Because a Friend Told Me I Should Be Writing More Blogs...

It is December.

A million December blogs run through my head-- about a season so draining it frays nerves like split ends down strands of blonde hair, a season filled with memories behind twinkling lights, banks of snow, poinsettias, weddings, friends who remember the anniversaries you are no longer allowed to talk about, and who toast your anniversary of independence, and of realizing that that being lonely while single is so much better than being lonely while lying next to someone who cannot love you, because being lonely while single means only that-- that you are alone, while being lonely while lying next to the man you are trying to love and knowing he does not love you means (possibly? probably?) you are unlovable, and of secret December lives, and lies, and people dying, and birthdays, and Rudolph's nose lighting the way home from Grandma's house along every radio tower in St. Paul, and drawing with your finger against the frozen molecules of the car window, and your mom telling stories about how she worked in the 1st bank downtown and turned the flashing light that dots the skyline on and off, and on and off, because she didn't think you understood, at seven, what statistics meant. And a Santa who knocks on Grandma's door when you are three because he sees you waving in the window and hands you a wooden toy car that has wheels you can take apart, and later, how you learn no one knew who this Santa was, that he appeared out of nowhere, and how somehow you brought that Santa down the aisle with you in December, twenty one years later, and how now both memories slide along the ventricles of your heart with slow, easy, deliberate serrated blade edges.

This is my December.

There are a million December blogs that dance in my mind, like sugarplums laced with acid.

But the blog I will write is my December 29th, the day after yesterday. And today I took a step forward only to have to go back, but stepped forward again, and, after visiting the phone store three times in one day, after making friends with gay, Jewish salesman Bill, the Somali couple buying a phone from the Somali salesman who recognizes me by the third visit, and after somehow offering to bring lunch tomorrow, two days after yesterday, to everyone in the office, I purchased a new phone. Finally.

Today, December 29th, I abandoned the flip phone I had borrowed to replace a much loved and dramatic Blackberry with another. Which meant I had to reenter all of my contacts. One. At. A Time. Phone. Number. By. Phone. Number.

So what I learned was this-- in the middle of My December, my emotional mini-drama, my endless lists of school work and course work and syllabi and syllables, I pushed everything aside to sit on my couch next to my yorkie-poo, watch Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, and type digits into my phone one by one--that while the first ten minutes felt tedious, suddenly a shift occurred. I learned that entering phone numbers into a phone, remembering birth dates, figuring out birth years and anniversaries, brought all of these people into my living room. All of these happy memories and people got my undivided attention as I thought about them and their important dates and numbers. I couldn't help but feel happy as I thought about each and every one. My favorite numbers went into my phone, right alongside my favorite people.

And everything felt right.

And that is why I wrote this blog, this, the day after yesterday. This is my blog for December 29.

Everything just feels right.

The Day after Yesterday

Today I am blowing off the mountains of schoolwork I am supposed to be grading.

Today is a slow morning and singing "Winter Wonderland" in my best lounge singer impersonation.

Today is addressing Christmas cards and buying groceries.

Today is yoga and holiday parties.

Today is remembering newspapers and coffee and French toast for two made with one egg per piece of bread, vanilla, cream, brown sugar and toasted pecans.

Today is smiling at the memory.

Today is making French toast for one and thinking it still tastes pretty damn good.

But Maybe Wear a Helmet

There is something I have lost. Something that recently has gone out of my life. It is the something that lets me send words out into the world without care and with a sort of blind faith that somehow my fingers know better than my mind what needs to land on a page.

Thus, (to borrow a transition word from the list of transitions I gave to my 9th graders the other day), I haven't been writing much.

And for a couple months this was fine. I was busy. I was moving. I was teaching and going to school and applying for another teaching position and training for teaching online and getting sick every other day and THUS, thus- I left writing.

So now my fingers don't know quite what to do. They start. They delete. They second guess. They worry. They pause...

But today, well- today I was walking through my office at school, eyes glued to the assignment I was about to copy for the students restlessly awaiting instruction in the computer lab, when I slammed my leg right into a file cabinet with a noise that startled at least two of the three co-workers that were in the office at the time.

"Katie!" said one of these dear co-workers, "are you ok?!"

"Yeah," I replied, but in my head I thought no. No. Something is very wrong with this picture. What am I doing here? What has happened to my life? Obviously there is a reason my eyes have been causing me problems for the last two months. Obviously there is something I am not seeing.

"I'm fine," I said to my co-worker. "It sounded worse than it was." In my head, though, I was saying, "Nice job. How clumsy can one person be? Who runs into a file cabinet?" And a story a student wrote in a creative writing class I taught one year long ago came to mind, one that featured a teacher who tripped over cords and bumped into things. I sighed.

It wasn't until I bumped into my stove for the second time later on the same night that I thought of my blog, and the tagline about being clumsy and running into things in an adorable way.

Thus, now that I am sitting on the couch with my hound beside me, watching Julie and Julia and trying not to be envious of the blog writer in the movie who became successful by writing about recipes and cooking. I am thinking maybe I should stop being jealous of someone in a movie and start doing work of my own. I am thinking maybe I can be successful writing about collisions? Accidents? Embarrassing mishaps?

Since there is no telling how many embarrassing mishaps I will encounter in my life, no telling how many slightly painful collisions I will have, since I am bound to run into objects and people for the rest of my life, I might as well keep writing.

Thus, I might as well let my fingers run as they will.

And just wait to see what will happen next.

No pausing, no second-guessing. No more worrying.

From New Toy to Skin Horse--Comments on the English classroom

Well- here I am. In a coffee shop. On a school day. Feeling like the world's worst teacher, yet again.

My body has been rebelling against teaching this year. It's only November and already I've called in SEVEN sick days this year, made a trip to urgent care, the minute clinic, two visits to my own doctor, and one trip to a fancy opthamologist in a skyscraping building downtown. Not exactly a personal best. But I want to put aside my rebellious immune system issues, the possibility that my body is telling me to quit teaching, and the pain I am feeling from a golfball sized pus-filled lymph node that is irritating the left side of my throat and making me squinch both shoulders up in a painful wince each time I swallow.

I want to put aside the physical for a moment and think about teaching.

I have to create an assignment for composition students for a course I am taking on composition and pedagogy. Conveniently, I teach composition and so this assignment will be pulling double duty for me- once when I turn it in for my grad class and then again when I use it on my unsuspecting students in a couple weeks.

I felt a little reluctant taking a grad school class on teaching composition while working on my MFA in writing, because, having already earned an M.Ed, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about teaching already. But it has turned out to be surprisingly helpful, and, even more surprising, I am starting to feel as though I am exiting the shiny, new toy stage of teaching and entering into the shabby, worn skin horse part of the profession. I don't profess to be "real" yet, as the Velveteen rabbit wanted to be in the story, the one in which he sought wisdom from the skin horse who explained about the passing of flashy, new toys. But I do think nine years in the profession has changed my thinking about what I do.

I began teaching as a shiny, new toy right out of grad school, one year after under-grad. I was a ferris wheel of activities and lesson plans and games and exciting things to DO in class. But I think now that I DO a lot less and my students are learning a lot more. Or at least I hope so. I'm learning more, anyhow.

So here are some thoughts and lessons I've been considering in my evolution to skin horse composition teacher:

1. It is better to not do everything but to do certain things really well. It's better to scrap the day's activity in favor of going over the one you gave yesterday. Students want to do assignments that have meaning and they will put more effort into it if they see the meaning in what you do. By going over the materials, you illustrate the importance of the assignment for them.

2. The less I am involved in the assignment, the more they learn. My view of myself as a teacher has changed--I am not the expert telling them what to do, but I am a scholar, asking what we can learn from what is in front of us. I see my students learning the most when I introduce materials and ask them questions, when I say "what can we learn from this piece?" and "how does the writer make her point?" rather than "This is what we learn," and "This is how the writer makes her point." I ask my students to come up with grading criteria for their assignments. I ask them to tell me what a good narrative essay should do. They have to engage more critically with the work and, hopefully, start to think like scholars, rather than as students waiting for instruction from the teacher.

3. Learn from them. I used to be so nervous to pass out class evaluations, and not without reason. Handing a volatile 17 year-old an evaluation form can be seriously devastating for a 23 year-old newbie teacher. Now I learn from my students by asking them to reflect on their own process as writers, or by asking which assignments were most helpful. I am more willing to change and less fearful about their reaction to me. My thinking has gone from "do they like me?" to "are they learning?"

