To break, to bend.

It starts with a text to a dear friend, that nattering anxiety and worry you’ve been wrapped in all week, this week, the week of holidays and loneliness and estrangement tipping off a rush of worry about people you love. It’s a simple, frustrated text that he quickly intuits where you are. “I’m going to leave the door open and put a bottle of wine on the coffee table. Curl up on the couch and I’ll be down to talk in 20.” And moments like these are the test, you who are embarrassed by your neediness, not wanting to be a burden, not really wanting to admit that you need some love and a good talk and just a moment. But you go, because that act in and of itself is a bravery, and on the way out the door you grab the wishbone that has been sitting on your windowsill. “A wish in wait” you call them, ready for times like these.

Fast forward to a crisp, chilly afternoon with an azure sky and a smoking fire pit. You are sitting outside with another dear friend, glass of champagne in hand, escaping what can only be described as the smelliest fish dish in the world. You have been invited to her family’s small gathering, her welcoming heart opening another spot for you. It’s a timid acceptance of the invitation that leaves you wondering why you keep doing this, the resisting, when there are people to love and friendship and sisterhood with people who know your spirit.

Smelly fish and blue skies turn into singing “Proud Mary” and “Easy” and drinking cheap wine at karaoke with new, lovely, gorgeous friends and their friends whom you’ve never met, the invitation that was the hardest to say yes to (sober-ish karaoke at 7:30p? Um, ok...), but the greatest yes because this friend knows the struggle of finding a place in a city of odd circles and she’s very intentionally trying to make that change for you. And this is an act of caring that you haven’t felt in a really long time, not because it’s not ever been done, but because you’ve been so reluctant to accept it.

In truth, we are at our best and worst sometimes in these moments of acceptance, the urge to mask our own needs by wanting to be helper but not the one in need. The feelings that sit under that discomfort—embarrassment, shame, humiliation, abandonment, rejection, loneliness, loss, hurt, worth— are real and deep, their roots are so firmly planted that unearthing them feels like the ground underneath would give way. Some of us, most of us, are pack animals. We need our people, a place to feel protected and be productive, a group in which to make and sustain a life. And in creating that belonging for others, you have to accept it for yourself.

You sit on the couch looking into your friend’s eyes, having explained the simple rule of the wishbone (as you play it): each person makes a wish for the other and pulls on behalf of that wish coming true. “One-two-three...” and the snap comes away with your friend holding the winning piece. “Oh, good!” he smiles, “that’s going to be a good one.”

And you know you can’t ask because it won’t come true.

And you know that every good thing that happens to you in the future will be sweetened by wondering if this is the grace he gave you in that wish.

And you are so grateful.

This is the Sea

Crouched on the dusty floor of my new studio, light streaming through the huge casement windows, I took a deep breath and lifted the first plastic lid off the first randomly selected box. I'd brought all of the archives into this new space, the boxes and bins of my college and high school history kept for years at my childhood home, my compulsion to keep scraps of notes and cards and pictures and random fragments of my life come to roost in a city so very far away from the ones where I was from. I'd decided that it was finally time to sort and parse, to try to make sense and to try to remember and to be in what was my history at that time as I had recorded it through pieces.

The first piece of paper held my best friend's signature scrawl, the words of a song that sang in our souls at the time, nailing me between the eyes.

Damnit. 

I walked over and dialed up the Waterboys This is the Sea on my iphone and let the music wash over me.

These things you keep
You'd better throw them away
You wanna turn your back
On your soulless days
Once you were tethered
And now you are free
Once you were tethered
Well now you are free
That was the river
This is the sea!

One verse in and the irony of standing in the middle of this excavation hit me.

Now if you're feelin' weary
If you've been alone too long
Maybe you've been suffering from
A few too many
Plans that have gone wrong
And you're trying to remember
How fine your life used to be
Running around banging your drum
Like it's 1973
Well that was the river
This is the sea!
Wooo!

Verse two and I couldn't read the page for my tears.

Now you say you've got trouble
You say you've got pain
You say've got nothing left to believe in
Nothing to hold on to
Nothing to trust
Nothing but chains
You're scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
Scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
But that was the river
This is the sea yeah!

Three and my heart broke open.

Because that's really what this excavating was about, the finding, the sensemaking, the retracing steps and remembering who, what and why. Recounting, recontexualizing, renaming what has been lost and forgotten and erased and left behind over the countless miles. The who I had been back then made me the woman I am today.  

Two inches down and I found an envelope containing melted coins from my brother Hunter's car wreck.

Another layer and I found a cache of old love notes.

Another brought a rough letter from my mom.

Another offered hilarious cards from friends sent in the days before texting and email and iphones.

