Jane at West Wind Horse Show
Originally uploaded by kgranju.
June 25, 2006
Sunday
how big is your house?
Tell me about your house.
My three children and I live in a 1500 sq ft craftsman cottage built in 1930. It has a single bathroom. Hardwood floors - some refinished, some still all banged up. Big yard and sidewalks. Downtown, city neighborhood full of old houses. Our particular historic neighborhood hasn't yet gentrified yet, although it's surrounded by those that have. So I guess we are sort of urban pioneers. House needs some cosmetic work, but is pretty solid. No cable TV. My kids believe we are the only people on the planet living without cable TV and with a single bathroom. Most of their friends live in very nice, very large houses in madly affluent neighborhoods.
What's your house and neighborhood like?
My three children and I live in a 1500 sq ft craftsman cottage built in 1930. It has a single bathroom. Hardwood floors - some refinished, some still all banged up. Big yard and sidewalks. Downtown, city neighborhood full of old houses. Our particular historic neighborhood hasn't yet gentrified yet, although it's surrounded by those that have. So I guess we are sort of urban pioneers. House needs some cosmetic work, but is pretty solid. No cable TV. My kids believe we are the only people on the planet living without cable TV and with a single bathroom. Most of their friends live in very nice, very large houses in madly affluent neighborhoods.
What's your house and neighborhood like?
Saturday
nelly furtado
I really liked the first Nelly Furtado record. The new one, not so much. Okay, not at all.
ANyway, I was interested to read that she recently had a HOMEBIRTH WITH MIDWIVES.
ANyway, I was interested to read that she recently had a HOMEBIRTH WITH MIDWIVES.
ward
I've been thinking an extra lot lately about MY COUSIN WARD lately, as the first anniversary of his death comes in July. He was two years old. His loss has affected every member of our family very profoundly. We've all ben incredibly inspired by my cousin Julie, Ward's mama, who has taught us a lot about grace and courage over the last 12 months. She's such a wonderful person and mother and a great, fun friend to boot. Here's A SLIDESHOW of some favorite photos of Ward that she shared today.
Friday
the baby name zeitgeist
Here's an AMUSING ESSAY by a woman who named her children "Olivia" and "Ava," only to see these two previously out-of-fashion, old names suddenly zoom in popularity.
She ends her piece by saying she should have named her daughter "Jane" ;-)
I only know one other little Jane, daughter of my writer-friend Marion Winik.
I love the name "Violet," but can't ever use it now because of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. I like "Emma" a lot, but every other baby girl I meet these days is named "Emma."
I also like:
Clara
Frances
Genevieve
Anabelle
(No, I am not pregnant!)
She ends her piece by saying she should have named her daughter "Jane" ;-)
I only know one other little Jane, daughter of my writer-friend Marion Winik.
I love the name "Violet," but can't ever use it now because of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. I like "Emma" a lot, but every other baby girl I meet these days is named "Emma."
I also like:
Clara
Frances
Genevieve
Anabelle
(No, I am not pregnant!)
robert & me
new blog
The good folks at THE KNOXVILLE VOICE have launched a NEW ENTERTAINMENT BLOG that looks very...entertaining ;-)
adolescence
Jane is entering 6th grade in the fall (even though she's only 10 - really, she should be older - she will turn 11 the week school starts) and she is definitely starting to ease from childhood into adolescence.
One of the surest signs is her great love of the telephone. And since we are an all-cellular family these days, she has her own, pink cell phone, permanently attached to her body.
She is a lover of the text message. Oh how she loves texting! So I need to show her THIS ARTICLE about one little girl's text messaging injury - stress and strain to the hand and fingers from pressing the buttons too often...
;-)
One of the surest signs is her great love of the telephone. And since we are an all-cellular family these days, she has her own, pink cell phone, permanently attached to her body.
She is a lover of the text message. Oh how she loves texting! So I need to show her THIS ARTICLE about one little girl's text messaging injury - stress and strain to the hand and fingers from pressing the buttons too often...