4. Page requirements are for suckers. One lesson learned from the self-reflections I had my students do is that for many, the thing they were most pleased with was the length of their essay. The requirement had been to write a 2-5 page essay and one student wrote "I am pleased with the length of the paper. Usually I am at the minimum but this time I was right in the middle." As a teacher, I found I could actually care less about the length of the paper. And that, in fact, when the students tried to stretch their stories to make them longer, usually the writing became worse. The papers lost their focus, became too wordy, and contained so many details that there was no climax to the story. In the narrative essay, I found the papers that were about a page and a half long tended to be the strongest. And, furthermore, I decided that I didn't want my students to worry about the length of the essay for a second. I wanted them to think about content, voice, and organization. I scrapped the length requirement for future narrative essays.

5. Not everyone likes to write. As a writer, I found this shocking. Having never struggled for topic and being the sort who could ramble on and on for five pages just introducing my topic, it never occurred to me that some people might simply not enjoy writing or might struggle to think of what to say and how to say it. I grew up in a family where my dad was an English teacher and my mom, a businesswoman, loved writing limericks and poems and lengthy, comical Christmas letters. We discussed grammar at the dinner table. We wrote skits to perform at Christmas parties. I had no idea there was a whole culture of people who didn't enjoy reading and writing.

Having made friends with people more mathematically or business-world inclined, I have learned a new perspective. Some people feel frustrated by the subjectivity of English courses, by the hazy guidelines and criteria; there are no answer keys to say you are right or wrong: there is only the teacher with her red pen. Suddenly I could understand why students take the comments and grades on their papers so personally; they are personal. Of course, not to the instructor, but, if you are student who doesn't understand the concepts being explained, you aren't going to receive the comments written on your essay as anything but a message that you are inadequate in this world where other people belong and you don't.

6. Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. Plato said this, first of all, not me, but it is a lesson that has been the most painful for me to learn. As a new teacher, I took students' failures personally. Why wouldn't they learn? Why wouldn't they try? Why did they insist on failing? But there's always a reason and it usually has little to do with me.

For instance, there was the student I scolded in front of others for skipping class who stormed away from me in a huff. Months later I learned her two year-old nephew had just been beaten to death by her sister's boyfriend. Of course I had no clue, but I will never forget that I shamed her (and not too harshly, to be fair to myself) in front of other people while she was dealing with that. Or there was Tyler, the student who pierced his own eyebrow with a giant safety pin and promptly lost every assignment I gave him. Or Alan, a student who NEVER brought a pencil to class and would chew the ones I let him use for the period... and lose them before class the next day. Or Mary, a student who always dressed impeccably said to me when I asked about her failing grade "I don't know, I just can't concentrate. My dad and step-mom always fight, so I just want to hang out with my friends." Or Jereme, who said, when I asked him about his failing grades that his grandma, his only caretaker since his mom died the month before, had been hospitalized for a stroke and so he had to take over her dog-walking business while she was in the hospital.

No wonder he wasn't turning in his assignments.

7. Or else they are on drugs. Seriously. I've caught at least three kids using in my classroom over the years and I know that's just the kids dumb enough to get caught. Deals are going down in high school halls all over the place. But if students are choosing to be high in school, imagine how pointless they must see school in their lives. Some students will learn later on, some will go on to become addicts, some will have no long term consequences for their choices, but either way ultimately this is the student's choice.

I'm not really sure how this revelation fits into my personal pedagogy for teaching, other than to remember it is an element in the classroom that is never in the textbooks. When you are learning how to write a lesson plan there is never any guidance for what to do if your students are tripping, or stoned, or high out of their minds. And sometimes, when I am beating myself up for a being a failure of a teacher, for letting one or two of the children get left behind, it is slightly helpful to remember that one or two of them might be stubbornly planting their feet in the ground and refusing to move ahead with the plan. That it might not have anything to do with me at all.

8. Everyone wants to do well. Everyone. A peer in my composition class once told me that to get an F on an assignment, even one he didn't care about doing when he turned it in, was like "watching a video of being kicked in the face in slow motion." All students want to do well. All students want approval. All students care about the end results even if they show it by getting mad at the teacher, being hostile, challenging, demanding, apathetic, disinterested, or flippant.

This revelation has shaped the way I meet with students. I try to remember that their efforts on an assignment are their best efforts based on what they understood of the assignment. Even those students who waited until the last minute and rushed through it-- why did they wait? Why didn't they put more into it? Why did they sabotage their own efforts? What were they fearful of? What didn't they understand?

I have decided I don't want to be a teacher who crushes writers. I don't hand out A's but I try to simply remember to honor my students for their efforts and meet them where they are. I try not to shame or belittle my students.

9. You never know what they take with them. It's true. And especially with high school students. There are fewer pictures and cards made for high school teachers. Which is fine. Mostly it will seem like no one appreciates you. That is just the nature of being a high school teacher, especially if you have high expectations for your students and a reputation for being a little tough.

But sometimes a student will surprise you, and the student you thought cared less about school, will thank you for your efforts. Once in a while they will even buy you a shot, as a student of mine from my first year of teaching did when I was with friends at a bar downtown. He was a bartender and, in addition to giving me a drink, he turned to my friend and told her that I was the one of the few teacher at the high school who actually cared about what I was doing, the few that made a difference to him, a student notoriously late to class, usually inclined to goof off, and rarely inclined to finish homework. I would never have thought he would remember me any more than another student, Deshaun, one I worked with twice in an after school program and saw frequently in the halls.

Deshaun was frequently in trouble, mostly failing his classes, and often getting into confrontations with his teachers. I complimented his creative writing in the after school program and would ask him about the rhymes he was making up. Now he works at the Walgreen's by my apartment and is going to a community college in January. He greets me reverently as "Ms. Fuller" when he sees me and keeps me updated on his life, that he's working full time, planning to go to school, and getting his diploma on Monday at our high school because he finally finished his credits. I'm pleased he is succeeding now and surprised he remembers me; I never even had him as a student.

I'm telling these stories not to boost my ego for being an amazing teacher. (Well, maybe a little for ego-boosting. This is a pretty thankless job, so maybe I am just a little bit patting myself on the back for once instead of beating myself up for my many failures.) Mostly I am telling these stories to illustrate that teachers will hear the complaints instantly from the students they have pissed off, but that they rarely will hear the positive feedback. So it's a profession that requires a certain quality of faith, a certain skin horse toughness.

And finally...

10. There is nothing more satisfying than playing tricks on your students. It's so fun. On Friday I promised a taste test for an analysis unit we've been working on and I told my students we would be taste-testing broccoli, liver, and pig's hooves. For some dumb reason they believed me. Another classic joke is to write QUIZ! on the board on April 1st. They never catch on. Seven periods in a row- the joke works!

I say this because teaching can be fun, too. These are not mean-spirited jokes; they are harmless pranks and bring levity and life to the classroom. And, in a classroom where I will be largely unappreciated and teaching crabby students on drugs, I might as well amuse myself.

There are 800,000 variables I cannot control in the classroom (golf ball sized, pus-filled lymph nodes being one of them), but I can control my attitude. And I can find ways to amuse myself. To bring levity to the classroom. So I make bad jokes (for instance I asked my students which character in To Kill a Mockingbird said very little, which character said boo. Ha ha.) and I do not mock students, but I play tricks when I can. I tell my students embarrassing and amusing anecdotes about my family's obsession with jello. They don't laugh, but I don't care. It's not cool to laugh at your teacher's jokes when you are 15. Luckily, I am not 15. I can laugh at myself all I want.

So, an hour later into my sick day, I guess my conclusions are this: Am I an amazing teacher? Probably not. Am I a good teacher? Maybe. Am I doing my best? Yes. Have I learned anything in my nine years at this? Definitely. Is the journey from new toy to skin horse over?

Chances are, it's just beginning.

My October Paradox

This morning I stepped out of my apartment at 5:45 in the morning into the just-frozen October morning to see the glint of ice on my windshield greet me. And despite the irritation I felt knowing I would have to begin a life of scraping my window now that I no longer live at the cushy studio apartment with the heated garage, I couldn’t help but notice the clear air filling my lungs, the belt of Orion gleaming in the black sky above me. I breathed in and also cursed the harsh beauty around me pressing the rubber straight edge of my window scraper against the film of ice on the glass.

