Everything and no one... like the

Ingtroducing Gwynnie Bee, and how I never buy clothes for myself

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:34:00 +0000

So, I'm not a fashion person. I don't really wear make up or uncomfortable shoes. I don't care whether or not you approve of my "style," or if you find me attractive. I don't aim to be some kind of spokesperson for beauty, about what it should mean, or what role it should play in your life.

The bottom line is that you get to be whatever you want. You get to look however you look, how you were born or how you want to change yourself, and I don't even kind of get a say. You get to look like you and I will value you for everything but your clothes and makeup and haircut.

If you get a cute hair cut, I'll let you know that I like it, and it would never change whether or not I find you a valuable, beautiful person. If you lose a bunch of weight, and I know that it meant a lot to you, I will congratulate you and mean it, even though it doesn't mean anything to me, and the way I see you.

I'm not immune to fine and fancy things, either. There was a time where I walked around like this:

That was a lifetime ago. I got pregnant, and everything changed for me. I didn't know who I was. I had built an identity up around me for so long, that when I couldn't play that part anymore because it was killing me, all that was left of me was flesh and hair and bits of bone. I was annihilated. I was pink and raw and my skin ached all over.

I had no idea where to go, so I started opening the windows. I started stepping outside in the daylight. I started walking and walking. I went inside. Deep inside. And I found something there. It was as though I had been destitute and dragging myself along the ground, and the whole time I was dying there, there was a handful of treasure like seeds buried in the dirt beneath me.

Anyway, I'm terrible at selling things.

I'm working with the beautiful women at Gwynnie Bee for at least the next two months. They are giving me some free membership time in exchange for telling you my thoughts about it. Gwynnie Bee is a new clothing rental service for sizes 10-28 where you pay a certain amount per month, depending on how many garments you want to have out. You look through their growing collection, and put the things you like in your virtual closet, and they'll send you a package so that you can try them on and wear them for a while.

When you're finished with a garment, you can send it back in prepaid bags, and they'll ship you something else from your closet. You don't have to launder anything. Shipping and laundering are part of what you pay for, with your subscription.

So, I'm sharing this with you because I liked the idea when I heard about it. I might not be like... fancy and outfitted anymore, but I like feeling comfortable in things and looking like myself. Also, it's not like I'm going to go out and try on and buy a bunch of clothes any time soon. As a matter of fact, I can't even remember the last time I bought a piece of clothing for myself that wasn't out of absolute necessity, (and that didn't cause me stress over spending money.)

Here I am wearing a shirt from Gwynnie Bee. It was a comfortable, okay shirt. Scouty was my photographer. (It was her idea that I should model with the vacuum cleaner and while meditating.)

I tried on two other things that didn't really excite me. One of them was even hilariously awful. It was still fun to get them in the mail. I'll let you know when I try something that feels perfect.

If you'd like to try Gwynnie Bee, too, they're offering a free 30 day trial to my readers, (and to everybody else, it seems, but if you click the links on my page instead of looking GB up yourself, it will make me look good.) Click here to start browsing and closeting. Let me know what you think of everything, and if you find something that feels perfect, for you.

This moment...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:30:00 +0000

Nothing is solid, everything is like a dream.

I was lying in bed next to my girl this morning, and she was sleeping and quiet and beautiful, and it seemed so real. Then, the moment passed, and it was like a dream.

Later, we'll visit with our friends for lunch, but for now, it is only something hazy in my mind, some future thing that I can imagine, but I'm not guaranteed.

So much of what I believe to be reality is only held in the electricity and fog of my mind.

The only thing that is really happening is this moment, and it will pass, too.

I wonder how present I really am, for my life. I mutter to myself about my worries while I put away the dishes. I rush the girls through getting dressed so that we can make it to our next destination in a way that doesn't drag, so that we can be home and bathed and fed before it's time to sleep.

Everything I do, I'm stretching myself thin in long, dragging tendrils of smoke, trying to wrap myself about what's already happened so that I can predict what will happen in the future or reaching for something that hasn't happened yet.

I must believe that there is something better than myself, in my the future.

I must believe that I am not enough to live bravely and present, as I am, right now.

I must not understand that I have everything I need, in this moment.

In wanting more or less of everything, in looking forward to pleasure and trying to reason my way out of pain, I am missing the only moment that is really happening.

What am I missing because I'm afraid that I am not enough... because I'm afraid that something painful will touch me, or because I'm clinging to a hope that the future holds something better?

