Word Count. Page Count.

I managed to bum my parent’s old broken word processor for the month of November. Well, technically forever, since my mom was adamant “just take it to Goodwill when you’re done.” I’m in the throes of NaNoWriMo, and find myself cycling between ‘oh, this is really fun, I hadn’t remembered that memory,’ and ‘this sucks ass, why am I doing this, who would even read this terrible shit?’

Thankfully I’ve read enough Ann Lamott over the years to know that my shitty first draft monkey mind is probably right on par. The word processor part is broken, but I have managed to get it on the typewriter setting, so I spend my nights “typing away furiously like Angela Landsbury,” according to Boof. I manage to get at least two pages a day, sometimes three, or four, and at my last count I was up to a whopping 27 typed pages of pure memory drivel. While the rest of the NaNoWriMoers are coming up with complex stories rivalling the best selling romance Twilight, I am putting down words around every Halloween costume I’ve ever worn. And all the Halloween candy I stole as a kid. And why I can’t stop eating these damn mini snickers bars. Memoir writing at its finest.

What’s lovely about the whole romantic writing style, is that I can’t edit, delete, or save. When a page is done, with it’s terrible margins and weird spacing from the time the paper got caught up on the little banged up metal thingy inside, it gets put in the mounting stack. Hopefully my house won’t burn down anytime soon (mostly because that would suck, but also I would lose all of my work…and my house). I have no idea if I’ll make the 50,000 word arbitrary NaNoWriMo goal, mostly because I can’t actually do a word count on typewritten nonsense. But I already feel like a winner. To see the ever growing stack of finished pages sitting next to me on the table, and to know that I have 11 days of sitting-down-and-writing-regardless-of-how-I-feel under my belt, is something to be proud of.

Pass another mini-Snickers, let’s celebrate!

Internet Refugee

I feel like a refugee. I know that’s dramatic, but this feeling of being displaced, shuffled around, trying to assimilate in and ‘pass’ for one of the locals when grieving the loss of a family. I wrote about the OffbeatFamilies shutdown yesterday, and have managed to stay away from the shuttered doors, and have tried to nestle in to Offbeat Home & Life, a place I previously felt comfortable. But then I started reading the comments, which is advice they say NOT to do in most internet communities, because snark+ runs rampant. But the Offbeat Empire has felt so safe…and then…I come across comments like this:

Ooooh… I’m sure this makes me a terrible person, but as a childless-by-choice OBH&L reader I’m glad there’s not going to be birth stories and breastfeeding articles in here…. cuz it would totally ick me out, but I’m sure I’d end up reading it anyways cuz it’d be like a train-wreck, where you don’t want to look but you can’t tear your eyes off it. Then I’d probably just have to stop coming in here, and that would make me sad.

But hooray for Harry Potter!

Ugh. So birth and breastfeeding is icky to you. Awesome. And my parenting choices are like a ‘trainwreck,’ which is also awesome. And makes me feel super comfortable when I’m mourning the loss of a place I loved and content I loved. Imagine if I went there and said “I love reading about colored wedding dresses, but gay dudes kissing is sooooo ick, and a trainwreck and so I’ll probably not come back.” Hurtful, right? (and soooo not my views in reality, FYI).

But I was feeling kinda okay about squatting over there, but now I’m not so sure. So of course I’ve begun spiralling. Where do I fit in? I’ve bounced over to Mutha Magazine, and Mommyish, and Birth Without Fear, and think ‘oh cool, these might feel like home someday,’ but just like expatriating, that day isn’t today and so I feel displaced.

Which calls into question my own feeling at home here, on my own blog. A blog with a name I’ve questioned for awhile and with a handle that I’m not entirely comfortable with. Monk-Monk sometimes feels too…unhuman, if that makes any darn sense at all. So don’t be surprised, if like a post-breakup, I dye my hair to change my identity. The blog equivalent might be a look change/name change/handle change. Still me under the bloggy makeover, but I thought I’d give you a heads up that my mind is swirling about new taglines and titles and how to move forward in internet refugee empowerment.

When You Were Inside Mommy

I bought this book awhile ago, in hopes to start the readings early with Potamus. I also bought a book about having another baby, but loaned that to a friend, since there’s no need for me to read a story about something that’s not happening lately. And it’s a book that Potamus has asked me to read a few times, sitting through the whole story, and patting my belly when I talk about how he used to live inside me. This is a very easy and sweet book for little ones to understand, but I have noticed so many feelings as I read it.

