Friday, February 11, 2011
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
becoming human
(This is the transcript of a monologue I wrote and performed for a memoir/monologue class facilitated by Kirsten Wilson in Boulder, Colorado. The class is called 'Letting the Body Speak.' I wish to post it because the class itself was what I feel catalyzed my pregnancy. I conceived (unknowingly) during the beginning of the 9 week course. On the third week. During the writing process around children. When I melted a bit during class while talking about pain from an abortion several years ago --and my longing to have a child. Who knew I'd get pregnant that day or a day or so after? Not only that, I had given myself a gift of a tattoo on June 1st, 2010, to honor the girl in me who'd had an abortion when she was only 16...a bright poppy on my right ovary. The Poppy has special significance too, as you shall read.)
I’ve always been a bit of a mess. In my early 20’s and 30’s I got spiritual. It was the opposite of a mess. I was devoted to God, serving children, waking up, and healing. There were only two things: spiritual and not spiritual. Spiritual was shamanism and new age workshops and Boulder. Not spiritual was football, politics, my family and life outside of Boulder. I did so many things to become more spiritual: shamanic apprenticeships, reiki trainings, vision quests, solitude, spiritual teachers and almost being exorcized by a ‘healer’ who said the antichrist lived inside me. I took risks in order to transcend and unlearn my conditioning and personality. I didn’t want to be who I was. One of my un-conditioning experiments led me to become a Pixie one afternoon and I hung out on the Pearl Street Mall wearing a pointed green hat with a nest, butterflies, birds and furry pointed ears. I carried a wand and a sign that said Believe. I was self-proclaimed Myth and Mirth. A homeless man on the mall followed with curiosity, “What are you?” “Why I’m Poppy the Pixie from Tir Na Nog! “From where?” “You know, Tir na Nog, not quite here and not quite there!” She blew sparkles on him and marched up and down Pearl Street offering inner child wishes and declaring to children and adults alike, “Believe!”
Word spread about Poppy the Pixie and she was invited to create birthday parties and special celebrations for Waldorf-y kids and grown-ups. They were actually really wonderful. People were really moved and magical things happened. Poppy created improvisational stories and sang songs on the guitar. During story circles, deer approached, butterflies swooped at the perfect moments and a bat came once after being invoked by the story. It was way more spiritual to be Poppy than Stacey Ginsburg, that girl with those problems from upper Michigan. I came from an isolated snaggle of land on the border of Lake Superior. It was one of the poorest, most alcoholic, racist and depressed counties. I’d been a lost teenager who’s daddy died in prison when she was ten and who’d been pregnant and had an abortion by the time she was 16.
Poppy was pure love and joy. She gave me permission to explore polyamory and alternative ways of loving. I had three beautiful lovers. But then I got pregnant. Poppy got pregnant with the man I liked the most, the mystical one –the one I’d felt devotional, ecstatic love towards, the one I’d met on a spiritual retreat two years earlier. It got so messy. The gravity of pregnancy grounded me. We crashed. My wings singed. He fell. I fell. It hurt to fall from Poppy paradise. I was made to have a baby. Poppy was made to guide a child to her destiny, to her star. I was ready to have a baby. But I wasn’t. Something wasn’t right in me –despite all the spiritual work, something in me was still messy. It reared its head during my pregnancy. I was scared to be a mother because I didn’t like my mother. I was scared to co-parent with someone I didn’t really have a foundation with. Especially because he wanted the baby and he wanted polyamory. I wasn’t really spiritual enough. Poppy was, but not Stacey. Stacey had problems. I wasn’t big enough to dive into polyamory and share my baby with his other partners. But if I did it on my own, I’d risk becoming my worst nightmare: my own mother, who had struggled in a small town as a single parent to raise her two girls and wasn’t exactly nice about it. It fucking shattered me. Out of fear and desperation to save myself and my baby girl from a fate that would repeat my story, I aborted her. I felt devastated but convinced that the only thing to do was deal with myself and give birth to me as a woman. Someone who knew herself and wasn’t going to get lost in wonderland.