I am missing the feeling of the ground under my feet. The pleasure of breathing. The glimmer of water as it fills the sink. I am not tasting or hearing or seeing, when I believe that my thoughts are reality. I am not touching what I touch. I am nothing. I am smoke. My thoughts are not reality. My thoughts are shadows and light, they are like a dream. Everything that has ever happened will pass in an instant, and everything that hasn't happened yet, hasn't happened. The only thing I have is the wealth of this moment, and this moment is always new.

How my brother didn't drown in a riptide in the Outer Banks...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:02:00 +0000

It is a strange thing, watching someone drown.

First, you are kneeling in the wet sand. There is sunlight and space everywhere. The ocean waves are crashing behind you, and you are digging with your hands. The wind is blowing; a rushing sound in your ears, and you are happy. Your sister and your husband are on their knees next to you. Your children are there. You are digging them a little swimming pool out of sand.

You decide to work on a trench that leads to the water. The waves will come in and the trench will lead water into the pool, you think. A wall collapses, your sister makes a science joke, shaking her fist at the sky screaming, "Entropy!"

You'll be here all day until it's perfect, you think. It is perfect, this moment. You'll be here all day. The children walk through the pool of water, they step in a careful line down the length of your trench, their clumsy little feet covered in wet sand, caving in all the walls. They are dancing, almost. They are free little birds, singing a song under their breath.

Your husband shields his eyes and says, "You would think that with this many adults working on something this hard, it would be a lot more impressive a project." Everyone is smiling. The sun is burning your skin, the salt is burning your eyes. You stand up and make your way to the edge of the water, to rinse off.

This is when your mother approaches, full of worry and static. The sea spray is cool on your face. She yells to you, over the roar of the surf, "Do you think Adam is okay?"

Adam is your brother. Your mother annoys you. She is interrupting your moment in the sun with her jagged, peeling and curling worry. She is chronic, in this way. Anxiety clings to her like a mist. You've seen it a million times, especially near water. Every time someone wades in further than their waist, she starts getting agitated, putting a hand to her brow, watching for signs of distress. She's been this way since you were a kid. You've even pretended to drown before, just to scare her. You've been a child, and you've pretended to be eaten by a shark, just to show her worrying a lesson.

"He went to the house, I think," you say, dismissing her and planning to go back to digging a trench, fighting entropy; the tendency of things to move from a state of order to disorder, like the wind eroding a castle made of sand.

"No he didn't," she says. "He's in the water." Her voice has a shrill edge to it. The sound of it turns your stomach.

"He's fine," you say.

He, Adam, is, after all a giant. He is six and a half feet tall, so big and solid that he isn't susceptible to danger. You've seen him hold his ground in stormier times than this. He is so big and solid that sometimes, he can even disappear. He can live a life alone in the town where you grew up in a decaying old house with water stains on the ceiling and the shutters falling down, and he's fine.

"No he's not," your mother screams. "He's out there. He's in trouble."

She is looking at you, the swimmer, the water person. She is looking at you because, in her mind, we are always in trouble. We are her children, and the ocean is big, and she's always afraid. You've been out past the breakers so many times, you feel as though the deep water has become a part of you, like green, slimy tendrils of sea grass are always pulling at your feet, even when you're at home, doing the dishes and putting the children to bed. She says to you, he's in trouble, but what she really means is, tell me that he's not in trouble.

You turn around to face the ocean. He went up to the house, you think, one last time, before you see him in the water.

He is so far away you can barely make out the shape of him, a tiny round head and two waving arms like grains of rice, silhouetted against the horizon. You see that he is so tiny, he's living another life, in this moment. He is on another planet. He is set adrift where everything is quiet and lonely and blue. A jolt of electricity runs through your limbs. You begin to run. Your phone is wrapped in a towel on the blanket in the dry sand. You brought it down to take pictures. You are running and screaming, "Call 9-1-1."

Everything that happens next is like a dream. Your body is light and powerful. You can run through the sand, over the dune, down the splintery wooden walk to the street beyond the beach, telling the woman on the other end of the line, "The corner of Flambeau and Lighthouse Road," without getting out of breath. You are weightless. "He's thirty-three. He's drowning." Your phone has terrible reception. You get disconnected twice while you're obeying the voice on the phone, telling you to stay on the dune and wave to the rescuers when you can see them.

From the top of the dune, you can see that your brother is disappearing, being swept further and further away. He is a dust mote and space goes on forever. He goes under the water and you scream to the woman on the phone, "He's not coming back up!" He does, though. He goes under and comes back up, again and again, and no one is coming to help him.