;-)
more on rhett miller
Well, I did wander down to Market Square after work last night to see part of the free RHETT MILLER show and it was excellent. Nice sized crowd, with everyone singing along to his hits (including me).
But of course, the main thing was how dreamy Rhett Miller is. That man is too beautiful to be real. He looks like Shaun Cassidy for grown-ups.
Swoon.
(And yes, remembering your deep, deep love of all things Rhett Miller, I thought of you, MISS ADRIENNE MARTINI ;-)
But of course, the main thing was how dreamy Rhett Miller is. That man is too beautiful to be real. He looks like Shaun Cassidy for grown-ups.
Swoon.
(And yes, remembering your deep, deep love of all things Rhett Miller, I thought of you, MISS ADRIENNE MARTINI ;-)
Thursday
rhett miller & stewart pack
Tonight is my kid-free night, but it's also the night my show tapes until 8pm. Rhett Miller, whom I like a lot, is playing a free show on Market Square downtown, and afterwards, my friend Stewart is playing a show at Barley's. I would love to go bu SP's show and may, but if I were truly responsible, I would stay in and finish some freelance work I need to get finished. Yeah, I really should stay in and get that stuff finished.
Happily (for me), Henry returns from his week away camping with a friend's family tomorrow. I can't wait to see him. I spoke to him on the phone a little while ago and got very teenagery, non-communicative answers to my specific questions about how the trip has gone. Maybe once I get him fed and he gets a long nap he will be willing to tell me more ;-)
Happily (for me), Henry returns from his week away camping with a friend's family tomorrow. I can't wait to see him. I spoke to him on the phone a little while ago and got very teenagery, non-communicative answers to my specific questions about how the trip has gone. Maybe once I get him fed and he gets a long nap he will be willing to tell me more ;-)
bulimia
I had a really bad eating disorder (bulimia with perods of not eating at all) from about the time I was 17 until I became pregnant with Henry at age 23. So I am always happy to read about people who SUCCESSFULLY RECOVER FROM BULIMIA.
I've really only gotten normal with my eating - eating only when hungry and only until I am satisfied - in the past three years. Before that, I was always either thinking about eating, thinking about how NOT to eat, or thinking about how big my ass was about 80% of the time I was awake. Whether I was up 15 lbs or down 15 lbs, I always felt huge and I was obsessed with food and how to avoid consuming it.
Now I am at a healthy weight and I just rarely think about the whole issue. I am a bit baffled as to how this happened. It just sort of did. I like my body better now, after three pregnancies and at age 38, than I ever did when I was 21, when, in hindsight, it probably looked pretty darn great.
I still have a lot of trouble eating in front of my mother, though. And I feel uncomfortable discussing food and weight with my daughter, because I am so scared I'll say the wrong thing and give her the same kind of problems I have struggled with.
I've really only gotten normal with my eating - eating only when hungry and only until I am satisfied - in the past three years. Before that, I was always either thinking about eating, thinking about how NOT to eat, or thinking about how big my ass was about 80% of the time I was awake. Whether I was up 15 lbs or down 15 lbs, I always felt huge and I was obsessed with food and how to avoid consuming it.
Now I am at a healthy weight and I just rarely think about the whole issue. I am a bit baffled as to how this happened. It just sort of did. I like my body better now, after three pregnancies and at age 38, than I ever did when I was 21, when, in hindsight, it probably looked pretty darn great.
I still have a lot of trouble eating in front of my mother, though. And I feel uncomfortable discussing food and weight with my daughter, because I am so scared I'll say the wrong thing and give her the same kind of problems I have struggled with.
neighbors
We have lived in our house two years now and haven't made any kid friends in the neighborhood. It's an old, inner city neighborhood with sidewalks and lots of kids, but since we don't go to school or church actually IN the neighborhood, we haven't met kids, though we have tried a little. We do know a number of our adult neighbors and very much like the neighborhood in general, but the kid-friend thing has been lacking.