The abortion sucked more than a little bean of a girl out of me. It sucked out God and mysticism and magic and wonder. It closed my heart and my pelvis and fragmented my mind. It was too painful to be Poppy again or even to work with children in a traditional setting. Who am I if I’m not Poppy and if I’m not going to be a mommy? Who the hell am I and what is wrong with me that I attracted that? I knew I had to leave Boulder when I felt the desire to kill people from my new age communities who said, ‘We are all one” or, ‘There must be something planetary happening, I’m really off.” Or anything that reeked of spiritual bypass. So I said Fuck the Shamans. Fuck the healers. Fuck the therapists that I’m dependent on to find the way. It didn’t work. The new age didn’t heal me. Fuck it. So I went home to Michigan. To the house where I grew up. To face my ghosts. To get real. I’d vowed I’d never live there ever again. I hated it there. I’d hated my mother. I lived in the bedroom where I’d been a moody, suicidal adolescent. I wrote a coming of age memoir and gave that girl a voice for her stories. I let myself get wild and bitchy and mean and real and salty in that salty real place. I survived my stories, and fell in love with my mother the survivor. I saw her and she saw me; I listened to her and she listened to me and that is all I ever wanted. And I fell in love with that place. I fell in love with the lake that is a sea and the birch and the pine and the bluffs and the abandoned mines.
I spent time with my grandfather and his Italian stories and hung out with my vibrant 100 year old next door neighbor. I listened to story after story from the mechanic and the lonely truck driver and the born again Christians and the rough racist hunters. This place and the people I’d judged as not being spiritual became sparkly to me, in the most real, unassuming but magical way.
I eventually came back to Boulder and couldn’t relate to my former new age communities. I’m different than who I’d been. God and the former way of relating to the woo woo is dead. I think that becoming human is one of the most messy, amazing things in the world. I’m still messy and this is okay. There is no such thing as spiritual or not spiritual anymore. What matters now is that I’m real. I have a good partner who is far from normal, and we’re in a traditional monogamous relationship. It’s really messy from time to time and we’re learning to be with it directly, not sideways. Poppy the Pixie recently came out to play at a storytelling summer camp. She’s a lot more grounded than she was. And guess what? I’m pregnant! I am going to be a good mom, despite of and because of my mess.
I’ve always been a bit of a mess. In my early 20’s and 30’s I got spiritual. It was the opposite of a mess. I was devoted to God, serving children, waking up, and healing. There were only two things: spiritual and not spiritual. Spiritual was shamanism and new age workshops and Boulder. Not spiritual was football, politics, my family and life outside of Boulder. I did so many things to become more spiritual: shamanic apprenticeships, reiki trainings, vision quests, solitude, spiritual teachers and almost being exorcized by a ‘healer’ who said the antichrist lived inside me. I took risks in order to transcend and unlearn my conditioning and personality. I didn’t want to be who I was. One of my un-conditioning experiments led me to become a Pixie one afternoon and I hung out on the Pearl Street Mall wearing a pointed green hat with a nest, butterflies, birds and furry pointed ears. I carried a wand and a sign that said Believe. I was self-proclaimed Myth and Mirth. A homeless man on the mall followed with curiosity, “What are you?” “Why I’m Poppy the Pixie from Tir Na Nog! “From where?” “You know, Tir na Nog, not quite here and not quite there!” She blew sparkles on him and marched up and down Pearl Street offering inner child wishes and declaring to children and adults alike, “Believe!”
Word spread about Poppy the Pixie and she was invited to create birthday parties and special celebrations for Waldorf-y kids and grown-ups. They were actually really wonderful. People were really moved and magical things happened. Poppy created improvisational stories and sang songs on the guitar. During story circles, deer approached, butterflies swooped at the perfect moments and a bat came once after being invoked by the story. It was way more spiritual to be Poppy than Stacey Ginsburg, that girl with those problems from upper Michigan. I came from an isolated snaggle of land on the border of Lake Superior. It was one of the poorest, most alcoholic, racist and depressed counties. I’d been a lost teenager who’s daddy died in prison when she was ten and who’d been pregnant and had an abortion by the time she was 16.