Hot, tired from the sorting and feeling, I was about to close everything up when I looked over to see that unmistakable handwriting once again, this time written across the entire swath of the envelope headed with PLEASE READ THIS.

oof.

My heart went zooming back to 1990, standing in my summer sublet, staring at this envelope from my clever-as-hell best friend. Months earlier, we had a bitter break, one so deep and severe that it felt it would be impossible to overcome. I refused her calls and wrote Return to Sender on every card even as they continued to show up. I was hurt and that hurt felt so huge that I had to throw gasoline on it, light it up and take it all down, even if it meant losing the most important person in my life. 

But she kept at it until one day this letter showed up with her message on the outside, her knowing damn well that I would be powerless not to read it, the message explaining that she refused to give up, that she was standing for me and for our friendship. That she wasn't going anywhere, for life. 

It also taught me a lot about myself: that friendship and loyalty are not light things for me, that maybe I expect too much or don't communicate clearly enough, that sometimes my favorite flamethrower is on deck with trigger finger poised. But also that I am there to extend the olive branch to work it out, show up, be there willing just as she was for me. 

I have never forgotten that act of love, just as I have never forgotten her patience and willingness to put herself out there again and again to rescue something that, decades later, is deeply precious to us both. That day, and the miles with her before and after, taught me about trust, what is earned, what friendship means, about not giving up. That people stay. 

These things you keep. Eternally grateful. Love you, sister.

Where has it gone?

Today I gasped a little bit when I loaded up this space to see that I have not written here in nearly a year, provoked to write by a memory I had of my brother and stuckness and disentangling.

Nearly a year.

Time is short in this moment, but I'm coming back if only to close this door and bless it in gratitude and let it be.

Amen.

Into the Waves

White Water was a huge water park in Oklahoma City, a place where legions of children, dressed in all manner of swim and floating gear, and adults, tugging large coolers of processed food and Capri Sun, would convene to escape the boiling summer heat. Our family would make the 40 mile trek to OKC to spend hours running wild, season passes clutched in hand, so exhausted by the end of the day that my mother would have the sweet relief of a carful of sleeping children on the ride home.

White Water had all of the features of a regular water park: the lazy river, the stories-high White Lightening slide, the kiosks where you could get sizzling hot french fries that rested salty against your chlorine-soaked tongue. But the strangest and sometimes most wonderful part of the park was the wave pool. It was enormous, hundreds of people packed into it's football-field like expanse just waiting, waiting. Suddenly the bell would ring, a scream would erupt from the crowd and the water would start moving, great undulations of waves roiling from deep within its man-made ocean.

I've been thinking about the wave pool lately as it applies to life, this wave pool in particular because unlike the ocean, there was a certain rhythm to the waves. You could sit atop of your raft and ride, or stand closer to shore and slam your body, back turned, against them. And there was that middle ground where you weren't quite tall enough to touch the bottom without the waves washing over your head. This was the thrilling, sometimes terrifying space, that space in between feeling solid and feeling the rush of danger. And, depending on the day, depending on how crowded the wave pool was, depending on the strength of your skinny legs to buoy you up, you sat on the edge of being plowed under or keeping your head above water. The rhythm of the waves had not changed, neither had your expectation of them being there, but the circumstances and your place in them became the variables of remaining above or being sucked below.

I've held this metaphor in my mind a lot lately, as friends have struggled with some pretty deep loss and sadness over the past year, as I myself negotiate my own place in the world, as we as a community lean in to lift one another up when we aren't feeling so strong. I think sometimes it's awkward to ask for help, that metaphor of being in a situation where you know that the waves are coming, but you just don't have the strength in the moment to kick yourself above them, or where how hard and disorienting it may be when everyone else seems to sit atop the water on their own raft while you can barely keep your head clearing the water's roiling plane. And, to extend the metaphor, the folks sitting atop the rafts likely don't even know you are struggling, because their gaze is shifted outwards toward the horizon, their perspective raised above what is happening below. But there is room on the raft for two, maybe three even. I know this, and I know the hospitality of that space if I just ask. Why is it sometimes so hard to do so?

I want to keep working with the raft metaphor, or to talk about the strength of pushing off of the bottom and riding the wave, that powerful feeling of not so much the wave striking your body, but the ride of catching it as it comes and not being swept under by it. To push up and engage, the timing of it coming and you being ready, the sheer thrill of knowing that something can drag you under but using your energy, your life force, to meet it and unify, to roll into it and wait for the next one.