 

An October paradox.

 

By mid-morning the frost was gone and by late afternoon I was wearing my hoodie without a coat out for a walk. But now it is night and I suppose frost is here again, just outside my door.

 

I just finished watching The Wrestler and so I cannot escape the idea of loneliness, of tragic ex-heroes of the 80’s, of men who end up alone clinging to their armor even as they realize behind it they touch no one.

 

My uncle died this summer. His grown-up biological children and stepchildren showed up like vets who had gone through a civil war of sorts, a bloodbath of divorce and abandonment that left scars that still smart when the weather isn’t right. They mourned not their father, but the relationship, the treaty lines that sent them scattering in different directions around the country. They wanted him back, it back, that life before the war.

 

We all did.

 

My once-upon-a-time husband lost his father to a similar war. I don’t know where his scars are or how they are doing now, but I know they must have ached when he rolled over in bed next to me years ago. I was no Nightengale, had no skills to treat his wounds, but I knew they were there, hidden below the surface. I could hear it in the tears he didn’t cry at the funeral.

 

My ninth graders just finished reading of Mice and Men and on a test I asked them to explain which theme in the novel was most important. “I think loneliness was the most important idea in the novel,” wrote one student named Patrick, “in the fact that it affected everyone in the story. I can relate to this theme because I have been lonely most of my life.”

 

“I think everyone has moments when they feel lonely,” I wrote on his test, because- what else could I say?

 

Loneliness crouches over me right now from the ropes at a ring. On this frost-filled night it is the wrestler in lime green pants and I am afraid that Mickey Rourke is about to “Ram Jam” me right into the floor.

 

I think this wrestler must visit other apartments as well. On Saturday, I went out for dinner with a man who said to me, “Don’t get me wrong, I love living alone. But I’m ready to have a relationship—it’s boring being single, and lonely.”

 

“What are you doing for Christmas?” asked another male friend of my mine on the phone the other day. His mom had been asking him about his plans and I think he felt the wrestler breathing down his neck when she did.

 

And these conversations make me worry because even in the face of the frost, even under the shadow of the wrestler, a part of me hears these comments as requests, as needs, and I want to hang up the phone and say good night early. The worry is not about these men. They are not saying anything wrong. They are being honest, which I like. What worries me is my own reaction.

 

“You’re kind of hard to reach,” said a man I went to a movie with this summer. “It’s hard to explain but it’s like there’s a wall around you.”

 

Am I one of the tragic ex-heroes of the 80’s? Am I clinging desperately to my armor?

 

I go to the place in my memory of funerals. Of armored knights on platforms in front of the people who tried to love them.

 

I am thinking of my uncle again.

 

He lost the war with some of his children. He loved them but couldn’t find a way to share that love with them. But he didn’t die alone.

 

In the end he adopted a third ex-wife’s daughter as his own and provided for her and her son, his grandson. He still spoke with his ex-wife (who was his daughter’s age), and her parents (who were his age). He still joked around with the people in his new life. He still pulled out a gun to shoot at rabbits in his front yard in Sauk Rapids. (A story shared that soothed the battle wounds at the funeral.)

 

I may have walls around me some of the time but I do not push everyone out of my life. There are people in my life with whom I can be completely honest, completely myself. There are friends who stop by for dinner, who help me when I need it, who call me every night at 10:02 to discuss the occurrences of the day. There are family members who are not perfect but who are as imperfect as myself and willing to learn how to connect.

 

Love is everywhere. It is all around us. Sometimes we mess it up. Sometimes we find ourselves fighting against something simple, we find ourselves fighting our own civil wars, but love never leaves. It is the starlight bouncing off the frost on a cold October morning, a beauty so harsh we aren’t sure what to do with it. 

My Relationship to Pain

Just below the orangish-red, newly painted toes of my pedicured foot, there is a puffy purple mark emerging.

 

I played soccer today. I played soccer during the 43-degree weather of a Minnesota October Sunday evening. I played soccer with a man who had a French accent and gray hair; a man who planted the entire weight of his body on cleats on the top of my foot.

 

I limped down the stairs tonight to let the yorkie-poo out.

 

This is not an uncommon occurrence for a soccer player. Even one who plays on a co-ed league for old folks, men over 35 and women over 30. Last week I went to school with a giant bruise on my elbow and a thumbprint bruise on my bicep. There was a purple olive on my thigh from a fist or a cleat. I don’t even want to tell you the number of toenails I’ve lost over the years to this game. Or the number of times I’ve rolled an ankle.

 

 

Many summers ago, my friend Emily once asked pointedly, lovingly, and mockingly, after seeing me hobble on yet another sprained ankle, “Do you have to play soccer? Would you like to just lay down on the ground while I beat you with a stick instead?”

 

“Would there be a way to win?” I asked earnestly, seriously considering the new sport, to the laughter of another soccer-playing friend.

 

 

 

I don’t know what my problem is.

 

I don’t know exactly what sort of crazy I am that makes me love this sport, makes me love the contact, the competition, the jostling and elbowing in front of the net. Why can’t I just be content to run? To swim? To move in a straight line without running into other people?

 

Ironically enough, in life, I find, I am trying hard to do just that—to move in a straight line, and avoid other people. I am finding myself so disinterested in men, at least the ones that are safe and doing all the right things, like calling in person promptly after getting my number, inviting me to dinner, and pursuing master’s degrees.

 

But then again, I am also avoiding the men not doing the right thing—the ones who are insincere or half-hearted or only half-interested.

 

I’m tempted, as the inwardly-introspective, prone to over-rumnination sort of person that I am, to focus only on the way I am disinterested in the nice guys who have asked me out. I am tempted declare myself masochistic- sadistically interested in inflicting pain on myself. I’m tempted to compare my dating life to my love for soccer, to classify myself as one of those women who loves bad boys and troubled relationships. I’m tempted to chastise and criticize and shame myself for bad choices and hasty decisions.

 

However, after careful consideration, I realize I am not shunning good guys in favor of bad. I’m not disinterested in someone just because he is nice. I’m also not dating a man who treats me like crap. I’m somewhere in dating limbo and mostly just waiting to see how things shake out.

 

 Maybe I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want.

 

I know I don’t want to talk myself into anything. I know I don’t want to date a man because I feel like I should. Tell myself that he’s cute and other people admire him and I know he’s really a good guy.  I would never want to be the woman some guy convinced himself to date and so I respect these cute, nice men enough not to be that girl convincing herself to like them.

 

I know I won’t tolerate being lied to, I know I won’t tolerate being treated disrespectfully, and so I know I’m not just drawn to the bad boys either. I know I want someone who communicates sincerely, who listens with his ears, his mouth, and his heart.

 

Some men I have dated have said they hear me, but I don’t always feel it. I have tried to talk myself into feeling it, into trusting them, but in the end, I just can’t.  I did that for a decade once already.

 

So I have decided I am done arguing with my gut—I have decided to just accept that it’s right. I am not interested the men asking me out on dates, not because I am sadistically hoping for a man who treats me badly, but because nothing so far has felt right.

 

Thus I continue, in life, moving in a straight line, avoiding people, men, for the time being.

 

Maybe this is why I love soccer so much. Maybe the field is where I let the wild girl out- the one who loves the collisions.

 

Soccer has been showing up in my dreams lately. I’m taking penalty kicks on goals on a field of white carpet. I’m throwing the ball in bounds to myself because no one else is checking to me.

 

There is a woman inside me who loves fighting. One who loves puffy bruises below orangish-red, newly-painted toes. But she only seeks pain on the turf, or the field. Never after walking away from the game.

 

Maybe that’s because she’s been down that road already. 

New Nest

One of my many nicknames, my favorite nickname, given to me by my mother—a significant thing in my life, as my relationship with my mother is not always a peaceful one, and so it comforts me eternally to know always that at least she coined this most special name for me—is Bird.

 

Lately I’ve been in the mood for nesting.

 

And getting ready to migrate.

 

 

In fact, there are only a handful of nights left in my current roost, the studio apartment with nine foot ceilings, blue walls, bookshelves and granite countertops, where I’ve been living for the past two years. The place I moved into while under stress, under attack, during my divorce, during my personal ground zero moment.

