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Dearest Reader. Reading this constitutes your consent to the following point:
I, Kelly Diels, plan to poach and scramble our every conversation and interaction
into yummy blog posts and other delicious content.
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Just kidding.
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(Sorta. That disclaimer basically describes life with a writer. Just ask my loverloverman.)
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…and now back to our irregularly unscheduled newsletter/loveletter/blog post…
So. I don’t put everything in my every blog post or story or article or Facebook update.
But my life and my art are intertwined. Explicitly. In all senses of that word.
I think it was Anais Nin who said “My life is my art” (if not, let’s pretend it was as that would be wildly appropriate since our girl Anais never let the truth get in the way of a good story, just ask her two husbands…whom she was married to AT THE SAME TIME) and that’s a much truer thing for me to say than my art is my life.
(I’ve been reading a lot of Victorian fiction. Can you tell? The tell is the overstuffed, overpunctuated sentence. It’s a delicious reprieve from online brevity.)
(Although with that particular sentence, I’m ape-ing Stephen Elliott’s comma splices too, despite the fact that when I first started reading him, they made me prissy. I’d see a series of his phrases hinged together with commas – all technically incorrect because they ran-on beyond a complete sentence – and sniff into my imaginary lace handkerchief thinking this: well that’s not correct.
And it’s not grammatically correct. But in his contexts and his voice it’s right.)
Because my life is my masterpiece. I just write about it.
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And teach you how to write about it.
And then write about teaching it.
And then slip into an alternate dimension.
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Let’s wander back to my point. I left the lead-up to it two sections and seven paragraphs back. But I’m going to pick it up in the next one.
(“It” being the aforementioned foreplay. We’ll climax a lil’ later.)
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Writing realistic telling and compelling dialogue can be enormously difficult. No matter how many multitudes you contain, it can be hard to speak in the voices of several characters.
I can, however, teach you two ways to generate authentic, excellent dialogue.
1. Do like Chuck Pahalaniuk -
Chuck Pahalaniuk is known for his memorable dialogue. Think,
“First rule of fight club, there is no fight club”
and
“You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake”
and
“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”
- and define a limited vocabulary for each character. A narrow range of words. A verbal tic. Short sentences. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Think about it: everyone you know has a favourite word or phrase or schtick that we use over and over again like a chorus. Or shampoo. Or a recipe. And most of us cook the same three or four recipes using the same three or four ingredients. I didn’t make that up. That’s research, baby.
And that’s why most blog posts generally feel conversational: because they’re composed of short sentences and short paragraphs. It’s both intentional – bloggers are usually explicitly attempting to build a community and so speak naturally, conversationally, communally – and an organic feature of digital offerings flowing from the limitations of the medium: it’s hard to read blocks of texts – ie long sentences and paragraphs – online.
(But don’t let that stop you.)
(There’s always a place for The Great Wall of Text – especially when you’re trying to build to an emotional climax, because a long sentence or paragraph can feel like a stream of consciousness rant, similar to the kind of thing that flows from your mouth during an impassioned argument or tearful, uninterrupted confession.)
So that’s a way to guide good dialogue: define a limited, different vocabulary for each character and use short sentences. The conversations of your characters will instantly feel more real.
Or – and here’s what I do a lot of the time -
2. Just use real dialogue. Eavesdrop on conversations with strangers so you can drop that dialogues into your stories. Write down your own wrenching interactions for your novel or memoir (caution: this can be risky for the retention-rate of your relationships). Copy and paste your IM or Twitter conversations into blog posts. (But yo, tell the other person you’re doing it!)
And so when students of Artful, Heart-full Blogging ask me how to write authentic, easy-feeling dialogue, that’s what I often suggest/advise/insist/command.
To write great dialogue, steal from your life. And the lips of everyone around you.
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And those two practical, tangible how-to’s bring us a touch closer to my more existential point.
Good artists copy. Great artists steal. – Pablo Picasso
That wasn’t it. We’re still caressing and corresponding. Onward.
But Picasso presumably knows of what he speaks, yes? He’s kind of a big deal, art-wise.
Because, as Picasso so crassly, concisely explained, this is what artists do. They sculpt, paint, dance, and write their lives, their experiences, their thoughts, their worlds, so that we can see the world through their eyes, see it differently, see…
…because when what we see changes, everything changes.
And so, to show us their inner lives, artists steal from their outer lives: a gesture, a line, the line of your back.