Because the truth is that the waves stop until they start again, and they do start again because life is not static and change happens and shit happens and hard things happen all the time. But the key is this: you are not alone in the pool, although you feel that you may be, and your position in the pool is based on your own negotiation. That's the thing I need to remember most. I choose how I work with the waves.

what lessons you prepare for us

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

-Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter

Today is the final day of my three week fall observance, something I jokingly call Lent in September, an extension of my spring observance left over from my catholic youth. Fall is a rich time for digging in for me, the turning and change of the season providing a beautiful backdrop to explore.

Every year something big comes up, usually something overwhelming and huge that encases my thoughts for the entire journey. Last year it was finally mourning my dad after 27 years of not, that space larger and more profound with ripples I could never have anticipated. Lent in September stays with me long, long after it's over.

So I walked into this year with an open heart, wondering where it would go, only to be met pretty much on the first day with the loss of a friend. Not your typical loss of a irreconcilable fight or death or some ripping apart, but the void of just. total. absence. This, a new friend who I'd gotten to know over six weeks of deep sharing and connecting, a creative force in my life in a very short time, someone who I felt a kinship with and an affinity for, a deep channel, twinned in perspective and vibe. It was a deep dive of friendship and then they were gone, vanished, nonresponsive, lost.

I have lived my life with a lot of loss, people removed from my life quickly through all of the regular passages of sudden death and arguments and betrayal, sometimes buried by my inability to get past feeling hurt enough to extend the olive branch and mend things, sometimes my own clumsy failure to apologize for things I acknowledge I have done. It's a dance of getting past your own ego, understanding the perspective of the other person, being clear about what you want out of the situation (mending things? having your say? turning the knife?), humbling yourself to be vulnerable to offering and receiving apology.

Loss that has no closure is totally different. It feels like that feeling of walking into school in fifth grade and not knowing if you will have friends that day, it's the first time the person you feel for handled the leaving poorly, it's the emotional unavailablity of key relationships in your life. Because it's ambiguous and undefined, it's all of the things.

For me, it calls into question everything about how I operate in the world. I've had conversations with good friends about whether or not I provide unearned access to people and what that means, or with others, whether that unearned access is actually one of the most important, vital and beautiful parts of my being. One friend said "I'd hate to see you close this part of yourself down, Fran. It's what makes you who you are." And, they are right.

So this time has been about walking around in the space of grief, with a perspective, for the first time, through all of the loss in my life. It's being able to observe the grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and my experience of weaving in and out of each. I feel like I am watching myself work this from 30,000ft while being deep in it at the same time and it is simultaneously painful and fascinating. Painful because even though you may intellectually know what is happening, it doesn't take the energy out of the emotional feelings. Fascinating because we are soft creatures, we love, love is important and fear is strong, hurt is real, being gentle with ourselves sometimes sits in the smallest places.

At times, I think I'm insane to be this bothered by something that was short term, possibly not legit, a hoodwinking, being had. How could I have just spent three weeks thinking about a friendship that didn't exist for much longer than that same period of time. But these experiences come up in life for us to feel and learn, growing in our own awareness of ourselves and how we are in relation to others, so love ourselves more as feeling and loving beings, to understand our porous boundaries. We are put on this earth to love one another, so in that what is safety? I am still trying to figure out how to simultaneously keep my heart open and myself in check, how to share myself with others when the connection is there and understand that even in the possibility of pain, it's what I am meant to be. Love over fear, every time.

Continually Make Anew

It didn't really dawn on me this morning as I drove down Hope street, D riding shotgun, talking about the election, basketball, his high marks at his last camp in "intangibles (hustle, coachability, attitude). Nor did it occur to me as I sat having coffee with a new colleague, touching on the rituals of our wedding day, what it meant to us, where the ideas came from, far and wide.

But now it's hit me, 14 years ago today I got married to someone I loved very much, still do in ways that I never thought imaginable at the tail end of a sad and hearbreaking divorce, so many years of trying under our belts. In those years, we faced so many obstacles: moving, changing careers, birth of children, sickness, death -- so many of life's challenges (and joys) hitting us pretty much year over year, some level of chaos or disruption being a constant. Looking back at the end of our divorce, it felt like our relationship may never have had a chance to even settle in, much less thrive in the way that it was intended to.

But now, another move, another sickness, more career changes, a little more chaos down the road, it occurs to me that in the chaos might live some of the thriving. I am not always quite sure how we are doing it, but we are good. We have beautiful children and a life that we have chosen to live amicably. We are thoughtful of each other and, in some ways, more thoughtful of the ways that remarks or arguments land than we were when we were married. These days, it seems we can breathe and step back and apologize, because it's good ground we are on and neither of us wants to ruin it. Our children are thriving in the space we are able to hold, for this time and in this moment.

I would be lying if I said it was always this easy, or there weren't days that I look at families walking together with a twinge of envy, or if I wasn't worried that the permanent addition of new people to the mix will disrupt this good balance or if I didn't acknowledge how it's weird and hard to understand how to be in this space with a former partner when my normal course of action in breakups is to exit and not return.