Last week a new family moved in across the street and I was heartened to see bikes and scooters on the front porch. It turns out they are a very nice Catholic-attachment parenting-homeschooling family, with three girls, ages 11, 9 and 17 months.
Tonight I chatted with the very nice parents while their kids and mine, plus my niece and nephew played like crazy in our house, the new neighbors' house and both yards, plus they all zoomed up and down the street on bikes, scooters and skates. They climbed trees and jumped rope and pulled the baby in a wagon up and down the sidewalk.
Then mine fell into an exhausted stupor after the neighbors left.
This is a most excellent development!
Last week a new family moved in across the street and I was heartened to see bikes and scooters on the front porch. It turns out they are a very nice Catholic-attachment parenting-homeschooling family, with three girls, ages 11, 9 and 17 months.
Tonight I chatted with the very nice parents while their kids and mine, plus my niece and nephew played like crazy in our house, the new neighbors' house and both yards, plus they all zoomed up and down the street on bikes, scooters and skates. They climbed trees and jumped rope and pulled the baby in a wagon up and down the sidewalk.
Then mine fell into an exhausted stupor after the neighbors left.
This is a most excellent development!
Wednesday
baby slings
Only a few years ago, baby slings were considered quite unusual. You didn't see that many of them out and about. Now YOU SEE THEM EVERYWHERE.
This is really cool, because I think babywearing is good for babes and parents. I think slings and front/back packs are a particularly great way for dads to bond with their infants.
I used a stroller for Henry, because I had never seen or heard of a sling. H enever liked it too much until he could sit up.
Jane LIVED in her sling and then rode around in the backpack constantly after she was a little older. I had a bad back after E was born, so the sling and packs were harder for me to use, but Chris did.
This is really cool, because I think babywearing is good for babes and parents. I think slings and front/back packs are a particularly great way for dads to bond with their infants.
I used a stroller for Henry, because I had never seen or heard of a sling. H enever liked it too much until he could sit up.
Jane LIVED in her sling and then rode around in the backpack constantly after she was a little older. I had a bad back after E was born, so the sling and packs were harder for me to use, but Chris did.
the...daddle?
So I was surfing the web looking for nea half-chaps for my daughter Jane, when I ran across an equestrian site sellling this BIZARRE ITEM FOR FATHERS.
Weird.
Weird.
jane's job
janebuddy
Originally uploaded by kgranju.
When Jane started riding, about five and half years ago, we were able to draw on some family funds (her father's family) to pay the costs. Hunter-jumper lessons and showing are incredibly, embarrassingly high.
For three years, this was the case, and Jane grew increasingly interested in her chosen sport and got really good at it.
Then family members decided that money would no longer be made available for Jane to ride.
(Don't even get me started)
We scraped by for about a year on money I had tucked away, but increasingly, her trainer, who had become one of my dearest friends, began basically letting Jane ride for free. The debt I owe SPK for what she has done and continues to do for my daughter and for me is really something I can't explain. When I can afford it, I will repay her in some way and I will also fund the riding for some other little girl who has a single mama who cannot pay for it. I will.
But anyway, this year, we began encouraging Jane to trade work at the barn for what amounts to a tiny fraction of what SPK does for her. This makes Jane feel really useful and competent. She loves being part of the "team" at the barn and the college-age girls who are actual paid employees are so, so good to her. They treat her like a little sister.
Three or four mornings a week this summer, I drop her off at 8 am. She has her lunch money and snacks and drinks and she stays busy playing and working.
She has a task list of things she is supposed to accomplish each week for her "job," including training rides on at least two ponies, grooming Hazel the overstuffe Corgi, cleaning a certain number of pieces of tack, dusting tack trunks and brushing ponies.
It's great. I am so proud of her.
Tuesday
what if the kids read it
Yep. I write stuff my kids might read.
I have never and will never publish anything I would never want my children to read.
