Category: nonfiction

Relevance of Story

Stories have power. Parents, teachers, public speakers, and therapists understand that the secret to engaging an audience or connecting with others is through illustration: storytelling.

I see it in the eyes of the my grandchildren, who love to hear tales of family history.

I’ve seen in the eyes of students, when recognition and understanding light up.

I’ve seen in in the eyes of audiences, who tear up or laugh at the telling of a relevant anecdote.

I’ve seen it in the eyes of the wounded trying to make sense of their past: the craving for a story that offers validation.

Imagine a world where we are absent from stories. This is a reality for many, whose race, ethnicity, or beliefs excludes them from discourse.

Chimamanda Adichie says it best in her Ted Talk: The Danger of a Single Story.

Mouse Massacre

There are mouse bits
splayed across the sunroom
stuck to my favourite throw rug
and great globs of glue

The trap my husband set
to catch the recent invasion
apparently lured the hunter
for she, stiff legged and
face matted, is skulking
elsewhere

I stepped on a gluey bit
eyes not yet open
before noting
the disarray

Hard to concentrate
when a tail detached
from a thigh (foot intact)
lie stuck to one’s rug
and entrails drip down
the freshly painted
off-white wall.

First Place in a Writing Contest

Thank you to the Story Circle Network for accepting my story:  Hoping to Be Missed.

I am excited to report that I won first place in the Reflections Personal Essay Contest 2018.

To read the story and find out more about the Story Circle Network, click here.

Finding Light After Divorce

Jilted by a philandering husband and defrauded out of my share of the assets, I made a convincing victim.

“You are righteously angry,” a friend counselled.

Perhaps so, but something niggled at me.

“A man does not stray unless there is a reason,” someone said, and I felt as if she looked right through me, could see the flaws at my core.  My mother’s repeated warnings came back to me:  “No one will ever love you.”

What is wrong with me?  my broken heart wailed.

Urgency drove me to find answers.  I never wanted to go through this again.  I had to know why my life had turned out this way.

I read.  I read Daphne Rose Kingma’s Coming Apart, and Susan Anderson’s The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, and The Mastery of Love by don Miguel Ruiz:  all offering glimpses of insight and understanding – something I could hold on to.  So many books passed through my hands and desperate to learn more, I turned to a galley copy of a book I’d received as a bookstore owner.  A commercial piece, now released, but that I’d never bothered with in the past, having stashed it beside many other soon-to-be published editions.

It was Relationship Rescue by Dr. Phil McGraw.

“Too Late for this, really,” I told myself but I decided to give it a chance.

Dr. Phil wrote the words I had suspected all along:  good relationships begin with the self.  His advice made sense, and more than that, I felt like I was finally onto something.  I attacked the book as if reading a how-to manual, highlighter in hand and pencil at the ready.

Relationship Rescue delves into the different “bad spirits” that we bring to our relationships, and as I read along, I began to recognize bits of myself in the “scorekeeper”, the “fault-finder”, and the control freak, but when I reached the eighth category and began to read, I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach and wanted to throw up. I was the “bottomless pit”.

I told myself that I didn’t need anything so that I wouldn’t be a burden.  What I was actually doing was sabotaging my partner’s chances of ever meeting my needs.  “He should know without me telling him,” was another one of those false beliefs that I measured by husband against.

The spirit I brought to my marriage was ugly.  I had so many expectations about what I wanted and didn’t want based on my parents failures that any partner was destined to fail.

With understanding comes change.  It would not be easy, and I am still a work in progress, but Relationship Rescue gave me solid understanding so that I can be accountable and achieve a healthier relationship.

My challenge this week is to write about (or submit images of) a book that made you sit up and pay attention.  What book(s) made a difference in your life?

 

 

Now, A Little About Me

Poetry, the words penned on this blog, have emerged as a gift from the darkness of a debilitating disease.

Three years ago, I was a special education teacher, loving my career, volunteering with the junior girls’ basketball team, and making plans with my husband for our next trip.  I had been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia in 2010, but a change in diet and weekly trips for acupuncture seemed to keep that at bay.  True, I could no longer participate in the acting group I’d so loved, or play tennis quite as actively as before, but that was compensated for by the arrival of grandchildren in our lives.