Which, Dear Reader (dear writer!), can prickly and problematic for the people in your life. When you’re telling your story, you’re often telling theirs, too. And maybe they didn’t sign up for that.
And maybe sometimes that doesn’t matter.
Maybe when you’re telling the truth you don’t protect the liars. Even when you love them.
And maybe sometimes it does.
This dilemma makes it essential for you to make up your own writing religion and define the artistic commandments by which you will abide and at the core your doctrine will be this question:
Which relationships in my life will I protect?
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(Hello, point! We finally come together!)
(I may need a cigarette. Or a cuddle.)
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And that’s exactly what memoirist Jillian Lauren – whose parents disowned her after the publication of her autobiography – realized, and lives by:
There are certain relationships that I’m unwilling to lose in the world, that would trump me publishing something, and have. I have written a few things that he’s been very uncomfortable with, and so they haven’t made it out of the house. But generally, he [Lauren's husband] is very comfortable being written about. He knows that aspects of our life are going to be all over things I release, and he’s perfectly fine with that. He’s believes in me, and he accepts it. He knew this about me when he married me. I didn’t marry somebody who wasn’t okay with it. So yeah, there are a couple of relationships I’m not willing to lose.
And that’s it.
That’s the point of my cracked-up introduction/disclaimer + two-point dialogue tutorial + my life, really.
Thus far, writing has been the most enduring and compelling relationships I’ve ever had but I refuse to be entirely faithful to it. My first loyalty is to my loverloverman, whom I do write about…and, when I do, he sees it before anyone else does. If anyone else does.
Because I want to be like Ayelet Waldman and Matt Damon.
Ayelet Waldman has publicly braved slings and arrows of outraged parents by declaring that she loves her husband more than her children. Of course it’s a false dilemma; “more” or one over the other isn’t the point; the point is that we raise our children to leave us – that’s our job – but your lover is your lover for life, so love your lover first. And always. Forsaking all others (for the sake of your children who’ll then blossom in the light of the love of their parents).
Similarly, in this month’s Vanity Fair, when Matt Damon was asked, What’s your greatest accomplishment?, he answered,
My marriage, so far.
And that’s what I aspire to. My life is my art. My love will be my greatest accomplishment.
(That and my thus-far imaginary, unwritten, best-selling book.)
(It’s coming. I hired childcare and everything. ‘Cuz I need more time than “nap time” for writing my magnum opus.)
(PS I love you, baby.)
Dori worked in the deli at Safeway on Davie near Denman. She was forty something and made half her age in wages per hour. (It was the early nineties. There was a healthy collective agreement.) Dori had dark brown hair dyed a fire-lit red and a heart to match the heat of that hue. She was the oldest woman in the deli and she mothered us but never really felt older than us. She giggled. She hugged hard. She worked hard or at least harder than us. Her bean salad was divine. She had a Polish accent because she was from Poland (this is how it works, usually) and she’d come to Canada eighteen or nineteen years ago. She had a husband she’d had for fifteen years and kids she’d had for eighteen and thirteen years, respectively.
There’s a story in those numbers, of course.
Dori laughed and smiled except when she talked about her husband, who didn’t much delight her. I got the impression that he was overbearing, patriarchal, bossy, old-world; but I’m mostly surmising because she never said a lot about him. She was a talker, so there’s a story in that, too.
Dori talked a lot about her children, and when she did, she did the proud-mama-keep-on-glowing thing. I was nineteen. I’d never been friends with a mother of teenagers. I’d never seen anything like her indulgent maternal joy and I wondered if all mothers were like this. (They’re not.) I wondered if my mother talked about me like this but I doubted it. With good reason. For example, I also doubted that Dori’s daughter came home from university at Christmas and told her mother “You’re just mad at me because I’m smarter than you and you know it.” I didn’t know much about mothering – or even about my own mother, really – but I knew it had to be hard to wax proudly poetic about that kind of kid. And I was that kind of kid.
But Dori treated me like an adult. Like a woman. Like a peer. And so she was peerless in my eyes.
I’d do things – like really, truly execute every single closing duty at the deli if I knew she was opening the next morning – for her that I wouldn’t do for anyone else. And she did something for everyone else, too. She told the truth.
Like the time our deli manager, Laura, came to work wearing tinted glasses. Not sunglasses, exactly, but not exactly not sunglasses, either. And it was December. And she had two black eyes. And she was avoiding eye contact. I immediately assumed her boyfriend was an asshole and was wildly concerned which made her wildly uncomfortable. She calmed my fierce imaginings with the real story: a tumble off her bike – right over the handle bars, actually – on the sea wall. Freakin’ rollerblader came out of nowhere.