 

At the time I wanted something safe and clean. The building was brand new. The hallways weren’t even painted. No one else had used my bathtub. I could see everything I owned from my bed. This felt comforting. This gave me peace. I felt safe enough to break apart. To weep on the bathroom floor until I was empty. To scotch tape my pieces back into place.

 

This place, this apartment, provided me with space enough to heal, no walls to hide emotions in other rooms.

 

But now-

 

Well, now I realize these four walls contain room enough only for me (and the yorkie-poo just barely). There is no room for other people in this space. Perhaps to visit. Perhaps to share a drink and a conversation. But there is no room, for instance, for a boyfriend in this apartment.

 

So I guess it’s time to move.

 

I don’t know if I’m ready for a boyfriend, but I’ve decided I’m ready for at least a bedroom. I’m ready for a dining room table and chairs instead of the four unevenly matched stools I bought for $14 a piece at IKEA. I’m ready for a desk in the second bedroom, a futon for friends who visit, a room entirely for curling up on a couch and watching a movie. I’m ready for rooms, living, family, and otherwise.

 

I visited the new two-bedroom apartment I will be living in—and by new, I only mean new to me because it lives in a building containing just three other apartments built in 1909- one hundred years ago. I stood in the living room wishing for different paint choices and getting used to the space. I picture this place full of life- full of other people- full of so much more than myself.

 

The mental nesting begins in the way of plans, my most comfortable tool, and leafing through catalogues, imagining what colors need to go where, picturing photos from trips decorating the walls. I see plants and rugs and a white enamel desk sitting in a room full of windows facing the coffee shop across the street. I hear music. I smell food. It’s like I can imagine my chosen family of various friends materializing in certain corners of the apartment. I am mentally buying a comfortable chair- one I would never want to get out of- to rest in the living room of my new place. The place where I want to not just stay, not just use to recover, but the place where I plan truly to live.

 

And in this mood, in the new apartment, I can’t help but feel that by finding a new roost, one big enough for more than just my sorrow, one big enough for my life, my joy, surely another person will appear in the space.

 

“Are you going to get a roommate?” a friend asked as I told him about the new two-bedroom place.

 

“No,” I say, “it’s not really big enough for a roommate. I mean, it’s big enough for something like a boyfriend to share it with, but not really a roommate.”

 

“Oh, so what, you have a boyfriend now?”

 

“No,” I say sheepishly. “But, you know, I figure I get the apartment and the boyfriend will appear eventually.”

 

“You’re planning ahead,” he said. “I like that.”

 

I do too.

 

 

 

Back at the studio, though, I think about the new spot and I wonder if I will be able to fill the space. What if there are no friends? No gatherings? No dinners? No boyfriends to make the walls of my new apartment burst with life? What if I wander lonely from room to room? What if I rattle and spin like a quarter through the empty, echoing walls, on the ancient, faded hardwood floors?

 

I can’t pretend that writing this has eased my mind. I can’t pretend that it makes me confident that I will suddenly be open to new relationships in my life.

 

But I guess I can trust the nickname. I guess I can trust those instincts stirring me to move and migrate, nestle and nest. I guess I can trust my mom knew me when she named me Bird. How do they find it? The place in the south where they need to fly? How do they know when it is time to leave? I’m pretty sure they don’t overanalyze it. I’m sure they don’t write lists and weigh pros and cons. It can’t be that they call friends and ask for advice. Or that they make appointments with their therapists.

 

I’m pretty sure they just go, just because something inside says fly. And so will I- not looking back over my wing.

The most heartbreaking blog yet...

I’m being haunted.

 

It’s October, so I suppose it’s only fitting, but the haunter is not a ghost or phantom, sadly not a monster or a zombie.

 

Instead it is a pile of white papers all trailing me from dawn to dusk and even into the night. A stack of the 150 narrative essays from my five classes of high school students this year- my year after the sabbatical.

 

They are in my car. They are on my counter. They are at my desk at school. I can’t go anywhere without seeing this gigantic collection of personal narratives reminding me that grading needs to happen. I estimate it will take twenty-seven hours to grade the essays, these essays about getting a dog, falling off of a horse, stepping onto the basketball court, hitting a homerun. Giving birth to a son. Finding out a friend has died in a car accident.

 

Despite the fact that I am moving to a new apartment and still taking a class at grad school and working full time and trying to have a life, I need to find an additional 27 hours to get this work done. And the problem is that my body is rejecting my plan to dutifully grade these papers and get them back quickly to my students. It keeps getting sick. It took me three weeks to get over a cold. I’m losing weight. I carry this giant stack of essays like a pack of sins from childhood around with me from coffee shop to apartment to school and it weighs me down with its guilt. I feel like a stick, unsteady and anxious, carrying a burden that keeps me off balance. 

 

It’s not a good situation.

 

Today I called in sick to work in order to spend eight hours grading these specters and writing comments in the margins, but my body had other plans.

 

“Lan,” I said last night to my friend. “I’m feeling so sniffly and I keep trying to pretend that it’s allergies but I think it might be another cold!”

 

“I think it probably is,” she said sagely, in an uncharacteristically pessimistic, yet pithy declamation. “I think this will be the year of the colds.”

 

And sure enough- this morning I woke feeling totally congested and miserable. I think the allergy my body cannot tolerate is my career.

 

My illnesses are not my only problem.

The other problem is that, unfortunately, I am a pretty good teacher.

 

I plan lessons, I design quizzes that build on skills we’ve worked on in class, I call parents, I post grades, I enter scores into the gradebook quickly. I design assignments that will be beneficial to students. I read what they write. I respect their efforts in my class. I greet each student personally when she walks in the room.

 

And it’s just killing me.

 

“How’s Cody Peterson doing in class?” asked my co-worker when I walked into the office at 6:30 am on Thursday morning.

 

“Pretty good so far,” I said, thinking of the cheerful, skinny boy who wears skinny jeans with sandy hair always in his face. The one I had put in the front row after he spent the first two days in class talking to friends. The one who lost his drafts of his essay and had to start over. The one who comes late at least once a week. Who reads clearly and competently, but softly. The one who raises his hand often and listens well now that he is in the front.

 

“Take him under your wing,” she said to me. “He’s a good kid and if he likes you he’ll do anything.”

 

“Ok,” I said, thinking about the many tasks I had to accomplish before class started at 7:20 and not really in the mood to adopt another student. There is already quite a collection living under my wing.

 

“He has a son,” she said.

 

He has a son? I think. Suddenly I am very tired.

 

“Yeah,” she said, “and he’s such a great kid. Last year was a lot of chaos and the mom wouldn’t let him see the baby, but things are better this year. Anyhow, we were talking about grades in advisory class and I asked him how English was going. He said, ‘I like Fuller. She’s really nice. It’s going good.’”

 

I nod.

 

“He’s happy in your classroom,” she says.

 

“Oh, great- that’s good to hear,” I say, but in my head I think I wish I was.

 

The truth is that even though Cody Peterson is a lovable kid, even though I am touched that he likes my class, even though I sincerely wish him success and happiness, I just can’t. I just can’t. I don’t know how to articulate this, but all I know is that I can’t teach without caring and doing a fairly decent job, but if I am doing a fairly decent job at teaching, it usually means I am doing a pretty awful job of living myself. I am getting sick, getting skinny, not writing, not sleeping. I am not well as a teacher.

 

I feel sad saying that.

 

Simply put- it is an impossible task. To teach students to write means thoughtful conversation one-on-one in which you are acting as coach/mentor/teacher and explaining complicated concepts like how to link ideas and be concise. In a room of 35 14 year-olds during a 47 minute class, I get one minute per student to do this. 

 

Two years ago, as a teacher going through the battle of divorce, I was a safety net for the bleeding hearts. I cared so deeply for the kids in my classroom that this year they beam when they see me and greet me with a hug. I don’t have room to take care of more students if I also want to take care of myself.

 

Who’s taking me under their wing? I thought after the conversation with my co-worker. I need help! I’m a mess too--  I thought about the ways I fail to take care of myself, the way I skip breakfast each day, the way I  sometimes skip lunch, the way I don’t get enough sleep. I thought about the unhealthy excitement of my weekend, the not-so-classy way in which I had repeatedly called a friend who pissed me off (at 3 a.m, and by repeatedly I mean about twelve times in a row), the way I continuously (adorably?) crash into my surroundings, the people in my life, and occasionally even stationary objects. Who am I to be a model of responsibility for my students? Who am I to be any kind of example? Who am I to be a mentor? To take someone under my wing?

