flawed but authentic

Post pictures of a lake sunset.

Hope that you can be wrapped up in God’s arms as He paints a picture for you in the sky.

Be encouraged that such colors are even possible and found in nature.

And then? Well, just share them with a friend and have a nice day.

I think I have mentioned StoryCorps here before - a mobile recording studio that goes around the United States, collecting true stories for archival in the Library of Congress.

Every Friday on the way to work, I hear the StoryCorps music at the end of the local NPR station’s broadcast of “Morning Edition.” I pull into my parking place and turn off the car, ready to listen.

Last Week’s Story really got me. It sums up everything Flawed But Authentic is about to me - how we make changes by showing up and paying attention. Life is a required course. I think the guy in the story gets an A.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In keeping with the theme of making a difference I’m trying hard to live an authentic life that puts my mental health first and foremost, but that keeps coming with other prices that I didn’t expect to incur. That means making lists on sticky notes and posting them around my house to read and re-read in the hopes that they help heal.

Right now my healing is coming from my very close relationship with my mother that survived teen pregnancies that none of us could foresee but that, nonetheless, affected my family in ways we probably haven’t fully dealt with yet. For the curious, I’m writing this here instead of there because it feels safe. Whether or not it is remains to be seen. A very long time ago I made a 100 List of things about me and wrote that after having my daughter at 15 *I got pregnant again before she turned one and gave up that baby for adoption. 20 years ago. Time flies when you’re trying hard to stop being a complete fuck-up and prove that you still have a brain.

Healing, then, has me doing a few things:

1. Seeking counseling even though it’s getting tough and leaving me in tears each time.

2. Yoga and/or breathing exercises accompanied by stretching. Sometimes the stretching is in bed, other times on the floor after my body is dragged from that goose-down bedding. So. Hard.

3. Quiet time.

4. Working on a book. Also hard. And trying to find a way to channel a passion for getting internet to the impoverished. A weird passion, I know.

5. Writing, screaming, yelling at God. That one is a doozy. Pretty soon the yelling will have to subside into softer pleas, but I’m not there yet.

I’m hoping all these things will help to make a difference in my life so that I’m not full of regret at 70 years of age. While there is knowledge to be had, I prefer the wisdom that remains. Whatever wisdom is out there I am 20 years smarter because I want it despite the great fear I have for writing it here just now. Be kind. Don’t recall that tough, smart-ass chick I have been portraying. Instead, remember a tender creature hoping for healing by making a difference in the small things.

How fitting that I would click on a link on my own blog to this tonight. Shannon was asking for advice from Birth Moms and I surprised even myself for commenting. This has been in my closet for far too long. If I am to heal, I have to share.

*I deleted it later fearing something. What? Something bad, I was sure. Writing for this site has made it less scary.

We tend to see teaching as a profession, but A Course in Miracles says ”Everyone teaches, and teaches all the time.”

 Every moment of every day, we are teaching those we encounter and ourselves what we believe about the world. We are also teaching the world how to treat us.

My friend Ken eats a lot of burritos, almost one a day.

“You really love those burritos,” I commented.

“Well, yes, but there is something else,” he explained. “There is this woman at Johnnie’s, this older grandma-type lady, who has the sweetest, most soulful smile I have ever seen. Whenever I go there, she gives me one of those smiles and I feel so good.”

Who woulda thunk it? A burrito lady that changes people’s day, just by her smile. It just looks like she is making burritos. What she is really doing is teaching her customers that they are valuable, appreciated human beings. She is also teaching the world that she has plenty of love and that she knows love is to be shared.

What do you want to teach?

My sister Laura had a highly visible illness, multiple sclerosis. She spent the last dozen years of her life in a wheelchair, progressing from a non-powered one at the beginning to one she could steer with her chin at the end because it got so that the only part of her body she could move was her head.

She taught me a lot and I don’t mean in a “What an inspiration!” kind of way. Sure, she inspired me, but probably not any more than I inspired her. It was real life after all, not some made-for-TV movie where everything comes out fine at the end.

She was wicked and sarcastic and funny about her illness at times. She would say “I don’t know why they call it handicapped – it isn’t handy to me!” or “Don’t call me ‘differently abled’ – I prefer the term ‘gimp.’”

Then there were other periods where whole days passed in storms of tears, anger and regret. Being ill, chronically ill, is a grind like the last 5 miles of a marathon, except that it goes on for years, and it isn’t just the sick person that is running. It is the whole family, the whole tired, fragile group of humans surrounding them.

Because the illness was so visible, it acted like a living Rorschach test. I think the most frustrating thing for Laura was that people stopped reacting to her as a person. Because they saw her as a condition, a handicap, they approached her with their emotional baggage out in front of them, leading the way.

Most people wanted to know what she did to end up in a wheelchair.

“They want to know so they can believe it won’t happen to them if they just do everything right,” said Laura. “You should see how scared they are when I tell them I DID do everything right and I STILL ended up like this.”

