Three Rivers Village School - Many kids in my city need this...

I went to the regular grocery store before sitting down to write.  Every time I go to the grocery store, (not Trader Joes where all the cashiers and workers know my name and love my children and make me feel happy), the regular grocery store... I think of David Foster Wallace.  (Have you seen the short film made from his speech?)

Anyway, there was a man in his seventies shuffling along in front of me, his back bent into a hump, his face pointed toward the ground.  He was wearing an apron and a black, collared grocery store uniform shirt.  He moved slowly.  Painfully, like every footstep was like a little miracle.  He shuffled across the hot black top, his apron hanging limply in front of him, and started to wrestle two stray carts together and push them toward the haphazard mess in the cart corral. 

That man has lived for more than two of my lifetimes, he is bent and broken and gnarled, and they have him fetching stray carts from the parking lot.  That is the way he spends his days.

Also, there is a group of college girls sitting near to me at the coffee shop.  They are polite and sweet and young and pretty, talking about their parents and teachers; working on an assignment. 

Two men are holding hands across a table a little further away from me, across the room.

If I'm not careful, this all will break my heart.

There is an amazing thing happening in my city.  A new school is opening.  It is a beautiful, democratic-free school in the burgeoning East End neighborhood.  It is called the Three Rivers Village School, and I am so proud of its founders and the parents who are signing their children up to experience life and education in such a considerate, forward thinking way.  I want to be one of those parents so very badly, even.  I'm invested in this school getting off of the ground on a personal and sociological and emotional level.  On an everything level.  I believe in this school.

Let me tell you a story about somebody I love.  He is a 6 year old little boy named Eliot, and he's brilliant and beautiful.  

Here's a picture, so you can get an idea of the kind of adorable I'm talking about, here.

He knows the names of every actor in The Wizard of Oz.  He writes comic books and builds robots.  In preschool, when all of the other boys wanted to be firefighters and super heroes, he was obsessed with becoming a mad scientist.  He talked early and A LOT.  He has always excelled at reading and writing and drawing and creating.  He is one of the most interesting conversationalists I've ever met, and often prefers sitting and joining into our mama conversations about marriage and money and the profundities of life.  We think of him as an old man in a 6 year old's body.  He's drawn to creepy things like zombies and Frankenstein, but he's also so afraid of them that sometimes you're not even allowed to mention them or you'll be in big trouble.  I've always referred to him as a mad genius.  His preschool teacher declared that he will be "the next Tim Burton."

His family are my wonderful friends.  My lunch dates.  The people who listen to me when I'm panicking and obsessing in a very long winded way about Scouty's health, about my life and raising girls in a world that disturbs me.  They are the people we invite over to roast veggie dogs in the back yard.  In short, they are awesome people.  I love them.

Here's another picture, so you can get an idea of the kind of adorable I'm talking about here, again.

So, Eliot didn't love his first year of public school.  He didn't love writing the letter t one thousand times per day, when he had mastered the entire alphabet, including sounding out words and writing entire stories, a least a year before.  He didn't love not being allowed to talk and think about things that interested him like paintings and ninjas and science experiments and Captain Underpants books. He didn't love getting in trouble for drumming on his desk and singing the Adventure Time theme song. 

In art class, when the teacher taught the kids, step by step, shape by shape, polka dot by polka dot, how to draw a cow, he drew this:

He was frustrated when the other kids told him that he drew it wrong, that it was "creepy" and "too messy."

Eliot is, quite simply, an exceptional, artistic, brilliant kid, and it's very easy to see how these qualities are going to have to be under-explored and discouraged on a daily basis, for the sake of maintaining the flow and structure of the learning environment of public school.  It is very easy to see how he will continue to become disconnected and disengaged with his learning process; how he will feel squashed and boxed in and bored.  It's easy to see that his natural gifts and persuasions are not the kinds of things that can be effectively nurtured in a traditional classroom.  It isn't anybody's fault.  It's just the way things are.