Because I never had books read to me like this. In fact, it wasn’t until I was an adult, and working with a gal who was pregnant, did I really come into close contact with pregnancy. Nobody I knew was pregnant, nobody talked about pregnancy other than “don’t get pregnant before you’re married.” So reading this story, and seeing how connected Potamus is to it, it made me think about my childhood. How I was the kid who answered “offices” when asked “where do babies come from?” How I felt growing up that I had just sorta ‘dropped from the sky’ and had no physical connection to my mom. It feels so different with Potamus. I am sitting there, reading a generic story about pregnancy, and I’m nodding along like “yes, you were as small as a dot. yes, you were inside mommy’s womb, right there,” as I point where my belly button is. I just wonder if I had been read stories like this as a child if I would have felt less…hatched. And then I wonder if I would have just been even more confused, as to why I grew in someone else’s belly.

I know, now, that there are more books for young adoptees, though I’m often put off by the ‘special chosen child that God put in someone else’s belly for us’ storyline that they seem to follow. But who’s going to write a children’s book about a teen who gets knocked up and they decide to give the kid to adoption because they don’t want their families fighting over custody? Yeah, that one might be hard to pitch…

I guess I was surpised. I though that since I had been pregnant, and enjoyed it, and am bonded and love having had Potamus naturally, that I would have been peaceful and love reading that story. But it makes me wistfully sad for the connection in stories that I didn’t have growing up.

Any children’s books do you read that make you feel emotions you were unprepared for?

An Introverts Dilemma

I’ve known forever that I’m an “introvert,” but I do love learning about this aspect of myself, and having conversations with others in my life. Because often I feel torn, as in, I feel like I make my life harder for myself in a lot of ways tempered with the thought that “this is who I am, I can’t change it.” And this recent bout of musings was brought on by the Huffington Post article 23 Signs You’re Secretly an Introvert. Now, we all know it’s not really a secret with me, but I wanted to address a few of them…

You find small talk incredibly cumbersome.

It wasn’t until I took an “anger management” communications course after college that I learned about the function of small talk. Before that it felt trivial and stupid and shallow. Once I learned that every culture has it’s own version of small talk, and that it’s an actually valid thing, I have grown to…well, not quite appreciate it, or even really understand it, but at least I participate in it…at least for a few minutes.

You have low blood pressure.

Yes. Yes I do. How did you know? But, I’m curious…what does that really have to do with anything?

You have a constantly running inner monologue

I am married to an extrovert (though it’s interesting, because I actually do more ‘social’ things), and we got into this great discussion last night about this running inner monologue. Because…yeah…he doesn’t have it. Sure he thinks about things, but then Boof said, “when I’m done thinking about something, like what I need to do tomorrow, I just stop.” Um, excuse me? You just….stop? The discussion went down a long winded rabbit trail about inner silence (he labels it boring, I label it as peaceful/fucking scary), about how our brains work so differently. I admitted to him that my new trick to fall asleep is saying random words in my head until I fall asleep, it goes something like this: truck, kangaroo, pumpkin, pink, love, scary, force, night, dove, poop, lice, crow, fog, door. His response? “That sounds stressful.”

Yeah. I guess so. But it’s how my brain works.

Which then left me wondering if introverts are more prone to anxiety, because it seems there is a fine line between my inner monologue and my inner monologue being influenced by a whirling dervish. Because that inner monologue is often my worst enemy. But then again, I rarely get bored.

And this conversation also makes me think about previous conversations with Boof about our brain, on the subject of dreams, he takes the perspective of the person, as if watching a movie. I see out of the character in the movie’s eyes, but I’m also the omniscient narrator a lot, too. Also, when reading, he doesn’t see pictures, he hears the words being read and it’s distracting because the words are a half second behind his eyes, so it’s like being in stereo. Makes me think about how we are all wired differently…

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Reading the article were you surprised by any of the categories? When dreaming do you see yourself, see out of your own eyes (as if watching a movie, or participating in the action) or are you from the perspective of the narrator? Do you dream in black/white or color? When reading do you see pictures, hear the words or something else?

What dreams may come?