 

I married and divorced a sex-addict. I attend a twelve-step program for codependents of sex addicts. Everything that I attained in my 20’s is lost. I have spent the last two years dredging up the skeletons of my past. I am clumsy and troubled and sensitive and honest. I’m not sure Cody Peterson would even want to be taken under my wing.

 

Thus I went to a coffee shop with my stack of papers and sat down to try to focus. I pressed on the sinus pressure on my face. I ordered breakfast. I graded an essay- I checked email. I graded an essay- I checked my bank statements. I graded an essay- I took an online quiz about whether or not “he” was more than just a friend.  I graded a dozen of the papers and couldn’t do any more. I needed to eat lunch. I needed more cold medicine.

 

I need to accept my limitations.

 

I need to find another way to do this.

 

I love teaching, but it doesn’t love me. I see this in the way I am getting sick constantly. I know I need to write more. I know I need a new plan for a career.

 

I need to not be haunted by these papers anymore.

 

 

 

October Morning

This is not the blog I intended to write. There is a better one about space and home and place lingering in my mind but I cannot access it just now. Instead I’m irritated. I’m really feeling cranky and so I must write to figure out why.

 

And I’m already bored with the problem but it’s still there- wiggling away in my brain.

 

It starts with an October morning of gloominess- weather sinking into the consciousness. Outside it is rainy and damp and gray and chilly and inside my head it is the perfect weather for curling up with a guy and watching movies… or for feeling sorry for myself that there is no such person in my life.

 

Thus, in this sort of self-pitying mood, the place where I feel a little lonely, I found myself annoyed when the loneliness was broken by the piercing chirp of a text message on my telephone, from a man I thought I had managed to get rid of months ago.

 

Perhaps I sound harsh.

 

But the thing is, six months ago he would text, I would get excited, we’d spend time together, then he’d disappear, and I would feel crushed, but he would eventually text again, and again, I would take the bait and get reeled in just so he could disappear. Again.

 

Hey!

 

Oh please, I thought. Hey? That’s it? Six months later you reach out with Hey?

 

How have you been?

 

And here’s where I get annoyed. With myself. I cannot be rude. I respond. He continues to ask questions. I am polite but I don’t ask questions back. I don’t prolong the conversation.

 

I’ve missed ya

 

Now I’m fuming. Not this game, I think. He doesn’t miss me. He’s lonely. And maybe it’s because I’m lonely too that I cannot tolerate his loneliness. His half-hearted attempt to connect with a girl who had been cute and fun and pretty easy to get along with and nice to meet out on the town six months ago. A relationship he hadn’t wanted to put much energy into at the time but now misses because the weather is getting colder and it’s harder to face winter alone.

 

I contemplate telling him that it’s nice that he says that but I’m dating someone. I am tempted to lie and be nice and take care of his feelings and not tell him how I feel which is that I’m not interested and a little annoyed since he is the one who walked away in the first place.

 

I still don’t understand my own anger. Maybe I’m angry because it feels so familiar, this constant reeling and pulling I feel from men, this game of drawing me close and pushing me away. Maybe it’s because this reminds me of my ex-husband when we were separated, when he would text me each night as I was falling asleep and need me.

 

I miss you. I love you. Don’t you love me? I am so sad without you. I thought we had something good. Look at our wedding pictures. We were so happy.

 

I would receive these texts and fall on my bed under the weight of his needs and emotions. I would feel so anguished, so guilty, for stating my needs. For walking away from an unhealthy situation. I would beat myself up for being so “mean” to this man who needed me so much.

 

Yuck.

 

Maybe I’m angry because it wasn’t just my husband who manipulated me with guilt. It’s my family, my co-workers, certain friends who can still activate my overwhelming sense of shame and duty. Maybe I’m upset because even though I stand up for myself and my needs now more than I ever have before, it still feels hard to do. It still feels like so much work. I still have to talk myself out of feeling like I’ve been mean, that I’ve been unreasonable.

 

I’ve missed ya

 

I run through several responses in my mind. I don’t think you really mean that, I write, choosing to be honest but not cruel. I have to get going. Talk to you later.

 

Have a nice day. What are you doing later?

 

By now I’m no longer worried about his feelings. I am wanting to not waste time on this particular conversation. Having dinner with a friend. Bye. And I resolve not to respond to any more texts. I’ve been polite but I’ve said I don’t have time to talk. I don’t need to keep responding anymore.

 

The thing is, I don’t have time for these conversations, with a guy I’ve dated or with anyone else. I don’t have time to feel like having needs makes me a cruel person. I don’t have time for the shame I feel for being myself. Toxic shame.

 

I’m proud of myself for setting this boundary, especially on a gray and gloomy day when it would be so easy to let someone into my life, even someone I worry wouldn’t ultimately treat me the way I need, just because he was cute and funny and pretty easy to get along with and nice to meet out on the town six months ago.

 

I’m realizing my irritation and my boredom with this problem is more about myself than the guy who sent me the text. I’m realizing the problem won’t leave me alone because I need to address it, but I don’t really want to, so I feel bored and irritated instead. I was getting mad at this guy for texting me because I felt like he had been disrespectful of my needs. But if I don’t own my needs why would he respect them? Why would anyone? I can’t ask someone just to be nice of his own accord. I have to make it clear I won’t tolerate anything else.

 

Brunch? I text to a friend. She responds immediately saying she’s busy but will call me later.

 

A little while later my phone chirps again. Hey! I’m planning to call you at 6, fyi. J

 

Thanks, I say to another friend, I will start the countdown. ;)

 

These are the people I want to make time for in my life, I think. This feels right. I need to remember that setting boundaries, while it feels hard, will ultimately lead me to a life filled with happier healthier respectful people in it. I need to remember it’s worth it to be strong around my needs.

Common Roots

My hands are still shaking as I write this. When I lift my fingers off of the keys they tremble like a Parkinson patient’s or a former alcoholic’s. It’s because I just ran into my ex, ex-addict, ex-heartbreak.

 

I was not at my best.

 

I started the day knowing I needed to use the Internet to get my schoolwork done. After a half an hour of debating little details about which coffee shop to go to in my neighborhood, wi-fi connection, proximity, ambience, I finally decided on the usual one I visit on Saturday and Sunday mornings and set out, hair tied into a scruffy side pony-tail, blond bangs crimped from a bobby pin the night before and pushed to the side. Still in the stages of cold-recovery, I felt like my skin was blotchy and breaking out, my eyes were puffy, and my lungs wheezy and phlegmmy. I had homework to do; I wasn’t thinking about how I looked.

 

To add further to the back-story, I have been worried over finding a new place to live and searching frantically for a place to call home. Earlier in the morning I had looked at two apartments—one, sort of dingy and not that appealing, and the other cute, and friendly. Lots of windows. Top level. Details from the early 1900’s. Beautiful kitchen. Patio. Storage space. Free internet from the coffee shop across the street. A writer’s apartment. And of course, about $300 more than I felt I should be paying each month for rent considering my goal of operation-speedy-loan-payoff.

 

I was ruminating on my budget. Floundering over the details of rent and groceries. Trying to talk myself out of wanting the apartment. I was scolding myself for going out to dinner with friends and buying new pants and shoes for the school year. Time to buckle down, I thought. Time to be serious. Practical.

 

So of course, on this mucus-filled, watery-eyed day, this day of self-discipline and restraint, I step out of my car and see my ex and his new girlfriend sitting at a table on the patio right by the entrance of the coffee shop.

 

He doesn’t look up as I pass by his elbow, his ear, his backwards baseball cap, my leg six inches from their space. I feel my heart drown into the past, lost suddenly below the surface of the earth and trapped instead in a colder, darker space where ex-husbands brush by like the filmy white legs of jellyfish. I crossed the threshold of the coffee shop. I stopped. I can’t do this. I can’t walk past my ex-husband as if he is someone I’ve never met.

 

I went back outside.

 

“Hi, Shawn.”

 

He jumped in his chair and his eyes flashed blue and lit up like he was about to swallow me in his relief. “Kate!” he said. “How are you?”

 

“Good,” I said, as if I were running into someone from class, someone safe, someone I had not spent the last year and a half writing about in my essays. “I saw you and I was just going to walk past but then I thought that would be awkward. How are you?”