Women are supposed to keep secrets. Male essayists are "bold" and "courageous" and "brutally honest"
Explaining being an essayist/mother is difficult sometimes. Joyce Maynard has this to say on the subject ON HER MOST EXCELLENT WEBSITE:
----------------------
For Writers: Writing for Health
by Joyce Maynard
I'm at a party and someone asks me what I do for a living. I write, I tell her. What about? she asks. There was a time when I hedged around this question, feeling defensive. But these days, I just say it. I write about myself. Other subjects too, of course. But for a quarter of a century -- since I was eighteen years old -- the subject I have most persistently returned to is my own experience, including some fairly intimate and painful experiences. I have written about the end of my marriage, written about having an abortion, about my father's alcoholism, about embarking on a love affair, and about ending one. The day my mother died I sat down and wrote about that. Call it self-absorption if you will (plenty have). I prefer to say that mine is the only life to which I have been granted total access. Mine is the only story I truly own. Then too, there's that old saw every English teacher delivers to her students, "Write about what you know." So I have.
But there's another reason why I tell my story. And when I think about the issue of health, and what I do to preserve and protect mine, it occurs to me that though I swim regularly and go to a gym, though I eat sensibly and stay away from drugs, there may be nothing I do that more significantly contributes to my sense of well-being than my own work. Telling my story has been, for me, the best way I know to free myself from the heavy burden of secret-keeping and denial.
The experience of writing as I have -- namely, not simply writing about my life, but also making it public -- may be particular to those who do it for a living. But whether or not a person publishes her work, I've come to believe the benefits to be gained are enormous, simply from the act of setting down one's story. (And specifically, doing it on paper. Speaking out loud -- at an AA meeting, or to a therapist, or just on the phone with a friend, is also, doubtless, a highly therapeutic exercise. Just a different one.)
I think it's important to tell your story, even if nobody's listening. But for me, it has been freeing not only to tell it, but to share it too. Probably because I grew up in an alcoholic family, with so many secrets and so much shame, my ability to speak openly not only about my successes in life, but also my struggles and failures, has brought me a kind of freedom and feeling of acceptance I doubt I could have known any other way.
I write my story, I always say, as if I were writing a letter to a friend. Maybe because of that, I've always gotten a lot of letters back from strangers who often ended up as friends. From them I learned that I was far from the only person out there with a less than perfect life, and that my terrible, shameful secrets were no worse than the kinds so many others silently and secretly endured, around me.
For eight years I wrote a newspaper column about my life -- my marriage, my children, my struggles at trying to find a balance between being the kind of parent I wanted to be, and still having some corner of my life for myself. Every Monday morning over the course of those eight years I'd sit down at my computer and think about what story to tell that week. Doing that required not just a reflection over the events of the week just past, but also, on a more visceral level, a re-examination of the feelings associated with those events. Something might have happened -- an exchange with a friend, a disagreement with my husband -- that I had let slip by at the time. But five days later, taking out that episode and re-examining it, I'd discover layers beneath the surface I'd chosen to ignore at the time.
Sometimes when I began to write down these stories, I didn't know myself what they were about. It was the act of laying them out on the page that revealed to me the true nature of the issues involved. And so I'd tell the story of an unwelcome birthday gift from my husband -- an electric can opener -- and , partway through the telling, I'd see that what it was really about was my need to be seen and understood as someone other than a woman who needed to get those cans of tuna fish opened, quick. I'd tell about the grief of one of my sons, at the loss of an inch-long sword belonging to one of his pirate figures, and of my own frantic attempts to find it. And as I spun my yarn (frequently comically), I'd discover that what really made me frantic wasn't the lost sword at all. It was all those other greater losses from which a parent can offer no protection or possibility of rescue. No humor there. And not just our children's losses. Also our own.