Then, in the middle of summer, 2013, I came down with pneumonia, and although my lungs seemed to clear with the prescribed medication, I continued to have breathing problems, accelerated heart rate, and bouts of severe dizziness.  I saw specialist after specialist, all with differing opinions, and then, thankfully, my respiratory doctor diagnosed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

“Myalgic Encephalomyelitis” is the formal term, my family doctor explained, although most recently she told me it’s been renamed Central Sensitivity Syndrome in an attempt to explain the varying complex symptoms.

By May of the next year, I could no longer drive without falling asleep at the wheel; had lost my ability to do math; was losing recognition of words; and could not climb a flight of stairs.  Sitting and standing became incredibly taxing, and at my very worst, I could not tolerate food – ugly sores would break out in my mouth and face, and my stomach would swell painfully.

Social interaction was exhausting, and watching television overly stimulating.  I spent hours on end lying in a darkened room in silence.  Scents were enough to send my nervous system into overload, and sudden noises made me startle like a baby.  I could not concentrate enough to read .

Words were my saviour.  Ideas floated around in my consciousness, forming images that I would cling to until I was able to find the words to release them.  Poems, like shining beacons of hope, emerged, and I felt brief interludes of accomplishment, as if my life still mattered, as if I still had purpose.

This past year, there has been improvement.  I am able to be out of bed longer, and with the help of a homemaker, can even prepare a few meals, and best of all, get out of the house to visit with friends, or have a meal out.

I came across this Ted Talk this morning, posted on Facebook, in which the speaker reveals her journey with ME.   An articulate speaker, Jen Brea has become an active voice in the crusade to bring this disease to the forefront of medical awareness.

I invite you to watch Jen Brea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda

I’d go back to school, continue post graduate work, rally the troops to get me there, scrounge
the fees, find someone to carry the books (I no longer have the strength) – undoubtedly miss a few sessions, get behind, feel frustration building, consult with the energetic youthful instructor, become brain locked when I cannot interpret the email address she writes down for me, confront the fact that transcribing the required reading assignment in nearly impossible (which means the work will likely never get completed in the allotted time period), and drop out.

I’d look after your young children, give you a break, but my hand is not steady and if I drop a cup it will break and what if it shatters where the children are playing – barefooted because I couldn’t rally the wherewithal to get them dressed without that much needed tea – and now the shards are a real threat, and the children are laughing and bouncing around, not heeding my warnings, thinking it’s all a joke, and I have lost control, needing to clean it up and manage the children, which I cannot do because multi-tasking is no longer within my realm of possibilities.

I’d visit my sister, the schizophrenic, who lives in a group home, and try to be supportive, but my mind is still reeling over the children, and other accumulating failures, and I know I’ve let everyone down, and quite frankly, her current state of neurosis seems so much less troublesome than mine, and I have nothing to say that would aide her other than I know what it feels like to be fucked up and exist outside the ‘norm’, and right now I just want to crawl back into my cell of isolation and breathe again – so have a good life.

I’d get a scooter, try to go for a ride on my own – be independent – but I’d likely choose the back roads to avoid the traffic and, not having accounted for inclement weather, would find the pace too fast and be forced into some small town where (with my luck) they’d be having their Christmas parade and I would be caught between crowds lining the street and marching bands and in a moment of panic would duck into the nearest opening – a family restaurant from which people are constantly coming and going  and where I’d realize that I just need to get home – and try to exit  just as someone (equally as pressed) is trying to enter, and having lost all vestiges of my normally polite self, I would refuse to back up, choosing instead to rage at the poor unsuspecting woman, who only needed a quick place to pee.

So, when you next ask me what I do with myself all day – and aren’t I bored – be assured that I am not lacking in suitable stimulation, do not need to take on added responsibility to give myself a sense of purpose, am incapable of volunteering with any degree of compassion, and have accepted my current state of dependency as the most appropriate given coping capabilities. I am, at present, unable to navigate life with any degree of normalcy, am content to struggle with my own limitations, putter at a speed below tortoise, bear the silence of solitude, and stay home.  I am not broken, in need of rescue, or lost.  I simply am.