Teachers are given orders by the principal and she's given orders by a superintendent and he's given orders by the district and they are given orders by the government, and there simply isn't room or time or the freedom to allow each and every child to explore and cultivate their unique talents and interests, especially when we're talking about a very quick and imaginative learner who thinks very much outside of the box.  It's not the fault of teachers or parents or the principal or anybody, that kids just happen to fall at the very bottom of the list of people who get to make decisions about how and what, and at what pace, they learn.  It's a systemic problem.  It's a political problem.  It's a problem on a grander scale than being anybody's fault.  (Allow me to acknowledge here that lots of kids thrive and blossom under a traditional model, and it's wonderful.  My support of a free model isn't in any way an indictment on any other method of schooling.)

But, what I'm saying is that my friend, Eliot, needs this school to get off the ground or else he won't get to become the amazing person he really is.  (It's not that public school doesn't want him to be himself, there just isn't room for him to get what he needs to be himself, in the structure. There are a lot of kids like Eliot, and a lot of kids who are nothing like Eliot, who are falling through the cracks and not getting what they need to become the amazing, dynamic, excited, multifaceted people they are meant to be.)

I want desperately for this school to get off of the ground.  Many kids in my city need this opportunity to become the people they are.  They need the chance to feel valued and safe and respected in their learning environment.  Having another education model available will benefit kids who aren't fitting into the system and who feel stuck, like there isn't a way out.  Kids who are different thinkers, kids who are bullied or outcasts, kids who are artistic and who want to learn, but aren't a perfect fit with public schooling.  Lots of different kinds of kids need another option.  The Three Rivers Village School brings diversity and a new point of view to the conversation about education in Pittsburgh.  I hope, one day, to seriously weigh whether or not my children belong there.

The Three Rivers Village School is important for a lot of reasons.  (You can read my interview with one of the school's founders here.)  And they need help raising money to get off of the ground, so that they can open their doors in the fall.  They are raising money to provide a scholarship fund for students from all backgrounds, who might not be able to pay the tuition. They also need to make necessary improvements to their new building to turn it into a safe and purposeful space to teach kids.

Anything you could give would be amazing.  You can click on the photo above to donate.  I thank you from the bottom of my heart, in advance.

If you can't donate anything, I understand.  

Any way you can pass along word of this campaign would be amazing.  

If you feel like you can't or don't want to do that, I understand that, too.  

I'm grateful for you no matter what.  

Thank you.

Pictures in a box on a high shelf

Kurt and I laid on our bellies, last night, looking through a box of pictures from my childhood.

I'm not sure what the truth of me, is.

There was a time when I was embarrassed of the girl in those photos.  I don't feel that way, anymore.  I don't know how I feel about her.  I think probably broken-hearted and a little bit sorry.

Not just for me.  For everybody.

 I looked at my mom's face, holding a baby against her shoulder.  She looks tired and sad in every picture.

I was mad for a long time.  It started early.  There were about a hundred pictures of me as a teenager, posing dramatically, my eyes mean and dark and shining.  

My grandfather was a Marine.  I feel like I own something of his story, because I loved him more than I loved anything, when I was a kid.  He wore short sleeved button down shirts with almost all of the buttons undone and he drank whiskey with tiny ice cubes and smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes.  He was so cool.  As a five year old girl, all I wanted to do was grow up to drink whiskey and have arthritis.

He married my grandmother when she was 17.  He saved her from a dirt road and a corn field and a monster. 

I don't own anybody else's story, not even my parents.  I've been telling their story all my life, like it was mine.  I took things too much to heart, that was a problem I had.  I took everything too hard and life seemed like a dismal thing, when I was a child.

So then, I've come all this way and the only thing I can really own is that my experience has been like a clot in a vein.  It bulges and it strains, and all the while, a thin trickle of warmth and life escapes and travels the length of a lifetime towards my heart.

The sad, soft animal in you...