Many, many, people wanted to “cheer her up” and gave her their fridge-magnet philosophy.
“Remember, God never gives you more than you can handle,” they would chirp. “Everything always works out for the best!”

This was always occasion for us muttering under our breath.

“God never gives you more than you can handle,” we would say. “Until He does.”

Others would grasp her hand, cock their heads to the side and blink back tears, saying “I’ll pray for you”

Prayer is a good thing, but being pitied is always uncomfortable. It was only thanks to our mother’s good influence on our upbringing that Laura could be kind and gracious and not tell people where to put their pity.

“You are so brave,” others would say, making it sound like Multiple Sclerosis was a burning building she had rushed into.

It was fascinating to watch my sister be used as a projection screen for the fears and hopes of random strangers.

They only thought she was handling it because they wanted to believe they would handle it. They only wanted her to be brave because they hoped they would be.

The problem was that she wasn’t a projection screen, she wasn’t an illness. She was a human, a big, messy, fragile, funny, smart, complicated, miraculous human and she deserved to be treated as such.

It’s natural to want to run from our fears, or to try and fix The Bad Thing. But sometimes things can’t be fixed, can’t be outrun. Then it’s just a matter of getting through each day with all the grace, dignity and humor you can muster. Which isn’t very damn much, sometimes, but you do what you can.

When I was in college I met a lot of new people and connected with some I neither saw nor heard from for some time. Like when Bobby Soccer called me out of the blue and asked, “Are you the Kelly who went out with me in 4th grade?” and I snorted first because of the thought that I had, indeed, considered myself of dating age when I was 10. So, yes, we went out.

Our conversation had a strange tone to it as he had simply found my name in a phone book, but I knew it was him when he confirmed that while I was sitting in some playground equipment that we called The Hamburger (dome-shaped, you climbed up a ladder through the center, apparently passing the lower bun until you sat in the meat part - why are you judging me, I was 10. And dating.) I noticed that Bobby was leaning forward on The Hill where he played, you guessed it, soccer. There was blood coming from his face as his hands were covering it because he apparently took a soccer ball right to the nose and it broke his glasses which cut his face up.

Why am I telling you this? Why am I leaving that preposition at the end of that sentence?

Because I am a rebel, that’s why.

Not entirely, but bear with me.

Once, while vacationing in Washington, DC with my husband and children and in-laws I was walking down a busy street (Pennsylvania Avenue is busy, no?) and squealed with delight as Roger History and I were passing one another. It hadn’t quite been 10 years since high school where we sat in U.S. History (you didn’t suppose I named him that because we took French together, did you? I took Spanish anyway. I was trying to throw you off your game.) and acted like we knew more about American History than our teacher who kept trying to move us apart because we were such disruptions. Roger was quick-witted, punk-attired, and rather fluent in German as we were seniors and he’d been taking it all four years. That moment, when I had two kids in diapers and a precocious 10 year old (who wasn’t dating yet, as far as I know) I turned into a 17-year old again and we hugged and kissed until my family finally asked Who IS this strange man?

During a family vacation in Tennessee one year I never expected to hear the voice of a former student call out my name while we were waiting to ride go-carts, but I did. We were several hundred miles from home and I ran into someone, yet again, that I know. Even my friend Becky teases me about going anywhere with her because once at that enormous Ikea store in suburban Chicago she joked, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you ran into someone in this store that I get lost in every time.” and within 2 minutes I heard my maiden name called from across the pillow bin. I hadn’t seen her in 12 or so years, but there was Basketball Michelle standing there squinting at me still trying to guess if it really was me. (It was.)

This is all to illustrate the number of people I’ve come across so far in my life. One time I calculated that with the average number of students I have in a year and their parents whom I’ve met at Parent-Teacher conferences as well as their step-parents and siblings I know well over 5,000 people in an educational career spanning 14 short years. Currently, I am reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and he makes mention of the types of people who connect others and connect TO others. There is something about relating to people on a daily basis that is necessary for me. When I meet people I never forget a face and I do very well at names. Mostly, however, I will recall incidents of occurrences to help me make those connections.

There was even a blogger meet-up where I only knew one person who connected me to other people and another blogger who came to the Chicago meet-up simply because I was attending and out of that came folks near and dear to my heart.

All that was to say that I like to connect, that’s all. I’m thinking so much more about how we connect with one another daily like the same people I see at the Farmer’s Market or the scruffy guy at the liquor store who knows I never use their bags (long, slim wine bags are not good for anything else and waste paper). It’s amusing to see these people elsewhere and watch their faces betray their brains which are trying to connect, “Where do I know that woman from?” Whether it’s the mani-pedi gal (Mary) or the kickboxing chica (I just call her StrongBad) or the older gentleman at the bookstore (Gordon), I enjoy my connections. They are familial reminders of who we put our energies into on this earth.

