.

I will be able to call him once we're safe and together and buckled into the car with a prescription or a referral, to tell him that she is okay. That we made it through another appointment. I love him.

(Is there anything more terrible than having a sick baby?)

When my daughter is sick, I am a well of boiling poison. I don't want to talk. I don't want to get out of the house for a moment to relax. I don't want a bath or a warm cup of tea. No, I haven't eaten. I don't want to eat. I don't want to sleep. I tell Kurt I am going to bed early and leave him downstairs in the glow of the television with the volume turned down low.

I brush her red hair from her forehead, and she smiles in her sleep. I marvel over what a beautiful little thing she is, that even being disturbed while she is sleeping, she smiles. I curl up next to her and watch the rise and fall of her little chest. I marvel over how her face looks the same as the day she was born, in the moonlight.

In the morning, I wake up before anyone else so that I can scour the internet for information. I scare myself with these searches. I tell myself to stop, not to look, but I always look. I forget to eat and drink and suddenly the baby is awake and it's time to get ready for school. I carry the scary things with me. They flash and tingle around the edges of me, turning my stomach and making the walls close in, over breakfast.

I am a hot boiling well of poison and fear and panic. The air is full of sulfur. My heart is stuck at midnight. I fill and fill and fill with worry, gulping fear and stars and blood, choking myself on it. I fill up with worry and my stomach is a boiling hot center of poison and stars. The universe is so big and she is so tiny and she is everything.

When she is sick and I worry this way, I tell her, "Let's go pick out some clothes for Louisey and get dressed. We're going to spend every second of today having fun and being together."

And that's what we do.

I think of all the times I groaned when she woke up in the night, as a baby. All of the times I cursed having to load and unload her from her car seat. The times I told her, "Mommy just CAN'T, right now. Mommy needs some time, and some quiet." I hate all of those times. I hate myself for those times. I want to go back in time and slap myself hard on the cheek. "She is healthy and she loves you," I want to say to myself, in the past, the one who groaned over how everything was too hard. "Nothing is hard, yet. Nothing is scary, yet."

Sometimes, I want to shake people who don't have children, who have never murdered themselves with worry over a diamond snowflake in their hot and clumsy palm. "Tell me all of your worries," I want to say to them. "I would worry all of the worries of my life a thousand times over, to skip this one. Tell me yours, so that I can remember what worries were like, before the first time my child got sick."

(My childless friends will hate me for a moment, upon reading that last paragraph. They will accuse me of not respecting their lives, their choices, their pain. I believe in your pain, friends, and I want to shake you; rattle your brains and gobble up your loneliness and anxiety. I want to bathe myself in it, to remember it... the nights with a slew of knives to my veins. I want to do anything to get away from this worry. This one trumps everything. It is the only thing, and I am alone on an island. This one, when it shows up in the dark, is the only thing.)

This one.

It's just where I am, right now.

In a few days, things will calm down. I will breathe and eat too much at dinner time and laugh. I'll read a scary book in bed and the shadows from my book light will startle me. I'll take a walk, have sex, write a letter. There will be other things, again. I'll put on makeup, invite a friend over to talk. Right now, though, give me your hands.