You can see that your sister and husband are holding boogie boards that the kids found in the laundry room. One of them is red with a picture of Spiderman and the other is pink with the word BARBIE printed across it. You can't read it from here, but they are the same boards your daughters were using to float tentatively in the surf earlier in the day. You can see that your husband and your sister enter the water and get knocked down by the waves. There are other people with brightly colored children's floatation devices trying to get to him. They are miles away from where he is, you think. Your sister and your husband wash back up onto the shore.

Your mother appears, gripping fist fulls of her blonde hair. "Where are they?" she screams. "Where are the people who GET PAID to do this?"

She is talking about lifeguards. You paid extra money all year, drove a few extra hours to purposely vacation at the end of the world; a place without hoards of people, without mini-golf courses and proper grocery stores and chain restaurants. A place that is definitely without lifeguards.

"Stop," you snap at her. "They're coming." You don't want to have to deal with her panicking, right now. You are standing on a little hill of sand, the sea oats scratching the skin of your thighs, watching your brother die. Time goes by. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes.

Your brother becomes a child. You can see him, at every moment of his life. Scenes from pictures that you keep in a box on a high shelf in your bedroom closet play out in your mind, as you squint to find him in the black-blue water. The Easter where you got a white rabbit, and he strangled to death trying to escape through the chicken wire of his pen. The camping trip where the tent was infested with sand fleas and Adam struggled out in the middle of the night and went to sleep in the car. The Christmas morning where we stood in front of the tree, holding matching stuffed mice from An American Tail. He is a child; we are all children, and he is going to die.

A police man wearing shorts and hiking boots is standing next to you on the dune. You expect him to pick up a lifesaver and head into the water, but he doesn't. He just stands still, holding up his hand to shield his eyes, pretending you're not there, occasionally saying things in a low voice into a crackling walkie-talkie. Crack. Just out past the sandbar. Crack. White male. Crack. Flambeau and Lighthouse. You're not sure if you're allowed to move, yet. You stand dumbly, looking behind you for lifeguards who aren't coming.

You slide forward in time, then so that you're spread thin across the past and the future. This is how our brother dies, you imagine. Mom will collapse on the beach and you will have to pick her up. We won't come back here. We might never go to the ocean again, not together, like this. You'll come back, though. You'll stand in this spot, right here, and stare out into the water, trying not to picture his arms waving for help, trying not to picture him as a kid, his big teeth and giant glasses. You'll stand ankle deep in the water and your sadness will be like the ocean. You'll toss a shell or two into the waves. Your heart will seize a thousand times, out of nowhere, every day for the rest of your existence; like someone sneaking up and tapping you on the shoulder, thinking about how he didn't have a good life. How he was always lonely. How he always felt small. How he was shy and mild and didn't know how much he was worth. He had a life like yours, only silent and with walls that felt smooth and safe; a life like yours, if you'd been a better person. You'll stand in the sand staring at the place where he went under the water and never came up again, feeling guilty about how you were all hurting, brothers and sisters, and the church stole our breath and our house fell down around us, everything stagnating and molding... only you exploded all over everything, and he didn't. Your brother died, and he never had the pleasure of exploding. He only faded into the place where the sky meets the sea and everything is quiet and the enormity of his death lay beneath him with the eyeless creatures that slither and glow in the moonlight.

Except, he doesn't die. You realize suddenly that you can see him better. He is getting closer, slowly and almost imperceptibly, he is making his way closer to where the waves are breaking, where the strangers holding their childrens' rafts over their heads are trying to reach him. "He's floating on his back!" you scream at the police man.

"It looks like he's doing the back stroke," he says to you, in a lazy, southern voice.

Inch by inch, your brother floats bravely. You can see that the water surrounding him looks brown, not the blue-black of the sky between the stars as night falls. He is closer. He is getting closer, and the air rushes back into the world, your lungs are full to bursting as you call out, "He's standing!" Waves crash over his head and you laugh, "He's standing!"

It occurs to you for the first time to wonder who is caring for the children, and a sudden fear grips you that they've wandered away. You spot them, instantly, huddled together, sitting in the sand with their little, pink arms wrapped around one another. You run to them shouting, "Uncle Adam is okay!" Your six year old daughter springs from where she is sitting and bolts down the beach, screaming in her beautiful, tiny voice, "You're alive! You didn't die!"

How strange it will be when it really is time for your brother to die, and your parents and husband. Everyone you've ever loved and hated are all children forever and we will all die, some of us drowning. Isn't it all the strangest thing?

Let's live a good life, together.

