Made manifest

Today the men came to rip out the kitchen, next week the bathrooms, weeks after that the not-original built-ins and flooring. This shit is getting real, for real, now. Minutes after I took this picture, I saw one of my realtors on the street outside. "Come back and see what we are doing!" I called to him. "Oh my, go slow on that remodel, Fran!" he counseled back. "HA! This is go big or go home time, Ralph!" was my gleeful response.

And it was gleeful. All of the anxiety over the enormous amount of money I'm spending, whether I'll be in this home forever, what it all means to this time in my life had been burned away in that minute.

This is my vision, my brain reminded me.

My big, beautiful life, the home I wrote about back in June when I laid out my vision for my future. And that vision encompassed life and home and work and relationships. It is coming true in ways big and small that I haven't focused on, but have become manifest just for the sheer fact that I have articulated them. It's all in motion, big and huge and becoming. I can feel it.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to override the intellect and go with your heart. Sometimes the bravest answer is "yes", or "no" or "not this" or "hmm, let me consider that". Sometimes the decision trees are not enough, that the downward cascade of the worst case scenario is not going to save you from hurt or sadness or tragedy. Sometimes you have to run in front of the good thing to make sure you catch it. Sometimes what you think is a good thing only exists to teach you more about who you are and how gracefully you can let go of things that are not meant for you. And bless them, and say "thank you" for the lesson.

Late night last night, I got some great wisdom from a new friend about creating the life you want to live. He said that he believes that you attract good things by living the good things: to attract depth, you have to be vulnerable to going under; to attract partnership, you have to get past the need to manage the situation; to walk the path with others, you have to be comfortable with the ambiguity; to create a difference in someone's life, you have to know yourself in all of your sticky messy-ness first.

He also said that knowing the difference between suffering through an untenable situation and the life you are destined to have is having a sense of what this big beautiful life would feel like well lived.

What would that big beautiful life look like?
How would that make you feel?
Who and what exists with you in that space?
How will you continue to grow?
How will you help to make this life you've envisioned manifest?

And why are you waiting even a moment to begin?

On Letting Go

The couch was a good place, close enough that I could hear what was going on in my mother's room, far enough away to sit or sleep, to think and process, to rattle around in my brain looking for answers. My mother was a few days away from dying. This time was marked by ups and downs in her mental state, her physical body crumbling underneath her as she rested in the hospital bed we'd had brought in a couple of weeks before. She'd be alert one minute and wanting to go out to sit in the sun, the next completely out of it. "She's not ready to let go yet," the short, red-haired night nurse whispered to my sisters and me. I can imagine my mom, at this exact moment of whispering, popping her head up and demanding to know what we were being so secretive about. It was an insane ride, those days.

Although we had had many people die in our lives, this was our first rodeo with terminal illness. My sisters and I would look at each other with the sad and incredulous faces of people who desperately needed the situation at hand to come to a close, while at the same time wanting to roll back time...back, back, back...to a safe space where all of everything just went away.

On one of those nights, and in a desperate attempt to find some help, we downloaded the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying on my ipad, scanning its pages in the semi-dark for a way to help my mom let go, this woman who had weathered so much in her lifetime, who fought and stood strong throughout our lives. It was there that we read a passage that would change our perspective on death and dying, what leaving means. In dying you lose everything you have ever known. You lose the touch of loved ones, the smell of your favorite meal, the soft fur of your beloved animal, the sunshine on your face, your favorite vista. Even if you are religious or ready to die, facing that loss is tremendous and overwhelming in a way that we often don't think about. It's not the not being there, it's the anticipatory longing for the parts that you love but have to leave behind.

My friend and I were talking about the similarities between divorce and death, how losing someone in death is almost easier, that bereavement is different when what you have lost is walking around in the world. And much of this same story line holds true for divorce. You miss your former life even as your new life is emerging: the camaraderie and closeness you once felt with your partner, the regularity of someone's habits, the well-worn teamwork of holiday packing, the gathering of extended family that you love with all your heart. It is stepping away from this certainty, the compilation of so many days, that provokes unexpected stabbiness as you rise from anxious sleep,  haul the bags out to the car, worry that you have forgotten something, check the tickets twice. It's cutting an entirely uncertain path, thrusting yourself in a future you cannot see and don't entirely trust. In leaving you lose everything you have ever known, even if you know in your mind it's the right thing to do, the heart a few paces behind.

