Starting a different story
When I looked at my body in the full-length mirror after a shower as a teenager the one thing I always hated was my stomach. Once puberty hit, I got curves, like every other girl. And I felt betrayed. My stomach was not flat or defined or angular which I imagined was necessary for beauty.
Then, I wasn't self-critical about where I'd picked these perceptions. I didn't analyze the constant stream of skinny media I consumed. Instead, I only knew my stomach as my greatest flaw.
I went to a small high school. Twenty-two kids in my graduating class. Not quite preppy, not quite hippie either, but somewhere in the middle. We did a lot of art. We read Dante and Dostoyevsky. We went to San Francisco to study architecture for a weekend and hiked the Lost Coast together. But because the class was so small all of my classmates were my friends, even when they weren't. Competition was fierce.
The summer before ninth grade a tall red-headed girl, who had been in my eighth grade class and played the meanest game of basketball ever, became anorexic.
Five foot ten by the age of fourteen, she'd always been lanky, but tough too. In the fall we heard she was hospitalized weighing 69 pounds. She never came back to our school, and though she lived, I only saw her twice again, once the year after we all graduated and once later in passing on the street. Both times she looked gaunt and hungry without the fire she'd once had when she was still a kid, shooting hoops, pushing the boys out of the way.
But because of the smallness of our high school world, that girl's anorexia hit the girls in my class like a tidal wave. Everyone got skinny. Everyone had boney hips. Curves were shunned at a time when curves were just developing.
And though I never became fully entrenched in the deep scaring groove that anorexia can become, I did obsess about my weight. I didn't eat enough.
But I was also lucky, because I've never been drawn to the superficial. Always, I've been pulled to ideas, to what's deep, to things that matter beyond appearance. So though I wavered there on the brink of an obsession with skinniness, I never fully gave in to its calling. Always distracted at the last minute by somebody's story, by teaching kids, or by body boarding.
But many girls in my class were less lucky. Content to suck on one lolly pop all day long, they were gorgeous and gaunt and pissed off.
I graduated and spent a year in Europe with a boy I'd met in Germany. He taught me to rock climb, and for the first time in my life I realized that my body was really good for something other than being looked at. Since then, I've always fallen back on this. I've started to see my body as a tool---as a part of the mechanism that makes it possible for me to mountain bike, to ski, to run, to swim, to climb. And I acquired a decent set of legs. Some muscles where they aught to be. Some strength.
But I still maintained an uneasy relationship with my stomach. Less lean, less tough, less firm than the rest of me, it portrayed my proverbial soft side. It made me feel vulnerable, if not a little self-loathing.
Then, two April's ago, I hung out with my mom who was living in Boulder, Colorado. I flew out over the tall jagged Rocky Mountains to see her, and we sat in her tiny studio apartment, going through her horrible wardrobe of clothing, and talking first time about her body image.
It hit me then. More than anything else, it was my mother;s self-depreciating, shy, prudish perception of herself that defined the language of my own negative image. Always dressed in a turtleneck, even in summer, she hates her collar bones, her stomach, her thighs. And she is obsessed with the small roll of flesh that curves over the waist of her size eight jeans.
A month after our visit, I found out I was pregnant, and for the first time in my life I put my hand on the curve of my stomach and felt wonder.
Wonder that this body, this stomach could contain life. And this feeling continued to grow as the orb of my belly did. I watched my skin grow taught. Watched the inevitable stretch marks appear, despite coco butter and crossed fingers. Watched my belly button pop out.
And then my son was born and I was left with the sagging curve of womb that had been his world. But something of the reverie I'd felt towards my stomach remained. I made a pact with myself to no longer rile against a part of me that could do such a miraculous thing.
Since then I've done a lot of running. More than I've ever done, because I have the time, the space, the energy to do it. And my stomach, like my entire body has grown strong as a result. But something else has changed along the way, that has more to do with my perception than with actual flesh.
It has to do with gratitude for my body, just as it is. For the pure loveliness of a stomach that has given birth, for the wonderment hips. Yet posting this picture for Self Portrait Tuesday’s September theme of body parts still seemed risky. An open acknowledgement of my softest side. But I was compelled to post anyway, because as I read what so many other lovely women write, I know that this story is terribly universal.
We've all been here, it seems. This internal battling with the beauty and the softness of curves that make us who we are. And I'm ready to start a different story.