Not that I always got to the truth of the matter in my writing about my life, by any means. My stories about marital tussles or the exhausting rigors of caring for three children, six and under, were often written in a humorous style. Even when the feelings I experienced at the time were not ones of amusement but rather, pain. Just because a person writes down a story (in print, or in a journal) doesn't mean she's taking an honest and self-aware look at her life, after all. She may just as well be reinforcing her own brand of denial -- creating the reality on paper that she wishes were hers. She sets up her characters in front of the photographer, fluffs up their hair, holds in her stomach. And waits till the fellow with the camera has gone home to yell at her kids again, put on her corniest country album and get back into her old housecoat. I frequently did that, only the one who recorded the ultimately false images was the same person who appeared in them. Happy Mother of Happy Children, inhabiting a Not-Wholly-Blissful, but ultimately loving marriage. Or so I said.
But there's something about reading a story on paper -- even one you know very well, from having lived it in its original form -- that allows a person to see her own experience in a different way than she did when it was simply unfolding in the pure open space of time Just as it would be different, seeing a photograph of yourself nude, from how it is to catch a glimpse of one's body (or even stare at it for a prolonged period) in the mirror. Writing about your life -- even writing with some level of active denial or self-delusion -- puts a frame around it in ways that simply living that life never can.
These daysit's an increasingly fashionable concept to keep a journal. The word has even become a verb, and a gerund, (as in "I'm staying home tonight to do some journalling" or "That man isn't my type. He doesn't journal..."). The therapeutic effects of all this journalling have been well recognized, and testimony from journal-keepers and letter writers, as to the positive effects of their efforts, are familiar to most of us, probably.
But when people talk about writing their stories, they tend to focus , often, on the writing part: How good it felt to pour all that stuff out. How cleansing. What a release.
All true enough. But I would add, the greatest benefit to me from telling my story has been what followed: reading it. Putting it away, ideally, for a week, or a day, or even just an hour. Then picking it up, as one would pick up a letter from a friend or a total stranger, and reading it again.
I remember something told me once by a friend who has cerebral palsy. Like many people with his particular problem, Tom speaks in a manner that is fairly tortured and difficult to understand, at first. But he never understood what he sounded like, he said, until his sixth birthday, when his mother gave him a tape recorder. And then, hearing himself on tape, he wept.
As for me, I read my own stories about my life, and concluded that my marriage was over. It could truly be said, for me, I read about it in the paper first. And then I realized it was true. And while my discovery -- like Tom's -- was a deeply sad one, and one that brought about terrible, wrenching pain, I can't acknowledge that without adding that like a lot of painful events, it also made possible the series of life-changes that allowed for a healthier and happier life . As well as much better writing.
Of course, writing with total honesty about one's life raises its own set of problems. It's one thing to tell a story on your own self. It's something else to tell one that involves other characters who might not shareyour enthusiasm for openness and self-disclosure. For me, an important part of my own retrieval-of-self, following the end of my marriage, seemed to require a more honest telling of the story of my marriage. But what would have been healthy for me, in the way of unburdening, was not necessarily the same as what would have been best for my children, or their father. So there are stories I don't tell. I'd rather bypass them altogether than tell them partway. And of course, there's always fiction, as a place where a writer can make use of her own life experience, and still protect people she loves or cares about.
I have to conclude that nobody benefits from deception or prevarication. (And that includes our children. Who may not need to hear all the truth of our lives. But who surely do not benefit from lies.) Hard as it may be, to face up to the truth about one's story, to do anything otherwise only allows us to build the structures of our lives on faulty foundations. I think of a man I know, adoptive father of a thirty year old son who has never been told that he's adopted. (I know it. Now you know it. But the young man himself does not. ) And though his father is a loving and totally decent man, who has kept this information from his son out of the most loving of impulses, I have to believe that --founded as it is on a fundamental innacuracy concerning something as centrally important as the circumstances of his birth--this young man's whole life has been somehow thrown out of balance by his parents' secret-keeping.