Grasping

My chest felt tight and unusually heavy as we swung out of Panera, coffees in hand, to make the 40 minute drive from Oklahoma City to my childhood home. This was the trip home that ended things, most things left being sold, my mother's house contracted for sale, the end of my time of having a place to land should I need it. This all ended long ago with my mother's death and our inevitable dividing of things and the eventual acknowledgement that our childhood home would be bundled up for someone else to own.

But it's been a tender couple of days. I walk past all of the tables in my mother's house that are laden with memories in the form of glass and silver and ceramic and oil paint and I feel a tug, a grasping for these items that remind me of my grandmother's home or of some piece of family history that I'm not quite ready to let go. I suddenly think that I haven't taken enough, that my parsimonious view when we were dividing things was short-sighted, that now I need these things to fill up a certain void left by dividing and new space and the time when my own children might want something of their own. I have a moment when I believe that I have bankrupted their future with a few fickle objects, which is total bullshit because these things mean nothing to them now and will mean nothing to them in the future because they don't know the people for whom these pieces had value. Still, I feel the tug and want and I sit in these feelings for a moment just letting them come and go, come and go.

The most interesting feeling that I am having is the feeling of grasping at something, fine threads of memory that are silken to the touch but so fine that they are hard to feel between the calloused fingers of my memory. I pick up my grandmother's wrecked suitcase, I take my dad's toy monkey, I find an electric razor that may contain DNA that would help me unlock who I am through where my dad came from. This all lands for me at a remarkable juncture in my life. I am losing the emotional security of my childhood home just as I have moved into a new place of my own to live. I am packing up a lifetime of memories just as I am launching into a new sphere of work. Never have I been in such a transitional space in my life, all by choice, all completely without a concrete plan or emotional safety net.

A strong vision or the predictive power of decision trees have been my family's way of managing through some of the shittier events in life. Have a vision, you'll know what to aim for. Map out the predictable outcomes, you won't be surprised when the worst outcome arrives at your door. There is comfort in knowing what is going to happen and in a family that has had such wildly unpredictable loss, it's been a saving grace.

But wrapping up pieces of your life and closing the door on spaces that house your memories is terrifying. It means closing off the one thing that you knew you could come back to, no matter what. It also means that sometimes you just have to sit without a vision for the future, that sometimes you have to just be in it. And you think back across those people whose things you touch: remembering what a kind woman your grandmother was, or what a fiercely strong woman your mother was, or what a generous and loving man your dad was, or how you look back over your family history and realize that you come from perserverant and courageous stock.

And the grasping slowly subsides and is replaced by appreciation. And you muster your own courage and think about working without much of a net. And you can let go, slowly, and move forward, slowly. And so be it. Amen.

They Gather Their Courage and They Give It a Try

You can’t buy a simple pad of paper in the New Orleans airport. Paper as it exists here is either the kind of list pad that has “hot & spicy!” or “Jazz!” written at the top, or comes in the form of a lined journal with biblical quotes at the bottom of every page. So I’m destined to write this post with my thumbs. Maybe God is telling me I should have gone with the journal.

Another door closes today as my treatment in New Orleans comes to a end with the embellishment done by a guy named Vinnie from Baltimore who has a penchant for beautifully made hats. We talked about home tattooing and PCP trips and stories about his youth as he tattooed my tits. Tittats. Tittats™ could be a great marketing schtick except that Vinnie is known as the Michelangelo of areola tattoos and needs no marketing help. Vinnie, who is incredibly cool and lovely to talk to, is flying to Memphis to check out a hat store tomorrow. Tittat™ business is good when you are talented. Thank God for the likes of Vinnie. Maybe there is a bible verse for that in one of those little lined journals.