My dreams have been intense lately, like last night’s adventures that were interupted by my own snoring. There had been flying, by me and others close to me, and there had been labor. Lots of babies being born and one friend in particular who somehow was giving birth naturally, though I know she had just had a C-section a few days ago. I was helping deliver her baby, in the dream, but I can’t quite sort out my role in the whole adventure, now that I’m awake. Because I had a camera and was taking pictures, but also had the feelings that I imagine a doula or midwife might feel. The dream was filled with other women given birth, so many babies, and also, flying. Did I mention the flying already? Flying dreams usually mean that my life is going well, or that I feel in control, which, in the light of day doesn’t seem to be that way at all.

I think the intensity of my dreams is influenced by all the reading I’ve been doing. While I’ve managed to read a few books for pleasure since Potamus has been born, it’s felt like  A LONG time since I’ve really gotten into a book series, rather than sporadically picking up a book and reading it on a whim. But the other day I was at Costco and saw an intriguing book that seemed to fit my interest in things related to motherhood AND fit my interest in mystery/thrillers. The author, Sophie Hannah, has written several books and after I was 1/2 way through the book I bought from Costco, I had ordered a few more on Amazon, and have since bought a few via Kindle. Yeah, I’m on my 4th book…in A WEEK! Holy Moly! At this rate I’ll have read all her books in a month.

But, the characters she has created, and the plots that she has woven so masterfully together, leave me inspired and chilled and totally mesmerized. I love whodunit type novels, as it makes my brain work while I’m reading, trying all the while to figure out who the ‘bad guy’ is and why they’re acting the way they are. These books are written so well that the psychological aspect of the ‘why?’ keeps me guessing and it feels, at the end, like my mind has been sharpened. But in the midst, my heart and mind is racing, and I’ve found that I’m okay putting the book down halfway through, but once I pass the 75% mark, I definitely need to have time to finish the rest or my mind whirls and I can’t focus on things like…sleeping…

Before I went to bed last night, Boof and I laid next to each other and tried to re-connect. I’d been feeling shitty about how much I complain about his workload, but I know that he’s struggling with it, too. I know that quality time is one of my cheesy languages of love, and so not having him around causes me to get irritated. But I do see how hard he’s working and I want to stop nagging and being a crazy psycho about it all. I think some of my craziness has been due to my fear about trying to expand our family to another child. We talked frankly about our desire for another (hopefully daughter, but welcomed son, too) and how two is the max, how we don’t want a 3rd. But I talked about having enough patience for it all.

So I think the intensity of having several friends giving birth, paired with these well crafted psychological thriller books about mothers and crime, paired with my own wrestling around having another child, is causing my dreams to go to a whole other level.

Help. Thanks. Wow: A Book Review

This book, is about prayer. And when I think of prayer, this is what I think of:
Anne is one of my dashboard saints. Though she would probably rather be my dashboard dancing hula girl, since the grass-skirt would cover The Aunties.  She is my go-to in spiritual famine. A breath of fresh air. I read nearly everything she writes including anxiety inducing facebook posts about the Election 2012.

And while this book doesn’t read as much like the hilarious coffee-house storytime gossip chat punched with spiritual wisdom, it does read like a really real fireside chat with a spiritual mentor, about things that are true and good. So it’s more spirit talk peppered with personal stories and wickedly true metaphors, than a personal jabber cupcake with Jesus sprinkles. Which, I was sorta hoping for the latter, but feel like the God I’ve been avoiding, really wanted me to read the former. Confused? Keep reading.

The book is about prayer. The 3 categories she puts prayer into (Help. Thanks. Wow.), is refreshingly honest and cuts across the denominational divides…though my fundamentalist upbringing sometimes shouts from the devil-shoulder that I shouldn’t listen to such nonsense, and that it does too matter if it’s God or Earth Mother or Hewlett Packard (Higher Power) that I’m praying to. But mostly I ignore that voice, because Truth speaks much louder.

Here are a few of my own prayer thoughts, based on some of her most powerful quotes.

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She says:

…and when I spent the night at your houses, I heard all of you saying these terrifying words, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my sould to keep. If I should die before I wake…” Wait, what? What did you say? I could die in my sleep? I’m only seven years old…
“I pray the Lord my sould to take.”
That so, so did not work for me, especially in the dark in a strange home. Don’t be taking my soul. You leave my soul right here, in my fifty-pound body. Help.

