Vivid Living

This is a month of paradox. Our four children are winding down the summer and gearing up for school. Me, too, for as readers know, I’ve just begun a two-year MFA program in creative non-fiction writing at Goucher College. All week we’ve been purging old clothes, shoes, toys, books, papers and other mindless knick knacks, while making room for the requisite back-to-school sneakers, supplies and the like.

This “letting go” and “taking in” feels especially poignant to me right now since graduate school has me thinking a lot about balance.  Much as I would love to apply the intensity, discipline and solitude of my two-week Goucher residency to life at home, I can’t.  This focused time away to attend lectures, workshops, read, write and engage in community with other writers was a sacred and particular experience. To think that I can clone that platform anywhere else is plain foolish. I wear too many hats, as most of us do.

And yet, it is possible, I hope, to distill some of my experience by embracing balance. Routines will be set once school begins but weekends and vacation are more unstructured by definition, and therefore, thornier for working moms with fluid schedules. Time stops but moves along, too.

It’s a privilege to be a mom, responsibilities and all. It’s a privilege to be someone’s life partner and to help care for our home and family. It’s a privilege to be a daughter and friend and colleague. And it’s a privilege to be finding my voice as a writer.  Together, the parts add up to the whole.

“The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.” 
 Euripides (And woman!!!)

Sunday’s Denver Post ran a cover story about female genital mutilation. The article featured a 43-year-old woman from the Ivory Coast who was cut at 11 and a 26-year-old from Guinea duped and then defiled at eight. I’m very culturally tolerant, yet this type of depravity leaves me, a writer, beyond words. What struck me most about the piece was the survivors’ courage to escape their past and renew themselves through a radical reconstructive surgery performed by one very extraordinary doctor.

Courage has many faces, and I’ve been thinking about them ever since reading this story.  Courage is my new friend, Liz Holzemer, who was diagnosed with a meningioma brain tumor in 2000, underwent extensive treatment, wrote a book about her experience, Curveball: When Life Throws You a Brain Tumor, and founded a non-profit called Meningioma Mamas to raise awareness and funds for this common cancer affecting women. Courage is my closest high school friend, a pediatrician, who is battling a very serious brain tumor.  Years and states separate us, but I’m lifting her up in my prayers along with her two children and husband.  Courage is my friend in Denver, a wife and mother of three young children, who contracted Hepatitis C from a drug-addicted nurse.

Beyond illness and grief, courage is the face of a young girl who says “that’s not nice” when her peers tease her because she can’t run as fast on the playing field. She has a mild disability but doesn’t want to appear different than others. Courage is the boy who comforts a crying classmate; he sits with her alone under a tall tree.

Courage is my friend in New Jersey who is raising a baby girl from South Africa literally placed in her arms.  ”Take her,” the child’s grandmother said, “you can give her a better life.”

Courage, I believe, is having the pluck to face your fears, the grace to make unpopular decisions and the bravery to live your dreams.

I’m not sure how these seeds of valor are sown.  But we all have them, this I know for sure.

Here’s how a typical morning goes:

Where are my keys?

Where is my cell phone?

What day do the library books need to be returned again?

Why can’t I remember…?

The other day my friend Cindy called to ask me the name of the baker who created the one-of-a-kind cake for my wedding not even two years ago. The one shaped like our house with custom rooms for the four children between us.

“Oh shoot, what was his name again?” I said aloud. “B something. Barbar? Barbat? ”

“You have C.R.S.!” Cindy told me. “I’ve got it, too,” she said.

C.R.S. stands for Can’t Remember Sh*T!

Call Julie, I said with resignation, ”She’s got C.R.S. too but she’ll probably remember.” Which she did.

Hmmm. This C.R.S. is a slippery slope.  I’m not exactly a  ninny and I’ve had some incredible career experiences along the way.

Still, gone are the days when I could spit out phone numbers for neighbors or the birthdays of third cousins.  As far as I can remember, my “brain drain” began in my 20’s, once I began to shed all the knowledge acquired from my $100K education at Northwestern University, which today would be more than double that amount. One particularly fond moment – which I still remember because I recently wrote about it – happened when I forgot to drop the garbage in the bin while living in Hoboken, NJ more than 20+ years ago.  I was so lost in my thoughts that I boarded the bus into Manhattan with that bag of foul garbage.

This brings up a salient point about life and memory. It occurs to me that I’m still in the “meaty” years. By which I mean, life is thick with the demands of children, teenagers, marriage, SAT’s, college, careers, writing, grocery shopping, laundry, bills, sports and so much else.  Often times I feel like a multi-tasking madwoman who juggles it all even as the balls drop around me.  It won’t always be this way. The older boys are steps from independence and the twins will grow up. Someday, this sizzle will simmer down and then, perhaps, the sharpness of my memory will return.

I hope I’m right. For now, I’m stocking up on blueberries.

Now why the heck did I put the hot dogs in the cupboard with the dinner plates?

Can any of you relate?