Oblivious to the Obvious

Change the word obvious to oblivious and you have me. It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I live inside my head most of the time. It’s a nice place to be, but really blinds me to the realities of the outside world. This becomes glaringly obvious when company comes calling.

Ordinarily I keep a clean house. It’s not magazine perfect, much to my husband’s disappointment, but the health department is not going to come calling any time soon. It’s picked up and the dishes are mostly clean and put away. The obvious things are done. Well, the things that are obvious to me. Therein lies the problem. What I’m oblivious to can stand out glaringly to others, and when they enter, I seem to all of a sudden see through their eyes what before I had no awareness of.

Once my mother-in-law came to visit. She noticed some cobwebs and I joked that they were there because we needed the spiders around to catch the flies. (I think my humor was lost on her.) Well, another time we were cleaning up the kitchen together and I swiped some cobwebs that I suddenly noticed in the kitchen window. Her response? “I was going to get those, but you said you needed them to catch the flies.”

Oh, dear.

Another time one of my son’s friends wrote dust me in the thin layer of dust at the top of a bookshelf! Who looks at the top of bookshelves?

Fortunately for others, my obliviousness is all-encompassing. If I go to your house, don’t apologize for your messy kitchen. I would never have noticed otherwise. Don’t spoil the great conversation by pointing out the weeds in your garden. Trust me. I won’t see them. When I go home, I won’t be able to tell anyone the color of your house, let alone whether or not you have cobwebs or dust on top of your bookshelf. All I will remember is how much I enjoyed your company.

As for the rest, I am resigned to being forever oblivious to the obvious.

Echo Chamber

This empty nest thing is for the birds. (Pun intended.) I feel like I should enjoy this silence after years of rambunctious kids and their singing and shouting, TV blaring cartoons through the house, dancing, laughter and fighting. Now the house is just so quiet.

On a good note, I’m getting more proficient at self-talk. I can almost carry on a whole conversation with myself while walking through the grocery store. I’m not the only one afflicted. I saw a friend in the chip aisle the other day. We were both stocking up for graduation parties. I saw her before she saw me, and didn’t recognize anyone around us she might have been talking to. I approached her and laughingly asked if she was talking to herself. She nodded semi-sheepishly. I think we’ve both come to terms with a certain amount of crazy.

They say you should live long enough to embarrass your kids. I have, but they’re not around enough to be embarrassed.

I get it. Kids need their space. My head knows this. I’ve been an independent young person aching to stretch my wings. I lived through the days of no cell phones and probably didn’t call my mom as much as I should have. (Mom, I’m sorry I put you through this.) My head is on board. My heart, however, feels like it’s being ripped out of my chest and trampled on the ground in front of me. (Okay, only slightly dramatic.)

The thing is, I saw my mom starting to teeter with empty nest syndrome, but I was the eldest and didn’t take much time to look back over my shoulder. She coped by adopting a whole new family’s worth of kids, thereby extending her motherhood years by another eighteen. I was not willing to go that route. I looked forward to the day Mr. A and I could spend some quality time together sans kids. The appeal of a $30 dinner bill loomed in the near future. We could go out to eat 3 or 4 times for what it cost to take the family, all of whom are lovers of strawberry lemonade (at $4.00 a pop). We could go to the beach on a whim and not hear anyone complain about the cold or try to figure out an activity that everyone wanted to do. We could watch documentaries without eye rolls. Yet here I am, longing for those days, for the structure of the family web and the love and support we provide each other.

Determined not to be that parent frantically trying to hold onto my kids as they perched precariously at the edge of adulthood, I went back to school and finished up my teaching degree. I wanted a life, something to fall back on after motherhood, an airbag to fill the space left by my fledglings. The thing is, motherhood doesn’t end. Those babies whose first steps you worry about become preschoolers who learn to ride bikes and teenagers who start to drive and develop relationships and head off to college, and you never stop worrying about them. It’s a mentally exhausting job. My life is inextricably intertwined with those of my kids, bonds I’m sure they’re only too eager to hack at with the machete of youth.

I know they’re busy. I was too, at their age. The days go by and my phone doesn’t ring. Texts go unanswered, and then all of a sudden they are there, cheery and wanting to talk, and for a moment, life goes back to the way it used to be. Too soon the conversation ends, and I’m surrounded by silence once more. I’ll be glad to one day reach a state of equilibrium.

In the meantime, won’t you join me in crying over this clip from Toy Story? I’m certain the song was written by an empty-nester.