As an adopted kid, my parents had to modify the traditional bedtime prayer, because it gave me nightmares. Reading trashy kids books like The Face on the Milk Carton made me nervous that my own parents had kidnapped me. I then also worried about my unknown birth mother coming to snatch me away in my sleep. And then I had to worry about legit strangers coming to steal me and take me into an orphanage or make me a slave. I did NOT need to think about God, in all his scary white beardedness, coming into my bedroom and snatching my soul.

So my parents, awakened by my anxiety driven night terrors, made up a less terrifying version asking Him to  give us good dreams and God blessing mommy and daddy and monk-monk and monk-monk’s brother and sister, forever.  But still, the lingering fear of “soul to take” and “dying before I wake,” was still there. I mean, sleep is like a little death, and what 7, 8, or 29 year old really wants to think about the possibility of not-waking-up.

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“In prayer, I see the suffering bathed in light…I see God’s light permeate them, soak into them, guide their feet. I want to tell God what to do: “Look Pal, this is a catastrophe. You have got to shape up.” But it wouldn’t work. So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics.”

I think that’s beautiful, and definitely something to aspire to, though this is often more like how I am:

“…they might say, jovially, “Let go and let God.” Believe me, if I could, I would, and in the meantime I feel like stabbing you in the forehead.”

There is nothing worse than that kind of  “let go and let god” drivel, in my opinion. And yet, I never know what to say to people when they give me such Hallmark lines. A friend, who later became an adoptive mom, used to practice lines with me to answer people who asked about when she was going to have kids. Not wanting to talk about her infertility with everyone, let alone in public, the lines we practiced sounded like, “this is not an appropriate topic for the frozen food aisle at Safeway.” It shut people up, and was less drastic as stabbing them in the forehead, though she had to practice in order for it to not sound rude or worse yet, burst into tears. It had to become muscle memory. Much like prayer becomes muscle memory after a time. Especially the help prayer.

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I write down the name of the person whom I am so distressed or angry or describe the situation that is killing me, with which I am so toxically crazily obsessed, and I fold the note up, stic it in the box and close it. You might have a brief mment of prayer, and it might come out sounding like this: “Here. You think you’re so big? Fine. You deal with it. Although I have a few more excellent ideas on how best to proceed.” Then I agree to keep my crazy mitts off the spaceship until I hear back.

This just kinda-sorta-don’t-really-want-to-admit happened to me this last week. If reconciliation and Help prayers can be facilitated by my over-functioning-anxious adoptive mother. Because, if you’ve kept up, I am crazily mad at my adoptive sister. So much so, that I did the only adult thing I could do: defriended her on Facebook. And, even better yet, have been almost-smugly telling people about how  annoyed I am with her.

And then I got her name in the rigged name-drawing for Christmas.

Awesome.

But instead of glowering, I changed out of my yoga pants and went out Christmas shopping. And, instead of  buying her athletic socks and gum, I found her something she would actually like. I’m almost sorta proud of myself for getting through my crazy anger, but then I don’t want to be seen as a braggart, so I’m just here blogging about it. Maybe my help-me-n0t-hate-her-forever prayer was sorta answered. Though don’t expect me to text her anytime soon.

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Help, help, help. Thank you. Wow. Amen…And then two hours or two days later. Help….

I think my prayers are sometimes even less sophisticated. I often pray Please, which is the younger brother to Help. It’s the “beggy prayers,” of please please please, which feels both more pathetic and more manipulative than the distinguished Help, which has an air of surrender to it. I mostly approach God like a 5 year old who wants ice-cream and feels that they might utterly die if the wish isn’t granted. Lately I’ve found myself saying please please please about all sorts of things, like Boof getting a job, or getting a few more hours of sleep (in a row, this time, thanks), or that my boss wouldn’t find out that I’m an utter sham and fire me on the spot. These pleading, groveling prayers also have this air of manipulation in them, as if I were to say the prayer in such a tone that surely God would get tired, but instead of my mother would say, “stop using that one of voice monk-monk,” She would, in her eternal patience, realize that yes, I really do need that ice cream cone.

Beggy.

Perfect word for it.