I believed her. Hell, last week I’d almost been her. Those rollerbladers really were out of control. And so it was good story. I told Dori the story later and that’s when I learned it was only a story.
Dori laughed ’til tears streamed down her face. “She didn’t have an accident. She had her eyes done!”
And so she had. And everyone knew except me, which made me wonder why I needed to be lied to – I was wounded, truth be told – and why women lie about cosmetic surgery. If I ever have anything done, I would (will!) laminate and carry and flash the receipt with proud abandon.
So I could trust Dori to tell the truth. About other people’s eyelifts and the secret of her spinach dip (it’s really good) and her marriage (not so good, and who ever admits that outside their circle of intimates?) and about her children.
Her thirteen year old son played soccer and was a joy. A joy. He made her laugh. He was affectionate and a mama’s boy and comical despite his precocious rigidity. He liked things a certain way. He was his father’s son. But, unlike his father, she talked about her son endlessly and was endlessly emotional about him. She loved him.
And then there was her daughter. If she glowed about her son, when she talked – or thought – about her daughter, her radiance was nearly nuclear. It was a daily day-glow love. She called her daughter her ‘love child’.
Because she really was. Dori’s daughter was not her husband’s child. In Poland, as a young woman, Dori had an affair with an older, Catholic, married man. And it was love. It was really, really love. And it couldn’t be. What came to be was that she became pregnant, left Poland, came to Canada and gave birth to her lovely little girl made from love.
Nearly two decades later, she softened when she told the story. She still loved that older, Catholic, married businessman. He visited yearly and every year her daughter went to Poland – presumably discreetly – to visit him. And even though he never left his wife, never made a life with Dori, left her to raise a child on her own, it had been love. It seemed like it was love, still. She talked about that man. She rarely talked about her husband.
Then, that was hard for me to grasp: I was a very young woman with polar, magnetic ideas about love and life. Like, if it was love then you made a life together. If you had a life together, you didn’t make love to – or love – someone else. So, if Dori’s lover was married, then he didn’t – couldn’t – really love her. It wasn’t really love. That’s what my dichotomized romantic morals and total lack of life experience told me. And that’s why I was stunned at the way she freely – proudly, romantically – “admitted” her transgression (the affair with a married man) and her mistake (the unwed pregnancy).
That was my reality. That’s probably most of the world’s reality. But it wasn’t Dori’s. She walked in the memory of her one true love. She looked at the living incarnation of that love, every day. Her daughter was her love child.
I wish everyone was a love child.
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Our love child is Theo. He’s two weeks old, today.
go tell your lover that s/he’s your fucking hero
right now. You won’t regret it.
No man wants to be sand.
I looked at him and I saw him. I saw us. Clearly. Then I sighed and said, “I’ve been building my castle on sand.”
And even though he didn’t want to be my rock – twelve years after that life and love ended, he’d call and tell me that he had loved me but hadn’t been ready for me – he was wounded. Offended. Because no man wants to be sand. Sand is shifty. Sand is uncertain. Sand isn’t manly.
Then, this long, sandy summer, I was uncertain – not about loving each other, but about the ‘forever’ bit – about a different man. Ambivalent.
Ambivalence, I’m comfortable with. I’m drawn to emotional tension and mixed emotions. It’s why I studied pluralism, feminism, intersectional politics. It’s why I decorate in black and white. It’s why I like sweet ‘n spicy dishes. It’s why I like cocky but funny men; vulnerable, powerful women; and disconcertingly sentimental gangsta rap. It’s why I like dirty, fraught, flawed love letters (and lovers). Cleavage isn’t only creamy curves, it’s the dark shadow between them. It’s the lines that shape us. It’s why I quote William Butler Yeats over and over again:
It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.
Ambivalence – mixed emotions – is like change. Inevitable. A fact of life.
And fertile ground for growth, imagination, art.
Ambivalence: I accept it. I embrace it. I see it. I seek it.
But uncertainty…
I seek security so I can take risks. So uncertainty – sand beneath my feet when I’m craving concrete – unmoors me. Makes me shaky.
I was ambivalent about this pregnancy. Happy, sad, reluctant, excited. That was hard, but I understood it. I knew it was a tunnel I’d get through. I could even see the light, and I knew that when I emerged into it, life – and my new baby – would be golden.