A Cautionary Tale

They lay like dinosaur bones of old, just another layer of strata on an ancient planet, slowly being enveloped in green and brown. Someday they might be fuel for a future species, but that won’t occur until they have been forgotten for millions of years.

Sadly, they were close to the pinnacle when it happened. In the previous two centuries famine and disease had withered into a distant memory, and eons of genetic adaptation lay dormant under warm roofs with running refrigerators. In what was a blink in geologic time, they had connected the globe and planted flags on the moon. Shining eyes had stared out outward thinking maybe, just maybe, they could actually colonize another planet.

But greed and ego hacked away at the pinnacle until this great civilization could no longer stand. They were warned, but with a spewing of hot air and angry waving of hands, a shout went up like a great industrial cloud of smog, blotting the sun, drowning out the warning, and smothering the populace until finally, with one small voice, they said, “We were wrong.”

But it was too late.

With the energy of an avalanche that would not be stopped, ancient cycles gained momentum until storm upon storm battered coastlines and mountains and the houses with warm roofs and running refrigerators. Sea levels crept up, pushing an already crowded world closer and closer together. Disrupted supply chains broke down down the doors for disease and famine to come rushing back like a torrent. The rewind button had been pushed, and like the video tape of old, it squeaked and rattled back through time and human advancement until only small clusters of people remained, gasping, relearning how to exist on this new earth, until even they could exist no more.

The storms continued. They were not dependent on the machinations of man. Refrigerators rusted, roofs blew in, and walls collapsed as the next iteration began.

Humanity became just another layer in the strata of time.

: Photo credit: weesam2010 via Source / CC BY-NC-SA

The Barrier

We stand at the pane,
Me looking out,
You looking in.
It all seems so clear,
Yet here we remain,
Separate
In all of our clarity.
Our hands reach up
And touch without touching
Through crystal clear glass,
And while they may leave a mark,
We don’t feel the warmth of skin upon skin.

Unfolding Plotlines

: Photo credit: modular.dodecahedron via Foter.com / CC BY-SA

I read like a writer. I can’t help it. I love a good sentence or turn of phrase. The thing I love the most is when I come upon a story that unfolds like origami to reveal layer upon layer of complexity. This ability to delve deeper and deeper into the plot and character motivations is a skill I have not yet mastered in my writing. (I’ll be throwing a big party when I get there.)

These layers are what give stories life. The best ones mirror the intricacies, the unexpected driving forces for a character’s actions. We think we know people, but our closest friends, our spouses, and even our children have had experiences that we may never know about, but that influence the way they interact with the world. That interaction creates a path. Each choice narrows the trajectory. Good plotlines reflect this real world experience, pulling the reader in, coaxing and drawing him/her closer to the intended goal of revelation or denouement. The ultimate goal is to leave the reader with a story that sticks in their mind, something that keeps them thinking and mulling over, something that may be with them for a lifetime.

That’s the kind of writer I aspire to be.

The Finish Line

: junah42 / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I’ve reached the finish line of the NoMo challenge of a post a day. (Cue singing choir of angels.) It feels good to add one more thing to a growing list of accomplishments.

Here’s a little secret. I have anxiety issues. Every box I can check off where I’ve done something in a public forum is a big, bold check mark. The hurdles are big, but I’ve been practicing my leaps, and I can sometimes make it over. I wish I would have learned earlier in life that you only build resilience through practice, failure, and more practice.

Curiously, it took a friend who I had always thought to be the epitome of self-confidence telling me that underneath it all she was nervous. She was just really good at faking it. She would plunge ahead, and I watched people react positively, even when something she said or did caused me to wince for her. After that, I pictured her outward confidence and it inspired courage in me. And funny thing, now I have enough courage on my own and don’t have to picture hers any more.

There is a moment that is forever etched in my mind – a pivotal moment, a decision that affected the majority of my life. I was a young, introverted 7th or 8th grader. The class was called “Creativity,” and it hinged on integrating other subjects with creative writing and art. I had written a poem from my heart. My teacher at the time, Mrs. Marshall, approached me and asked if I would mind if she hung it on the wall. I was mortified that my words would be out there subject to criticism. I was the type of girl who wrote with her head and hair hanging over her paper, while the other arm shielded it from view. Yet there was a part of me that was proud, and that part of me nudged the anxious part, but not hard enough. Anxiety won out. My poem remained unseen. I was safe. But was I happy?

