Layers and Layers

12/7/16

#keepcalmWRITEon Day 7

Today was the first snow of the year.

If you know me, you know I love the show "Gilmore Girls".
As in -- eat, sleep, and breathe it.
For those if you not familiar.... in the show, the main character, Lorelai, loves the snow. Adores snow. She has at least two monologues about her relationship with the fluffy white stuff over the course of the show. She says, "The world is magical when it snows...the whole world changes color."
I am a desert rat, living in Kansas.
I used to say "stuck in Kansas" but I've changed my tune because, well, e'rybody got choices. I no longer feel stuck but rather, at home. But that's a story for another time.
I can't handle the cold. I wore two layers of under armour today, beneath a hoodie, beneath my work polo, beneath a coat. With ear warmers. And I still whined a little.

At my job, you have to be prepared for anything: kids could run away out in this cold, and we have to chase them! Better be prepared for the worst of conditions!
And yet, after I returned from just such an excursion this evening, I found all my layers of preparation working AGAINST me----I was sweating through my clothes and feeling so uncomfortable. I had to sit with my jeans rolled up to my knees at the desk while I completed my end-of-night paperwork, exposing my patterned tights to anyone who walked through the nurse's station. (My legs can't get cold, either!)
So this all got me thinking---even our most earnest methods of preparation can harm us in the end. Even when we think that we think of everything ----- there will be curveballs. We should always prepare to get a little uncomfortable, because there are always two sides to every coin.
Isn't it so interesting that the same things that can protect us from some elements, can very well expose us to others? I wonder what other areas of our lives this concept applies to.
I won't stop wearing my crazy layers anytime soon--- but I think I will start paying more attention to those things disguised as lifesavers, when in all actuality they might be weighing me down.

Sink or swim, friends.

Desert Diaries, Volume 1

Well, this week, I've gotten to spend some time in my hometown--Yuma, Arizona---visiting friends and family.  I haven't been here in two years, and I had been getting pretty homesick/nostalgic.  I don't know that homesick is the right word, because I don't LONG for home or anything like that.  I've gotten to this point where I've accepted and created my home around myself in the state and city where I live now, so it's strange to come back here.
I find myself driving the streets of this city, wondering, "I really grew up here?" Not because it's a bad thing, but because my entire adult life has been somewhere else.
I feel strangely at home, and a stranger, at the same time. While I've been here on this visit, I've gone running on the canal, which I ran 2-3 times a week during cross-country season in high school; I've gone running at Smucker Park, another high school favorite; I've had meals with friends and people I love; I've reminisced on "the good ol' days" and had conversations about my next steps in life; I've been around all my friends' and families' animals, mostly cats and dogs; I've visited and bonded with my Ocean in San Diego (yes, I needed to re-bond with my Ocean).
I've helped with a lot of things at my mom's house, planned and brainstormed with my sister, taught my baby sister card games, and eaten lots of fresh avocado.
I always end up with same panicky feeling: it's never enough time.
There's always someone else I wish I could spend time with, another old haunt I wish I could revisit.  I hate always running out of time.
I feel like at some point soon, I want like a 2-3 week period to come back and visit.  Life feels so different out here from what it does in my little Midwestern city.
I am more present and more appreciative of certain things this time around: the sunshine, the occasional warm (cool?) breeze, the faces of all the people who need someone to acknowledge their existence and say hello.
It feels like nothing's changed, and yet, like everything has.
I'm not the same person I was when I was growing up here.  It's strange to go develop and spread my wings as a person somewhere else, then come back to visit and bring everything I've learned with me.
Life is a really wacky thing.

Mom-ish Friends

05-04-14

“Mom-ish friends”

I know I use this term a lot.  

I think I may have coined the term, actually.

You see, not all little girls grow up with a mommy to look to for answers to life’s questions, or to pick them up when they fall down.  Some little girls grow up meek and quiet, watching their life go by in a whirlwind around them, across two states, two schools, and two homes, with two parents who were together, yet not, and always seemed to have something to argue about.  

Some little girls grow up with all their basic needs provided - food, clothing, transportation, schooling, pets, even - and so, they never even realize that they are missing something.  They don’t even know what entitlement is, so how can they feel it?

