When I was 10, a neighbor knocked on our door. She sat in my mother’s kitchen all polyester grief. She told my mother about a broken down car that was at the shop. A broke down car is and is not a metaphor. She clearly wanted a ride to the market, but was afraid to ask. I watched the way she moved her mouth like a hint. It made me furious. Why didn’t she just come right out and tell my mother directly what she wanted? I left the room disgusted at how a person could be so weak. A half hour later, I smiled a greedy smile at the slope of my neighbor’s back as she walked down the street to her own home. I crept down the stairs and watched my mother quietly humming, washing out the dirty tea cups in the sink. I thought my mother the most beautiful thing.

My mother used to tell a story about my brother and I growing up at Christmas time. She liked to explain how my brother never asked for anything. Brian always believed in working hard for every thing he got. My mother would extol with obvious pride. I do not fault her in her storytelling. It is true. My brother is this very sort of amazing. Always has been. Enter the foil. Apparently, I was the opposite. I would sit with the Christmas catalogue and circle entire pages. I want this, and this, and this. The other children on the block called me Princess. When I hear my mother tell these stories, I marvel at how I could have been that little girl. Sometimes, I miss her.

All grown up, I once followed a homeless man down a street begging for him to get in my car so I could give him a thermos of hot tea and a blueberry muffin. The more he resisted, the more I was desperate to help him. There was something about his stubborn refusal that had me quite convinced that no one in the world could save him but me. Everyone needs. Some of us just need a lot more than others.

I am constantly trying to pin down my own definitions of self, but self is slippery. I grew up manipulated and angry. I grew up with the enormity of love. I spent my teenage years with an indefeasible loneliness and an inability to speak. I am constantly told that as an adult I talk too much. I am a woman surrounded by people. Sometimes all I do is ache to simply be left alone. All definitions are hazy.

Need is this strange thing, isn’t it? Look around and you see it, here, everywhere. Blogging only magnifies it. Sometimes I feel like we are this human circus. The fat lady charging a buck fifty to let the audience marvel in awe and revulsion at our skin. Some of us just smoke and mirrors, bravery like the man who stares down the open mouth of a lion and dares the crush of teeth on the vulnerability of his own head. Only most times the audience is unaware that the ferocious beast has been drugged into submission. Needs get tamed.

I do not know what I need or if I actually need anything at all. I am no longer the little girl who can turn the slick page of a Sears catalogue and have happiness materialize. I’m not a sullen teenager, either. I’ve been thinking a lot about that long ago neighbor. Why was I so angry with her? I think the answer to what I am asking might be found in the washing of dirty dishes and the broken down car that is and is not a metaphor.

I am not whole. I am not fractured.

I’ve been losing weight. It is not intentional. I just forget to eat. My husband fills my book bag with cheese sandwiches and cups of chocolate pudding that I misplace somewhere between leaving the house and stumbling into the faculty room. It is like my teeth are too lazy to chew, my hands too busy to forage. I have been subsisting on bottles of diet Pepsi and random snatches of trail mix. I’m getting thin. Every couple of days I have to reintroduce myself to myself in bathroom mirrors fogged with steam. What was once curved and fleshy is now pronounced, hard and definite.

Why hello there hipbones. Haven’t seen you in awhile.

When we were 13, my friends and I invented a game. We would swish, swish, swish our hips parallel to the pavement. The goal was to count how many times the tipping of our adolescent gravity could evoke the honking of car horns racing by on the two-lane road. We were innocent girls let loose across the gravel summoning grown-up danger from the safe concrete of sidewalks and the cut of freshly mowed lawns. We never really wanted or expected the pickup trucks to stop.

Is there even a point to me telling you this story? Probably.

***

I told myself that I would stop blogging. On Halloween, I took my children trick or treating and then quietly crept up into my parent’s bathroom and sobbed. My son is struggling. I sit here worrying constantly about words like evaluation and denial. I finished two pieces of writing for publication this week. All I can think is what good is pride when your three-year old son trembles in the backseat of his grandmother’s car before pre-school, and once there becomes anger personified?

I do not have any answers.

I was going to stop blogging. Many of you wrote that I should not leave. You said you would hate to see me go. For a long time, I was convinced that didn’t matter. I constantly surprise myself.

I have only just found you, a few of you wrote in comments and private e-mails. You make me feel a little less alone.

There is such kindness in your words. I like to picture you, a woman in a nightgown that replaces her three-piece business suit. You nurse a bottle of beer or a tepid cup of tea in front of a computer screen that holds my words.  Are you a man with a casual sweater who is tired of constantly straightening his own tie? Here. Let me loosen it for you.

