Monthly Archives: November 2012

Processing the Latest Development…

Last week, my life took a sudden turn. I’m still trying to think of appropriate metaphors to explain the impact this has had on me, but none of them work. Seismic shifts, blinding storms, whirlwinds, tsunamis, these are all disasters of one magnitude or the other and this change in my life is not a disaster, not for me. Other comparisons, Dorothy stepping from her house into Oz, Wendy discovering Never Neverland, Gulliver meeting the Lilliputians all evoke images of the fantastic, the magical, the otherworldly, and there is nothing remotely magical or otherworldly about this development. So the best I can do is to say that overnight, my life has changed from a much anticipated and long awaited drive in an idyllic countryside to a high speed, rubber burning, bullet dodging car chase through urban streets.

That’s what it feels like at least.

Last week, my husband and I were enjoying scouting the lay of the land as empty-nesters (albeit koo-koo bird empty-nesters, since two of our four kids have boomeranged back home, our youngest, a freshman in college, is home for holidays, our oldest brings her toddler over for babysitting three days a week, and my mother has moved in)…so although our home is not exactly empty, everyone living here is a grown-up. We can leave them. We enjoy leaving them. We leave them on a regular basis. Whenever we want. For as long as we want. Laughing as we go out the door.

Three days ago, Thanksgiving morning, we became the grateful, and greatly fearful, guardians of a fourteen year old fresh out of options for such a short life. She is depressed, anxious, and possibly still suicidal, but I really feel like she is the sanest person in our household. It was her circumstances that were crazy. She is a survivor. Just barely.

I am instantly back in long familiar territory. Braces, morning and afternoon school drops, friends, doctors’ appointments, clubs, sports, three square meals, homework, curfews. I can do this in my sleep. I am also instantly floundering in completely uncharted waters. Suicide watch, pharmaceuticals under lock and key, vitamin deficiencies, cutting, someone else’s child who I don’t know like the back of my hand, whose moods I can’t read, whose inside jokes are outside of our history together. The good news is, maybe we will have some time before snarky, sullen responses and disgusted eye rolling sets in. We have no baggage. The bad news is, how will I keep vigilant enough to know if she’s in danger? I don’t know this child.

I’m trying to live completely in the present. I can’t have expectations of raising her. I’m rooting for her mother. But I can’t be less than a hundred percent in. Her very real and actual life may depend on our commitment. Recovery, reconciliation, and forgiveness- I want these for her, but I also want to protect her from soul-killing imitations. Today I saw genuine and spontaneous joy in one of her smiles. I’m greedy. I want more, but I feel like a thief wanting more. That smile should have been witnessed by another mother. I have been blessed by such a big and consuming family life, that I feel ashamed to throw my whole lot in with another woman’s child. I don’t want to be like King David when Nathan warned him of having everything and still coveting the meager blessing of another. Still another part of me wants my old life back, and knows that when, if, Hannah returns home, I will be relieved. Every day that goes by, these two conflicting emotions will each only grow stronger. How do I live with either one of these desires except to wholeheartedly embrace the present, and trust that every tomorrow is in better, more knowing hands than mine?

Letter to Hannah

Four days until Thanksgiving and my niece is at Johns Hopkins Hospital after overdosing on her mother’s prescription medicine Saturday night. We got the news yesterday morning that she’s been cutting herself, the full length of both her arms covered in slices. I don’t feel very thankful today, and it seems a horror to me for the rest of the family to gather at my home on Thursday to “celebrate” while Hannah sits in the psych ward, broken at the age of fourteen.

I am full of so many emotions that are crying out for expression.

Rage. Where are the grown-ups in this child’s life? I am one of them. Guilt. For over ten years my husband and I have watched this sweet child’s life unfold like a slow motion train wreck. Why didn’t we do more to flag down help, to stand in the tracks of her lonely and dysfunctional life and say STOP THIS TRAIN RIGHT NOW! Incredible sadness. I am so easily satisfied by the joys in my own small world, and so easily ignore the injury and brokenness even in my own extended family. And how dare I? Because I am that child, I was that broken. I had a different train wreck of a childhood, more of a Running with Scissors scenario than a slow motion pile up, but I remember like yesterday the feeling of needing to hold the universe together since the grown-ups in my world were so clearly bent on pulling it all down on top of us.