But I wondered if I was standing on sand. Our commitment to each other only preceded our unexpected pregnancy by mere months. Sometimes it felt like minutes. It definitely didn’t feel like we were ready.
(And this was what I was working through – and my way to - when I wrote “Not Ready but Willing“.)
Which is why this summer I was obsessed with sand and castles. It didn’t help that when I thought about my loverloverman/babydaddy, I thought about one of his favourite songs: Castles in the Air.
And so I thought about airy dreams and sandy illusions and the shaky ground beneath my feet and in front of me. I thought about it all summer. I thought about relationships, love, commitment, castles, marriage, security. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that security is always an illusion.
(When a security-seeker seeks comfort in the notion that security doesn’t exist, you know you’re in existentially-trying times.)
I thought about the average length of a marriage: 10 years. I thought about all the women I’ve comforted at kitchen tables as the foundations of their lives and their futures dissolved in the acid of discovery…of secrets. Infidelity. Betrayal. I thought about all the ways I’ve tried to extract pledges of security while knowing such promises held no promise.
And I thought about all the people I know who profess absolute faith in their relationships and in their partners and even as I envied them, I knew that no relationship starts that way. Every history starts in the present. Every relationship starts out with wondering: is she into me? Does he want me? Does she still want me? Will he want me tomorrow?
Uncertainty. It’s the beginning. It doesn’t have to mean anything except that we’re still new. It doesn’t have to be an indicator of a sandy future or a shifty character.
Shift.
In thinking. Jonathan Fields and Danielle LaPorte see uncertainty as a necessary precondition of innovation. When you’re doing something no one’s ever done before, you don’t know how it will turn out. You’re uncertain and that’s gorgeously uncomfortable. It means you’re doing something incredible.
The way they see uncertainty is how I see ambivalence: as rich and rewarding. A source of generation and creation.
Ambivalence, uncertainty, innovation, generation, creation. It’s almost linear. It’s certainly relational.
Which is why I’m entranced by their thinking about uncertainty (Jonathan has a brand-new book about it)…and by two newly launched projects by coaches Tanya Geisler and Randi Buckley.
Tanya’s thing is the question, What’s My Thing? and Randi’s work is an answer: Maybe, Baby.
And both are processes designed to reveal your possibilities. Your values. Your truth. Because your truth is your compass.
I know that’s true because in the last two years I’ve decided my direction. I’m living My Thing. I’m making a living at writing. And I just lived through Maybe, Baby.
Except the answer isn’t ‘maybe’. It’s yes, yes, YES.
To my lovechild and my loverloverman and all of our castles wherever we build them.
“I found out today that the baby will be a boy. How do you feel about that?” I ask both of them, but I’m looking at Sophie.
Sophie’s thrilled. “I feel great. I always wanted a brother, especially a teenage brother.”
“He’s going to be a baby, not a teenager.” The default position of motherhood is hope-dasher/porter and splasher of buckets of cold water.
“I know,” she says, “I’m just saying a teenage brother would be perfect. But a baby brother is good too. I’m so excited!”
“Lola, how do you feel about us having a baby boy?” This is quicksand. I can predict the contents of her reaction but not the precise details of her reply. But I know it will be…remarkable.
Lola sighs elaborately. “I really wished we’d get a cat.”
Of course she does. This is going better than I expected. ”But we’re having a baby, not a cat. And F and and I are thinking his name will be Theo. What do you think about that?”
“Theo rhymes with Cleo. How about Cleo?” Lola offers.
“We had a cat named Cleo before you were born, Lola.” Sophie says, helpfully/unhelpfully.
“We’re not naming your brother after a cat,” I say. I’m quite firm about this.
“Then how about Leo?” Lola asks.
Again with the hope-dashing. Mama, thy name is pessimist. “The baby. Is not. A cat.”
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Lola has since reconciled herself, delightfully and with great anticipation, to the species of baby that will soon populate our home and our lives. Now she greets people not with “Hello!” but with “My mommy has a baby in her tummy and it’s a BOY!”
I looked into the face of faith – and grief - and it was beautiful.
And it was awful.
It is awful. Indescribably.
But she - a family friend and mother of a young man who drowned last week at a lake just 50 feet from shore, 50 feet from the eyes and arms of his waiting wife and five year old son – held my gaze and told me that in the days before his death, he was joyous, so joyful, filled with joy.
“He told me he knew his purpose. He knew what he was supposed to do. He told me he knew his mission, why he was here.”
He had a family, a son, a wife, a life.