Frye Boots
The places he gets to now
Did I mention, he's a CRAWLING TERROR? Yeah, well, he is. He has officially figured out how to crawl, and it's so adorable and miraculous the way he slaps each little hand down on the floor with determination as he moves forwards. And totally terrifying. Because he does things like get stuck under chairs now. And the other day, I found him up to his elbows in the cat's water bowl--which took him -3 seconds to get to. But the good thing is, because he's finally crawling for real, his night time routine seems to have settled down again--no more 'milestone wake ups.' And this morning, the incredible happened. He snuggled in with us after playing for a little while when he woke up at 6am, and WENT BACK TO SLEEP. We got to sleep in this morning people. Do you know how amazing this is??? We slept until 9am, and then went to the local market to buy breakfast and sit in the sun. So lovely.
Taking note of small things
The last bright flames of flowers farmer's market this morning, gathered up into a whimsical bouquet. The air had a certain chill all day, a harbinger of shorter days, of early twilight, of southerly migrations.
Finally, after a week that felt slightly tumbled from it's own momentum and busyness, today was solace. A morning ramble through stalls of fresh goat cheese and honey, samosas, carrots stacked high, and golden squashes. We sat in the sun by the fountain to drink our lattes and eat freshly made croissants.
Later we watched black smiths bend hot metal--part of this weekend's ongoing art festival. They worked in perfect tandem, their hammers making pinging thuds in the crisp air.
True to my promise, I dug myself into a book for awhile when Bean took his mid day nap--Broken For You, by Stephanie Kallos, which is proving thus far to be eccentric, delightful, and well worded. It felt so good to soak up sentences. To be wholly transported into the world of fiction.
Fall brings days like this--wistful, lazy, but with a slight zing. We went running in the early evening, noticing many monarch butterflies on the milkweed along the edge of the bike path. And coming back to our neighborhood we found a new Mexican burrito place, and a lovely cafe, full of eclectic art, excellent espresso and live music.
It is so easy to become a creature of habit. To grow so accustomed to daily patterns of living that one is no longer actively aware of one's surroundings. Today I made mindfulness my mantra. I took the time to notice small things---to gather them up with my eyes and feed my soul wonder.
Literary diet.
After a morning of silver gray skies, rain came down, filling up puddles and freckling my sweatshirt on the way to dinner at the local vegetarian cafe. We talked about classic literature versus modern popular literature over our plates of pasta. Modern literature, we agreed, often seems to be targeted at a specific audience. Chick lit. Sci Fi. Environmental lit. Action. Fantasy. The scope of traditional genres has expanded almost exponentially--creating micro genres that custom fit each population pigeon hole.
Classical literature by comparison (and by classical we were referring to the heady works of Plato, Homer and Aristotle) encompasses a great deal more, it seems. It was the human archetypes that those first authors were after, not readership. IDEAS mattered more than popularity or a pretty book jacket.
It's interesting to reflect how we've changed as readers and human beings both since Socrates was widely read. I squirm a bit realizing how little I know of these great works compared with my great grandparents, or my father, even. But I also feel like the readership today has gained something from its perpetual quest of self-examination. Despite our loss of common ethics that the archetypal heroes once provided, I think we are learning something new about simply being human, in all it's varied peculiarity, from this flood of market specific media.
The blogosphere I've been bouncing around in is like this: windows into other people's daily bubbles. Lives on tap. Real time. Installment by installment we discover how across the world we've got things to say to someone who we won't likely meet in person over Sophocles in a cafe. And though I love this, because like most people I'm a horrible snoop---eavesdropping is my chosen addictionâ€--I've started to feel diluted this week. My literary diet has grown sparce.
I've got a whole stack of books on my shelf that I've been meaning to read: meaty stuff (no Homer this time though) that requires me to do more than click for comments.
Being well read has always been on my long list of "To do this lifetime" items, and this past month I;ve barely gotten through the front page of the Wall Street Journal most mornings, when we sit together DH, Bean and I on a bench downtown, with our iced coffees and bagels.
Of course this has much to do with the fact that Bean is truly crawling now, suddenly and with fierce determination towards electrical cords and the cat's water bowl, than it does with anything else. But it also has to do with self discipline.
This is not a new topic for me. The terrible internal struggle to focus, to say more than what's just at the surface, to delve into the issues is one I am constantly waging.
