"Forgetting How Easily Children Soil Clothes"

This beautiful, totally unedited fresh writing came from a student this week, Priscilla Matthews, in response to a prompt where they selected a single line of poetry from various poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. Priscilla had no idea this was what she was going to write - as is true to the practice, she simply put pen to paper, and this homage emerged.

There's not much I want to say about it, except to point out the incredible ordinary-ness of it: clothing, stains, children, laundry. And so powerful - all the details, and the way she connects it back to her mother and herself. Direct. Clear. Universal. Specific.

I will also point out that Priscilla stated some things I can relate to, having also lost my parents when I was young. I relate in particular to these lines: "If she had lived, she may have died by now," and, "Does this mean I'm finally in sync with my peers?"

Please enjoy this poignant grief and pleasure mixture.

forgetting how easily children soil clothesI just remembered that today would have been my Mom’s birthday.  She would have been 87 years old.  If she had lived, she may have died by now.  Having a parent pass at my age now is “normal.” It’s part of the process many people my age are going through.  Does this mean I’m finally in sync with my peers?  No.  I don’t understand their expressions of grief.  But I am more compassionate and patient with them than I was with myself.“forgetting how easily children soil clothes”My mom had 8 children within 9 years.  The other day I imagined how joyful it must have been for her with one child…the time she had to dress her, play in the grass, share her growth with my Dad.  And then my brother was born, and the work grew, the balancing act.  And then another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another.

Recycling Grief

"If that younger self inside you is the only one who responds to grief, then you end up doing what I call "recycling grief," because that younger self doesn't have the capacity to handle it." 

-Francis Weller, interview in October 2015 issue of The Sun

I don't have much to say about this yet. I am still mapping it all out, and figuring out what will resist mapping. But something is shifting in me, deep inside. After I read these lines by Weller, I realized another piece of it - the grief my inner child self has carried for so long - ostensibly for my mother and father, who died when I was so young - is slowly transferring to my adult self. 

It is a delicate procedure, a handling of an egg without a shell. Slick and delicate membrane of feeling and all that I couldn't feel when I was younger. Raw sadness without labels or names. Yesterday, on a walk through the Wingra creek portion of he Arboretum, I felt the lowlands marshy-ness, the high oak hill. I knew all of this is natural, suddenly, with full feeling. A relief. I can have this grief in the world, for the world - not just about my loss, but about all loss.

It's hard to describe, but ascribing my specific sadnesses to the larger current moment helps me both feel more specifically and directly, and also with fewer labels. I can just feel. And that feels amazing.

No more recycling grief. Feeling a fresh sadness now, so what comes from before can move through and on. I don't expect less sadness in the future because of this. But perhaps clearer sadness, less muddled by story and yet with better insight into past and present.

The Right To Exist

Enter/ing, LA/Mar Vista, January 2013

I know.

You wouldn't think I struggle with that, now, would ya?
Look: I do important work.
I Believe in What I Do.
People love me.
I am happily married.
I have a great home, great cats, a wonderful life.

And yet.
And yet.
What?

 I am working on one of my memoirs (that's how much I am not sure I have a right to exist - I am writing two memoirs at once at age 35 - I jest, but there's a grain of truth there), and I keep running into my dad. Smack dab into my dad. No matter what I write about him, people say the same thing over and over again:
"Ok. You loved him. I get it. But why?"

An editor. A critique group. Friends. It's a valid point, one I have addressed before even here. But this time around, it comes when I am trying to pile through my control and anger issues, of which I have plethora. As most people do.

And he's right there, right in the center.

Listen. My dad had a hard life. He was adopted, had a single mom with a disabled sister living at home with them, for whom my dad had to rush home from school and care for. He married my mom, a woman who was not always able to function at top notch, didn't get paid enough, and had three kids. He had two heart attacks, got Diabetes and then cancer in his 50's, then died.

Whew. I know, right?