When I sat down to blog this post, I thought I would ask you stupid questions.
When you look at me, what is it that you see?
Please do not answer.

I worry that you will read this and imagine me quite sad. I am sometimes. Mostly. I am not. Really.
My life is full of mortgage and marriage, defeating scary monsters hiding in the closets of my children, and the mirror on my bathroom wall.

Sure. I am losing weight. But, it is not intentional. I simply forget to eat. Every couple of days I have to reintroduce myself to brand new kneecaps and the wings of newly drawn shoulder blades, the former curve of me now pronounced and sharp. The terrain of my body is a constant discovery.

This blog is another body. One of words.
I think it would be nice for it to remain soft and fleshy, undefined.

At least for awhile. If that would be okay with all of you.

I lied about being raped. How is that for an opening line? This is what is true, and what is not true. This is my story.

Awhile back, I wrote this post. I wrote it pretty early in my bloggy life. I do not know what came over me in writing this. But, I did it. It was like cleaving ice with an axe. Everything that had been dormant and frozen inside of me, split. As terrifying as it was to write that, to wait with my head between my knees, rocking back and forth, anticipating that first comment to arrive with either support or indignation, it was liberating too. I told my truth online. I took the first step in owning it. That post was seminal in the fact that it brought me here, to this ordinary space, where I recognize my own art. Oh, how long it has taken me to say that my history is more than scar.

For years I told everyone, my husband included, a lie. I told people that I was raped by a stranger who shared a cab with me. I needed to tell my story, but I was afraid of the true version. I was afraid the real story made me culpable. I was the one drinking. I was the one who got kicked out of that damn bar. Didn’t that make me an accomplice, willing participant, whore?

In writing the past down, sharing the vague memory of two men in a parking lot, how I woke up the next day with my underwear missing, and an ache between my legs, a foggy black hole where my memory should be, I was able to move forward and share that painful history with the people I love in my real life. I was able to see that no matter what I did, or did not say or do that night, that I was too drunk to give consent. I wrote those words down, and claimed the reality of that experience. It was not my fault.

Why am I telling you this, now? Well, I’ve been thinking about sharing this story at BlogHer. I’m going next week, and I’ll be speaking on a panel about the Transformational Power of Blogging. I want to sit on that panel and let you see that blogging with dignity means forgiving yourself, loving yourself, knowing that your words are enough.

Please stop worrying about the shoes you are wearing, or the size of your waist, the number of blogrolls that link you, put the focus where it belongs, on the power of your own language. You determine your own worth, no matter if your content is cats, technology, food, humor, Mommyblogging, or anything in between. You determine your own value.

I deem myself worthy. Do you? I’d love for you to stop by my panel and tell me. I’d love for you to stumble across me in the hotel lobby, or random hall, and share your life as poem, sing your history as spiritual song.  

I believe that blogging can transform you life, if you let it.  Has blogging transformed my life? My god, yes! It is through blogging that I learned to understand and accept my own narrative. Blogging is the accumulation of all of our stories, all that passes between us in posts and comments, in private e-mails, Facebook, and Twitter. All that we learn, all that we are.

I want to share this story, my story, so that maybe one person sitting out there in the audience hearing it, or you sitting at home reading it, realize. No matter the past you carry in the deep pockets of your own flesh, you have the right to lay it down. We are all scarred. We are all human. I just want you to know that there is someone out there who will understand. There are people that are listening.

I am one of them.

Is blogging a radical act?

This question is often asked in regards to Mommy blogging. This one has tattoos and listens to Wheezer. She breast-fed during rock concerts. She likes to kick back on Saturday night with a pint of tequila when the babies are snuggled safely in bed. Are those moms somehow more radical than the chick with the high-waisted jeans and argyle sweater who snuggles little Susie or Johnny gentle in a crib and then prays fervently in the living room at her weekly bible study?  What about all us Moms who fall somewhere in the murky inbetween? What about the bloggers who are male, or who don’t have or want children? Am I really suppose to believe that I am so very different from all of them?

Sometimes I have to ask my husband to take the babies, carry them away someplace where I can not hear the screams, whines, and gnashing of toddler teeth.

Haven’t we all been a person in desparate need of a time out? I may be tired of tying another shoe or reading Good Night Moon for the fourteenth time, but that does not mean I have the market cornered on exasparation. Bloggers have lovers, and pets, and bosses, and friends, and cheap furniture that comes with directions in languages they do not understand to keep them on their own ledges of anxiety.