These little girls grow up into pre-teens whose friends want to be all huggy all the time, and they realize this is the first time they remember giving and receiving hugs.  So then these little girls start building their identity around their friendships.

Then boys want to start giving and receiving hugs, and these little girls realize they don’t ever remember hugging their fathers.

But then these little girls get stuck living with their father, while the person who holds the title “mother” is in and out, back and forth, across two states, working, making whirlwind decisions at very loud volumes.

So, trust begins to build in father-daughter relationships, but then mothers get jealous and make up lies and stories and do everything in their power to rip away the relationships that they never cared enough to build themselves.

So then little girls end up confused and caught in the middle of custody battles, not understanding why they have to choose one parent over the other, upset and experiencing separation anxiety when it’s a “mom weekend”, but not sure from which person they feel anxious about separating, the mother or the father.

These little girls eat too much and don’t get enough exercise, but rely on Nickolodeon and Disney Channel for company.  (They fight too much with their sisters to ever get along peacefully for any actual amounts of time)

Dads win the custody battles and little girls continue with schooling.  When boys want to start holding hands at lunchtime, there’s no mommies to ask for advice.  There’s just daddies to hide information from.  

Little girls find their peace in books and schoolwork, spelling and arithmetic, and get a “Good job, mija” when they bring home a good grade, which by the way, is always an “A”.  

Junior high goes by with no more from Mommies than demanding questions and high expectations when they come to visit.  

By high school, little girls have found some more of their identities and escapes in sports.  Building bonds with teammates is easier than building bonds with family members.

The schoolwork gets more intense, and little girls grow more confused and feel more pressure.  By this point, they’ve mastered the “Thank you for cooking dinner, Daddy” and help with housework and take on more responsibility than they maybe should.

By age 15, little girls have seen how some of their friends interact with their mommies.  They’ve seen the hugs, and the eye-rolling, and the kisses on the cheek, and they hear the “Love you’s” and they wonder, “Why is my family so different?” But by this point, they don’t really care.

Because by this point, they’re getting hugs and kisses from boys and doing well with sports, and algebra and biology and theology at their Catholic high schools, and they’re headed toward a college scholarship.

Then Daddy dies and leaves Mommy in charge.

And there’s so much anger and hurt feelings all over the place that little girls don’t even know how to handle themselves.  But they don’t have to, because they get college scholarships to faraway places like Kansas, so they get to run away.

But every time they come for a visit, it’s fireworks, and not the good kind.  And all along, they don’t know who they are, or who they’ve been, or known guidance, or a mother’s love.  For Mommy was too busy figuring herself out to pay any attention to her Little Girls.  

It wasn’t completely her fault.  She just didn’t know how  

Thank goodness for Mom-ish friends, who step in when Little Girls are 20, 25 years old and help answer all the questions; who stand by and offer words of repair and wisdom, gestures of healing and kindness.  For it’s not the Little Girl’s fault that she wasn’t given what all Little Girls should have.

Thank goodness for Mom-ish friends.

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

October 30, 2013 
This month, my mother celebrated her 50th birthday.

I didn’t get to see her on her special day, because I live halfway across the country, and don’t have the resources or the time off work to be able to go home to Arizona this calendar year.  My sister wants to plan something big to celebrate my mom’s birthday later on, perhaps next summer, when we can all be together.
My mother lives at home with our youngest sister, who is 9.  Sometimes I wonder if my mother gets lonely.  She tells me stories of how my little sister says, “When I grow up, Mommy, I will never leave you.”

That makes me feel guilty sometimes.  I have been away from home for 7 years now, and three years ago when I graduated from college, my mother was ready for me to move back.

I, however, was not.

Most people are in a hurry to move back home; they sense a piece of themselves is always missing until they are back in the familiarity of their hometown.  I did not turn out that way.  I have actually found myself by moving away, and the staying away part was never a question, really.  I never had any desire to move back home.

Part of that had to do with the not-so-fuzzy relationship I had/have with my mother.  My mother is a very complicated, broken person.  Over the years she has manipulated, emotionally abused, and done her best to try to break me as well.  A couple of times she has really succeeded.

But, today isn’t to write about the brokenness; I will save that for another time.

Today is to celebrate the beauty within the brokenness.

