Muchness and Light

And there has always been laughing, crying, birth, and dying.

My father-in-law died this week after a horrible, lengthy battle with Alzheimer's.  Yes, it's a blessing in a way, but it's still hard when someone you love dies, no matter what.

He was a sweet, kind man.  He was quiet and gentle but with a booming voice that seemed like it should've come from a radio announcer in the 1940s.  He lived a life peppered with remarkable, noteworthy tasks and accomplishments.  He was married for 41 years.  He had two children, plus two step-children, and six grandchildren.  He will be missed.  He was 84. 

DH's mom is 15 years younger than her husband, and my parents are both in their late 50's.  This is the first loss of a parent for either of us, which means it's also the first loss of a grandparent for my children. 

My younger son doesn't remember a time when Paw-paw wasn't sick and bed-ridden.  Thankfully, he has memories of his seeming lucid and smiling.  My older son does vividly remember his grandfather when he was healthy.  He remembers trips to the zoo and playing in the car with his grandparents, who would spend hours letting him pretend to drive. 

DH had time over the weekend to talk with the boys about what was coming, about how he was thankful to have had time to emotionally prepare himself for this loss, as best he could.  I think it was beneficial for the boys to get that talk with Dad.

When I told them last week that Paw-paw was gravely ill, they were sad and teary.  It had been coming for days, and we wanted them to be aware of what was happening.  When the morning came that I had to break the final news to them, they took it completely in stride.

It wasn't that they weren't saddened by the news.  DH and I had prepared them as best we could for what was coming, and I guess we did our job.  I'm sure there will be more tears in the time surrounding the funeral, but for now the boys are continuing on with their daily, summer boyhood.

My older son asked, though, "Why do people always say 'passed away' or 'gone on'?  Why can't they just say people died?  They die."

He's absolutely right.  We've been gentle in our sharing of information with the boys, letting them lead with questions and thoughts, trying not to overwhelm them with details.  There was no need for sugar-coating or euphemism with them.  They understand the cycle of life part as completely as they can at their young ages.

My son also asked why people get so sad when someone dies.  "If you believe in God and Heaven, then you believe you'll see them again one day.  If you don't, it's just what happens in life, and it happens to everyone.  What's there to be sad about?"

This is when I see that he doesn't have the life experience or emotional IQ to understand yet that grief is about the griever, not the deceased.  It's about the complication of memory and emotion and neurotransmitters, about the process of dealing with loss.  In some ways, I'm really thankful that the boys have made it this far into their burgeoning lives without knowing these things.  Grief is hard enough to process as an adult; I can't imagine what it would've been like to deal with it as a child, no matter how intelligent or mature I (or they) may have been.

What I do know is that DH and I will help them get through this, and vice versa.  The bond we have with our children is deep and strong.  They are relying on us to set the emotional tone for the next few days and weeks.  Knowing our sons are emotionally safe and secure within those bounds to be able to handle this loss will be reassuring.  And if any of us falters, there will be hand-holding and hugs—and a lot of love—to help us get through.

 

The world is scratching at my door.

I just finished proofreading the latest draft of my book.  I'd originally thought I would write about these things I wanted to tackle as non-fiction, but I later decided fictionalizing it would give me the freedom to cover some things in a better way. 

And I was right.

It allowed me to step outside of chronology and other constraints and to explore characters in ways I might not have otherwise been able to do.  Where one person in the book would be tied to a real person in my life, the characters could become amalgamous renditions of conversations and experiences.  I wasn't hamstrung by reality and found that I could be even more frank and honest than I'd originally thought possible. 

There are a lot of things in this piece that are real.  There are a lot that aren't.  I wrote a lot about what I knew and a little bit about what I didn't.  I turned it over to the inner circle for feedback and comment, which has so far been overwhelmingly positive.  Yes, these are people who know me well, but they also know I want their honest opinions.  I feel confident that I will get real, barely-tempered reaction from them.  That's why I chose the readers I did for this phase of the project.