Now we have an actual, legislated government policy in place -- the one concerning homosexuals in the military -- based on the dysfunctional approach "don't ask, don't tell." Our own government tells gays, "keep in the closet". So why should we express shock and dismay, to learn that our elected officials lie to us, as well?
As for me, I've chosen to follow a simple course: Come clean. And wherever possible, live your life in a way that won't leave you tempted to lie. Failing that, I'd rather be disliked for who I truly am than loved for who I'm not. So I tell my story. I write it down. I even publish it. Sometimes this is a humbling experience. Sometimes it's embarrassing. But I haul around no terrible secrets.
I have always believed there's a connection between my writing and my sleeping. And the fact is, I sleep well every night. Like a baby -- only better than any baby of mine ever slept.
Mine may not be the sleep of the innocent either. But it is, at least, the sleep of the free. My brain is largely emptied of worries. My hard disk is full of them.
Try it.
------------COPYRIGHT JOYCE MAYNARD
(And Ms. Maynard, if you by some chance see that I've posted this amazing essay in its entirety on my blog and want me to take it down, just let me know and I will, immediately...Thanks - KAG)
I have never and will never publish anything I would never want my children to read.
Women are supposed to keep secrets. Male essayists are "bold" and "courageous" and "brutally honest"
Explaining being an essayist/mother is difficult sometimes. Joyce Maynard has this to say on the subject ON HER MOST EXCELLENT WEBSITE:
----------------------
For Writers: Writing for Health
by Joyce Maynard
I'm at a party and someone asks me what I do for a living. I write, I tell her. What about? she asks. There was a time when I hedged around this question, feeling defensive. But these days, I just say it. I write about myself. Other subjects too, of course. But for a quarter of a century -- since I was eighteen years old -- the subject I have most persistently returned to is my own experience, including some fairly intimate and painful experiences. I have written about the end of my marriage, written about having an abortion, about my father's alcoholism, about embarking on a love affair, and about ending one. The day my mother died I sat down and wrote about that. Call it self-absorption if you will (plenty have). I prefer to say that mine is the only life to which I have been granted total access. Mine is the only story I truly own. Then too, there's that old saw every English teacher delivers to her students, "Write about what you know." So I have.
But there's another reason why I tell my story. And when I think about the issue of health, and what I do to preserve and protect mine, it occurs to me that though I swim regularly and go to a gym, though I eat sensibly and stay away from drugs, there may be nothing I do that more significantly contributes to my sense of well-being than my own work. Telling my story has been, for me, the best way I know to free myself from the heavy burden of secret-keeping and denial.
The experience of writing as I have -- namely, not simply writing about my life, but also making it public -- may be particular to those who do it for a living. But whether or not a person publishes her work, I've come to believe the benefits to be gained are enormous, simply from the act of setting down one's story. (And specifically, doing it on paper. Speaking out loud -- at an AA meeting, or to a therapist, or just on the phone with a friend, is also, doubtless, a highly therapeutic exercise. Just a different one.)
I think it's important to tell your story, even if nobody's listening. But for me, it has been freeing not only to tell it, but to share it too. Probably because I grew up in an alcoholic family, with so many secrets and so much shame, my ability to speak openly not only about my successes in life, but also my struggles and failures, has brought me a kind of freedom and feeling of acceptance I doubt I could have known any other way.
I write my story, I always say, as if I were writing a letter to a friend. Maybe because of that, I've always gotten a lot of letters back from strangers who often ended up as friends. From them I learned that I was far from the only person out there with a less than perfect life, and that my terrible, shameful secrets were no worse than the kinds so many others silently and secretly endured, around me.
For eight years I wrote a newspaper column about my life -- my marriage, my children, my struggles at trying to find a balance between being the kind of parent I wanted to be, and still having some corner of my life for myself. Every Monday morning over the course of those eight years I'd sit down at my computer and think about what story to tell that week. Doing that required not just a reflection over the events of the week just past, but also, on a more visceral level, a re-examination of the feelings associated with those events. Something might have happened -- an exchange with a friend, a disagreement with my husband -- that I had let slip by at the time. But five days later, taking out that episode and re-examining it, I'd discover layers beneath the surface I'd chosen to ignore at the time.
