This Mother’s Day in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but before the fog rolled in on the end of a windy afternoon on the sandy edges of California. Folding our beach blanket, edge to edge, while unbeknownst to us, my husband took photographs and wrote our names in the sand . . .
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”
On this, the penultimate day of a month long writing challenge, I am resorting to cheating, and I am going to plagiarize a post I wrote not too long ago. The nice folks over at WEGO are asking for some self-congratulatory smugness, having completed (almost) thirty posts in thirty days, giving us free reign to wax lyrical about our own awesomeness. Well. Having had the misfortune to once work with a self-proclaimed guru whose oft-repeated pitch, seriously, was about an ability to channel dreams into reality, I don’t care much for braggadocio. Still, I think my versatile blogger award story is worth telling again. Challenge accepted. For the 29th time.
Last July, I got lost on the Internet. As you do. On the way back Home, I bumped into Lesley Richardson, a self-proclaimed unpublished writer. Before long, I discovered that, like me, Lesley has badly behaved hair that she has learned to embrace, a husband, a beautiful teenage daughter, and a cat. She has just turned fifty, with me not too far behind her. We immediately bonded over the shared trauma of life in 1970s Northern Ireland, not because of The Troubles, mind you, but because we had curly hair before a collection of brilliant minds, in my mind deserving of at least a Nobel award, invented products and tools to tame our stressed tresses. We were relentlessly compared to Crystal Tipps, some us still bearing that handle well into our university years. You could be forgiven for assuming the content of Lesley’s blog is a bit questionable: Standing Naked at a Bus Stop, but the story behind the title is that the mere thought of people reading her writing makes Lesley feel as though they have caught her naked … and standing. At a bus stop.
Such a condition might require a professional intervention, given that Lesley aspires to be a successful novelist, which, by definition, would involve people reading her writing and thereby making her uncomfortable. People like me. Now, let me be quick to point out that Lesley has an agent, and she has even written a novel, which was probably fabulous. She’s been in an anthology too, so it’s not as if she’s technically “unpublished.” And then there is her blog. I love it, even though she neglects it for weeks at a time causing me to wonder if she might actually be “on assignment.” At a bus stop. On the road to Helen’s Bay. The next time I go back home, I will definitely be looking for Lesley. When we meet, I’m convinced we’ll wonder how we managed avoiding each other for the first fifty years of our lives. The other day, I received from the lovely Lesley, a Versatile Blogger Award. Hooray! Between us, the versatility part is a bit of a stretch, bringing to mind the kind of nimbleness required by your Pilates instructor, but I’ll gladly take it. When you’ve been around for almost half-a-century, shameless self-promotion can be forgiven. Especially if you haven’t been promoted by yourself or anyone else for several years. In fact, right when I heard from Lesley, I was shedding the cloak of self-doubt that is the mandatory uniform of a toxic, dysfunctional, and largely joyless workplace where sacred cows and large egos leave little room for anyone else. Margarita Tartakovsky calls self-doubt Creativity’s No. 1 Crusher. No argument from me.
Anyone who has ever worked in such a place knows that every day you don the mantle of self-doubt, it feels heavier, like armor. Why would anyone want to show up every day? Well, maybe there’s an upside in the very near future, like the departure date of the self-proclaimed guru who’s been brought in to shake things up. Or maybe you have the health, finances, and internal fortitude to weather the lies and manipulation, the passive aggressive pettiness, and the collective aversion to honesty. Otherwise, you deserve so much more than living minute by minute, always waiting for the other shoe to fall, and I recommend running at high speed as far away as possible. Once out of their sights, shed the armor. And breathe as yourself, once again. Today, I am out of that uniform – lighter, brighter, and – just ask Lesley – award-worthy.