Winter is coming, the few scattered orange leaves on the sidewalk tell me so, floating vein-side up in the puddles. In just a few short months the trees will be bare, the sky raw gray, the water cold. It is time to refocus, gathering myself towards my own embering center. Starting now.
Almost a package of candels old
I made a flourless chocolate and vanilla cake from a recipie I found here. It was divine.
Studio Friday: Favorite Tool
When I got to thinking about it, I realized that the tool I always use in my art is gel medium. I've already shown what happens to my son when I use it here. Better than glue, I use it to adhere pieces in a collage, as a fixative for pastels or watercolors, as a sealant, or as a thinner. It dilutes paint without making it runny, adds texture, depth and translucence. This stuff is good, people. Yes it gets all over everything. Yes I catch myself pulling off thin sheets of dried gel from my elbows or fingers like peeling skin after a sunburn, but I'm fine with that. I've never been one to keep my hands clean anyway.
Illustration Friday: Roots
Listen to this. Andrei Codrescu's words filled my soul last Wednesday, and for days I've kept running over these sentences in my head. Images suit me better in times of wonder or grief. So I painted.
Starting with a topographic map of the Mississippi delta, I wanted to convey how hope takes root, like it always has. How it floods up through song, through sorrow, through the mouths of the poor enraged by poorer leadership. How our country, always feeling entitled, stumbles and then reaches out, realizing that to blame is not the point. And from flooded rubble, a million small stories of human grace turning devastation into song. So much is lost, but this we can remember.
Today
Six full years today, DH and I have been together, and he came to me this morning with a box wrapped in coupon paper for juice and tied with a red ribbon. Inside a beautiful hand made silver necklace--just the one I would have picked. My smiles scatterd about the room like freckles. I am so in love with this man. Then a day spent watching cyclists race, crashes up brick pavement, speed, adrenaline, sweat. The sky was bright like a blue ceramic bowl over turned above us, filled with sun. A long nap with Bean tumbled between us in bed, awakening to the sounds of boys playing stick hockey in the street, and harmonica drifting up from a few houses down.
An evening spent getting to know new friends over shrimp and pasta, tossed salad, wine and trappist cheese. Laughing about what we were like in high school, so long ago, and now. Ready to sink willingly into the sheets, to press up against my husband's back, my little one nestled into my body's spooning curve. Then sleep, as the planets whirl and the night air falls in through open windows, bringing dreams.
because some days it's all about ME
Answers to the meme Steph tagged me with: 7 Things I Plan to Do Before I Die: 1) Write & publish. Writing is a love-hate thing for me. I've established that I can't live without it, but I've also established that writing is a major pain in my ass. It's introspective, personal, and challenging, yet without it I feel an absence of purpose. I believe deeply that writing can affect change, and I feel that it is one of the ways that I can affect change in the world. Yet I procrastinate about writing whenever I possibly can. It's a vicious thing, this writer's bug I've got.
2) Teach writing at a university(dream job.)
3) Keep bees and chickens and grow an organic garden. The first thing I plan to do when we have land again is to learn how to keep bees, I love honey and as I mentioned here, bees are becoming threatened throughout the world by bee blights that are resistant to most traditional treatments. This will ultimately affect food production world wide, and on a small scale I can make a difference by learning bee keeping techniques, and growing organic vegitables and flowers. As for the chickens, I kept chickens when I was a kid. One chicken, named Blackie, came when I called her and sat on my shoulder. She was the fancy breed of chicken that lays green and blue eggs. And I loved having fresh eggs. Nothing quite like them.
4) Learn to sail. I would love to take my kids on a sailing trip around the world for a few years & home school them, but if that's not possible, at the very least I'd like to have a small boat we can spend summer weekends on, diving off the deck, basking in the sun, and sleeping like sardines in a can packed below deck.
5) Live in a foreign country for a year (or more) with my kids and husband. DH and I have many roots in Italy and Germany, and I would love for Bean to grow up knowing that culture is an expansive thing, that horizons stretch farther than the eye can see, and that diversity is a necessary and vital part of human existence.
6) Learn a second language fluently (see #5)
7) Hang glide I've always wanted to do this since I was little & I'd look up in the sky in Colorado where I lived and see hang gliders circling like birds in dizzy winged spirals.