You see, I’ve been learning a lot about gratitude and abundance over the past year.  I have been learning how to give thanks for the ugly, the seemingly mundane, and the broken.

So I’ve challenged myself to think through the broken pieces of my relationship with my mother, and to identify glimpses of hope within them.

Even though my mother may not have been the best example to me or the best friend I ever had, and even though I still resent that sometimes, I know there are a few things she taught me that are apparent in my character today.  Most seem like small, trivial things, but they make me smile, and they make me thankful, and that's the whole point.

1) My handwriting.  I always get compliments on my handwriting and how neat it is.  This always takes me back to my schoolgirl days when my mother would compare my handwriting to hers (and almost admire mine).  She would spend lots of time practicing cursive with me, back in the day.
2) My driving.  My mother was the one who played Teacher in most of my lessons. Or, she was in the passenger's seat while I was behind the wheel.  During the time that I was learning to drive, she was pregnant with my youngest sister, and the baby doctor she went to was in California, an hour away.  I drove her to many of those appointments, and although she was very critical and overly explanatory of each detail that she felt I needed to learn, I know that my driving skills are results of listening to those details and the hours of practice she gave me.  I also really, strangely, LOVE to drive long distances.  Tell me I get to drive for 6 hours and I jump with excitement.  In college, it was never a question of who would be the designated driver--whether there was alcohol involved or not--because everyone knew my obsession with driving.  The long-distance driving thing comes from my mom; she basically learned to drive by following my dad on the freeway between Yuma, AZ and Salinas, CA every season for work.
3)Doing Laundry.  Now, I know this one sounds sillier than the rest.  But from my mother I learned how to wash whites in order to get them radiant!Also, given a choice, I would rather hang clothes on a clothesline outside than use a dryer--another little quirk from my mother.
4)Housecleaning.  My mother is a BEAST when it comes to housecleaning.  She hates clutter, and takes pride in how well she can clean.  We're talking scrubbing tubs and toilets and mopping floors. And ripping blinds down and sticking them in the tub to clean with a broom and soap and water. Not only am I now good at it all, I LOVE to do it.  I've got to say, this one definitely comes in handy.

Even though they are small things, and as I look through them, seem almost like little obsessive quirks or complexes, they are my memories and my traits.  Perhaps I created these habits in myself, because I was so desperate to have something in common with my mother, to feel like she had taught me or nurtured me in some way, that I convinced myself to develop them.  That is a topic for further personal exploration.

For now, I see them as gems of humorous wisdom from my mother's 50 years of life.

Maybe in the next 50 years, I will find more.

*also, the title of this post is in reference to an old song title*

Blame and Forgiveness

Some self-disclosure here...  what do you blame yourself for in your life?

 

 

"In my life...I’ve found it way too easy to blame myself for a lot.  I blame myself probably more than is fair for “messing it up” ... but the common thread is my being too eager to find something wrong with myself to blame ...  I don’t think I like to blame myself, but it just always seems like the easier thing to do.  I have always been my harshest critic; teachers, coaches, and counselors have told me this throughout the years.  They always pointed that out as my greatest weakness, my most debilitating quality.  I have been struggling for years to work with this quality and turn it into a positive, but it always seems to get the best of me and make me feel like the world is crashing down on me. 

I don’t know where the insatiable desire to achieve came from for me.  Lee says that I grew up feeling inadequate, like my mother didn’t love me (since she was never around, and I probably tried to decipher why that was).  I always tried to fill that hole and that need to be loved and appreciated by overachieving in school.  I was taught that perfection was the best way; we must strive to be the best we can.  I do remember Dad being upset once when I got a B instead of an A, but this was never a chronic, abusive environment, just high expectations.  I always knew that I represented my family and my race and that if I messed anything up, it made a lot of people look bad.  I always grew up being told that I had to help Mexicans look good, to change the way Americans thought of Mexicans.  I guess that was a lot of pressure.  And then growing up being the main responsible one in the home was a lot of pressure too.  I even blamed myself when Dad died.  I felt like there was more I could have done, more I should have known, more questions I should have asked, I should have been more involved with the hospital stay.  I’ve just always put so much pressure on myself for everything, like having too high expectations of myself and then letting everything disappoint me when it all went wrong.  "