Sometimes when I began to write down these stories, I didn't know myself what they were about. It was the act of laying them out on the page that revealed to me the true nature of the issues involved. And so I'd tell the story of an unwelcome birthday gift from my husband -- an electric can opener -- and , partway through the telling, I'd see that what it was really about was my need to be seen and understood as someone other than a woman who needed to get those cans of tuna fish opened, quick. I'd tell about the grief of one of my sons, at the loss of an inch-long sword belonging to one of his pirate figures, and of my own frantic attempts to find it. And as I spun my yarn (frequently comically), I'd discover that what really made me frantic wasn't the lost sword at all. It was all those other greater losses from which a parent can offer no protection or possibility of rescue. No humor there. And not just our children's losses. Also our own.
Not that I always got to the truth of the matter in my writing about my life, by any means. My stories about marital tussles or the exhausting rigors of caring for three children, six and under, were often written in a humorous style. Even when the feelings I experienced at the time were not ones of amusement but rather, pain. Just because a person writes down a story (in print, or in a journal) doesn't mean she's taking an honest and self-aware look at her life, after all. She may just as well be reinforcing her own brand of denial -- creating the reality on paper that she wishes were hers. She sets up her characters in front of the photographer, fluffs up their hair, holds in her stomach. And waits till the fellow with the camera has gone home to yell at her kids again, put on her corniest country album and get back into her old housecoat. I frequently did that, only the one who recorded the ultimately false images was the same person who appeared in them. Happy Mother of Happy Children, inhabiting a Not-Wholly-Blissful, but ultimately loving marriage. Or so I said.
But there's something about reading a story on paper -- even one you know very well, from having lived it in its original form -- that allows a person to see her own experience in a different way than she did when it was simply unfolding in the pure open space of time Just as it would be different, seeing a photograph of yourself nude, from how it is to catch a glimpse of one's body (or even stare at it for a prolonged period) in the mirror. Writing about your life -- even writing with some level of active denial or self-delusion -- puts a frame around it in ways that simply living that life never can.
These daysit's an increasingly fashionable concept to keep a journal. The word has even become a verb, and a gerund, (as in "I'm staying home tonight to do some journalling" or "That man isn't my type. He doesn't journal..."). The therapeutic effects of all this journalling have been well recognized, and testimony from journal-keepers and letter writers, as to the positive effects of their efforts, are familiar to most of us, probably.
But when people talk about writing their stories, they tend to focus , often, on the writing part: How good it felt to pour all that stuff out. How cleansing. What a release.
All true enough. But I would add, the greatest benefit to me from telling my story has been what followed: reading it. Putting it away, ideally, for a week, or a day, or even just an hour. Then picking it up, as one would pick up a letter from a friend or a total stranger, and reading it again.
I remember something told me once by a friend who has cerebral palsy. Like many people with his particular problem, Tom speaks in a manner that is fairly tortured and difficult to understand, at first. But he never understood what he sounded like, he said, until his sixth birthday, when his mother gave him a tape recorder. And then, hearing himself on tape, he wept.
As for me, I read my own stories about my life, and concluded that my marriage was over. It could truly be said, for me, I read about it in the paper first. And then I realized it was true. And while my discovery -- like Tom's -- was a deeply sad one, and one that brought about terrible, wrenching pain, I can't acknowledge that without adding that like a lot of painful events, it also made possible the series of life-changes that allowed for a healthier and happier life . As well as much better writing.
Of course, writing with total honesty about one's life raises its own set of problems. It's one thing to tell a story on your own self. It's something else to tell one that involves other characters who might not shareyour enthusiasm for openness and self-disclosure. For me, an important part of my own retrieval-of-self, following the end of my marriage, seemed to require a more honest telling of the story of my marriage. But what would have been healthy for me, in the way of unburdening, was not necessarily the same as what would have been best for my children, or their father. So there are stories I don't tell. I'd rather bypass them altogether than tell them partway. And of course, there's always fiction, as a place where a writer can make use of her own life experience, and still protect people she loves or cares about.