7 Things I Can Do: 1. Figure out how kids learn, and help them with that process. 2. Rescue a 6 foot, 220 lb guy from the bottom of a swimming pool (or from the ocean---which I once did, for DH in Puerto Rico when his blood sugar went low when we were snorkeling over a coral reef.) 3. Use grammar & punctuation rules correctly. (My freshman year in college one of my writing teachers tore apart a piece of my writing, telling me to get Strunk & White's book and use it, and that she was not "my writing janitor." Later she said, "once you know the rules, you can break them." I now know them well enough to break, though I'm still a TERRIBLE speller--thank god for spell check! 4. Articulate my ideas in conversation. 5. Listen. 6. Make some wickedly good scones. 7. Forgive people easily.
7 Things I Cannot Do: 1. Play any musical instrument. 2. Order drinks at a bar without feeling self-conscious. 3. Go to a party without obsessing about my outfit. 4. Understand religious or political extremists. 5. Spell. (For years I spelled water, w-a-t-t-e-r, different as d-i-f-e-r-e-n-t and just last night I realized I’ve been spelling destruction as d-i-s-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n for years now!) 6. A downward dog that doesn’t make other people cringe watching me. 7. Sex in a public bathroom.
7 Things That Attract Me to the Opposite Sex: 1. Self confidence. 2. Beautiful eyes (love smiley lines!!) 3. The ability to build things and fix things with his hands. 4. Someone who can do sports with me without feeling the need to compete (seriously, I'll NEVER have pecs like that, so no, I'll never be able to jump a log on my mountain bike like that. Sorry.) 5. The ability to cook really well. 6. A sense of humor. 7. Willingness to grow, change & listen. 7 Things I Say Most Often: 1. I love you. 2. Who's a little bean? 3. Shhhhh! 4. It's your turn 5. Just let me finish this! 6. Ow (in response to my hair being pulled by Bean a million times a day) 7. Hmmm.
7 Celebrity Crushes: Because I grew up without TV in my house, I have a huge popular culture void that I'm still trying to accommodate for. That said, it's nearly impossible for me to name five celebs I even find interesting, let alone have crushes on.
7 people I want to do this: If you're inspired, go for it. Leave your answers in the comments or a link to your site!
Gel medium paste gets in his hair.Learning Curve
I am starting realize that the early baby months---when Bean has been a pre-crawling little bundle easily carried from place to place--gave DH and I a slightly warped sense of what it means to be a parent. I mean, thus far we have managed to retain some of the grace and adult-only sensibilities that keep us on par with our non-baby friends. We have a white chair in our living room for example (what the hell were we thinking???) and CDs on the bottom shelves of the entertainment center. Sometimes we even have fresh flowers in a vase on the coffee table. Cats and magazines lie on the floor unsuspecting…
But most of all most of all, we still live with the illusion that we're COOL like we were pre-Bean.
But this week we're realizing with a great deal of trepidation that a shift is about to occur. We know that it's only a matter of days really before we're forced to become parents for real. Parents with safety plugs in the outlets, toys scattered across all horizontal surfaces and (possibly) a regular bedtime routine for Bean that includes more than a hand washing, and some lullabies (the boy ,manages to get himself DIRTY now. Not sure how. And he's fighting sleep these days like nothing else!)
All this because Bean has gone and figured out how to INCHWORM his way across the floor. Not really crawling---more army cadet style belly dragging, but man it gets him where he wants to go. And he he's working on going vertical. And sitting all by himself.
And this is fun of course. Thrilling even, to watch him drag his belly across the floor with determination. But also it fills us with a gaping feeling of worry we're unaccustomed to.
This is what it means, isn't it? To be a parent.
Bean has suddenly entered the frightening terrain of being able to get hurt---on his many adventures with gravity, he bangs his face into the floor, just after doing a gorgeous downward dog. Or slams his cheek hard into the wall after making a great bunny hop.
And when I sit down to think about it, it isn't becoming UN-COOL that has me feeling edgy and unsettled, really---though I know our chair's upholstery is totally doomed, and I'm well aware sippy cups and blocks are going to outnumber wine glasses and pretty pottery around our house from here on out...What really has me is the sudden stunning realization that I cannot control everything that happens to my baby boy.
Until now, my body was nearly his entire geography. Now, the world is. And my heart, it expands each day with love, with worry, and leaves me feeling breathless.