Poppy was pure love and joy. She gave me permission to explore polyamory and alternative ways of loving. I had three beautiful lovers. But then I got pregnant. Poppy got pregnant with the man I liked the most, the mystical one –the one I’d felt devotional, ecstatic love towards, the one I’d met on a spiritual retreat two years earlier. It got so messy. The gravity of pregnancy grounded me. We crashed. My wings singed. He fell. I fell. It hurt to fall from Poppy paradise. I was made to have a baby. Poppy was made to guide a child to her destiny, to her star. I was ready to have a baby. But I wasn’t. Something wasn’t right in me –despite all the spiritual work, something in me was still messy. It reared its head during my pregnancy. I was scared to be a mother because I didn’t like my mother. I was scared to co-parent with someone I didn’t really have a foundation with. Especially because he wanted the baby and he wanted polyamory. I wasn’t really spiritual enough. Poppy was, but not Stacey. Stacey had problems. I wasn’t big enough to dive into polyamory and share my baby with his other partners. But if I did it on my own, I’d risk becoming my worst nightmare: my own mother, who had struggled in a small town as a single parent to raise her two girls and wasn’t exactly nice about it. It fucking shattered me. Out of fear and desperation to save myself and my baby girl from a fate that would repeat my story, I aborted her. I felt devastated but convinced that the only thing to do was deal with myself and give birth to me as a woman. Someone who knew herself and wasn’t going to get lost in wonderland.
The abortion sucked more than a little bean of a girl out of me. It sucked out God and mysticism and magic and wonder. It closed my heart and my pelvis and fragmented my mind. It was too painful to be Poppy again or even to work with children in a traditional setting. Who am I if I’m not Poppy and if I’m not going to be a mommy? Who the hell am I and what is wrong with me that I attracted that? I knew I had to leave Boulder when I felt the desire to kill people from my new age communities who said, ‘We are all one” or, ‘There must be something planetary happening, I’m really off.” Or anything that reeked of spiritual bypass. So I said Fuck the Shamans. Fuck the healers. Fuck the therapists that I’m dependent on to find the way. It didn’t work. The new age didn’t heal me. Fuck it. So I went home to Michigan. To the house where I grew up. To face my ghosts. To get real. I’d vowed I’d never live there ever again. I hated it there. I’d hated my mother. I lived in the bedroom where I’d been a moody, suicidal adolescent. I wrote a coming of age memoir and gave that girl a voice for her stories. I let myself get wild and bitchy and mean and real and salty in that salty real place. I survived my stories, and fell in love with my mother the survivor. I saw her and she saw me; I listened to her and she listened to me and that is all I ever wanted. And I fell in love with that place. I fell in love with the lake that is a sea and the birch and the pine and the bluffs and the abandoned mines.
I spent time with my grandfather and his Italian stories and hung out with my vibrant 100 year old next door neighbor. I listened to story after story from the mechanic and the lonely truck driver and the born again Christians and the rough racist hunters. This place and the people I’d judged as not being spiritual became sparkly to me, in the most real, unassuming but magical way.
I eventually came back to Boulder and couldn’t relate to my former new age communities. I’m different than who I’d been. God and the former way of relating to the woo woo is dead. I think that becoming human is one of the most messy, amazing things in the world. I’m still messy and this is okay. There is no such thing as spiritual or not spiritual anymore. What matters now is that I’m real. I have a good partner who is far from normal, and we’re in a traditional monogamous relationship. It’s really messy from time to time and we’re learning to be with it directly, not sideways. Poppy the Pixie recently came out to play at a storytelling summer camp. She’s a lot more grounded than she was. And guess what? I’m pregnant! I am going to be a good mom, despite of and because of my mess.