My lovely Versatile Blogger Award has arrived right as I am poised to begin Act Two. Scene I opens with me testing the waters of versatility and moving away from the edges where I have had an unfortunate tendency to denigrate myself so people might like me or give me credit when it’s due me or even feel a bit sorry for me because of The Cancer that has sat like a great pink elephant for the past eighteen months among people who were entirely and shockingly nonplussed by it. I am not proud to admit that I have allowed such people to dismiss me as “insignificant” or less, when the nobler self-respecting thing would have been to just turn around and walk towards people who might raise a glass to me, interested in what I have to say or what I think about a thing or an idea.
Pat Roy, of Learning Forward – The International Non-Profit Association of Learning Educators, once said to me over lunch, “You put a good person in a bad culture, and the culture wins every time. Every time.” I remember thinking this couldn’t always be the case, but I think Pat is probably right. I vaguely recall a power point slide in her presentation, featuring a little stick figure completely overwhelmed by a Tsunami wave. Or to put it another way, “Culture eats structure for breakfast.” Think about it. You may have a million dollar idea like the one my best friend and I have been mulling, albeit fruitlessly, for the best part of a decade. All well and good, but if the culture does not value the creativity, risk-taking, and vision of the individual behind it, the idea will be stifled or scoffed at, and you will be forced to bury it deep in your pocket and stand in the corner with your tail between your legs, asking yourself if you might possibly be stupid.
I have not yet read the versatile Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. I probably will, given all the hoopla surrounding it. In truth, a more accurate assessment of what I’m doing is leaning back – for a better view of the situation, to listen better, to take stock, and to figure out – finally – what matters.
The Versatile Blogger Award reminds me of those chain letters we used to pass around when we were teenagers, convinced that bad luck would befall us should we break the chain. So far be it from me to break the chain begun by Lesley’s Versatile Blogger Award. Now for the rules I must nominate 15 blogs for a Versatile Blogger Award, and regale you with seven random things about myself. These should probably be true.
Previously, I have recognized bloggers who advocate tirelessly for those of us living lives altered immeasurably by breast cancer. Their writing is frequently highlighted by Marie Ennis O’Connor, another Irish friend I met while stumbling around the Internet. In her weekly round-up at Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer blog, you will find some of the most versatile women I know. Living out loud lives formerly untouched by cancer, their resolve has emboldened me to say no to pink ribbons and platitudes and one-size-fits-all treatments for a disease that should have been obliterated long ago. Thus, they write and fight for a different way. Versatile, indeed.
This time, my nominations for a Versatile Blogger Award go to an entirely different group of writers who make it easy to step into their worlds, their words strung together in ways that remind me you can always find your way home. Each of these is well worth a visit. Enjoy:
In a moment of mild rebellion, I gave my ironing board to Goodwill. I couldn’t quite part with the iron, but that day is on the horizon. This is of some significance given that I was raised in a house where everything was ironed. Even socks, tea towels, and dish cloths.
My best friend, Amanda, is convinced that the teenage version of me is re-asserting herself. I used to get up at five o’clock every morning. Now, I can’t imagine why on earth I would entertain a meeting before 9:30AM. How fortunate am I to have found a new job where, apparently, lots of other people feel the same way.
I will never not listen to my gut again. Recently, someone I admire, asked me why on earth I once upon a time even considered accepting a job when everybody told me I was insane to do so. My husband, my best friend, my parents, people I respect in the field, and, most importantly, my gut, all told me to run as far away as possible from it. All those red flags waving in my face, and I ignored every one of them. I chose not to listen to my gut. I was stupid. I forgot to ask, “How will this job be good for me?” Lesson learned.
I have rediscovered the sweet tooth I had as a child. My grandmother used to make sugar sandwiches for me, great door-steps of white bread sandwiches filled with creamy, country butter made crunchy by caster sugar. Once, my parents left me with granny while they took an excursion to Derry city with my aunt and uncle from America. While I played outside, she made the mistake (or maybe not; she adored me) of leaving three lemon meringue tarts to cool on the window sill. In no time, there I was on my tiptoes, starting out by just picking ever so gingerly at the edges of the mile-high white mouth watering meringue topping, hoping nobody would notice, but I couldn’t stop myself and devoured every bit of it, rendering the tarts bald, shiny yellow circles atop rings of shortcrust pastry. Granny just thought it was funny.
