BLAH HUMBUG

....And so the other day I was talking with Kid #2's teacher and she asked me if I'd ever considered the fact that I might have Seasonal Affective Disorder. Well, yea. I thought about it two years ago when I was pregnant with Kid #2 and the holidays were rolling around and I just couldn't seem to get myself out of the funk I was in. A co-worker told me about it and described some of the very mild symptoms I was indeed experiencing. She recommended I buy one of those special lights for my desk. I never did because shortly after the holidays I began to perk up and then baby came and well, you know how it is. But since then. I've noticed that every year, about this time, I start to drag. My writing slows, my ideas are flat. So when Kid #2's teacher said he was rather blah-humbug that day and suggested that perhaps he was in his blah-humbug mood because *I* was in a blah-humbug mood then I started to think, hey, maybe she's right. So the week goes on and I'm noticing this real urge to avoid all things Christmas. I mean, here it is December 19th and I have not strung light one, have not baked cookie to first. Only have a snowman wreath on my front door just for good measure. So I started to think, well, maybe it's not Seasonal Affective Disorder. Maybe it's more along the line of what my girl Rashunda was talking about in one of her previous blogs. I mean this whole American Christmas stuff is just exhausting. The pressure to get someone something they don't want or need. The pressure to decorate your house with all of these lights that are gonna run your freakin' electric bill through the roof. The commercials and newspapers and bus stop ads all cramming for your attention. The people who act like the widget they are doing 95 miles an hour on the beltway for is the last freakin' widget that'll ever be made. The phoney-baloney-ness of it all. And don't get me started about the whole Santa thing. I have a serious, serious problem with telling my kids that a fat white male is going to slide down their chimney and give them everything they've ever hoped for. First off, I don't go for telling kids lies and then having to de-contaminate their minds later down the line with the truth (that goes for the Easter bunny, too). Second of all, I don't go for telling young girls that a man is going to bring them happiness (read: every Disney movie ever made). Third of all, I don't go for telling my colored child that a white man is the holder and deliverer of their joy. Uh-uh. Nada. Not happnin' captain. Call me a scrooge but that's just the bottom line. So I'm thinking, all day, that maybe it's just this whole seasonal/holiday stuff that's got me so blah-humbug.

But then, as Spouse started to put on his painting clothes (we're painting the kitchen and family room FINALLY !!!!!) and began painting over the white walls that I've been staring at for the past 3 years I immediately knew what it was/is. Eureka! I am seriously affected by the lack of color. As each stroke of my beautiful Benjamin Moore #982 - Peaceful Breeze went on the wall, I felt a wave of happiness wash over me. I felt life filling my lungs, coursing through my veins. I felt like I was ready to run the New York Marathon.

Here's the deal: we artists are affected in very deep ways by color and sound. A friend of mine, who is a dancer and now developing a love for writing, told me once that her children's "noise" used to literally drive her out of the house. Her point was that as artists, we *need* moments of silence in ways that non-artists do not, we are often affected by loud sounds and noises much more intensely. For instance, I do not think Spouse could survive without his television. Honestly. He would never make it. For me, when the television is on and the commercials are running one after the other, I feel like my mind is going to explode. I NEED SILENCE.
The winter months don't bother him. The bland gray sky, the naked trees (half of them pruned in my neighborhood, which makes me physically ill), the yellow piss-colored grass .... ugh! It makes me incredibly depressed. But when Spring comes and the green is back and the sky is blue again and my tulips are pushing their way through the Earth, I feel like my heart is going to break through my chest. My writing is vivid and rich with detail, metaphors and similes. My poems are right there....on the pulse of what I'm trying to get through. My charachters are right there on the edge of my desk just waiting for me to take up my pen and get going. But winter....forget it.

I looked back in my journal and sure enough....right there around October and early November I was pumping at least a chapter a day. Now, I'm lucky if I can stay awake long enough to get a paragraph.

So, I've figured out what I need to do to A) accomplish my goal of finishing this novel draft by the end of the year and B) to get through this season without calling my internist for a zoloft prescription. I schlepped over to one of the most essential stores ever installed at my local mall and picked up the White Blossom body cream. (Aromatherapy is essential for conditions like mine). And then I went over to the flower shop and bought myself two big bouquets for my desk....crocuses, daisies, carnations...just color. I need it right now. And I'm sitting in my family room (which is not yet finished but getting there) loving Mr. Benjamin Moore.

be well. be love(d).

LIFE AND DEATH

I was going to post something about a book I'm reading now by Alice Hoffman but instead I need to get something off my chest. My nephew is coming off life support today. It's hard for me to write this and even harder to put something so personal out here in the world but I am. If you love your relatives -- husbands, wives, sisters, brothers -- do yourself and them a favor by knowing a thing or two about how the medical system works.