On vacation...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:37:00 +0000

We've been at our favorite beach all week. A tropical storm came to shore, and we're all thinking about getting ready to drive home.

We caught little chirping toads at the foot of the Hatteras Lighthouse. Both girls became brave little swimmers.

There was a very scary day where my brother was swept out to sea by a rip current and almost drowned.

But, I'll tell you all about everything when we get back.

Until then, here's the cutest smile in the world.

Fairy bitten girl graduates from kindergarten

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:00:00 +0000


tough face

My big brave girl had her first major accident the night before her big graduation.

She was climbing a tree, like brave girls always do, when she slipped and a branch cut her. She was at the ER until almost midnight and had to get seven stitches in her perfect little face.

She made me so proud. She said that when they were stitching her up, she kept saying out loud, over and over again, "This hurts, it's okay. This hurts, it's okay. This hurts, it's okay."

I told her that it looks like a fairy bit her. She must have been climbing too close to its home.

I was a little heartbroken that her stitches kind of stole the show, at kindergarten graduation. I bought her a sparkly new dress a few days before, and anticipated that she would feel so happy and sparkly walking across the stage to receive her award. Instead, she kind of kept her head down, aware that everybody was seeing her injury before they were seeing her dress.

she WAS smiling

She also yawned a lot. Like her mama, she tends to be a little (read: A LOT) moody when she's super tired. I held up my camera and said, "SMILE!" She rolled her eyes and said, "I AM SMILING," and gave me this face.

It was a very big day.

As of 3:25 today, she will no longer be a Kindergartener.

She also told me after graduation, "I think my stitches made some of the boys fall in love with me. Ryan told me that I was awesome, and he wishes he had to get stitches."

She said, "I told him, 'Well, I'm pretty brave and do a lot of crazy things. I'll probably have to get stitches like... a million times in my life.'"

Lets hope not, kiddo.

(Have I mentioned lately that I'm not sure I can take this parenting thing, anymore? Too scary. I'm not sure I can escape it without going totally insane. In fact, I'm sure that the sanity boat has long since sailed for me. Every time one of my girls get hurt or sick, another tenuous thread in my brain snaps. I think this phenomena is evidenced by the look on my face in this picture...)

Win a Pittsburgh Mini-Vacation from UPMC Health Plan...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 28 May 2013 14:16:00 +0000

my louisey, two summers ago at the water steps on the north shore

UPMC Health Plan sent me a wonderful opportunity for you and/or your friends and family in the Pittsburgh Area.

Anybody who knows anything, knows that I love my city. It's a wonderful, quirky place to raise a family. It's big enough for there to be a list of Thai restaraunts for me to rank, (Thai Spoon in Dormont and Thai Cuisine in Bloomfield have the best curries) and small enough that I never feel that looming, overwhelmed feeling that I get walking around in places like NYC, where it seems like all of the buildings lean in over me to block out the sun and are filled with little scurrying bug people, and I'm just a meaningless speck with little moving insect legs. There are plenty of beautiful green spaces, lots of bike trails and places to hike. There are hundreds of weird, fun little restaurants and exactly one million of those yogurt shops popping up everywhere. You know which ones I mean. They are EVERYWHERE. (I am not complaining.)

I love Pittsburgh. Everybody who lives here loves Pittsburgh. If you live here, or love somebody who lives here, wouldn't it be awesome to win this package?

-A weekend stay at a top downtown Pittsburgh hotel
-A Wild Encounter, behind-the-scenes experience at the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium
-Dinner at a great downtown restaurant
-Personal tour of the Senator John Heinz History Center
-Pittsburgh Sports Prize Pack

Here's what you do to win:

1. Prepare a few convincing sentences about what makes you and your family unique. Do you have a history that would make us blush? Weird holiday traditions? Do you love each other so much it might break our hearts? Write a paragraph or two, (or make a video or take a picture,) showcasing your family's individuality.

2. Then, click here to go to UPMC Health Plan's Individuality App. You'll see a big purple button that says share. Click the button and use the form to submit your story.

That's it! And you could win a fun little vacation for you or your friends or loved ones in Pittsburgh.

The submissions are currently open and will close on June 2, 2013. Five finalists will be chosen, and then users can vote for their favorite from June 3-9. A winner will be announced on June 10! (Only residents of PA are eligible.)

Encourage your friends and family to participate, read and vote! Also, if you can't think of anybody to give your prize to, you could always keep in mind that I could sure use a weekend stay at a fancy downtown hotel. I'M JUST SAYING. (Just kidding. Mostly...)

You have six days! Get to writing!

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.