And, finally, a purpose. And that gave him joy.
And it gives his mother peace.
She has faith he is in a better place. And that was his purpose.
And that’s probably the truth: knowing and declaring our purpose is a form of heaven.
But discovering, admitting, acknowledging, accepting and activating our purpose is not a mystical process. I suspect most of us know what we are here to do, but we tamp down that audacious vision because it’s not practical, or no one else has done it, or who are we to do it?
Or, how do we do it? How is that thing even possible?
It’s one tiny task, one insightful inquiry, one compelling truth at a time. As my sweetie says of commitment, it’s not one grand decision that alters the sweep of time (though that resolution can be a crucial ingredient), it’s the daily decisions. It’s the decision to wake up and get up every day and do it, even though you’re tired, it’s hard, and there’s no glory (yet).
And that thing might not be externally glorious. You might never be lauded for it. There are millions of working poor living heroically, honestly, persistently, without applause. There are frustrated, frazzled parents who get by on next-to-no cheerleading.
But doing your best by your family is magnificent. And that can be a purpose.
That’s a truth I’ve been fighting about myself. I’m a blazing feminist and all-out champion of women owning themselves, their ambitions, their careers. I’m lit up by stories of women CEOs, pioneers and trailblazers. But all I want to do is adore my partner, raise my babies, and write (preferably best-sellers, but any form of writing for an audience will do, marvelously). I don’t take business or money or even career that seriously. I’m serious about developing my craft but that’s a minor occupation in comparison to my devotion to my man.
And that feels like a shameful thing to say: that I am, at heart and with primal purpose, the woman whom, in my twenties, I despaired of, criticized, and tried desperately not to be. Motherfucking Betty Crocker. With a pen.
But that’s who I am. Lover. Mother. Writer. And knowing that is knowing my purpose and there’s expansive, directive clarity there.
And faith.
Because we only have a limited number of days and years – my friend’s son only had 31 - on this earth, in this life.
Let’s live them well and fully. Divinely. With purpose.
Lower the bar. That’s what my friend, His Highness of High Weirdness aka Matthew Stillman, wants us to do.
When he told me that, I didn’t understand. Doesn’t that mean lowering your standards? Expecting less? Offering less?
Dude. I can’t endorse that.
Except that’s not what he means. Matthew doesn’t want us to dilute our excellence or offer more junk, less jewels. He wants us to be more accessible. Lower the bar means loving more. Showing the world more.
I can’t keep it in/I gotta let it out/
I’ve gotta show the world/The world’s got to see
See all the love/Love that’s in me.
Can’t Keep it In by Yusuf Islam
And that’s what blogs are about. Lowering the bar. Getting it out.
Last year – and continuously, really – there was much noise and thunder about how blogging doesn’t make you money, business makes you money.
And therefore that’s what you should worry about: your business. Your plot to monetize and/or take over the world.
And: duh. Of course you should put mucho effort into building your biz. Of course the thing that makes you money – whether it’s your job, your art, your business – deserves devotion. Honour thy independendance and abundance, in whatever vehicle it drives you.
But. Here’s why I adore blogging and bloggers: because it’s not all – or only – about money. It’s about message. It’s about community. It’s about communion.
Penelope Trunk thinks one of the ways to measure Blog ROI is if it improves your sex life.
Holla.
I think you’re doing it right – blogging, sex – if it improves your life.
And your character. And those of other people, too.
And that’s what Matthew Stillman (and Yusuf Islam and maybe even me) is a-talkin’ about. Lowering the bar means making your mad and meaningful message accessible to everyone who needs it. Or wants it. Or wants to participate in the grand project of creation and self-actualization and community contribution but is busy surviving and doesn’t – yet – have $50 or $500 or $5000 to invest in learning how to do that.
That’s what blogs – and bloggers – do: share.
So if your blog isn’t making you money, don’t despair. That’s not really what blogs are supposed to do. A blog can be a podium, a platform, a stage on which to shine for as many lovers (and haters) as possible.
A blog can be an Acropolis. A sacred daily gathering place for people, ideas, discussion, debate, change.
A blog can be a salon. Your salon. Your living room. A coffee shop. Your kitchen table. Historically, this is where ideas, worlds, governments and good times are schemed and dreamed.
And so, yes, let’s lower the bar. Let’s get it out. I gotta get it out.
Isn’t that what bloggers have been doing all along?
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Let’s lower the bar. Let’s make it more accessible. Let’s get it out.