But it's the remaking and continually making anew that is the path here, no other choice if we want our children to be at their best, no other choice if we want the one we said yes to so many years ago to live their life happy in our world as it exists now. Because, if we are lucky, we are always each other's, in an altogether different way and in a different space, sitting at weddings and births, shouldering emergencies or loss, opposite one another on the journey of parenthood for as long as life lets us be.

Start somewhere, even today

For Paul, because I'm still learning (with so much thanks).
************************************************************************

This morning as I bent my head down to kiss Ava's forehead to wake her, I whispered "Hello, my beautiful girl. How did Mama get such a beautiful girl to call her own?" Ava's eyes fluttered awake and as I came into focus, she smiled and said "It's because you're beautiful, Mama. Where did you think the genes came from?"

"Oh, sweet girl," I said, "Mama is..." and stopped, hearing in my mind what I was going to say next.

What was I going to say next?

I was going to say something to deflect the compliment. I was going to say anything that would deflect what she had just said. "Mama is...old? smarter than she is pretty? not beautiful?"

Instead, I smiled at her and said "Mama is so thankful for that compliment, bug. I love hearing that you think I am beautiful, it means so much to me that you tell me things that you appreciate about me." Because here is this fantastic, powerful, beautiful, creative, light-filled 10 year old who doesn't get that it's not ok to think that you are beautiful, that acknowledging physical beauty is fraught and full of connotations. And, at the very end of the day, she hears time and again that we look so much alike. Who is lying, then, if I deny her compliment, her or me?

I struggle with this question of beauty, the inclination for my girl to watch herself dancing in the mirror, the tossing of the mane of hair, the emphasis on her looks. She's confident across the board: smart brain, kind personality, giving heart, beautiful face. But there is this narrow line of humility that needs to run the border between confidence and arrogance that I feel as a parent I need to enforce, lest this get out of hand. Or is there? Perhaps it's just all my own conditioning now brought to roost in my shaping of this bright soul's opinion about herself. What am I supposed to do?

Years ago, a friend told me about an experience she had with two trusted and lovely friends. My friend is a smart, beautiful, clever, funny, hardworking and talented woman. At this stage in her life, she was already professionally successful in her mid-twenties, working hard and being recognized for the great things she brought to the table. If memory serves me, her friends were running a workshop about messages that women receive about themselves and wanted to work through an exercise where they each made a list of loving truths they believed about my friend. They then sat on either side of her and whispered these loving truths in each ear, one at a time. I think she told me that she made it through maybe 5 rounds before she could no longer stand the urge to reach up and shield her ears, finally asking them to stop, tears streaming down her face.

Maybe it was because we were in our mid-20s, but I sat nodding at her reaction, my skin prickling at the discomfort.

The truth is that I think women want nothing more to than to be truly seen by the people we love and who love us. We want to that inner light to rush to our eyes because we are able to be vulnerable. We want to feel that warm comfort of trust. We want to be beautiful, not only in the manifestation of someone digging our physical form (in whatever form that may be), but beautiful in the most all-encompassing way: heart, mind, soul and personality. Stop a woman on the street and pay her a compliment and watch the smile radiate from her face. These safe, single-serve intersections put a lift in anyone's stride that lasts hours. But go deep with a friend about how much you love and appreciate her, how you love how she walks in the world, how you think she's physically beautiful and watch her squirm or, typically, deny.

It seems the only way around this is exposure therapy: the relentless and targeted exposure of authentically admiring the beauty in the women we love. It's a text to your friend highlighting something that you admire. It's a phone call where you say, with your words, that you find something about her beautiful ("cute" has no space in this exercise...puppies and kittens are cute). It's the letter you write to tell her why you think her being on this earth matters to you, why her relationship with you matters or is important. And then there is the conversation over drinks, looking into her eyes (friend to friend, lover to lover, mother to daughter, etc), where you get to say these things and react to one another in a physical way.

Exposure to her own goodness, in varying degrees of intimacy, from someone she loves.

I had this sort of experience with a friend years ago, at a time in my life where I felt lost, alone, and less of myself than I had been in years. This friend made it his job to show me to myself, to bring me back to an understanding of what I could mean to people, to boost me back up on the path. This is his gift, a source of encouragement for many people I know. I also know he saved my life in many ways by this simple gift of sharing with me the bright light he saw in me.

So who is that 10 year old inside of you that all too quickly learned to stop trusting her belief in her own beauty? And how can you love and encourage that confident 10 year old in others? Because we all love the love, even if it's at different levels and with different layers of security keeping us safe. But it's good to start somewhere, even today.