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Wow means we are not dulled to wonder…Wow is about having one’s mind blown by the mesmerizing or the miraculous: the veins in a leaf, birdsong, volcanoes…Alpine blue spider lupine, monkeyflowers, paintbrush. Wow., because you are almost speechless, but not quite. You can manage, barely, this one syllable.

When I take pictures, I capture wows, and they somehow turn into well-worn wows when I re-visit the moments. When I’m seeing the world through my viewfinder, I am less critical, more open to wonder, more childlike and excited. I sometime shout

“LOOK A DAISY!”

Or stare in awe that such a beast can sleep with her mouth open

 

Or, a little gasp of wonder about the beauty of an upcoming wedding ceremony:

And even that sometimes-truth can be found on rusty burn barrels

Wow. I get to see things. I get to capture images. I get to re-live moments in full-color and share memories with others.

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Now as then, most of the time for me gratitude is a rush of relief that I dodge a bullet-the highway patrol guy didn’t notice me speed by, or the dog didn’t get hit by someone else speeding by. Or  “Oh my God, thankyouthankyouthankyou” that iwas all a dream, my child didn’t drown, I didn’t pick up a drink or appear on Oprah in my underpants with my dreadlocks dropping off my head.”

This is a pretty thankful time of year, with people’s incessant gratitude posts on Facebook feeds, which mostly make me nauseated and remind me that I am possible the least grateful person on the planet. Though I am thankful, I just get sick of it being plastered all over the internet. The internet is for worry and anxiety and pictures of food that will make us guilty later. Why do I hold the things I’m grateful for in such a grinch-like vice grip? Probably because I’m worried about losing them, and hope that my cavalier, almost disdainful, attitude will keep the big bad God from taking away those things that He/She/It most likely influenced in the first place. Because, “The Lord Giveth, and the Lord Taketh Away,” as the saying goes. Where this Milk-Money Bully of a God idea came from I have no idea. Okay, a small idea. But I hate always blaming my fundamentalist upbringing.

So I say thanks. But quietly. And sometimes in that same beggy way, like “please please please don’t take this away from me because now I know I can’t live without it, I mean, don’t want to live without it.” And I feel almost worse than the groveling 5 year old ice cream kid. Like someone who thanks you for buying them a sweater from Goodwill. That sort of, martyr-ey way about people, as if God went soooo out of Their way to throw us a bone.

Gratitude is clearly not my strong suit.

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I think you should read this book, even if you don’t think you pray. Because, maybe you’ll find that you really do.

Adoptees in Fiction

Comment on how adoption is portrayed in fiction, either as a fiction reader or writer. Adoption in classic fiction often centers on the orphan experience, from Oliver Twist and Little Men, to orphan Jane Eyre living with her aunt and cousins. Today there’s the Twilight series and others that use adoption to explain “families” comprised of various vampires. Talk about other examples of adoption used as a plot device in fiction. What types of adoption stories or adopted characters have resonated with you? Or haven’t? Are the feelings and experiences described authentically, accurately? 

I was obsessed with orphan storylines as a kid. Some of my favorite books included: The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, and Anne of Green Gables. I know now, as an adult, that I was drawn to these storylines because I was trying to work out some of my own feelings around abandonment and family and perseverance.

Even the games that I played as a kid were storylines around adoption. So my siblings and I were always playing, “orphans” or “lost kids,” where we had been separated from our family and we were trying to get “home.” I wonder if my parent’s had psychological training they might have noticed these play themes and gotten us counseling, but, alas, they did not. When I met Boof he was surprised that my childhood was spent playing “orphanage,” as that storyline never crossed his mind as something to play pretend when he and his sisters were children.

But it seems like, since the dawn of time, stories of orphans have been popular. Mythology, folklore, fairy-tales…Disney. From Oedipus to Romulus/Remus, to Mowgli from the Jungle Book or Little Orphan Annie, Harry Potter or Superman, there is something appealing to people…and I think it’s about overcoming hardship and the search for identity and home and family. Characters being separated tragically from their family from a young age provides a great backdrop for exploring the themes of identity and perseverance, that can’t as easily be found in other storylines. Like the Alex Haley quote goes:

“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.”

The adoptee storyline in fiction is one of the reasons that I resonated so deeply with BJ Lifton’s A Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness. In the book she looks at myth and fictional adoptees and shows how it is quite the archetypal character.