While I don’t have the phenomenal memory I thought I had (see previous post) I can still recite great chunks of poetry from school and entire episodes of the BBC’s Fawlty Towers. My brother and I are also given to exchanging quips and profanities from Goodfellas or shrewd insights from movies based on scripts by Nora Ephron or Willy Russell. This morning it was that scene from Educating Rita when Frank realizes that, like Mary Shelley, he may have created a monster.
I just don’t understand American Football, basketball, or baseball. Any team sport, really. Over the years, scores of well-meaning Americans have tried to explain their version of a footie match to me, but I don’t get it. I especially don’t understand why football takes such an inordinately long time. It is much easier to go to the mall instead. I watch bits of the Super Bowl – the National Anthem and the half-time show, but only to see if the National Anthem person will hit the high notes and if the half-time show will feature rockers like Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, or Bob Seger or any other band that would be considered quintessentially, American. These I understand very well. The game? No. I suppose running is almost a sport. It makes sense to me, even on a treadmill where you don’t go anywhere. I like baseball and have elevated it to mythic status because of W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe which I wish I had read before watching Field of Dreams (I always read the book before watching the movie because I like to cast the characters myself) and, of course, The Natural. Were I ever to teach English Literature again, I would do a whole unit on baseball and literature. It would include Line Drives, a beautiful anthology that transforms baseball into poetry as Bill Littlefield explains:
“We wait for baseball all winter long, or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that’s what poets do, too.”
My favorite movie is Coming Home. Made by Hal Ashby in 1978, it was the first movie to tackle Vietnam in a way that was honest and human. In it, Jane Fonda, portrays Sally Hyde, wife of an army captain who has been deployed overseas. While he is away, she volunteers in the hospital, where she meets and falls in love with a Vietnam vet, played by Jon Voight. I like to think Sally and I would have been friends, as she educates herself about the war and what happens to the men coming home. Today, it has to be said, I am utterly depressed that Jon Voight, in real life, appears to be absolutely nothing at all like Luke, the Vietnam veteran he portrays with such vulnerability and humanity. Then again, he is an actor. He even won an Oscar for his performance, over Robert de Niro’s Michael in The Deerhunter, another of my favorite movies, and the venerable Laurence Olivier. The Coming Home soundtrack is essentially a time capsule of life from 1965 – 1968, with no covers. Because a soundtrack was never released, my brother once took the time to recreate it on a CD for me some years ago. This was shortly after we accepted that the days of the Mix Tape were over. I still have that CD, and I cannot listen to Tim Buckley’s Once I Was without thinking of the final scene of the movie, and all those young men who died in Vietnam or came home broken.:
For extra credit, here are the tunes from the soundtrack, but not in the right order:
Social media has enriched my life in ways I never thought possible, while at the same time snuffing out a way of life for so many of us. I will always treasure the hand-written letters that also served as envelopes. Trimmed in red, white, and blue, those sky-blue single sheets, delicate as onion skin, were sturdy enough to make the journey par avion from Ireland to the other side of America. With only one sheet of thin paper, we had to be economical with our words, shaping our tidings with only the very best.
In school, I filled blue jotters with words that weren’t my own, but I learned by heart from favorite poems carefully copied in a fountain pen full of Quink. Love medicine on every page.
Before Skype, I treasured long-distance phone calls with my mother and my friends, usually during the weekend when we could be less circumspect over the time difference and the cost per minute. Before the Olde Antrim Photos page appeared on Facebook recently, now with 480 members all feverishly posting pictures and recollections of childhoods that have grown more idyllic over the passage of time – before all of that, those of us far from home relied on the pleasant interruptions of sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of home so achingly familiar, we fell simply and softly into conversation, all the comforting colloquialisms helping us pick up where we left off a lifetime ago. Unlike the phone or Skype which brings my mother to me whenever I need her, as though she is sitting across the table from me at lunchtime, it is the letter, with its faint fragrance of home that I have always found superior, because I could hold it in my hands.