Today, in therapy, we discussed a memory that keeps reeling back into the scene, one that seems to be blocking any specific details of positive memories of me and him. In short (you want the long one? Read the memoir when it comes out!):
We are eating cheese and crackers late at night.
We are discussing why I have missed so much school lately (nervous kid, sick a lot, wanted to be home with him, though I said none of this then).
He tells me I need to go to school more.
He tells me not to be a nervous person.
He says "You are not a nervous person. I need you to not be a nervous person."

My hips and heart and throat get tense just typing that, though it is an ingrained, old and long-processed memory.

What one critiquer said about my memoir is that it is clear I was not allowed to have feelings as a kid.
Yup.
In therapy, we went even deeper:
I wasn't allowed to have feelings.
It wasn't good to have feelings.
And if I couldn't have feelings, I could exist, but only without them.
So if I had them, I have no right to exist.

That's what my child mind heard when my father said that. And it fit with a lot of other messages from him. He was trying his best to keep a sinking ship afloat. He encouraged all three of us kids to be independent, forthright, political, funny. He also disencouraged our emotions.

Like a lot of deeply held (secret, even) beliefs, this one has blocked my other memories because it seems incongruous that my father could both love me and also somehow tell me that I don't have a right to exist. Well, shit. Talk about a mixed message: one I am sure he got when he was a kid (adopted, early divorce, always caring for others) and I am sure he intended to give to us so we could survive. In other words, he meant well.

Today, I could really feel that for the first time ever: the power of this awful idea that I don't have the right to exist, and the deep need I have had for 35 years to justify my existence: through work (yes, sometimes even the amazing work I do, which, don't worry, I won't stop doing but perhaps I'll be happier doing now!). Throughout my relationships. In everyday speech. All the time.

I know I am not alone in this.

Deep down, inside the core, I believe - some part of me believes - I don't have the right to exist. I know I do - meditation, Basic Goodness, you know, lots of good teachings. Not small stuff. But belief takes more work to re-wire.

I don't need reassurance. But I do need to root out that belief and give it a good airing out. Join me, would you? It's time to take the skeletons out and set generations of not believing we have the right to exist free.

a few sounds take me there

a poem came to me while doing yoga this morning...

a few sounds take me there

chickadee dee dee turns into

the twits of

bats on a cool fall evening -

the impermanence

of sonar.

i cannot sleep

up like the cicadas

long after midnight

long into when the day

has finally cooled

off enough to rest

so i rest.

all my tiny children inside

curled up under the creaking tree

of me now

adult

awake into the wee

hours.

i only know i have slept

because at some point i wake

and think:

those were only dreams, sweetie,

nightmares.

that place never existed -

where he touched me -

that time is outside time.

but then i realize before i went to sleep

i was awake

very awake

and knew full well

what was happening--

the crickets

my witnesses.

Never-Ceasing

(photo from a strip mall in Dallas)

It never ceases to amaze me.
Week after week, after month, after year - seven of them now, from when I started part part time to full time and then some.

I write these prompts, and the students respond. And inevitably, most of the students will say:
"I can't believe you knew I needed to write about this."
or
"I wasn't even thinking about this, where did it come from?"
or
"Why are you making me write about this?"

The thing is, the prompts are vague/open enough that they can be interpreted lots of different ways. One student last week was sure I was demanding that she/they write about writing their own memoirs - it's the part of the prompt she could not ignore, that would not go away from her. Ditto for others that they had to talk about parts of their lives that haven't happened yet, or their favorite childhood book, or what they are reading - or not reading - right now.

Our inner impetuses, impulses, are so powerful, they take on the face of the current circumstance and recommend or reinforce what we need to hear or don't want to hear or both.
Or neither - what we don't need and don't want but won't go away.

Here is the prompt from this last week, with a follow-up list with questions that came out of students' answers. These ideas are a whole other 5 or 6 prompts in themselves.

Enjoy. See what arises for you. See if you can "blame" it on me. I'll take the blame, no problem.
So long as I get to read the results.

Miriam

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The original prompt

Writing and Reading

Imagine a book in front of you.