 

He said he was fine and smiled at me and then there was an awkward pause during which I nodded at the new girl before saying I had homework to do and heading into the coffee shop.

 

My fingers have stopped shaking but what stays with me is that right after we said hello, while my body was trembling and my heart jumping in alarm, I still felt stable, steady. I felt like me. I felt like I was light years beyond where I had been. Like I had no desire to be with him and like there was very little anger in our meeting. It was almost like he was becoming someone I might just casually say hi to, someone I might even hug, someone safe, someone comfortably located only in my writing and not in my life.

 

And because I am human, I could not help but note the new girlfriend. She was clearly not getting over a cold and throwing her hair into a ponytail. She was done up and darling, pushed up and pretty. I couldn’t help but think that she also looked like she was trying really hard. It looked tiring. It was like looking at myself five years ago.

 

Instead of feeling like the vaguely nervous, overly anxious, unassuming, unaware, and unsure girl I was in my past, I felt like the cool, cognizant, world-traveling writer that I am now. I felt like a woman who is living her own life pursuing her dreams. A woman not afraid to be herself.

 

I’m getting that apartment, I thought, after walking into the coffee shop.

 

I decided not to do the homework first. I decided to write, even though I had other work to do, even when he walked past me to deposit his coffee mug in a dish pan while I wrote about our encounter, and even with shaky fingers, smiling at the white flower ring I sometimes wear on my fourth finger, the one that no longer breaks out in a rash from my wedding ring.

 

It is only just now that I am noticing the irony of where we encountered each other—the coffee shop called Common Roots. Shawn and I have common roots. We shared our past, a trunk where two lives were encased in one. But now we don’t.

 

And I just love these branches that keep taking me towards the sky, so very far away from where I was. 

A Change in Season

You have to be kidding me, I thought, leaving my apartment the other day and noticing a shockingly “autumn” orange-leaved wreath on the apartment door kiddy-corner from my own. It is the only adornment on any of the doors in my modern and trendy apartment building. My building is the kind of place where marketing directors would decorate their advertisements for the community with phrases like “East meets West in simple harmony and clean lines” and “Life with Style at VillageGreen”. We have a community room. The leasing company hosts happy hours for the young and upwardly-mobile professionals who live here. There’s a Zen garden, for the love of God (or Buddha, I suppose).

 

This is no place for wreaths.

 

And what makes this particular orange wreath even more shocking is that it is the third in a series of wreaths to appear on the door. First there was a white-flowered wreath that made me assume the occupants of the apartment were either gay or grandmas. Second there was a green wreath of plastic pine needles, which I did not necessarily associate with summer, but now, with the orange-leaved wreath I clearly see that there is a seasonal pattern in the door decorations.

 

Of course since then I have learned that the occupants of the apartment are neither gay nor grandmothers. They are a ridiculously happy couple. The kind of couple that holds hands in the hallway. That goes to watch television together in the community room. The kind of couple that doesn’t reach out to neighbors because they are so happily involved in themselves. And their wreaths.

 

I hate that wreath.

 

What kind of a guy lives in an apartment with a wreath on the door?! I thought as I walked past. I’m sure I scowled as I thought it. All sorts of non-politically correct thoughts jumped into my brain, including, I am sad to say, “What a pussy!”

 

But, in my surprise at my own vehemently angry and ignorantly condescending inner monologue, I started to realize that I was really getting way too worked up about my neighbor’s apartment door. Katie, I said to myself, in order to address the unfounded amount of rage swelling in small waves in my inner ocean, why does that wreath piss you off? It’s just a wreath. Let it go. He probably loves her very much and knows it makes her happy to put the wreath on the door.

 

And with that I started to picture the life inside the door with the wreath. The life I hear only small pieces of when she, and I imagine it must be she, starts to play the piano they must have inside. Careful notes fill the hall as I walk past. I picture them holding hands in the hallway. They are quiet and polite when we meet in the elevator.

 

As these images flood my mind I realize that what I hate about that wreath is that five or six or seven years ago I would have been the one hanging it on the door. I would have been delighted in my new domesticity with my new husband in our new place. I would have hung the wreath on the door as if it were my hopes and heart that I was placing very high and in a special place. There. Love, Life, come visit us and be generous. We are just so happy. We are so in love. WE. WE. Whee!

 

 

 

 

 

I do not hate the wreath.

 

I do not hate the girl who hangs the wreath.

 

I might hate that I wasted energy on such a wee endeavor when there were more exciting avenues in life that I needed to explore. I might hate the girl I was, the one fixated on wreaths and scrapbooks and pasting memories carefully into frames. There. This is us as the perfect couple. There. That’s a picture of my happy family. There. Welcome to my perfect life.

 

Life isn’t perfect. It is so much more beautiful to me now that I see it for the wreck that it is. I am so infatuated with the mess that is life that I haven’t time to hang orange-leaved wreaths upon my door.

 

But…

 

 maybe someday I will.

The End of August

I reached up to put away my Aerobed after a wedding weekend full of bonding with women I love and as I stretched on my toes to put the mattress on the top shelf of one of the four closets in my studio apartment, four Fridley High School yearbooks came crashing at my face, nearly gouging my eye out with pointy corners. Luckily I deflected the fast-advancing yearbooks, but there was a lesson in the occurrence. Sometimes your past not only catches up with you, but it is plain gunning for your vulnerable spots, sharp angles and all.

 

This weekend, after a few months of joy in singledom, a genuine excitement over my independent life, giggling, even, as I walked my dog alone past couples and families, the past seemed to be gunning for me, taking aim as I walked in front of one of my dearest friends as she stepped up to an altar to say “I do”. And it seemed bent on shattering my newly celebrated independence. 

 

I smiled for my friend during the ceremony because I honestly believe she and her man are made for each other, but as I listened to the readings- Corinthians, Ephesians—and heard the rhetoric about love being kind, and patient, and how through loving and helping your spouse you find real joy, I couldn’t help but think “Bullshit!”

 

It was really a low moment. The soundtrack playing was the Beach Boys singing “Wouldn’t it be nice” and all I was thinking of was the soundtrack to the Wedding Singer where Adam Sandler belts out a nice edition of “Love Stinks!”

 

And that, I realize, is what I am mourning two years into the end of my marriage. That blissful Beach Boys optimism. That belief in a kind love.

 

As I heard tales of the ex, his new life, new girl, from my old friends, I plunged from my single-gal high to a broken-hearted low.

 

“But that was two years ago,” said my dear friend as she listened to me lament the losses in my life. “Look at all the good things you have going on.”

 

“It was yesterday!” I said to her—and now, I realize I wasn’t talking about the lanky, basketball-playing man I married so much as I was talking about me. I was mourning me. I was mourning the loss of that girl who believed in an easy love, a romantic-movie love, an infatuation lasting forever.

 

I wouldn’t trade spots with the romantic girl I was in my 20’s, but I miss her. I miss feeling nothing but confidence and happiness at weddings. I miss thinking chance meetings might lead to real love.

 

I know the woman I am now is more cynical about relationships. I know she flinches when a man seems too excited, too eager in a relationship. I know even when nice men, really good guys, take her on nice dates and do nice things, like placing sunflowers where she will see them and smile, part of her cringes. There is fear, disbelief, in this woman.

 

“You’re like a girl I could marry,” said the lanky ball-player to the blond girl on their second date.

“This will be a long relationship,” the girl said to herself. “Just let yourself like him.”

 

The woman remembers this heady love, this twilight romance, this mutual desire for affection. And she knows it was ultimately, deceptively, false: empty. And so this woman is skeptical of good things, of fast infatuation.

 

I put the yearbooks back on my shelf without pausing to look at them, but I can’t help but think about how the past still affects me. Sometimes I am frustrated by the fact that I can’t make myself get over my loss, that I still feel sad at weddings, but then again, as I told my mom tonight on the phone, “I think it’s good I felt that way- I think if I didn’t feel upset that would be strange, like I was an alien or a robot, and I would rather be a human.”

 

People who love me sometimes want me to be over my loss. People who date me sometimes question my grief. But I am ok with how I am feeling. I think the sane response for me, after going through the biggest personal tragedy of my life, is to feel a little sad and cynical at weddings, and to be just a bit distrustful of things that seem too good to be true.

 

I lost myself in my marriage and found myself in the divorce, but change is never easy. Change is brave. Change is painful. Even when it is positive. And so I think it is ok that I am still, sometimes, sad.