And that’s what I’m doing today: making a lower-the-bar/can’t-keep-it-in/gotta-get it out offer.
Until midnight tonight (I chose today because it’s Canada’s birthday, hooray!), every time a Red Shoe Blogger session is purchased, I’ll give one away, too.
If you book one, you can choose to whom your gift goes.
Or you and a savvy friend can pool your loonies (that’s Canuck-speak for “dollars”) and subsidize each other by buying two sessions for the price of one.
Or you can make your gift a scholarship and I’ll match it up with someone burning to walk the red shoe walk.
And with that gift we’ll show the world all the love – and blog genius and generosity - that’s in you.
And you’re not doing this alone. We’re in this together. For every four Red Shoe Bloggers booked-and-paid-for, I’ll not only offer the matching four free sessions, but I’ll gift another free scholarship session, too.
And there’s no social proof required. You don’t have to tweet it, facebook it, or even comment. If you decide to buy a session, just send me an e-mail telling me to whom you want to offer your gift session, and it’s on, baby.
Let’s get it out.
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PS This offer was inspired by Red Shoe Blogger and web developer/designer Leah Shaver (Amanda and I have been recommending her to our Red+Purple clients who need gorgeous sites while Amanda takes a work break to have a baby), who dreamed up and did this very thing all on her own. Leah booked a session for herself and then bought another for a friend. Lovelovelove.
PPS In the first iteration of this piece, I referred to Yusuf Islam as Cat Stevens. And then, afterwards, while I was listening to his oeuvre online, I realized the magnitude of that wrong. How is it that I can so clearly see that it was racism when 1960s mainstream media continued to refer to Muhammad Ali as Cassius Clay…but that I haven’t been according Yusuf Islam respect by calling him by the name he has chosen? There comes a time when you tell the world who you are. With names or postscripts.
My dude threw down some serious wisdom last night.
Here’s a metaphorical recap…
Imagine you’re a rat in a cage and mmmmm mmmm mmmm you’ve just discovered that when you press a magical lever, you get a morsel of cheese – only it’s cheese soaked in love and pixie dust and endorphins and mother o’ rodents it gets you HIGH.
So you keep going back, cranking that lever and licking those morsels.
You’re floating. You’re delicious. It’s delicious. The whole undamned world is delicious. Colours are brighter, the air smells like flowers. All you can think about is that lever. That seductive, entrancing lever. You cannot get enough of her.
Because of course that lever is your girlfriend. She is the dispenser of good feelings. She makes your world go ’round. You adore her because she makes you feel great. Gifted. Lifted. In love.
But, over time, the cheese starts to feel a little crumbly. It’s the same cheese, soaked in love and magic, but it’s the same cheese. When you eat it every day it loses the aroma of novelty and possibility that made it so bewitching in the first place.
And this rat-cage-lever-love trajectory is what plagues modern marriages and partnership.
But this isn’t a story about novelty and boredom. This is a story about transactions. About how we North Americans view our partners as pleasure-providers. As dispensers of good feelings.
And about how we often value the feelings over the other person. We value the impact our partners create rather than our partners, themselves. We marvel at the things our lovers make us feel rather than behold the wonder of the extraordinary web of water and flesh and lifesparks and experience and possibility that is them.
So when the intense, gorgeous, rainbow feelings fade – as they do when you argue, change diapers, check your dwindling bank account online, rush the kids to soccer – we’re think – feel – it’s over.
And then, if we’re behaviourist rats addicted to the pay-off (side note: this is why behaviourism is so impoverished and Lianne Raymond is the antidote to Dr. Phil), we go looking for the next lever. Some more magic cheese. The high.
Unmetaphorically: our relationships are premised on transactional payoffs. When they stop paying off, they end.
My dude and I both know a lil’ something about this. We’ve got a couple marriages and domestic partnerships between us and behind us. And while I’m impetuous and romantic and prone to leaving my apartment for a first date to never ever again return to my own home, he’s cautious – and I was tearfully, fatalistically, dramatically interpreting that cautiousness as reluctance, lack of commitment and a whopping absence of faith in our future.
But.
It turns out that he might be a little more committed than me because he wants us to do a something that is both wise and revolutionary: he wants us to go slow and deep. Learn to swim in the waters of each other so we can survive the rapids and float forever. Get to know each other. Cherish each other as people rather than as the dispensers of good cheese.
And that’s something. ‘Cuz good cheese is mighty fine. Just ask my foodie friend Heather who several years ago had a still-smoldering argument with her mother over an $11 sliver of Parmesan. They didn’t speak for weeks. True story.
epic post alert.