One time, when I was young, a therapist told me that I didn't know who I was. 

I rolled my eyes.

"Well then, who are you?" she asked.

I didn't have an answer.  "Who are YOU?" I shot back at her.

She laughed.  "I asked you, first," she said.

So, I'm much older, now, and I still think it's a stupid question.

Who are you?

I'm not sure I have an answer.  I have a bunch of labels and characteristics I could give you.

I'm a woman.  I'm in my thirties.  I grew up poor in a revival church.  I am a mother.  An atheist.  A loud mouth.  I'm funny.  I'm intense, or something like that.  I believe in science.  I'm a writer, right?  I'm prone to bouts of desperation.  I used to be reckless, and now I'm restrained.  I like swimming.  I'm a water person.  I'm an outdoors type of person.  I think too much.  I talk too much.  I like eating food.

Is that who I am?

It seems like maybe those are the things I build up around myself because the world seems to need to define me.  The world seems comfortable with me if they can say, "I know who she is.  She's liberal and fat and dramatic."

That's who I am to some people.

To my kids, I am hilarious and soft and amazing.  To them, I represent boundaries and love and a big, strong, beautiful body that gives them comfort. 

Is that who I am?

The thing about who we are, is that we're really all the same.

I'm big and bold and full of worries, and there is a quiet one inside of me that watches everything I do, and everything that happens around me.  That quiet one is who I believe I am.  And I believe you have a quiet one inside of you, too.

Our quiet ones are sad and hopeful.  Our quiet ones believe in good, and they also believe in pain.  They get buried by our minds, our thoughts, our commentary on everything.  They get buried in the definitions of us, in the way the world needs to see us.  They stand silently behind all of the ways we judge ourselves, grieving softly for the injury it causes. 

Who we are isn't woman and mom and good cook and grew up in a trailer park.

Who we are is an animal, inside.

Behind what we think and the judgements we make, behind the labels and characteristics we gather and pile up around ourselves to define who we are, we are a stone and a shadow and the branch of a tree.  We are glowing and tentative and ancient.  Behind who we really aren't, we are a gentle animal inside, watching and waiting and grieving and loving.

We all want the same things, in the blood and breath of what we are.  We are all the same creature.  We don't really hate who we hate.  We don't really feel mad about the things that trigger our tempers.  We aren't really us and them.  We don't really believe in the quick judgements we make about the choices of other people.  We don't really like to make one another feel bad.  We do, though.  We make one another feel bad, because we don't respect the animals, inside.  We don't warm ourselves by the heat of the stone at the pit of our being.  And we don't recognize the quiet ones in the people around us.

We see other people as being a list of labels, and we believe we know who they are, and all the while, a soft, quiet animal waits behind what we allow ourselves to see.  We pretend the quiet ones aren't there with our minds, but we feel them with our hearts.  Every time we say an unkind word, we justify it with our thoughts and commentary, but we feel the heat and wrongness of it, in our gut.  Some people get so far away from their soft, sad animals that they almost can't feel the wrongness of it, anymore.  Sometimes we are all that way, a little bit.

I want to be more of who I am, and less of the list of things that people need to define me.  I want to get closer to the quiet one, inside of me, and to allow myself to get closer to the animal in you.

Marriage Is Hard, Because Everything Is Hard

Things we do in life are hard.

I think it's probably what it means to grow up, to realize that committing to something means that it will be hard.

People are always saying marriage is hard, parenting is hard, getting healthy is hard, meditation is hard, following your dreams is hard work.

Everything that you commit yourself to, is hard.  Its being hard is kind of the way you know that you've committed yourself to it.

Marriages fail, fathers run away, it's uncomfortably cold for running, your first manuscript doesn't get published, so you stop trying, or whatever... because, at some point, the thing that felt good, stops feeling good, to you.

It stops feeling exciting and hopeful and fresh and new, so we perceive that, since it's not actively providing us with pleasure, it's actually causing us pain, and we want to get away.  We want to commit ourselves to things that feel good, and it feels good when things are easy and new.