This does not make us bad-ass or bad people. I’m not even sure it makes us radical. It just makes us ordinary and alike. I dare you to find any mother who has not wished to go back to her care-free childless days, even if only for a stolen hour. This is the experience of all mothers, our experiences as people are similar too. We just create arbitrary divisions.

I think division is a result of marketing and fear.  A good deal of blogging involves creating a persona and then attaching that persona to a tribe. That tribe supports one another and gains power by how visible it is in the blog world. The fear comes into play when we start allowing our blogging notoriety to be the yardstick by which we define our own worth. Things sure do get dicey then. I wonder if the wars between bloggers would dissipate if the competition for money and comments faded away? How radical it really would be if blogging was a mirror of our own self-perception not the machine we use to create a sense of self-importance, instead.  

For me, radical writing is reflection.

Blogging can be the antithesis of reflection. When we allow ourselves to be sucked in by the media machine, we risk losing a sense of our own voice. How many bloggers shut down their blogs when faced with a negative comment? How many bloggers write with the fear of their audience’s reaction in mind? How many bloggers turn their backs on one another in the face of disagreement?

Why are we so afraid of someone telling us they think we are wrong? When we do write a post that we feel teeters on controversial, do we have to disclaimer it with titles like, This will be the post that causes me to lose all my readers?  The irony is that those posts are usually not explosive or revelatory and therefore just read like another marketing technique.

I think social networking has created the monster of carefully guarded photo-shopped identity. We can gain accolades for the witty blurbs we leave on our about-me pages. We gather up followers on twitter like greedy fat kids let loose in the candy store, and measure ourselves by our pseudo-sexual banter. We try and define ourselves with blog names and blogrolls and strive to push ourselves higher and higher up on Google’s search page. But, what is the cost of this?

For some, the cost might be popularity. For some, the cost is honest disclosure. For others, there is no cost because blogging is something different, something more.  

There are writers who are seamless in straddling the divide. They aspire to be read and found. They have lush evocative words, or humor that causes us to laugh aloud in an otherwise empty room. They are not afraid to lay their heartbreaking human frailties quietly on the page. These writers are unique and individual. Theses bloggers do not worry about any arbitrary rules other than following their own voices, and sharing in the cacophony of comments, great or small, that fill their pages. These are the type of writers who I believe are defining blogging as radical.  This is the type of blogger that I aspire to be.

How about you? What kind of blogger would you define yourself as? Tell me some of the reasons why you think people should read you. Or, maybe should not.

(I’m not looking for modesty here. Please don’t be afraid to boldly tell me all the reasons why your blog kicks ass. I really want to know how YOU define YOU.) 

We do not hold hands. We do not press our tongues together as the house lights dim. Our bodies keep their boundaries in these side by side seats. Your side popcorn and Diet Coke. My side Junior mints and water. When you ask for me to share, I do it begrudgingly. I like my candy all my own.

During the film, you lean over into my territory and you whisper,

Hey, why don’t you squeeze me some fresh juice in the mornings like this here Kate?

I am all straight-faced when I reply,

Be happy to, dear, just as soon as you look as hot as Leo.

I do not have to check your profile to know that you are laughing.

Later on in the car we analyze the characters’ motivations. Who was more sympathetic? Her need for something other than babies and tin-can trash in straight as narrow lines, against his need to believe the lie she mimes as he draws her a sketch on the cloth linen napkin of their morning after, this is all heavily debated.  

We both agree that it is a draw. Both heroes and villains.

Your hand shakes itself across the console. It finds the waiting warmth of mine. 

We are driving another road. Now, the kids are tucked tight in their car seats, asleep.

If we never achieved anything more than this, would it be enough? 

You have seen me struggle the past few weeks with my voice. I beg you day after day to take the kids out into the yard while I try to find the thread of this story. I am desparate to claim ownership of this slice of past and it makes me frustrated and short with the present. 

I need to write it down. I need someone to hear it. I need this to truly matter.

This is the mantra I repeat, even in my sleep.

There is not always room for you in this dreaming. But, there you always are.

 Even when I push you off to the periphery you are always at its core.

Would this be enough for me?  Daughter. Wife. Mother. Sister. Lover. Your Best Friend.  

My answer to your question is simple.

Everything that has ever mattered to me is right here in this car.

You smile and shake your head.

When we get home, you better get that fine ass of yours up to that computer and write it down.

This is me becoming. This is a testament to what we are, not a revolution baby, an evolution, quiet and more powerful by far.  