Monday, June 1, 2009
girltruth
Anticipated Publication, Spring 2011, Anthology of Unruly Catholic Women Writers Volume II
Women always walk in two worlds. Born into the ‘Adam’s world’ of culture consistently ‘named’ from male life-experiences, we find ourselves with language and categories that do not fit or name our experience as girl children or female adolescents. We early come to know ‘girltruth’ which is experience without a language.
Elizabeth Dodson Gray, foreword, Walking in Two Worlds
Girltruth
I didn’t know what it was called until recently, or that it was something I might temporarily disconnect from. Mine was spunky and full of voice. It got me into trouble in Catholic school on numerous occasions. The first time was a declaration at age nine, that there is no such thing as heaven and hell. I said, quite matter of fact, "Heaven is what you make it and so it is different for you than it is for me. " The Catholic school teachers looked at me as if I had just told an enormous sin. I also got into trouble for crossing each of the angels off my sheet. We were supposed to ‘be good’ each week of lent. If we sinned, we were to cross out an angel. They sent me to the principle’s office and I declared, “but you gave me original sin! How am I supposed to keep my angels if I’m bad because I was born?” I don’t recall what they had to say.
Girltruth gave me full-belly permission to be equal to boys. It made sure I knew I was smart, athletic and talented. It encouraged me to compete with boys in contests, races and spelling B’s. In my fatherless family, my Italian grandfather treated boys differently than girls, in a way that felt like a secret handshake to a club I wasn’t invited to attend. In Catholic school, boys seemed to have a privledge that I wasn’t allowed to participate in. Girltruth was my first revolutionary ally.
I decided to create my own clubs with secret languages and handshakes. I challenged the boys to races and kiss-or-kill games. I ran for class president and won at age 9 because girls have a right to be president. I was the only girl on the boy’s Little League Team. I could make as good a fort as any. I jumped out of trees in winter. I went alone into dark places retrieving treasures.
My girltruth declared freedom to my mother and nonna, assuming that they knew nothing of it at all. Their black-and-white womantruth was explosive but often defensive and rigid. They often referred to church, God or politics in a way that made authority seem dangerous, punishing, and judging. No matter. For a brief time, girltruth was a wild warrior child questioning every rule, boundary and limiting statement such as “Children should be seen and not heard.” “Only boys can be altar boys.” “Kissing will give you babies.”
My girltruth believed in magic and imagination. She knew you could learn a lot from trees and that you could know things ahead of time without knowing how you knew. She knew that just one person in the magical space with a cranky attitude was enough to kill the magic for everyone. She knew that the church didn’t feel magical, but nature did.
When I reached puberty and it was time to be confirmed a young adult by the St. Sebastian Catholic Church, I tried naming myself after my favorite saint, Saint Francis Xavier of Assisi. I wanted to shorten it to Xavier because I thought it would be cool to have a new name that began with the X on a pirate’s treasure map. I also wanted to be as important in the eyes of the church, to God as boys. Why is God a man? Why did a woman grow out of a guy’s ribs? Why did woman tempt man? And why do I have original sin now because of it? My opinions and questions embarrassed the priest. “We just don’t do it that way. You cannot have a boys name, that is not acceptable.” I pleaded but had to settle on the name Monica. The wind in my sails died and my fire got blown out. Although I didn’t realize it, I felt a dangerous poison take seed in me. I was now confirmed in the eyes of God a girl becoming a woman, a possible temptress, a sinner, maybe pure and untouchable if I strived to be like Mary, but forever shamed with original sin, descendent of women, who are original sin makers.
My girltruth closed itself tightly inside of me around puberty and slept for a long, long time. Was she scared? Had she given up? Was she a victim? Or like Persephone descending or Sleeping Beauty lost in a 100 year sleep –was this an essential part of the transformative story of her becoming, separate from what church or some other authority deemed an appropriate rite of passage?