This post is so long that it requires a table of contents.
Love is Ugly
Announcing the TEN winners of the Red Shoe Blogger Digital Strategy Sessions
Check out the Love Sparks Blogging Festival
One More Thing (for everyone who wanted to win a Red Shoe Blogger Digital Strategy Session)
PS I love you
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Love is Ugly
There’s a dark side to generosity. Most of us (one hopes) are taught to give to those “less fortunate than ourselves”. That’s noble, altruistic, charitable…
and hierarchical.
We’re taught a one-sided charity. We’re taught that the rewards reside in giving, in being privileged enough to give; and that magnamity and magnificence flow in one direction: from the offeror, with the offer.
For a long time I believed that to love was to give and I bathed my beloveds in acts of kindness and charity.
But I rarely, if ever, asked for help, even when I desperately needed it. Unless I had no choice.
Late one afternoon I was stranded on a bridge that, just moments earlier, was the scene of a horrific, multi-car, fatal accident. The bridge was shut down. I wouldn’t be going anywhere for hours. And the daycare closed in thirty minutes.
And I was sick about having to call my friend for help. She’d have to drop everything, pack up her two kids, and dash to the daycare right now and then she’d have to feed all of them dinner. Such an imposition.
I had no choice. I had to ask. And I worried about it all the way home.
And almost every day was a day like that. I was a newly separated single working mama of two kids under the age of four. I worked, I took care of the girls, and when I wasn’t at the office I was essentially housebound. I had no after-work-hours childcare. I had no money for babysitters. I did, however, have family and friends living within a four block radius of my home.
But I couldn’t ask for help.
Because my defense – my shield against the failure of being a single mama in the midst of married coupledom – was to be seamless. Perfect. Superwoman. Need-free.
And at the same time, I was generous. I’d take my friend’s son for the weekend when she was working night shifts at the hospital. I’d offer advice. (I love to offer advice.) I’d write projects for free. I’d work extra hours and not bill for the overtime. And I loved doing that. I loved – and love – it when people let me in to their lives.
But if anyone offered me what I offered them, I was wildly uncomfortable.
I couldn’t let anyone in unless everything was perfect – which meant I had to keep everyone at arm’s length. Which meant, in times of trouble, I retreated. Disappeared. Cut contact.
Then, last October – after a year of a lot of growing up – I got sick. I collapsed. I was hemorraghing on the bathroom floor at 4am.
And at that moment, flat on the tile, bleeding, in overwhelming pain and on the verge of passing out, I still worried about asking for help. Even calling an ambulance seemed a touch histrionic.
But I couldn’t faint on the floor for my four year old to find me in a pool of blood.
So I called my sister and my friend Heather. Heather drove me to the hospital and my sister scooped up the girls and carted them home. Heather stayed beside the emergency room bed until 7am when I convinced her to go.
After she left I bawled hysterically and unceasingly until noon.
I sobbed through exams and needles and tests and a nurse stroking my arm saying I know honey, I know.
I cried because I didn’t want this to be happening. I cried because I didn’t want to be there. I cried because I was alone and in pain and I needed help and I sent help away.
And the woman in the bed next to me bawled all day, too. She’d just left the hospital four days earlier after a four week stay. She’d had part of her intestine removed. She had two little kids at home. She had a business she was tending to on the phone. I’d hear her make very composed calls organizing her employees to cover her absence and then I’d hear her sob with her entire body. I heard the doctor tell her she had an infection at the surgical site and pneumonia and still I heard her beg him to send her home. He left to consult with another doctor, and I heard her cry, hard, and say oh god I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here.
We sobbed and spoke in concert. That was what I saying and praying too. I didn’t want to be there, and part of my grief and hysteria came from the not wanting to be where I was.
Naturally. I was in the ER. No one wants to be in the ER.
And somewhere between the pain and the percocet I realized: most of my emotional anguish comes from fighting what is.
I was in the ER. I was sick. I needed surgery. Nothing would change those immediate circumstances. I was fighting the wrong dragon. I was fighting reality.
Instead, what I ought to do was fight to be okay, right now, right where I was.
I told myself to accept the pain, to breathe, to feel every twinge of my battling body. I tuned in instead of trying to block it out. I marvelled at my own resilience. I suffered; I hurt; but I wasn’t fighting myself. I was fighting for myself.