It's like we only have two settings:  active pleasure vs. active pain.  There is nothing in between.

When newness starts to subside, we start to resist.  We say to ourselves, "This used to make me feel so good, and now it's boring and irritating and mundane.  If I can't get back to the way I felt before, I'm finished with this thing."

Our habitual pleasure seeking, which is probably a very American thing, keeps us from being able to be truly and deeply committed to our endeavors in life.  Our idea that we deserve to feel good all the time, and that anything that isn't actively making us feel good is bad and wrong and scary, makes it so we inevitably begin to resist the things we have committed to.

When we're resisting, we handle our relationships and responsibilities halfheartedly, purposefully pointing out to ourselves how awful things are.  Every moment that doesn't feel explicitly good becomes evidence that this this thing is WRONG and BAD and not worth it.  We're so attached to the way things were, because everything was new, at one point, and newness feels exciting and fills us with hope is so obviously good.

When something isn't new anymore; that is where we find out what we're really made of.

The realization that things aren't so much fun anymore leads to resistance to the way things are, in the present moment.  And that resistance either leads to quitting, giving up, running away, closing off and hardening towards... or it leads to softening, opening, beauty and meaning.

We see articles all the time about how statistics show that people who choose not to have kids are happier than people who do, and we, as parents, feel a little confused... because we can understand this statistic.  It's true that parenting doesn't always feel good.  It often feels really bad, in fact.  Even at the best of times, it's scary and we worry and doubt ourselves and feel afraid of the world.  So, why then, when asked about what we love the most, and what the best choice we've ever made was... do we always say, "My children are the best thing that has ever happened to me?"

It's because we've committed to them so that they are a part of who we are, and we understand that feeling good isn't the point of life.  The meat of life happens in the places beyond novelty and fun and excitement.  It happens when you choose staying, instead of fleeing.  It happens when you choose to open yourself where you have the impulse to close.  It happens where your commitment becomes like a part of your body.  It becomes as vital to you as your organs and your skin.  It happens where you've released your children or your partner or your practices and missions and dreams from the responsibility of making you happy, and have allowed them to become a part of you, in the way that they are able.

I don't mean to alienate people who don't have children.  This same thing applies to all kinds of commitments, whether you're a marathon runner, or have been married for 25 years or are sober or are meditating through the pain, or whatever it is in your life that you love, but isn't new, anymore.

New love is beautiful, it's true.  The first day of a baby's life is like a dream.  Beginning something and believing in it is a wonderful feeling.

Perhaps those moments are special things and should be allowed to exist with space and freedom inside the timeline of our lives.  Perhaps clinging to them strangles them, stunts them and turns them into something other than what they could have been, if they were allowed to exist freely for their moment in the sun.

Maybe, every time we say to our partner, "We need to get back to the way we were," we aren't at all honoring the way we were, which was new and shining and like a dream.  When we feel resentment and resistance because things don't feel that way anymore, we're robbing those special things of their sweetness.  We turn them into something negative, something that must not have been real and can be used as evidence that everything is wrong.

You don't love me, anymore, because we don't spend hours in bed, talking and laughing.  Since being with you after so many years, doesn't feel the way our new love did, and I'm choosing to believe that I'm entitled to that new, good feeling and that you're obligated to provide it for me always because you provided it for me then... I'm going to use those good times against us.  I'm going to cling to the time we were young and made love next to an open window and the sound of thunder crashed all around us, and I'll strangle it, and hold its limp corpse up for you to see, shaking it while it gasps and dies.  "You don't love me anymore, because you couldn't keep giving me this," you'll say.

New love is beautiful, but it isn't the point of life.  Honoring it and allowing it to be, to flare and flourish and light up the sky and then to fade in its own time, like everything does... and staying with it, consuming it, taking it into ourselves, letting it become us, to become as vital to us as our lungs and heart and tongue, might be the point of life.  Finding the deeper meaning and beauty beyond the flashier, temporary kind that comes with newness, might be the point.