Without her I felt a victim to the status-quo world around me, split temporarily from the effortless knowing and spunk that had been my compass. I felt tricked into relying on authority while rebelling self-destructively in secret. I had to learn to navigate a world with rules that often didn’t make sense.
Occasionally girltruth opened herself like the eyes of a sphinx, in between the spaces surrounding the oppression of a perfectly valid and beautiful coming of age voice, identity and wild womanness. She would witness me, eye me up and down, and ask, before closing her eyes, “Who are you? What do you know, girl, what do you know?”
Girltruth and I grew into each other in the wild and primitive forest and nature playgrounds in upper Michigan when I was eight. My girltruth sprouted like from a trillium seed, took root and grew delicate and wild in the forest between pine trees, oak, birch, fern and moss. She has been plucked and overlooked. Sometimes she wilts, and sometimes she is preserved. She waits quietly in the dead of winter. Every spring, when she returns, she wants us to know: she is an important endangered species.
I want to protect and honor the vulnerable strength of girltruth. Girltruth and trilliums have taught me the true meaning of a trinity. Because of this I have more courage to walk in the world as I know it --a gentle warrior father holding the fiercely compassionate and revolutionary hand of my inner mother so that my inner child or girltruth can continue to blossom her living experiences into wisdom.
Women always walk in two worlds. Born into the ‘Adam’s world’ of culture consistently ‘named’ from male life-experiences, we find ourselves with language and categories that do not fit or name our experience as girl children or female adolescents. We early come to know ‘girltruth’ which is experience without a language.
Elizabeth Dodson Gray, foreword, Walking in Two Worlds
Girltruth
I didn’t know what it was called until recently, or that it was something I might temporarily disconnect from. Mine was spunky and full of voice. It got me into trouble in Catholic school on numerous occasions. The first time was a declaration at age nine, that there is no such thing as heaven and hell. I said, quite matter of fact, "Heaven is what you make it and so it is different for you than it is for me. " The Catholic school teachers looked at me as if I had just told an enormous sin. I also got into trouble for crossing each of the angels off my sheet. We were supposed to ‘be good’ each week of lent. If we sinned, we were to cross out an angel. They sent me to the principle’s office and I declared, “but you gave me original sin! How am I supposed to keep my angels if I’m bad because I was born?” I don’t recall what they had to say.
Girltruth gave me full-belly permission to be equal to boys. It made sure I knew I was smart, athletic and talented. It encouraged me to compete with boys in contests, races and spelling B’s. In my fatherless family, my Italian grandfather treated boys differently than girls, in a way that felt like a secret handshake to a club I wasn’t invited to attend. In Catholic school, boys seemed to have a privledge that I wasn’t allowed to participate in. Girltruth was my first revolutionary ally.
I decided to create my own clubs with secret languages and handshakes. I challenged the boys to races and kiss-or-kill games. I ran for class president and won at age 9 because girls have a right to be president. I was the only girl on the boy’s Little League Team. I could make as good a fort as any. I jumped out of trees in winter. I went alone into dark places retrieving treasures.
My girltruth declared freedom to my mother and nonna, assuming that they knew nothing of it at all. Their black-and-white womantruth was explosive but often defensive and rigid. They often referred to church, God or politics in a way that made authority seem dangerous, punishing, and judging. No matter. For a brief time, girltruth was a wild warrior child questioning every rule, boundary and limiting statement such as “Children should be seen and not heard.” “Only boys can be altar boys.” “Kissing will give you babies.”
My girltruth believed in magic and imagination. She knew you could learn a lot from trees and that you could know things ahead of time without knowing how you knew. She knew that just one person in the magical space with a cranky attitude was enough to kill the magic for everyone. She knew that the church didn’t feel magical, but nature did.