I have always been prone to aimless wandering, lazy-centric circles in spiral notebooks that should have held the sum of mathematical equations all lined up in ram-rod straight rows. I could never get my mind around the rigidity of numbers, pretending instead that the shape of all those open-curved twos in my algebra textbooks were leaping frogs. Eight times all those hump-backed amphibians let loose across the landscape of my page, squared, only amounted to a failing grade on my report card. What good does this imagining do me when in the real world I still can’t figure out how much less the shirt in my hand is going to cost me minus 25 percent?

I have no head for numbers. I tell this to the man who marries me. This is my way of begging his forgiveness for the impracticality of my degree in literature, the one that we will have to spend the next 10 years paying off in small increments.  What do I have to show for my knowledge of the functions of an arc, except for a proclivity towards sun-splayed floral comforters on king size beds and long days spent making love to literature?

Poetry?

There was a moment lost somewhere before this, a moment I am trying to recapture.  

I am going to be a writer

I tell this to my college advisor. I emphasize each word, as if just saying them aloud could suddenly transport me to my Manhattan rent-controlled apartment, a cramped loft I would share with four other women. We would sit around all hairy-legged, angst, drinking cheap wine out of a box, empty plastic glasses with sugar-encrusted rims toppling against the makeshift egg crate table. I would lean my spiral notebook against the wobbling frame as I penned the great American novel with a pencil that had no eraser. I would gladly put my trust in the number 2 if and when. All it would have taken was a second person to believe in me at that moment.

Do you know how many people actually make a living off of their writing? Do you know how talented you would actually have to be?

Actually?

 The nineteen year-old girl with the sweaty-palmed poem in her back pocket, tight-fisted her writing, and went into hiding. I used that number 2 pencil to bubble in the answers on the state certification exam. I became a teacher in the suburbs instead.

Regret?

It all depends on what you do with it. And so, I write it down.

This blogging becomes the practical, the bastion to protect the dream.  

I share with you the choices we make each day: one pigtail or two in my daughter’s reckless hair. Should I have that extra slice of pizza? How many times can I hit snooze? Where will we place our naked bodies when we come together this way we pray in side by side skin? Which hand is mine to hold? There is frugality and excess both in these dream as yet unraveling.

Nothing is inconsequential.

Anything worth believing will not be spared in verse.  

So between the Great Lakes,
The Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie,
The living lighted skyscrapers stand,
Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow,
streamers of smoke and silver,
parallelograms of night watchmen,
Singing a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging
Carl Sandburg

I am going to Chicago.

I am going to stand before you and ask for you to love me, with my hair all tangled in knots, and my palms sweaty. I will be all legs and wineglasses, name tags I’ll have to squint to read from across a room because the children have broken my glasses. My children, who will wait at home while I shrug off the role of mother, quietly place it in my breast pocket, and become what has, up until now, been only longing…
                                           this dream of being a writer.

I am going to Chicago to claim it. 
I hope to see you all there.

I wanted to be one of the Horizons, the chosen child who got to leave the fourth grade classroom to have a meeting of the minds in that special place where construction paper Picassos hung a brighter shade, with a teacher that smelt like watermelons, the kind with the spit the seeds out onto the freshly cut lawn, which was her smell. They tested me for the gifted class. They asked me what I would do if I was given a large oak tree, a rope, a two foot plank, and a bucket. I wrote a poem with old man branches, and half eaten apple cores diving into buckets tied with rope that no one wanted to hold. I did not know what to do with the plank, and so I walked it, right out of my chance to be called smart. Later in the year, a friend that they had tapped to be a part of that secret, I could not touch, society, invited me to their party. I was so disappointed when the cookie crumbled into my mouth and it was just ordinary cream.

I wasn’t the valedictorian of my school, more like the girl who sat in the back of the class reading The Cider House Rules and wondering which of my fellow students would end up needing the abortion, wondering if my own flesh would ever be rubbed into a version of its own sin. Smart was defined with IQ tests and word lists that tied my tongue. It seems if you can’t ride the phonetic pony it doesn’t matter if you can shape a snake and shake it loose across the page. Just make sure you bubble in your Scantron and you color between the lines. I always wondered why it all had to be so paint by number.

I almost failed out of college my first semester, majoring in booze and boys that did not love me, but only the way I was so willing to spread my legs. I cultivated an act of cool in worn corduroys and unwashed hair. I wrote forlorn poetry on the bottom of my sneakers that the ice and sludge of a Buffalo winter washed away, leaving trails of blue ink bleeding into the snow. I forged friendships I could not maintain, leaving the wreckage behind like abandoned car parts on the highway, the sleeping with her boyfriend, and the borrowing of your clothes. It made sense that you did not want to live with me. I did not want to live with myself. I just wish I could have turned my heart inside out to show you the side where there were seams; maybe you would have forgiven me all the ways I could not forgive myself. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, for all the opportunities I missed.