 

And I also think it is ok that I am, often, joyful.

 

Suddenly I am feeling lucky again. I am back to rejoicing in my independence, in the freedom to accept my own feelings even though others want me to be over the sadness.  The yearbooks are put away and I’ve got my past put back in a comfortable position. Time to return to joy.

 

From Inside the Mess

I am surrounded by the clutter of my life. Literally my apartment is in disarray. This is the problem with living in a studio. It quickly erupts into chaos when life gets busy. There are receipts, itineraries, purses and bagels laying everywhere. Strangely, in a fit of what I assume must have been my creative-genius abstract absent-mindedness, a half-used roll of toilet paper has made it to my kitchenette countertop. I am hoping it is sleep deprivation and not dementia driving these toiletry wanderings. And I must admit, this chaos mimics my creative process—things often get messier before they get cleaner.

 

In any case, while amidst the clutter, in the seven hours I have between getting off my shift at work and leaving for a girls’ weekend away, I should be straightening, cleaning, righting my life, and instead I feel like I must be typing, pondering, and writing my life.

 

Last night a man who lives in my apartment building invited me to join him for a beer on our patio (let me mention I live in a somewhat strange, Melrose-esque building rife with singles of the upwardly-mobile persuasion). I agreed despite the fact that I knew I wasn’t interested in dating him.

 

“Try.” A voice inside me started saying, and she continued to point out that it’s time I dated someone seriously again. Did I want to be alone for my whole life? Did I think men would find me attractive forever? Did I ever want children and a family? This guy will be successful. He wants to be a patent lawyer. Just try dating him.

 

So I went.

 

And was delighted when I found the patio already occupied by two other friends from the building.

 

Pressure off, I leaned back and enjoyed my conversation with the three guys, all engineers (strangely), and my yorkie-poo.

 

“Your dog looks kinda smart,” said the future patent lawyer. “He picks up his leash when he runs so he doesn’t trip on it.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “He is smart. Too smart.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, he understands commands and everything, but he has his own agenda, too. He’ll do what I say but then he’ll still try to get whatever it is that he’s after.” And, because I couldn’t resist the giant button in front of me, I added, “You know, he’s a guy.”

 

Thus began the teasing, the banter, the trading of stories from adventures in the weird world of dating. My dog became the butt of jokes after his girlfriend, a pug from next door, joined us while her owner was on the phone. “He’s definitely not sensitive,” said one guy. “But then again, no guys are really sensitive.”

 

Again the button was shining in front of me. “All guys are sensitive,” I said. My friend shook his head at me as if to say, “Oh, you-poor-naïve-little-thing.” But I continued.

 

“In that they all have fragile egos.”

 

“This is true,” he conceded. “But it’s because girls are so mean!”

 

We traded war stories from the battlefield of love (thank you, Pat Benatar) and I said good night, abandoning all the engineers and leaving them to talk about valves and thermodynamics, and basketball.

 

But I continued thinking about our conversation and about these men with their agendas and their fragile egos and their fears of girls who are mean and of my own fears and my own fragile ego and my own lack-of agenda.

 

I’m at a strange place.

 

I’m at home with the temporary clutter in my life. The confusion, the chaos, the roll of toilet paper in my kitchen. It all feels strangely safe. Uniquely mine. I’m feeling selfish, lately, and guarded. I have no agenda, when it comes to men. In fact, I’m avoiding anything I could potentially find serious. I’ve adapted this routine where when I need to I can find some sort of intrigue, some new adventure in the world of romance, but if I’m honest, it’s like wading into the ocean up to my ankles. I’m pretending to get wet but refusing to put my face under water.

 

It’s almost like putting on a sort of shell. To continue my water metaphor, I’m a hermit crab who trades up for a fancy pink shell when a sand crab asks her to dinner. We meet up, we each do a little dance, back and forth in the sand, and then retire to our separate worlds, leaving the dating shells on the beach and going back to the familiar.

 

And this feels safe. This feels comfortable.

 

What is really scary is being with someone I care about.

 

I think I might care about someone.

 

And so I am avoiding him.

 

It’s better, I think, to stay safe, right now. Or at least this is what the practical voice inside my head is telling me. The same one who told me to try to like the patent lawyer.

 

To get hurt by someone I’m not interested in is not the worst thing in the world. But to get hurt by someone I really care about? That is potentially devastating. That is what makes me raise my claws (back to the crab metaphor) and shrink back into my shell.

 

And how do I know I really care? (Believe me, that practical-girl voice does her best to make me believe that I don’t.) It’s simple (and ridiculous). It’s the first date. Or the first meeting. It’s knowing I didn’t feel at all awkward pouring out my guts and my life story to the man sitting across from me. It’s knowing I was (strangely) being myself, sans shell, when we first met. It’s knowing that even though I had no interest in dating (this meeting being only months after my divorce), I still wanted to kiss him, wanted him to kiss me. It’s the unexpected rush I felt when, somehow in playful teasing, he took off my sandal while we walking home, holding it inches in front of my foot so that I had to hop and protest in order to get it back. It was so silly and yet, I was flirting. I still can’t believe it. (The practical smart girl in my mind keeps telling me how stupid and corny this is, but unfortunately- it is also just what is true.)

 

Maybe it’s some sort of reverse-Cinderella fantasy. Didn’t the prince put the shoe on her foot? How appropriate that I would fall for a man who would take it off. But really, when I think of the dates I’ve been on, I realize I shrink from the men taking me out to dinner. I pull back. I hide. I physically withdraw. My knees were turned away from the patent lawyer on the patio and when his legs accidentally touched mine I moved them out of his way. I had a physical reaction to him. (Which is how your body shows you what you need, says another voice in my head, the one who pointed out the shingles and rash on my ring finger were a sign I needed out from my marriage months prior to the divorce.) In contrast, there have been moments of purely physical attraction where I have not exactly hidden from a man, not right away, but days or weeks later I did, and this has led me to realize that I have somehow adopted this belief that it is “safe” for me to connect physically with men who I am not connected to emotionally. Mostly.

 

Because there is this one exception. And because it scares me so much, I am avoiding the situation entirely.

 

There. Now I can turn back to the clutter. I can bring the toilet paper back to the bathroom. Put the bagels back in the fridge. Maybe I’m not brave enough to address the situation, but at least I’ve acknowledged it. It's time to get back to righting my life, now that I have spent time writing about my life.

Addressing the Blisters

So I am sitting at a coffee shop next to a couple of intertwined hippie-children bumming their way around the country and some wholesome, granola-pretty people who "just love Jesus." 

Suddenly I am wanting to write.

But, this is a false-start blog. I already began an entry that I immediately deleted. One about the creative process, my life and thoughts, how I wanted to write when I knew I should be completing one of the eight million tasks scheduled into my life between now and a little while from now, blah, blah, blah. I was bored with it immediately and deleted the whole thing. 

And so, I randomly went to the google box in the right hand corner of my screen and typed in what felt necessary. Confessions from a sex addict.

Suddenly I was reading an account from a man destroyed by his compulsion to masturbate and buy pornography. A man who felt so guilty for his actions that he tried to avoid breathing around women in order to avoid inhaling the smell of their perfume. It sounded crazy. It sounded so sad.

And I couldn't help thinking--I married someone like this. Different of course, in many ways, but similar, too. 

*****

Lately a rash has reappeared on my finger. My ring finger. It began two years ago around this time, three months before I knew I wanted to divorce my husband. My husband who bought pornography compulsively and lied to me constantly. 

I haven't worn a ring in 22 months and my finger is still breaking out in a rash.

I have tried talking about this to people who might be helpful but no one seems to have any good insight about the matter. "Quit wearing your old ring," said a friend when I told him. "That's really weird," said a friend who is a chiropractor. "Are you allergic to your earrings?" she asked.

Of course I said no.

The thing is- I know why my finger keeps breaking out. I know it's because there is material that needs to surface. 

It's not love.

Or at least, it's not love in the sense that tends to make sense. Not love in the sense that I want to reconcile with my ex-husband. Not love in the sense that I miss him from my life. I miss him, sure, but I have no desire to ever kiss him again. No desire to lay in his arms. I feel sad saying that and I miss laying in someone's arms, but I know I will never want to be with him again. 