I have to conclude that nobody benefits from deception or prevarication. (And that includes our children. Who may not need to hear all the truth of our lives. But who surely do not benefit from lies.) Hard as it may be, to face up to the truth about one's story, to do anything otherwise only allows us to build the structures of our lives on faulty foundations. I think of a man I know, adoptive father of a thirty year old son who has never been told that he's adopted. (I know it. Now you know it. But the young man himself does not. ) And though his father is a loving and totally decent man, who has kept this information from his son out of the most loving of impulses, I have to believe that --founded as it is on a fundamental innacuracy concerning something as centrally important as the circumstances of his birth--this young man's whole life has been somehow thrown out of balance by his parents' secret-keeping.
Now we have an actual, legislated government policy in place -- the one concerning homosexuals in the military -- based on the dysfunctional approach "don't ask, don't tell." Our own government tells gays, "keep in the closet". So why should we express shock and dismay, to learn that our elected officials lie to us, as well?
As for me, I've chosen to follow a simple course: Come clean. And wherever possible, live your life in a way that won't leave you tempted to lie. Failing that, I'd rather be disliked for who I truly am than loved for who I'm not. So I tell my story. I write it down. I even publish it. Sometimes this is a humbling experience. Sometimes it's embarrassing. But I haul around no terrible secrets.
I have always believed there's a connection between my writing and my sleeping. And the fact is, I sleep well every night. Like a baby -- only better than any baby of mine ever slept.
Mine may not be the sleep of the innocent either. But it is, at least, the sleep of the free. My brain is largely emptied of worries. My hard disk is full of them.
Try it.
------------COPYRIGHT JOYCE MAYNARD
(And Ms. Maynard, if you by some chance see that I've posted this amazing essay in its entirety on my blog and want me to take it down, just let me know and I will, immediately...Thanks - KAG)
god bless reese witherspoon and her perfectly normal body
Check out the THESE AWESOME PHOTOS of Reese Witherspoon in a bikini, playing on the beach with her kids.
She looks great, but not airbrush/pilates/plastic surgery "great."
She looks real.
She looks great, but not airbrush/pilates/plastic surgery "great."
She looks real.
ben folds is nice
Did I mention how really, really nice Ben Folds was when I met him last Friday and asked him to sign something for Jane? i WAS A FAN BEFORE BUT AM NOW A DEVOTEE. wHAT A GREAT FELLA.
(whoops. caplock)
Elliot, who is 8, came home last night after TWO WHOLE WEEKS away with the grandparents and his father. That is by far the longest I have ever been away from my baby. Jane and Henry have been gone 3-4 weeks at a time to France and to camp, but Elliot hasn't seemed old enough to do those things because he is my baby boy.
He came back taller and brown as a berry, with his fuzzy, dirty blonde hair somewhat blonder from the beach. His blue eyes are much more startling when he's tan.
He fell asleep with his head in my lap last night as we read about aborigines. I sat like that for a long time after he was sound asleep because I just wanted to feel the weight of his head on my leg and look at his limbs.
(whoops. caplock)
Elliot, who is 8, came home last night after TWO WHOLE WEEKS away with the grandparents and his father. That is by far the longest I have ever been away from my baby. Jane and Henry have been gone 3-4 weeks at a time to France and to camp, but Elliot hasn't seemed old enough to do those things because he is my baby boy.
He came back taller and brown as a berry, with his fuzzy, dirty blonde hair somewhat blonder from the beach. His blue eyes are much more startling when he's tan.
He fell asleep with his head in my lap last night as we read about aborigines. I sat like that for a long time after he was sound asleep because I just wanted to feel the weight of his head on my leg and look at his limbs.
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