What I also found was that I was pleased with what I've written.  Even though I see details and edits and things I want to change, I am happy with this work.  I can look at it and say, "It's good."  It was scary as hell at first, when I started to mark up my printed copy.  All of my niggling fears of not being good enough, or feeling like I had no right to write, all came rushing to the forefront of my mind.  My heart pounded, and I cried, thinking I was stupid to have ever thought I could do this. 

But as I calmed that and looked further, I found the energy and found the truth behind those words.  I found the places where my characters could say the things that I may have been afraid to say, both to others and to myself. 

I have no delusions that I've written the Great American Novel.  As much as I would love for this to be a smash hit when it's published (hopefully by the end of the summer), I know the statistical chances of that are pretty slim.  That's scary, and it's the kind of challenge that might have historically been so daunting that I backed down from it, in fear and apprehension that I couldn't succeed, that I would make a fool of myself if I carried through. 

And it's not that the trepidation is gone; it's just that I know I can do this.  And I want to do this.  Maybe for the first time in my life, it's a challenge that doesn't bore me, that excites me, that I can't wait to see through to the end.  It's not to prove a point to me or to anyone else.  It's just because it is.  It exists, and it deserves the chance to fly on its own, even if no one else ever sees that graceful flutter. 

So, it's coming.  Persona Non Grata will be here very, very soon.  There's still a lot of work to do, and I'm ready, methodically plodding through each step, trying carefully not to miss anything. 

And when it's done, I'm off and on to my next project.  I already know what it will be, though I'm holding back my own thoughts about it.  I can't start to focus on what's coming next until I can finish what's before me now.  I'm being careful to stay in this moment without worrying about the next.  I know there's something around the bend; I just can't look at it until I see every inch of this part of my path. 

View more gifts at Zazzle.
 

Well you're in and out and up and down and halfway in between.

Tiff and I had a chat this morning about my assertion that I am, at heart, a wallflower.

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," she said.

No, really, I am.  Okay, maybe not so much now, but historically?  Yes. 

At least, I always thought so. 

As a child, I was shy.  Not in a painful way, not so much so that I couldn't say my name in public or actually answer a direct question.  But I was slow to engage other people and tended to stand back.  In peer groups, I was almost always the last chosen for games—though it didn't help that I was a fat, out-of-district transplant, moved to a school with a gifted program.  I wasn't like my classmates, and I was generally happy that way.  I didn't socialize with them away from school, I didn't dress like they did, and I didn't think like they did.

In junior high, I had a few good friends, but I tended to stay on the outskirts.  Sometimes it was, again, because of my history of being generally unpopular.  Blending into a crowded hallway let me stay anonymously out of the line of middle-school-fire. 

When I got to high school, though, some of that changed.  It was a small magnet school with about 150 students across four grades.  We were all gifted outcasts who were encouraged to flaunt our eccentricities, and we did it with abandon.  RLC was a revelatory experience for virtually everyone who went there.  Most students found their identities within the walls of that old, mustard-colored building.  Some found they didn't really fit the amoebic mold of gifted eccentric and chose to return to their regularly scheduled programming, leaving RLC for a big, normal high school. 

Even then, though, I had an amazing talent for being able to go unnoticed.  I could wedge my way through a situation quietly and garner as little attention as I wanted.  Usually.  I really did learn at an early age when to keep my mouth shut—though I know some of you who read this will argue that point until the cows come home.  (You're all a bunch of contrarians anyway, so shush it.)  I can be sociable with almost anyone, but I can also be non-existent when it suits me. 

At least, I always thought so.

I'm an Amazon.  I'm 5'11 with broad shoulders and a loud, stomping step and a louder, projecting voice.  (Thank you, choir.)  I am often brash and bold and demanding, though usually with the sweetest of intentions and persuasions. 

If I'm in a very crowded situation—a store or a show, for instance—I can maneuver quickly and quietly through that sea of people and get to where I need to be, with very little flourish.  I don't have to be pushing and demanding to navigate the crowd.  Hence, my wallflower super power.