Seven years later, with a Master’s degree, and a shiny 4.0, I still had trouble opening my mouth at faculty meetings, imagining they would only see the skinny girl with the trembling knees hiding out in the back of English lit., hoping that if she was called upon she could unstick the tongue plastered to the roof of her mouth, to explain just what Darcy’s mirror symbolized in the house that Elizabeth stumbles upon, to realize her own mistake, the pride of her own prejudice, and oh how I have prejudiced myself!

Then, I took to wearing black, and boots made of metal. I stopped shaving my arms before protest rallies, where we chanted about the patriarchy that was chaining us to the kitchen walls, refusing to stand barefoot turning the bacon he brought home, trapped under our own glass ceiling, all of us hating ourselves. How many times did I tell you that I did not want to be a mother, while my uterus screamed otherwise, and I worried about how badly I would fuck it all up? Those were the days when I wore my anger like armor so no one would ever detect how delicate the skin underneath. But desire is like a varicose vein, it always is this throbbing.

Desire is the way you look at me, my stretched out skin, a beautiful mosaic of all the places you can hide your eyes, and hands, and body when the night sniffs at your cold feet from where the blankets have fallen away. That the crib does not give you half the comfort of my body is the blessing that I repeat over and over in this blogging. We come across the landscape where all is quiet, no ranting voices in my head, no prying eyes. There is just the way you dance around the living room in your purple stripped socks, dropping raisins, as you follow me into the kitchen, and help me knead the bread. We are all dough up to our elbows, and it is the laughter that causes our loaf to rise. It is the way we pick pumpkins on a Saturday afternoon, and the sun slants against the side of my jeans, where the curls of your head are silhouetted, and I can not help but drink this in and be glad for every single thing that came before.

My writing is suffering. This happens when I hide behind metaphor instead of saying what it really is that I want to say. I need to make it simple, but I am afraid.

How do I explain how often I am disappointed in the world, how sure I can be that I will always be at odds with it?

This morning, as I was driving to work, I heard a song that brought back this memory…

The day after September 11th, I had to pull my car over to the side of the road, where I wept for an eternity, all in a mere five minutes, at the heartbreak that was the sound of a voice against a violin.

The sadness I felt quickly turned to anger at every single driver on the road waving an American flag. I could not help but feel like our sudden sense of sisterhood, brotherly love, brought about by tragedy, would be fleeting. I knew people were grieving that day, but I hated them for not having been generous the day before. I was crushed under the knowing that they would go back to their myopic behavior and road rage in the weeks after.

Why do we have to lose 3,000 people before we discover our best selves? Why could I not take the community generosity at face value, instead of contorting it until my expectations where no longer met?

Perhaps, this is an imperfect example. I am floundering with my words.
Every sentence comes out wrong, a small detonation, a cloud of dust.

Instead, I think about my first trip into New York City as a little girl. Awestruck, I vowed I would move to the Village, pen a novel, break some hearts on the way to learning about love. The city, she was infinite.

That was until I saw a homeless man living on the street without shoes. My father had to hold me against his chest, tight, the whole ride home on the railway. He kept repeating over and over, it is going to be okay, while I wept. I was 8 years old and already he had an inkling, fearing that this world was too much for me, knowing with certain heartache that I was so easy to break.

And I do, I break again and again and again.

I’m tired,
wishing I could live in a world with violions instead of shoeless misery on city streets that are suppose to be paved with gold.

I’m tired
of inauthentic language, and hiding behind metaphor.

I’m tired
by all the ways you dissapoint me.

I’m tired
by all the ways I dissapoint myself.

“Taking us by and large, we’re a queer lot
We women who write poetry. And when you think
How few of us there’ve been, it’s queerer still.
I wonder what it is that makes us do it.
Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise,
The fragments of ourselves.”
Amy Lowell

And so I’ve learned, across phone lines with background static, and small children sucking on their mother’s breast, while we jiggle laundry and lovers, balance belief with lack of self-esteem, that we are a queer lot, we women who aspire to the poetic word.

We sit in our pajamas silently penning Pulitzers while the world races by outside our doorstep, unaware. How many of you, how much of me, has been steeped in loneliness? Fear that it isn’t enough, could not possibly matter to anyone but ourselves.

And then there is a voice on the other end of the line, bringing with it the recognition that we are more than the echo in a silent room of fingers tapping impatient keys. We are more than longing. We are more than ache.

We are a queer lot, we women who write poetry.
Each call taken, every word felt.

I have learned, we can be a resolution for each other, a reclaiming of our best selves.