Now, I cannot imagine a world without Twitter, its sheer speed and instantaneous access to the information I need. Bite-size chunks or, if I need more, connections to charts and graphs, studies and reports, to newspapers from every corner of the globe, to communities of writers, teachers, cooks, politicians, breast cancer patients, scholars, musicians, poets, readers et cetera.
“Whatever happened to Tuesday and so slow, Going down the old mine with a transistor radio?”
Van Morrison asked in 1967. Almost my entire life later, he is singing in the background of my home far away from home, The Days Before Rock and Roll, and I am a teenager, once again sitting by my bedroom window, turning knobs on that old transistor, circling through Athlone and Budapest on the way to Radio Luxembourg.
It is National Poetry Month, and I no longer have to search through anthologies to find a favorite poem, or copy it out line by line in a book that will become a personal collection to lean on when I am weary. At my fingertips, at lightning speed, I can find any poem I need. I have needed Damian Gorman‘s “Devices of Detachment,” often throughout the years, especially when I am reminded of the extraordinary coping skills of ordinary people, revealed through their words, how we can turn a phrase, a word, a hint, around and around until we have successfully distanced ourselves from the subject. Then, we can feel no longer responsible or accountable. Terrorism. Cancer. The Wars on both. How well we use words and phrases to sanitize and glamorize the suffering and pain, to hide the horror and heartbreak so often visited upon ordinary people going about their daily lives.
While ruminating on the complexities of cancer and the politics of its lexicon, I rediscovered Damian Gorman and his spare but searing suggestion that the bombs and bullets, the “suspect incendiary devices” all too familiar in 1980s Northern Ireland were far less deadly than the “devices of detachment” its people used to distance themselves from the violence. Aware of it, yet so removed. When we think we need to be, we are all very good at “detachment.”
Devices of Detachment by Damian Gorman
“I’ve come to point the finger
I’m rounding on my own
The decent cagey people
I count myself among …
We are like rows of idle hands
We are like lost or mislaid plans
We’re working under cover
We’re making in our homes
Devices of detachment
As dangerous as bombs.
Sometimes when I need my mother but she’s out shopping or the time difference doesn’t allow it, I turn to Seamus Heaney, the Nobel poet whose poetry so easily scoops me up and into the County Derry countryside where he grew up, just down the road from my mother. Recently, in an act of mild rebellion, I gave my ironing board to Goodwill. I couldn’t quite part with the iron, but that day is on the horizon. This was no small act, given that I was reared in County Antrim by a mother who ironed everything, including socks and dishcloths. Nonetheless, when I close my eyes and picture her, she is not as she was just this afternoon on Skype, inches away from me on a computer screen; rather, she is standing at the ironing board in our kitchen, in the house my dad renovated from top to bottom during my childhood. As plain as day, I can see her setting the steaming iron in its stand, while she shakes out one of my father’s shirts. As she resumes “the smoothing,” she is telling me a story she has told before or reminding me not to wish my life away because I’ll be a long time dead, and invariably, she is reminding me to consider the lilies.
Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.
To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
In the mid-1970s, I was a bored teenager, convinced there was nothing to do on a Saturday morning in Antrim. But if the recent activity on the Olde Antrim Photos Facebook page is anything to go by, we had the kind of extended childhood we hope for our own children. If the weather was fine, we played rounders and football, and we built forts with great mounds of cut grass on the field between our house and Lough Neagh. We jumped off the roof of the maisonette garages into the barley field and played hide and go seek until we were called in for our dinner.