I’m feeling all sorts of sassy and consternated here in New Orleans, gathering all of my memories to tally them up and close them out in a last-chapter roll finale my experience here. It’s humorous that I went from flashing my tits in this fair city to getting flash-worthy tits in this fair city. That’s something I’ll put in the thank-you note to Vinnie who tells PCP stories but not likely to my drs who might find my tit-talk a little off-putting, a tidbit I gleaned not only from their demeanor but also from the Romans 5:1-5 quote in my parting gift. And so it rolls.

There are things that wrap with this trip. Now the next four years stretches out before me as I am done fiddling with things. I have to put all of this fiddling aside and live in the present because being in the space of still having medical things to distract me is over. I have to dig in and realign where I am. I have to settle into the reality of now. On the way back to the airport today, I listened to my cab driver speak about his life. He poured out his story, this man, about his daughter who had cancer, about his wife who was depressed for losing her mother a year ago, about the spot they found on his lung that he’s not sure what it is. And all the while he holds out hope, this man who had lost his restaurant to the hurricane and who was driving a cab even though he was proud to mention that he had a college education. This man who came from Iran and was delighted to tell me that the Persians prefer butter to olive oil in their cooking. He told me about Jesus and hope and his confidence that I would be fine. “Eat oregano and garlic and onions!” he said. “I believe you will be well!” he shouted as he craned his neck out the window. “And Jesus! Don’t forget Jesus!”

I’m eating blueberry granola on the plane and wondering if there is really gin in my G&T. I’m winging my way back to Michigan, leaving all of this behind. I’m flying without net. I’m flying onto what is next. I’m flying.

Navigating Who I Am (in this space)

Little hands crept around the door frame. "Mama?" her voice called tentatively. "Can I ask you something?" I was in the shower and panicked for a moment. Ever since my first surgery, we'd made an agreement with the kids that time in the shower and getting dressed time were "personal time". "Dad doesn't watch Grandma Pat get dressed. There is a time when you get old enough that privacy becomes important," was my reasoning to them, but it was 100% that I didn't want the children to see what had become of my scarred and destroyed body. I thought it would scare them. Because, in all honesty, it still scares me.

But here she was, my little girl, needing something.  "Come in, sweet girl," I called. She came in, fully in the middle of her thoughts, and stopped. She looked. She looked puzzled. Then, taking in what she saw in this new landscape of her mother's body, she started in with her question. I smiled, she smiled. It was ok.

Dealing with the reality of what happens to your body during breast cancer treatment is one of the most difficult aspects of living through this journey. You feel sick from the treatments, you fear death, you fear the unknown, you have to work through all sort of emotional issues with friends and loved ones about your illness but one of the hardest things, every day, is to deal with the body that you inhabit. For me, that is feeling stripped down, genderless, alien myself. I remember seeing a picture of Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort in the last few Harry Potter movies and being horrified because I identified so strongly with his bald, pale, almost genderless presence. That's the shit side of what body image in this space does to you. I've mourned that in previous posts, but it's something that is always with me.

Yesterday, a friend sent me an article that spoke so clearly about what its like to feel the tug and pull of these body changes. Even if you are right with it (which, obviously, I am SO not), there are others whose opinion, feelings and thoughts you have to navigate. Children, partners, friends...it's overwhelming. My means of dealing with it have been to turn inward and just try to put my head down and get through it, figuring that at some point the new normal will kick in (post-chemo, new surgeries, weight loss) and I will be able to deal, or at least deal with what is permanent. But its hard and lonely working that way, even though daily I hear from friends that I look beautiful. It's a mind mess I that I am still working to resolve.

So this article and the Scar Project in general has done a lot for me. These are *beautiful* women, lovingly photographed by a fashion photographer. Some look amazingly beautiful, some are just who they are. I remember seeing the photo of the pregnant woman on a poster in Cincinnati and being shocked and horrified before I myself was a double mastectomy survivor.

Now, I want others to see so that we can make this all more normal. It's there and it's the truth. And there is no shame. And there can be beauty. But shit, it's hard.

Article here:  http://www.brainchildmag.com/essays/fall2011_lynch.asp

The Scar Project website here: http://www.thescarproject.org/