And most of all, acknowledging that maybe happiness doesn't mean what we've always thought it did.  Maybe happiness doesn't mean feeling good.

That's what I think it means to grow up.

A big thank you... Una Biologicals

I had my wisdom teeth removed.

And it sucked.

A lot. 

photo credit: Una Biologicals

I want to take a minute to send a big THANK YOU to Jessica at Una Biologicals, for taking care of me.  She sent a care package over, with a friend, full of wonderful things from her shop that, (along with the help of a painkiller or two,) made my recovery almost pleasant at times.  Despite bleeding from the gums and not being able to open my mouth and sporting cheeks as big as tennis balls, it was like being at a mini-spa.

photo credit: Una Biologicals

All of the Una products I have tried are my favorites.  They're organic and locally sourced, and made in my beautiful city, Pittsburgh, by the most beautiful, kind, marvelous girl in town.

photo credit: Una Biologicals

Jessica was kind enough to send me everything in my favorite scents, (which are lavender and peppermint, by the way, in case you're ever in a gift giving mood.) The Lavender Body Butter is AMAZING.  You can ask all of the people who visit The Strip District in Pittsburgh on Saturdays, because they're like... addicted to it.

photo credit: Una Biologicals

And she gave me a Headache Relief roll-on, some Bruise Balm and Wound Wonder, which were absolute lifesavers, since I was majorly suffering from all of those things.  (Have you ever cared for a 2 year old and a 6 year old while bleeding from the gums and carrying around cheeks that each weigh about four swollen pounds and are covered in bruises?  Well, it blows.)   I especially loved the Bruise Balm, which helped my discoloration go away quickly.  We're a big fan of herbal remedies, and Arnica and Calendula are some of my favorites for inflammation and infection.

I can't express my gratitude enough.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, Una Biologicals, for doing such a wonderfully kind thing for me, and for doing responsible, creative, wonderful and admirable things with your time and talents and life.  You're the best. 

I was supposed to be a spider, I guess.

When I was young, I looked like a candy wrapper.

One day, a little girl said to me, while we waited to cross a street, 

"Excuse me.  Are you supposed to be a spider?"

She was holding her mother's hand.  I wasn't holding anybody's hand.

I smiled at her and she smiled back at me.

"I guess so," I said.

I didn't know what I was supposed to be.

We all have something to give

When I was younger, I think I must have believed that I didn't have anything to give.  Or that, I had to be secure on my feet before I could think about helping anybody else on to theirs.

I had to be happy to spread happiness.

I had to be well to bandage the wounds of another person.

I had to have something, to give something.

The truth of life is that we'll never be so secure, so happy and so well that we'll feel ready to give away what we have.

The truth is that we won't even be able to find security, out there all alone.  The way to be well is to help someone else to heal.  The way to stand tall is to provide balance for someone shakier.  The truth is that we all have something to give.

I've become a great lover of tiny, kind acts.  It's true that I don't have a lot of time, I'm not boiling over with energy and resources.  I'm poor, I don't have any money.  I'm not anything special.  I can't change anybody's life in grand, sweeping ways.

But, I have my thoughts and my mouth.  I have my hands and my intentions.  I can be kind.  I can say I'm sorry.  I can look into someone's eyes and thank them.  I can remember birthdays.  I can bring over a meal.  I can volunteer to help with a fundraiser.  I can send little packages full of surprises.  I can tell you when I'm thinking about how much I like you.  I can carry boxes.  I can help you to your car.

I don't have a lot of money or possessions or time.  I never wake up feeling secure that I have enough, that I am enough.  I do have an infinite supply of things people need, though.  We all do.  I have my choices and my voice. I'm not bigger or better than anyone else.  I've been the lowest of things.  We can't afford brake pads for our car.  I have an infinite supply of things people need.