If we stayed inside because it was raining, which happened frequently – it was Ireland after all – we could read our comics, talk on the phone as long as the shared line was available, or watch Saturday morning television which offered three channels: BBC1, BBC2, and UTV. I think we were able to pick up RTE. I vaguely recall watching The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Joe 90, and The Banana Splits and then something happened. At 9:30 one Saturday morning in 1976, The Multi-Colored Swap Shop exploded on our tiny television screens with three hours of unheard-of live TV that featured pop music, cartoons, roving reporters who might show up near where we lived, live call-ins, and even a kid-friendly version of the news. Hosted by a Radio One breakfast program host, Noel Edmonds, who now hosts the UK version of “Deal or No Deal,” the main premise of the show was that children could call in and “make a swap.” Noel would answer on his red rotary dial phone, and the kid on the other end of the line would describe what it was that he wanted to swap and the item he hoped for in exchange, so you had fairly low-tech transactions – a tennis rackets traded for an alarm clock, a doll house for a board game, vinyl records for different vinyl records. The best swaps made it on to the Top Ten Swap Board, and if you were one of the lucky kids who happened to be in the vicinity of Swaporama, you could swap something in person.
Day 15 of The 2013 Health Activist Writers Challenge takes me back to those times when I was tempted to call Noel Edmonds to “make a swap.” Today, however, I am swapping stories with Katie, in a Guest Post Swap Day, to learn more about Type 1 diabetes, while she learns more about breast cancer.
Katie chronicles her thoughts and feelings on living with Type 1 diabetes over at her blog, Diabetic Advocate. Until WEGO Health connected me with Katie, pictured here appropriately enough on St. Patrick’s Day, I have had a very limited knowledge of it. It made me realize just how easy it is to forget that disease and suffering comes in many life-altering forms and that we can never underestimate the power of community.
Yvonne and I are participating in the HAWCM challenge and have been paired up to swap blogs for the day. I don’t know if any of you reading this have a personal connection or understanding of Type 1 diabetes. What I do know is that if you are following Yvonne’s blog you are part of a community of people that gathers for support, love, empathy, information and camaraderie. When thought of in this way, blogs about diabetes and cancer are quite similar.
Living with a chronic illness or a life threatening disease is exhausting, scary, challenging, never-ending, surprising and life altering. Luckily, for people living with diabetes there is something called the Diabetes Online Community (DOC). The DOC is a compilation of every person who blogs about diabetes. Discovering this community about a year ago literally changed my life.
I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes on Thursday, October 26, 1995. I was 12 years old and looking forward to trick or treating in 5 days (btw – there should be a rule that no one can be diagnosed with diabetes before or on the following holidays: Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving or Christmas). Living with diabetes never made me feel incredibly depressed or anxious; however, about 15 years after diagnosis I started experiencing major burnout. I don’t know what flipped this switch, but suddenly getting through each day was incredibly challenging. Food had become an enemy, and taking insulin suddenly gave me anxiety. I felt lost, hopeless, scared and alone.
Out of desperation, one night I started Googling about Type 1 diabetes and anxiety and by the grace of God I found blogs like Kerrie’s Six Until Me and Texting My Pancreas. I spent hours that night laughing and crying. It was the first time in many years since being diagnosed that I felt there were hundreds, no, thousands, of other Type 1 diabetics and they were all going through the same thing as me.
After that night I started reading blogs every day and eventually launched my own. I learned new tricks, discovered new technologies, and most importantly, received encouragement and support to keep fighting and to not give up. My health, both physical and mental, is stronger today because of the DOC.
I am just one blog out of thousands, but I am part of a larger community of people who have found health advocacy an incredibly important part of their journey to good health. I truly believe that no matter what challenges you face in life, there are people out there going through the same thing. I encourage you to reach out, ask for help and you will discover a whole new family just waiting to welcome you with open arms.
Thank you for taking time to learn a bit about me and about the DOC. I wish you health and peace on your journey.