Even today, I got an email from a gal I’ll call Tattoo Seeker who wrote that she’d seen my daughter’s tattoo and wondered if I would write some lyrics on paper to send to her so she could get those lines tattooed on her body. See the amazing beauty in being connected? Someone, a person I’ve never met, wants to have MY WRITING ON HER BODY. Surreal. Not the prosaic requests one gets day to day.

In my effort to learn about my own connectedness I wonder, quite often, how people connect to places like this. What brought them here? Where they on a coffee break and walked by a co-worker reading this thing called a ‘blog’ and then happened to continue reading? Did someone send my writing as a link to someone else who gets this via an e-mail service like Feedblitz? Is my mother telling everyone she meets, “My daughter has a blog! Read it!”?

We connect, we link, we network, we build relationships, we support, we get fired up for indignant behavior, we search for a commonality, we seek invitations to be a part of something. This very moment I consider: Who is even still with me after this long posting? I marvel: How did this reader get here? I ponder: How did I?

For My Homo Homies

Sally Kern must have forgotten all the best movie quotes. As a representative out of Oklahoma, she’s clearly never seen An Officer And A Gentleman and heard this line:

The only two things from Oklahoma are steers and queers, and I don’t see no horns on you, boy.

Incontrovertibly, she does not purport to play for the other team, so she must be the devil. She did a nice job proving that. Somebody please check her head for hornlike projections.

I would think with all my connections out there SOMEone could do that for me.

It was 1977, and Mrs. G. was eleven-years-old. She was living in the deep south, culturally deprived and pining for the finer things in life. Having recently graduated from the fashion breakthrough known as Grr-Animals, the Healthtex children’s clothing line that helped children match giraffe head shirts with giraffe leg bottoms, Mrs. G. longed for a pair of these…

bell bottoms jeans to go with the tube top she was not allowed to wear because her mom said only sluts wore tube tops. Mrs. G. also longed for…

one of these babies, because they were so fresh.

Despite spending many an evening with her Clairol hot rollers and Vidal Sassoon curling iron, she never achieved Farrah Fawcett hair, but Mrs. G…

used Farrah’s shampoo and conditioner. In between showers, she placed both bottles prominently on her dresser with the labels facing out. Mrs. G’s mother called them false idols and turned the labels facing in every time she came into Mrs. G’s room to snoop change the sheets.

After combing out her tangles with her cutting edge wide-toothed-comb, Mrs. G. would spray every inch of her body with…

 a half gallon of this. When she got to school, away from her mother’s slut detector eagle eyes, she would slick her lips with fruit punch shellac Kiss Me Stick and pray she might someday walk on the beach…

with them. If she were forced to choose in a game of Truth or Dare, Mrs. G. would have picked Starsky. She was a big fan of the belted cardigan.

But what Mrs. G. wanted more than anything she had ever wanted in her life was …

a mood ring. For those readers who might be younger than Mrs. G. or who were living under one of those pet rocks, mood rings were made with this clear jewel-like stone that changed colors in response to your moods. One of Mrs. G’s co-workers (a science teacher) told her these jewel-like stones were actually thermochromic liquid crystals that respond to body temperature and have absolutely no connection to mood. Fine if science is your thing, but Mrs. G. thinks this teacher is a buzz kill mistaken and prefers to think mood rings are pure d magic.

Mrs. G. saved her pennies and finally bought her own mood ring at this classy store at the mall called Spencers. She focused on John Travolta happy thoughts so her mood ring would stay blue, the color that represented peace, harmony and passion. She wore it for three days until, one morning, the stone just fell off the silver band and landed on her shag carpet. In one fell swoop, a dream killed and $3.99 down the drain. Mrs. G. was majorly bummed.

Mrs. G’s grandfather heard about her mood ring tragedy and decided he could fix it as he was too cheap to buy her a new one handy that way. Mrs. G’s grandfather was a tightwad frugal. He lived through the Depression and never let anyone forget it as he wrung out paper towels and hung them up to dry for later use. She will never forget the time he called her at college and told her he had bought her a new winter coat. When it arrived in the mail, Mrs. G. opened the package to find he had bought her a neon orange hunting parka. His note said he hoped she liked it because it would be warm and help her friends easily spot her on the large campus. Oh yeah, because nothing says be my friend like a neon orange hunting parka. Consequently, this was the year Mrs. G. froze her butt off, and all the deer in Eugene, Oregon ran for their lives when they saw her coming.

Back to the story. Mrs. G’s grandfather decided that the trick to restoring the mood ring to its former glory was to get out his solder gun, set it to hot-as-hell and melt the metal on the back of the stone and the top of the band and hold them back together until the metals cooled. To his credit, Mrs. G’s mood ring never fell apart again. Unfortunately the heat of the soldering gun damaged the inner magic of the mood stone and it always looked

like this. Black. Angry, tense, depressed, nearing suicide black. There were some dark days for Mrs. G, but then disco hit, and it was all about the Bee Gees.

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