I know because when I found out he was still lying to me, nearly two years ago, I became immune to him. I didn't want his skin touching mine. I thought about trust before bed and woke up with the word severed on my lips. A word, hanging, suspended in the air, letting me know we had reached the end.

I trust myself to know when something is over. Every fiber in my body screeches to a halt.

And yet, the rash.

The frustrating thing is that this is my subject. I think this is the topic I have to sit with some more. And it is so frustrating because I so want to be done. I hate that I think about how sexual obsession affects people, both the people obsessed and the ones who love them. I hate thinking about how I compromised values for the sake of a relationship. I hate analyzing my own relationship to sex and intimacy and the patterns that originated in my own past.

Most people have patterns ingrained in their brain about sexuality by the time they are five.

I don't want to be the one to figure this out.

I want to be the one blithely living my new life. Forgetting my past. Going on dates. Wearing high heels and walking into the future. Smiling. Happy. Pretending the marriage, like my earlier blog, was just a false start. A random mistake. The accident of a very young woman. Maybe I was just too young to know better.

Instead, my itchy finger is reminding me there are still words that need to be said. The word severed came to me and hovered in the air, letting me know we had reached the end. But there are more words bubbling up in blisters between knuckles and fist letting me know I'm not done.

It so pisses me off.

Maybe this summer I will start to move on. Maybe I will write enough to get away from this subject. Maybe this summer my finger will heal. Maybe this summer, maybe...

 well, I can't say what comes next.

The Clumsy Journey to Wherever It Is That I Am Supposed to Be

Lately startling questions have come into my life.

One occurred while I was sitting on my apartment patio Memorial weekend drinking a beer after work and catching up on emails on my laptop, yorkie-poo at my feet. A friend, one I had been on a date with earlier in the year, joined me while waiting for his cab to come and take him away to a rooftop party downtown. He leaned in to me, open after a day of holiday drinking on a bar's patio, and said "Can I ask you a question?" I nodded. "Are you into girls?" I raised my eyebrows and shook my head. "Because I never see you with any guys. Why don't you have a boyfriend? It's time, you know? You should just try to trust someone. They're not all bad. One out of five. I'd say you can trust one out of five men. With women it's a little different. More like three out of five."

One out of five, I found myself thinking. Yeah, right. 

Another question occurred when I was talking to a friend of mine about feelings and issues and concerns, etc, etc, (all of the stuff I am really awkward and uncomfortable with) and he said, in response, "Why are you so serious all the time?" 

I bristled and steered the conversation back to the topic, but the remark stayed in the soft gray area of my consciousness.

And finally, at work, where I am currently a waitress, one of the regular customers stopped me as I was passing his table with a pot of coffee. This 70-ish gentleman moved his cup to the side of the table and said, "Say, I want to ask you a question. What do you want..." he moved his cup again, "to do with your life?" 

As it was 9am and I was a waitress working on her second master's and holding a pot of coffee and just done with mopping the floor, I didn't exactly warm up to this question. 

In fact- I didn't warm up to any of the questions. Who were these men to be asking me such weighty questions? Did I question their judgment? Their choices in life? Their decisions or lifestyle? No- of course not. What right did they have to judge my life? Or expect more from it?

As I thought about the questions more they irritated me even more. Why do I need to trust men again? Who says I'm serious all the time? Why do I need a plan for my life? And, more importantly, how is that anyone's business other than my own?

As I got riled up I started writing a blog in my mind about the audacity of these questions and the pretentiousness of the people asking them. The blog would end, of course, after analyzing this situation with a I-am-woman-hear-me-roar type of triumphant closing. Something like I like who I am and how I am content with my choices and I don't want a boyfriend and I'm not too serious and my life will be whatever it is meant to be and it will be perfect in that sense.

But then I realized the mental blog I had written would not work.

It was a lie.

The truth, if I dare to write it, is that I bristled at these questions not because of the people asking them. Not because I felt I shouldn't have to answer to anyone. Not because I had an answer to each of the questions.

I bristled because they are questions I ask myself. Or questions I would ask of myself if I were brave enough.

The truth is that I do want a boyfriend. The truth is that I am scared to trust again. The truth is that I do wonder why I have to so seriously analyze my life all the time. It is like I am hyperaware of all of my many imperfections all of the time. And the truth is I don't want to be like this. I want to go back to a life where I don't have to work so hard to be honest. Sometimes I think I might prefer the life of complacency and permanent mild dissatisfaction. Why not settle? Allow myself to drift into a relationship with one of the men I have gone on first dates with--the men with checklists who after a thorough two-hour interview almost visually decide things could work out between us. The men who are looking for a certain accessory to add to their individually crafted lives. It would be easy. I could stop feeling lonely. We could date and then live together and then get married and have kids and share space and exist in sort-of companion style life. All I would have to do is adjust to his life. 

Or--I suppose I must look for another option--why not try to trust someone who does know me for who I am? Why not let someone see me as myself?

The truth is that this is the scariest situation of all. Because the truth is that I am the sort of woman who accidentally almost starts her paper coffee cup on fire while heating it up in the microwave. I am the sort of woman who rebels and adopts the mantras of self-help books in the same minute. I am the sort of woman who takes herself seriously, who worries about making the same mistakes over again. I am the sort of woman who would get into a car accident before she would share her feelings. I am the sort of woman who has a dirty shower and snores and feels confused and doesn't know what she's going to do with her life and trips sometimes over the cracks in the sidewalk and who wants to let someone into her life again but has no idea how to do it. 

"Why don't you go talk to that guy?" my apartment friend said to me on Memorial weekend, nodding at another man drinking a beer and watching the baseball game from his chair. And so I did. Not because I was particularly attracted to him or excited to meet him (in fact I sensed a checklist from 20 feet), but because, when all is said and done, I am also the sort of woman who keeps trying. 

It's bound to get easier with practice. I hope. 

What I Am...

What  I am is sitting in my apartment and typing on my computer, eyes heavy from allergies and lack of sleep, body sore from soccer and running and standing eight hours at a time. I am tight-stomach sitting in my parents’ car on the way to a Twins’ game. I am strange dreams and strange sleeping. I am singing out loud in a coffee shop and cutting up my work, reassembling it in an updraft, a second draft, a current, a magic-wire I’ve plugged into, my wi-fi to the universe. I am smiling to earn money. I am smiling because I want to. I am sitting on a bar stool wanting every guy in the room to want me. I am sitting on a bar stool thinking there is not a single guy here that I want. I am looking at a stranger’s brown eyes and dreading my past. I am wanting so badly to see the future.

I am counting markers lining the lake where I run. Counting down the moments until the finish. Counting the couples walking past me. Counting the strollers. The groups of friends playing volleyball. Counting my single female friends— one.

I am worried about what I have said. What I have shared. What I have written. Who sees what I write. Who hears what I say. So many secrets spill out of corners. So much of me tumbles out into the world. So much held back for so long.

What tumbles out? You, of course. Ex-husband. And lately I realize maybe the until-death-do-us-part never even started until I left. You tumble out of my mouth in words, in front of friends, strangers. And it’s not that I want you back—it’s that by losing you I found me.

I guess I should thank you for that.

                                    Words that Still Hurt:

                                    Porn

                                    Addiction

                                    Lies

                                    Good-bye

                                    Family

                                    Babies

                                    Alone

 

What I am is lonely. What I am is scared I will never connect with a good man. Scared there are no good men. Scared I will forever fall into the trap of cute-fun-guys-who-sort-of-adore-me-for-a-time-before-they-ultimately-prove-they-can’t-love-me.

What I am is ashamed. Ashamed of being lonely. Of feeling sadness. Of being weak. Of being vulnerable. Of needing people. Of not being tough enough on my own. I am ashamed to admit I feel sad. Ashamed I can’t find happiness in the world alone. Ashamed I am not enough to keep people in my life. Ashamed that when I set boundaries, people disappear.

What I am is lonely-when-I-see-couples-with-strollers, but at least I am not lonely-when-lying-in-bed-with-my-husband. I am bruised knees and bruised feelings but I am also singing in coffee shops and singing at ball games. I am scared to want a relationship and scared I will never have one again. I am wanting to look at my past and dreading it. I am laughing and I am surviving and I am laughing and evading. I am smiling because I love you and smiling because I want so badly to be loved. I am severed and turning myself inside out. Or maybe just now outgrowing my shell.

You may not see it.

But this is what I am.

And so far I have no regrets.