I've been a nurse for ten years and all ten years I've worked at some capacity as a critical care nurse. That means, when your uncle is having a massive heart attack, I'm the one that bends low into his ear and says, "Don't worry, you're going to make it." When that uncle feels a pain in his chest and an elephant trampling up the side of his arm and into his jaw, I'm the one that says, "Lay down, take some deep breaths, put this oxygen into your nose... I'm going to call your doctor." I'm the one who helps reposition that ventilator tubing when Uncle winds up on a respirator and I'm the one who holds your Aunt's hand when she says she has been married to him for thirty nine years and doesn't know how she's going to live without him. So suffice it to say, I'm not a shit cleaner. I'm a nurse. And I'm the one with your relative in the darkest hour of the night when they are afraid, lonely and worried that they may not see morning. I had to take a break from it when I had Kid #1 because I was truly burnt out. I've kept my skills intact over these years though, continuing to do it part time, moonlighting over the last six years. I've never completely left. But what I know and have known all these years is that health care, in this country at least, is a business. Get that straight in your head. It's a business. There are laws that surround it. There is money -- lots of money -- made in it. Don't be fooled. There are many doctors who are truly God ordained. Called to medicine, I believe. But there are just as many that are shoddy. That do and fail to do many, many things.

My nephew suffered a fatal blow to the head after falling down a flight of stairs at the sitter's house. He's been in the hospital for one week. My sister and her ex husband are taking the information given to them by the doctor's and taking him off the respirator. After one week. I'm devastated today. I don't know what was done and what wasn't done to determine whether or not this kid has brain waves, electrical activity. I want to talk to the doctors. I want them to fight for his life. If he has brain waves and a strong heart, I say wait it out. Give it some time. Pray. My sister doesn't want to ask any questions. Doctors said he'll be a vegetable all of his life. They're pulling the respirator today. After one week.

I have seen miracles. I have seen teenagers O.D. on countless drugs, wind up on respirators for weeks and live to tell about it. I've seen it. Not something I've read. It's something I've seen. I'm an optimist and it pains me to see this degree of pessimism. What can I do?

I do know one thing: I've talked to Spouse about how I feel and what I want when the bell tolls. I want him to fight for my life until God gives me my last breath. Period. I want no man taking my life. No man gave it to me and therefore I want no man taking it away. Spouse agrees. This is why I love him.

Talk to your loved ones and put it in writing.

Be well. Be love(d).

WORKING FOR THE MAN .... OR, THE WOMAN

...and so I was talking with my manager today and telling her in no uncertain terms that I am not planning to be in the fold come January. Basically, I need my time for me. I can't establish myself as a writer and publish the way I want to be published if I don't here and now claim myself as a writer. I think the first step toward any measure of success is to free oneself from the chains that bind. And so without telling her *all* of the reasons I'm leaving I gave her the major reason: I cannot live this way any longer. Splitting myself between two kids' schools, Spouse, my writing (which she knows nothing about) and the myriad responsibilities that go into being a homeowner and taxpayer. My kids are 6 and 2 and as far as I'm concerned I shouldn' t be working at all. But that's another topic. But my manager just doesn't get it. And ya know, I don't expect her too. One thing I've heard Oprah say on many occasions is that people only have the ability to be who *they* are. What this means is you can't expect a woman with no children to understand what a woman with children goes through on the day to day. I remember a co-worker of mine making a comment about her two cats and the responsibilities she has as a pet owner. And I remember the conversation taking place in the midst of a winter storm and her making the claim that her "kids" at home were just as important as the kids we mothers had at home. I remember thinking how asinine it is for anyone to even think that an animal's life could be compared to a child's life. But now, as I look back, using this conversation today as a springboard, I realize that that co-worker then and this manager now do not have the ABILITY to understand. It's not that they don't want to understand, I believe, I think it's just they don't even have the ability. How can you understand what it's like to be a parent without being one? How can you understand what it's like to be an artist when you aren't one? How can you understand what it's like to thirst for your art, be willing to sacrifice sleep for your art if you aren't an artist?
So in any event, I understand how W. Somerset Maugham came to write the following:

"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passge. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriosly feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest. ----- from The Moon and Sixpence. by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919

WALKING IN A WINTER WONDERLAND .....

This is the kind of day that makes me feel glad to be in the Northeast. As much as I say I want to pack it in and move to San Fran or to some other artsy-fartsy place .... I surprise even myself on days like this. I woke up this morning to four inches of beautiful, undisturbed white on the ground, on the roofs, on the trees. Not a track to be found. And it's still not over. The snow isn't expected to stop until six o'clock tonight and by all counts we're expected to end with about nine inches of the white stuff. Spouse and I are feigning for the slopes but Christmas is coming and this is no time to drop $250 bucks for a one day event. I'm kicking myself for not buying the skiis we saw two years ago but the truth is we really haven't been getting much snow. We didn't ski last year and if memory serves me right I think we only went once the previous year.

So I turned on my notebook this morning and did some work on my novel and the peace and quiet was just beautiful. It's the kind of weather that slows things down....in a good way. Schools are closed and no one's expecting you to be anywhere by any time.
I'm still in my jammies and it's almost noon and I don't even give a darn.

On another note, I received my certified return receipt yesterday for the grant packet I sent in last week. I'm so proud of myself I don't know what to do. In the midst of all that I juggle in the course of twenty four hours I'm glad to even be an applicant. And an essay I wrote was published this week in a regional writer's magazine. So all that's left is to complete this draft in the next few weeks and I can call this year a blast.

Off I go to the outdoors to knock my six year old up-side the head with a few snowballs.

be well. be love(d).