Fast forward to my blog. It’s a work in progress, a baby taking tottering steps. It doesn’t really know what it wants to be yet, and that’s okay because the fact that it exists at all is me leaping over one of those hurdles. Being published. Putting my words and ideas out there for someone else to read. It has taken me a long time to build the confidence needed to make that leap. I know there will be some flops, and I still fear that they may all be flops, but I am getting better at shushing that bully inside who wants to keep me down.

Is it still hard to hit the publish button? Sometimes. But while my finger may waver a while, I soon think Oh, what the hell, and push. It’s not like it’s the infamous red button that’s going to cause worldwide nuclear war. It’s just a small victory in the war of attrition between my bully and me. I think at last the bully is losing.

As I move forward, I will probably not publish every single day. I may be inspired to publish more than once a day, it’s really up to my muse. I will try to keep in mind number one on Kurt Vonnegut’s list for creative writers:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

This quote has made me cringe more than a couple of times during the course of this challenge. I hope you have not felt your time wasted, even by a moose dream. 😉

As I added this to my blog, WordPress kindly noted that this was my 100th blog post, adding to my happy day.

Practicing Magic

I think, and there it is, a world conjured into existence. I smile. This power given to me has the ability to cause good or evil. Which will I choose?

I think again, and my world is populated with people so different from one another, I wonder where they came from. But there they are. They turn to each other and begin to speak, and I become the outsider, watching to see what will happen.

I turn my gaze away from them and conjure another world, a fantastical world, a place I’ve never been and maybe would not even want to go. It’s full of peril. I populate it with people who have to fight to survive. I’m a little horrified at my creation, and cease my magic temporarily, but magic is intoxicating, addictive, and draws me back. I meddle in the lives of my creatures, needling them and placing them directly in harm’s way. I know most of them will make it out alive.

On a dark day, I create a dark world, full of toxic people, people I would never associate myself with, yet they attach themselves, remnants of them clinging to me like lichen to a tree. In time they will break free, but they will always leave a mark. I withdraw from my conjuring, placing my pen on the table, and stashing my journal. I take time to breathe the fresh air and feel sunlight on my skin.

Magic is powerful business.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Do you Believe in Magic?.”You have been transformed into a mystical being who has the ability to do magic. Describe your new abilities in detail. How will you use your new skills?

: JKim1 / Foter / CC BY-NC

Why I Write

I write because it quiets the voices in my head, the city of unruly citizens clamoring to be heard. (Did that just sound as crazy to you as it did to me?)

I write because my anxiety causes me to stammer and lose my focus. Writing allows me the time to carefully gather my thoughts, time to sort and filter.

I write because sometimes things make me angry or upset or amazed. Writing drives the subject home like a post pounded into the soil or a root pushing its way into the earth. It make me feel stable. Grounded.

I write because I’m afraid I’ll forget… the things I felt at each stage of life, what was important to me, the small, funny, tender moments with my kids that get upended by doctor bills and grocery shopping and car repairs.

I write because it calms my demons.

Though this never used to be true, I write to be read.

Why do you write?

Ode to Coffee.

Oh, magic bean, far from your tropical home,

Child of the glossy-leafed tree that sits at the knees of giants,

Sheltered in the mist of the tropical canopy.

In my kitchen cupboard you wait, vacuum sealed,

Teasing and calling me through my slumber.

Oh patient bean, how skilled hands cradled your cherry-red youth,

Through your many iterations and metamorphoses from plant to store,

Lovingly bathed and set out to dry, soaking in the rays of the equatorial sun,

Before entering the sauna, where you danced a blistering tango, never stopping,

As you entered the sunset of your life.

Oh mighty bean, your small size belies your humble strength and power

To lift even the heaviest lid and awaken the most somnolent spirit,

Mighty warrior, you gird yourself in fluid zeal, giving chase to lethargy and torpor,

Fighting fatigue with the sharpness of your liquid sword.

Slashing through the dream curtain and illuminating the mind.

Oh, small brown bean, how your aroma beckons!

With great fanfare, the grinder accepts your willing sacrifice.

Purified in a scorching deluge, you are transformed,

Your mellow, nutty spirit released at last to ride the currents of air,

Causing even those who eschew you to take note.

Oh bean transformed, welcome to my cup!

My eager hands embrace your profound warmth.

Your spicy bouquet tantalizes the burgeoning senses,

As your heady warmth and mellowness revive the psyche.

With smile and grateful spirit I accept your promise for a fruitful day.

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: / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Forward Drive.” What is the one thing that drives you to wake up in the morning and do whatever it is you do? Is it writing, family, friends, or something else entirely?