I wonder what other examples of orphans/adoptees/adoptive families can be found in literature. What list could we come up with if we put our brains together?

Tiny Beautiful Things: A Review in Dreams

Holy shit my dreams have been intense and seemingly completely fucked-up lately. I blame the book Tiny Beautiful Things, which I purchased from Kindle after finishing Cheryl Strayed’s last book. This one is a compilation of advice columns that she wrote under the pseudonym Sugar. Some of these Dear Sugar columns can still be read over on The Rumpus. The advice she gives is raw, based on her own life experiences, and her no nonsense tell-it-like-she-sees-it mentality, it was a quick read (though I found myself taking breaks in order to process all the advice and stories I encountered.

The stories I encountered in her book did not leave my psyche upon entering dreamland. In one night I had 4 terrifying dreams, including:

1. A dream where I was sleeping in a dream and my father-in-law came in, spooned me for awhile, and then left when he heard my husband get home. His creeping into my room woke me up, and my dream self pretended to be asleep in order for him to go away sooner. Upon waking I felt very much like a little girl who had been molested (though I have no history of sexual abuse in my past).
2. A dream where my husband was sexually assaulted by a mentally retarded girl wearing a green shirt. He was tied to a chair when she raped him, and there were many people around, like what you would see at a college frat party.
3. A dream where my grandma and I visited a museum where the first room was full of mummies and decorated with bones and skulls in designs (I partially blame this on a travel channel show featuring such a place), and I was afraid to look around and we walked into another room which was similarly decorated with taxidermied animals, duck wings and antlers, until finally we made it to the part of the museum we came for…which was a room full of balloons and bouncy balls. WTF?
4. Perhaps the scariest of all…a dream where I pulled up to a park, was listening to the radio and finishing a snack before I got Potamus out of his carseat to go play. When I did turn the car off and go to get him out of the carseat, I realized that his head had gotten stuck in the straps and he had strangled. If I hadn’t been sitting there calmly eating a snack he might have lived. I called 911 and saw myself dissociate while  I did CPR, but he did not live.

Jesus, 4 intense dreams involving sex and death all in one night was a little too much for me. In the daylight I very much enjoy reading her frank advice to people struggling with all sorts of topics, but it entering into my dream-world is a little too much. Perhaps my next book choice will be something with a little…lighter…material?

What should I read next? Any good suggestions?

Wild: A Review

My hips and thighs and ankles hurt. Not from hiking 1,100 miles, like Cheryl Strayed does in her memoir, Wild, but from lying still, in bed, for hours on one side, cuddled up to a smallish human being who aches for my nipple to soothe him into slumber. I often feel alone, and resonated deeply with Cheryl’s descriptions of the necessity to do her trip alone, while appreciating and loving the people she meets along the way. Very much an example of the hero’s journey, and while I’ve heard reviews that state it’s over the top, I felt she lived up to her “Queen of the PCT” title given her by her fellow travelers.

I was introduced to the author by women in the processing group I lead. One suggested we check out the advice column “Dear Sugar,” and that she had also written these things that were worth mentioning. My co-leader said she had Wild on her nightstand and was making her way through it. Fascinated with a story about the PCT, a trail that I once fantasized about hiking solo, too, I knew that I had to read her adventure, if for nothing else than to see, perhaps, a glimmer into what my life could have been like, if I had done a different solo trip than the one I actually did.

I think my three day solo adventure to Ohanapecosh, my childhood campground in the Mt. Rainier National Forest, actually prepared me for those 6 months in India. I wonder if the 6 months in India prepared me for the solo adventure of motherhood. And when I say solo, I don’t meant that I’m not mostly-happily partnered up, or that I don’t have a great network of supportive people around me to watch Potamus or go to coffee with, but because the journey to becoming and embodying motherhood is inside me, a trek I’ve only been on for a short-though-feels-like-fucking-ever time. I am on a trail, and I pass beautiful things, and hard things, and I feel like stopping and resting my feet and sleeping for 1,000 hours, but the drive to keep moving forward, the nudge from the foot in my side saying “feed me mama,” is still there. Like Cheryl, I have my own Monster…her pack, my baby. Love sometimes. Loathe others. Feels heavy and full and bears down on my hips making them ache from swaying to relieve the pressure, if only for a moment.