The way we talk
I spent my senior year of high school skipping class to go body surfing with a red-headed rodeo boy who worked at the gym where I taught swimming lessons. I had other boyfriends too, but I could never decide on which one to keep. Then I went to Germany and met a boy with long hair who rock climbed and had just finished a cycling tour of most of northern Europe. I fell in love, and spent a year with him there.
We had a lot of fun: I learned to rock climb, and road ride with him. We traveled a lot. But somehow we never could really talk---in spite of the fact that he was a dual German-US citizen and could speak English fluently. In fact, our communication, or lack of it had less to do with language and more to do with the fact that we didn't have the same starting point. There was no overlap between us, so we were always hearing different things.
I read James Joyce and Jane Austin at the local library. He hated to read. I used words like etymology, nomenclature, and quintessential, and he'd give me blank looks, until I paraphrased. I was planning to go to college. He was planning not to. I wanted to have romance, he wanted to have sex.
Eventually I went to college and he kept rock climbing. I had a bunch of other men in my life then, some were sort of boyfriends, some just bed friends. And I spent a lot of money on phone calls. We tried to grow towards each other, to clarify things, to articulate something about the way our hearts moved, but everything we said clashed, and when he moved to the states I kept wanting him to read the damn poetry I wrote for him, and to respond. And he kept kicking my ass mountain biking and would leave me crying on trails I couldn't ride.
So I rode Canada with a bunch of girls, from Massachusetts. And several hundred miles of road later, after swimming in Canadian lakes and fixing my own derailleur, I decided I didn't need a man.
Then I met my husband. He was a total biking dork, who said he had his life all figured out. The first words I said to him were "nice bike," the mountain biker's equivalent of the "you had me at hello."
We went downhill mountain biking the day after we met, and had an fantastic time: he let me ride his bike, and waited for me when I couldn't keep up without making me feel small, and he rode my bike, and broke my wheel. But mostly, we talked. And we talked. And we listened. And we understood. And for the first time ever, I felt I'd found a man who wanted to share with me more than just his own ego, and who wanted to hear more than just 'I love you.' Which is what I told him two months later.
He was the first man, and the only man to whom I've ever said those words first. And so I married him.
Next week is his birthday. It will be the seventh birthday I will have spent with him, and I still can't shake the feeling that I've hit the jack pot big time. We play together, run together, ride together and fight together. And when we talk together, we hear each other. We speak the same language, use the same metaphors. Which isn't to say, communication is effortless, because it isn't. There are plenty of days when our words tangle and the meaning is lost. But when we're both trying, our words give our love wings. And that's a damn fine thing.
Underwater, for real
My heart goes out to them. I'm left without words as I try to imagine.
Underwater reinterpreted
In the quiet of the bedroom, the air conditioner makes the fish hanging from above Bean's bed float in dreamy spirals. We lie together, just the two of us in the semi-dark, waiting for sleep to settle over his energy-packed little body. Waiting to just be in the moment, breathing.
Underwater
I woke up moody this morning, my body drenched in sweat, feeling off-kilter for no particular reason. Sometimes it's just like that. Everything feels slanted, thick, slightly smashed. And I couldn't shake the mood all day. Even after a nap in an air conditioned bedroom, an iced tea and a trip to the bakery. Tonight I dragged my unmotivated self to the pool for a swim, doing a just about a mile. Lap after lap, pulling through the water, my lips and nose and cheekbones periodically pushing through the surface for air. It didn't help that it was gray out all day, the air heavy with rain that hasn't yet fallen. Even up here, northwards by many hundred miles, the weather reflects the storm that's pounding Louisiana right now. I can't imagine the anxiety they must feel, wind surging up so hard. Water everywhere. The threat of everything being gone tomorrow.
The end of summer
Riding back on our bikes from the beach as the sun was slowly falling towards the mountains, I noticed maple leaves turning red. Autumn always brings introversion. A time to take stock of the way the garden has turned out after the growing season; the way my feet look, with a flip-flop tan line and a callous from my bike shoes; the way my soul feels after months of expansion. I'm a bit reluctant this year to give up the goodness of summer, though I love fall more than any other season: for its gathering, its harvest, the leaves like fire spreading up the hills. But fall, with its sheer flaming beauty is like a lover that you know you can't keep, and before you've really learned its secrets, it's already gone. Piles of graying leaves and twiggy silhouettes in its wake; and with it, an inner shedding. An hesitation. Moments of silence. Loneliness creeps back up to the surface of things, waiting for snow fall.