It occurred to me as I was talking to Tiff that maybe I'm a little more foreboding than I thought.  Maybe my general size and aspect make people just get the fuck out of my way.  When I'm in that situation, I tend to stand very tall, shoulders back, tits forward like a shield.  Maybe that countenance is enough to make people want to step aside.  I can smile and say please and excuse me, but I sometimes don't.  I'm incredibly adept at giving the get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way look, and people usually do.  I often don't have to say anything at all.  They just move. 

I'm much, much more extroverted now than I used to be.  It's taken me years to grow into that.  But I still have times when I like to skirt the edges, to slide my way along the wall and go unnoticed.  Whether people really aren't noticing or they're looking away for some other reason, I have no idea.  It doesn't really matter, either.  I'll still use that ability, as needed, to maneuver along my path.  Sometimes it's better than bulldozing my way through. 

What I don't want to do is find myself paralyzed, stock still, waiting for someone or something else to come along and make me move.  It happens every so often, the fear of my life and my surroundings freezing me into submission.  That's when I have to feel my way carefully, inching along slowly, extending my vines blindly until I can find the sun. 

 

Whatcha gonna do? Gonna live my life.

I am a needy little thing.  I suppose we all are sometimes, but I have this real issue of seeing the difference in what I want and what I need. 

It's not things like food or clothes or even shoes—though I still argue that my delicate girlie psyche needs glittery shoes from time to time.  I get understand how to tell what's necessary for sustenance, what bare minimum is required for maintenance. 

Sometimes, the things I want become so important to me that I turn them, emotionally, into things I need.  Maybe they're things I just love for their aesthetics or their irony or the sheer delight I feel when I think of them.  They can be small or large, inexpensive or pricey.  And maybe they're not things at all, but ideas or experiences or understandings that are so glittery and poignant to me that they distract me from anything and everything else.

When I latch onto the idea of something so attractive, I can lose sight of whether it's a want or a need.  I may know the difference in my head, but I will almost certainly miss the delineation in my heart.  Once I become emotionally attached, I crave the rush of serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin and whatever other neurotransmitters flood my brain when I think about the object of my affection. 

My humming brain is distractible and noisy.  It's filled constantly with a dozen different, sideways thoughts.  If I were to take a mental snapshot and tell you what I was thinking about at any given time, you'd probably ask, "What the hell is wrong with you, Stephanie?  How are those things even connected?"

To anyone else, there probably would be no connection, no commonality to the multitasks in my mind.  I always understand how I hopscotched from one thought to the next.  It's kind of like Six Degrees of Stephanie, trying to figure out how I managed to jump from one synapse to another. 

But when something is so persuasively enticing that it becomes the object of my singular focus... watch out!  That's when I can become my most dogged, determined to get whatever it is that I can't forget.  I will persuade myself and anyone else that this thing I want is so important to me that I can't live without it, that it's something I have to see to fruition. 

It's a power I can use for both good and evil, certainly.  Sometimes it's as beneficial to those around me as it is to myself.  But other times, no one but me can see the importance of my obtaining my lofty-if-insane goal.

If I don't get my way, I can be petulant and difficult, like a child who wanted the big scoop of ice cream, not the kiddie cone.  Sometimes when I get the big scoop, it falls off the cone, leaving a dripping mess of Rocky Road down the front of my pretty dress.  My petulance will likely turn to smugness, over-confident satisfaction that I still got my way, even if it didn't turn out like anyone wanted it to. 

Every so often, though, I get what I want in the way that I need, and the satisfaction is exquisite.  All of those neurotransmitters flood my brain again, setting off a field of Pop Rocks landmines, synapses sparking and lighting in unadulterated joy.  There may be a letdown when the pops and crackles stop, but it will be brief.  It won't be long before I've moved on to some other obsession. 

And no matter what, I will always have the memory of fulfillment, and I will tap into that when I need a boost, reminding myself that sometimes my dauntless determination is worth the internal drama and the overwhelming anticipation of achievement.