I am tired after reading this book. I feel like I have so many more miles to walk, through snow and rain and sunshine, and while it gives me hope, it shows me just how hard it actually is. She doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulty, from losing toes, and gaining callouses, to the intangible diffulties of overcoming fear and the cocky unprepared pride she had starting out her journey.

I would recommend it to so many of you. She will go on my shelf of spiritual and literary dashboard saints. Maybe I’ll wedge her between Donald Miller and Anne Lamott, or closer to Elizabeth Gilbert and Sherman Alexie. I feel inspired. I feel like I can hobble to bed and not feel guilty for memory foam or a down comforter, but know that my journey is hard and that is okay, because my journey is different, but that maybe I’m doing it for the same reasons or entirely different ones, and that is okay, too. Maybe, when I reach my destination, my own Bridge of the Gods, I will be healed, just like Cheryl.

Book Review: Poser My life in 23 yoga poses

If you would have told me a week ago that I would have found time to read a 350 page memoir, I would have laughed at you. While I used to pound the books harder than a sorority girl does jello shots, I haven’t been very book minded since Potamus has been born. Unless of course you count the many readings of “That’s not My Lion,” or “Quack Quack Springtime Animals.” But I’ve been thinking a lot about yoga lately, having this bodily desire to get back on the mat, but this mind desire to never get back on the mat because of how it changes me by making me focus and be present and realize and ease into my limitations.

Yoga seemed like just exactly what I wanted: something to calm me down. It also seemed like just exactly what I didn’t want: a place where everyone could see what a mess I was, could see my tremor and my anxiety and my worry. There was something about holding still, about inhabiting a pose, that was scary. What was under all that anxious chatter?

But there I was, at the local splish splash park outside our library, and to kill some time I was browsing the “must read” section and there it was…a book I needed to read. Poser: my life in 23 yoga poses, by Claire Dederer. I am a sucker for memoirs to begin with and to have one focused on yoga poses (dang her for cornering the market on that type of memoir!). It seemed appropriate…would get me reading about yoga (and not having to actually DO it).

I wasn’t expecting it to hit me in the gut like it did. Not only was it a story of her experience and relationship to yoga, but it was mainly about her life as a mom, a new mom, and growing up and raising a family in Seattle, and the anxiety and fears of trying to re-create the childhood she didn’t have, and do everything right according to the latest mommying trend. It’s probably narcissistic on some level, but I love books that are set in Seattle, or the Pacific Northwest, where I feel like I can just settle into the main character’s shoes and walk around. Funny little things like, “In Phinney Ridge, people didn’t have BEWARE OF DOG signs. They had PLEASE BE MINDFUL OF DOG signs,” that make me go “yes, that’s it, exactly.” People who have only visited once or twice wouldn’t quite get the nitty gritty of the city, the nooks and crannies, the differences between Queen Anne or Fremont or Phinney Ridge and the islands.

And she gets it bodily, as shown in this little exchange in her mind about her own hunching and her teacher’s response:

I’m a huncher. I hunch when I stand and I hunch when I write. Sometimes I suspect years of breastfeeding left me curled forward like a fist or a flower…

Seidal said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of a huncy person. I don’t mean I have great hunches about things. I mean, I hunch a lot. When I’m at yoga, I do the opposite of hunching. I open. I draw my shoulders back. I used to thik that if I did enough yoga I would learn to stop hunching in regular life. I would teach myself at yoga to become a non-huncy person, and I would go around all the time with wide, open shoulders.”

Who can relate to that truth? On an anxious, body level, I relate to the hunching forward, fear, hiding my heart chakra from the world, and it reminded me of my favorite Ann Lamott’s quote about her shoulders being raised up to her ears all the time, like Richard Nixon. I also relate to the hunching from breastfeeding. And I too have though if I could just master this whole yoga thing that I would become the perfect picture of posture and openness, thus perfecting my appearance and getting rid of my anxiety for good. If only I could work hard enough at it, that would solve everything.

I feel accomplished, like I’ve scaled all 14, 411 (used to be 410 when I first memorized that stat in 4th grade) of Mt. Rainier. I read a book. A 350 page book, while working full-time and nursing my child on-demand.  It was real, and inspirational, and definitely belonged on that local library’s “Must Read” list. Check it out.