After hours and hours, the hospital sent me home. No space in the Operating Room. No beds. No room in the inn.Surgery would have to wait until tomorrow.
And when I got to my house - I still felt ashamed and guilty for needing my sister to ferry me home – I was alone. My girls were safely ensconced at their father’s house.
And this time, even though it wasn’t an emergency, even though I knew could get through the night alone, I asked for help. I told my loverloverman – who, at that point, was my former loverloverman and to whom I wasn’t speaking – this:
I’m sad and scared and I’m having surgery tomorrow.
He said, I’ll be right there.
And he was.
And, after I hadn’t let him see or speak to me for a month, he climbed in bed with me, kissed me and stroked my face. He gazed into my eyes adoringly and told me, as I lay wan, sweaty and shaking with pain, that I was beautiful. He held me and caressed me and hugged me and kissed me all night and every time I turned to him, he was awake. He didn’t want me to be alone for a moment.
He made what should have been the worst night of my life the sweetest. I was awash in his love and protection and stunned that he desired me even in my most bedraggled, unsexy, pain-wracked, suffering state.
And later, while I was in the Operating Room, he took my car and cleaned it inside and out. I know he was just trying to do something – anything – sweet for me.
I had surgery. I recovered. And while I was recovering, my man-who-wasn’t-my-man, friends, family and even my children’s father had my back unreservedly. Enthusiastically.
When I thanked Heather for her 4am service, she said: “I’m your person.”
When I thanked my children’s father, he said, “You’re the mother of my children. We’re a team.”
When I thanked my sister, she said, “Of course.”
When I thanked F, he said “You didn’t have to go through this alone.”
And, much like the realization that sliced through the pain and the percocet, a new understanding – a harrowing, of-the-marrow knowledge – cut through my fog of mortification at being dependant and unable to stride through emergencies unassisted.
Love isn’t only an offer. Love is reception and invitation. It means being able to receive. Truly loving and inviting people in to your life means letting them see you in all your glorious misery, in the midst of dirty dishes and unfolded laundry and sometimes pain and pools of blood.
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and all of this is to say thank you to
- Meggy Wang, The Novelist’s Hubris
- Matthew Stillman, Stillman Says
- Linda Eaves, Don’t Go Home with Him
- Sara Blackthorne, Forest of Stories
- Tessa Zeng, Experiencing Revolution
- Amy Friend, Cypress Sun Jewelry
- Marianne Elliott, Zen Peacekeeper
- Jenny Alexander, The Painted Lily
- Lindsey Mead, A Design So Vast
- Jasmine Lamb, All is Listening
for lovingly inviting me into their virtual houses. Yes, darlings, you won a Red Shoe Blogger Digital Strategy Session.
(Expect an e-mail from me today to line up our schedules.)
And thank you to my friends/judges Desiree Adaway, Tara Gentile and Amanda Farough for working through the long list of candidates and making the selections.
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PS Did you see the image at the beginning of the post? That’s the badge for the Love Sparks Blogging Festival by Jasmine Lamb (All is Listening). Check it out.
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Oh, One More Thing…
to EVERYONE who commented on my “this I know” piece,
If you want a Red Shoe Blogger digital strategy session, let’s do it like this:
pay what you can.
Really.
The usual price is $100 per session, but since you loved me up, I want to love you back. Tell me what works for you and IT’S ON, BABY.
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Finally:
lovelovelove to you on Valentine’s Day.
And always.
Parallel parking is my super-sexy-secret power.
Using only my wits, a manual transmission and a steering wheel, I can maneuver a thousand pounds of metal in and out of spaces so small they should require a can opener.
And I can do it consistently. With crowds of people watching and cheering. With the guy I want (always) to impress (always) in the car.
True story.
We were going to breakfast at my favourite joint in Fort Langley - ohhhh, the evil omelettes, ohhhhh the wicked weekend line-ups – and parking in that ‘hood is almost always a challenge. But lo! there was a spot. A very tiny spot, and a very long line of traffic behind me.
I lined up my passenger door with the driver door of the car ahead of my spot, backed in until the curb was in the middle of my rear view mirror, continued reversing while rolling the steering wheel the other way…and I was in, and tight to the curb too.
It was spectacular. I was spectacular.
And my newish man smiled at me and said Wow.
That was seven months ago and I don’t remember if we had sex that morning (of course we did), and it’s probably inappropriate to say if we had sex this morning (of course we did!), but let’s assume this driving lesson does indeed instruct.
The ability to parallel park can get you laid.
And maybe even loved.
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