When I reached puberty and it was time to be confirmed a young adult by the St. Sebastian Catholic Church, I tried naming myself after my favorite saint, Saint Francis Xavier of Assisi. I wanted to shorten it to Xavier because I thought it would be cool to have a new name that began with the X on a pirate’s treasure map. I also wanted to be as important in the eyes of the church, to God as boys. Why is God a man? Why did a woman grow out of a guy’s ribs? Why did woman tempt man? And why do I have original sin now because of it? My opinions and questions embarrassed the priest. “We just don’t do it that way. You cannot have a boys name, that is not acceptable.” I pleaded but had to settle on the name Monica. The wind in my sails died and my fire got blown out. Although I didn’t realize it, I felt a dangerous poison take seed in me. I was now confirmed in the eyes of God a girl becoming a woman, a possible temptress, a sinner, maybe pure and untouchable if I strived to be like Mary, but forever shamed with original sin, descendent of women, who are original sin makers.
My girltruth closed itself tightly inside of me around puberty and slept for a long, long time. Was she scared? Had she given up? Was she a victim? Or like Persephone descending or Sleeping Beauty lost in a 100 year sleep –was this an essential part of the transformative story of her becoming, separate from what church or some other authority deemed an appropriate rite of passage?
Without her I felt a victim to the status-quo world around me, split temporarily from the effortless knowing and spunk that had been my compass. I felt tricked into relying on authority while rebelling self-destructively in secret. I had to learn to navigate a world with rules that often didn’t make sense.
Occasionally girltruth opened herself like the eyes of a sphinx, in between the spaces surrounding the oppression of a perfectly valid and beautiful coming of age voice, identity and wild womanness. She would witness me, eye me up and down, and ask, before closing her eyes, “Who are you? What do you know, girl, what do you know?”
Girltruth and I grew into each other in the wild and primitive forest and nature playgrounds in upper Michigan when I was eight. My girltruth sprouted like from a trillium seed, took root and grew delicate and wild in the forest between pine trees, oak, birch, fern and moss. She has been plucked and overlooked. Sometimes she wilts, and sometimes she is preserved. She waits quietly in the dead of winter. Every spring, when she returns, she wants us to know: she is an important endangered species.
I want to protect and honor the vulnerable strength of girltruth. Girltruth and trilliums have taught me the true meaning of a trinity. Because of this I have more courage to walk in the world as I know it --a gentle warrior father holding the fiercely compassionate and revolutionary hand of my inner mother so that my inner child or girltruth can continue to blossom her living experiences into wisdom.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
The Power of Memory
Etymology of Remember
c.1300, from O.Fr. remembrer (11c.), from L. rememorari "recall to mind, remember," from re- "again" + memorari "be mindful of," from memor "mindful" (see memory). Replaced native gemunan. The noun remembrance in the sense of "keepsake, souvenir" is recorded from 1425.
Story, story, sing to me...
from the bottom of the sea...
Story story sing to me...
from the roots and from the leaves...
Story, story sing to me,
from the edge of everything . . .
Where does memory live? What happens when a person calls a story from memory? How does the memory feel in the body? How is it shaped by imagination or lack thereof? Are there keepsakes and souvenirs in memory? Are there ruins and archeological treasures too? How is memory preserved? His story, her story...the power of memory in words and images.
The work of memoir and life story writing is invaluable to the preservation of memory and the cultivation of personal authority. Calling the story can be a call to personal empowerment. Memory is powerful. It can bring up painful feelings. It can make it difficult to be present. And it can bring up old unfinished business which wants some sort of completion and/or transformation so that the present becomes clearer and more free.
Working with a memory line is like walking a tightrope, navigating a spiderweb thread and weaving and emerging from a cocoon.
How often have I gotten stuck on my memory lines, unable to move forward into now? The past can cast quite an enchanting spell on me. Or, the past can teach me where I have unfinished business. Sometimes I need to stop and open a memory room and do the work of memory --writing, counseling, art process, contemplation, and feeling --all that the former story wishes for me to know. And then the memory line moves me forward, more complete, more whole, towards the next chapter of my life journey, rather than taking the holes of the past with me into each and every new situation.
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