Flip through the pages, hear the sound of paper, and notice if it has a scent.

Look at the front cover, Index, Table of Contents, spine.

What is the title?

Is this book fictional or non-fictional?

A kid’s book or an adult book?

Maybe it doesn’t exist yet – it’s the book you are writing or have always wanted to read.

Perhaps you read it when you were young and no longer recall the title –

but you can remember how your heart felt when you finished it.

Take yourself to the place(s) that reading takes you, and write from there.

If you don’t enjoy reading, go into that resistance.

Feel yourself come full circle as you write, using words, to describe reading words.

I’ll let you know when your twenty minutes are up.

-Miriam Hall

If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. ~Oscar Wilde

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
~Benjamin Franklin

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The questions that arose out of student answers - either they gave me these questions or I derived them from their answers...

Were you read to as a child?

Were there books in your home?

Could you buy any book you wanted?

Were you dis/encouraged to read?

Were you ashamed to read?

Were books your only friends?

Did you leave books behind for boys?

Did High School, College, family life kill your love of the written and read word?

Are you still close to books?

Do you know/can you imagine what the "book of you" would look like? Written in code, plain English or Spanish, Russian?

Are you an open or closed book?

What is covered or uncovered in you?

Where does your mind go when its pages are let loose?

Does reading amazing books please you or make you angry or jealous that someone else wrote it first?

If you are writing a book, do you know what the cover would/will be?

Is a Kindle, Nook, or digital reader the same as a book?

Do you read to read?

Do you want to be read?

Do you write to have something to read or to share?

Or are reading/writing separate for you - one an affair that discounts the other?

Or in an entirely different family altogether?

Big Exit

I'm back into order. The office, the kitchen, are fully functional. The structure of the school year has saved me from myself. And falling back into the forms, freedom comes. The freedom to consider what structures haven't worked before, why, how to re-form them, what to reject and what to accept.

Family. Family order and inheritance is in my head a lot lately. A very good friend is going through a mid-twenties reckoning, figuring out what her raising has done, how it has shaped her, affected her. What to accept, what to reject. Right now there seems a lot to reject: parents' manners, opinions, structures. Yet she can still feel the love, compassion, underneath. Is it an undertow or an inner connection? Karma or Samsara? I know this battle well. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater - that baby, floating in your family heritage, emotional, political, psychological - is YOU.

Or, here, Me. I dreamt last night that my family was seated like a council around a large table. They were plotting and planning, in deep undertones, like a warren of gangsters accustomed to the action, to murder and torture folks. Even in my dream mind, I could see that the content came from watching so much Angel lately with Dylan, but the intention came from a long conversation just after TV with the aforementioned friend. Violence - intentional or unintentional, psychological, sexual, emotional - haunts us, from the inside out. I felt this strange allegiance to the family - I couldn't just walk out, and not because they'd kill me - and yet, I knew I opposed what they were plotting.

I woke disoriented, concerned about the content, the plot of the dream. Ugh. Why so violent? Less Angel, more Barney, I guess. Then it hit me, steel beam on the head: duh, of course, I was combining our conversation with the data from Angel. How do you stay in your family and yet make your Big Exit, become who you "really" are, and, for that matter, as the friend and I were discussing, how do you actually HEAL your family's karma, wipe some of the slate free, make sure the Samsara buck stops as much as it can at YOU?

How intertwined we are. In order to see interdependence, just look at your family, so many teachers say. You want practice? Call your mother. ("Say hi to your mother for me, Miriam!" a friend said yesterday after we hung out. "Oops," he quickly stated, sheepish grin. "That's ok. Even I forget sometimes that she's dead.") Think about your childhood. Go "home" - to where you were raised, to your adolescence, and you'll have plenty of fodder.

Fodder. Crap and Compost. Fetid rich rot. Ready to fall Apart. Perfect ground for Growth. Exit yes, but you'll have to come back, compelled to do so, with or without resistance. And there you cannot help but heal, yourself and your family. May as well make the best of these return visits.