Hannah, the world has failed you. I wish I could fix it, fix you, but I could not even fix myself and my own world. You might look at me and Uncle Bruce, at our family, and think we have everything. We have so very much, and so much that we’ve tried to share with you and with your mom, with your dad when he was a part of your life. But now I see that none of that, not our love, not our concerns, not our interventions, were ever going to make life right for you.

When I was a little girl I used to pray – to God, to Jesus, to whoever might be listening and responsible for the disaster that was my family. When I became a teenager, I decided that because nothing had changed and things had even gotten worse that God did not exist. In college, I thought that getting away from my family would make things better, and they were for a while. After a couple of years though, I was messing up my own life pretty efficiently and realized that the “crazy” was in me, not just all around me. I had given up on God many years before, but it turns out He/She had been listening all those years. I just didn’t hear back from Him until I was twenty-one. At twenty-one, sitting in a jail cell in Washington D.C., the Creator of the universe reached out to me, and I was just desperate enough to reach back. I can’t explain very well how I knew it was God, but I did.

I wish I could say I held onto God’s hand for dear life and never let go, but I didn’t. I’m just not that smart. I did even more terrible stuff and sank into even deeper despairs, but the incredible, powerful Love that reached out to me that day in jail never shrank back, never left. You will hear people ask why God lets terrible things happen, and I can’t answer for the things that happen to other people, but I know for certain that I would never have reached out and found the hand of God if all the bad things had not happened to me. Maybe life would be just fine if everybody behaved themselves and never hurt themselves or other people, but we seem to be inclined toward selfishness and self destruction as a rule. Hannah, you are only fourteen and the weight of keeping the world safe has already worn you down. I don’t know what lies in store for you today or tomorrow, but I know the power of Love and I know the name of Love. Cry out Hannah. Cry out for Love to reach you, and I will cry with you.

Finally I will be thankful, Hannah. I will be thankful for Love- not the love I have for you or you have for your mother, because our love fails. Our love hurts. I will be thankful for the Love that imagined you and had the power to create you, the Love that found me at twenty-one, the Love that can and does hold the universe together. I will be thankful for your future in that Love, and I will wait in faith and prayer for Love to rescue you.

A Day in the Life of an Award Winning Novelist

You used to be an unvalidated nobody, struggling to string some sentences together that someone, somewhere, might want to read. But no longer, because you have written a novel and your novel has won an award, or maybe even multiple awards. This is what you have worked for, what you have dreamed of since you were a child. It’s time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your long, hard labor.

In the mornings, you wake to the smell of fresh brewed coffee and the rhythmic hiss of waves crashing onto shore. That’s because the cat knocked over your husband’s half filled cup where he left it on the dresser and the 6:15 light rail train that runs through your backyard is right on time. On your way to the kitchen, you notice the help has not yet gotten to vacuuming the dead leaves in the hallway from when the dogs dragged half the outdoors into the house. Hmm. You read the notes left for you by your family- reminders, pleas, a couple of outright and heavily underlined demands. You forgot what they haven’t- you are the help.

Exchanging dirty dishes for clean ones in the dishwasher, charging your dead cell phone so you can retrieve your messages, pulling on that blessedly stretched out pair of skinny jeans one more day before you wash them and they don’t fit anymore, you begin to wonder where your laptop is. Back in the day, when you wrote your award winning novel, your laptop served virtually one purpose- to advance your career. It sat obediently on your desk, where you would go each day to write, to do research, to complete administrative tasks like communicating with the publishing world. Now your laptop, a newer model than the productive one, calls to you throughout the day and night like a siren song with its array of capabilities, winks at you when you think about writing, and travels all over the place as you interface with the world in its many fascinating forms. You finally find it under a sofa pillow in the living room where you spent last night catching up on episodes of Modern Family. It is dead as a doorknob (yes you, the award winning author, still speak to yourself in clichéd idioms, saving your original word choices for the printed page).

Looking for the charger reminds you of all the ways your life has changed since your novel was published and won its award. Your desk is no longer visible. You can’t remember the last time you sat there. Is there even a place to sit still? You look under where your chair used to be. Oh there’s your favorite book signing pen, over by the stack of your novels that were misprinted and that you’re supposed to be using as giveaways but that you really use for kindling. No charger. But you do find the to-do list you made for last Valentine’s Day.

Your social life has taken a turn since you’ve become an award winning novelist. If people you’ve known casually all your life know you’ve written a book, they suddenly find you remarkable. Conversations with these people become almost impossible when you realize they are holding their breath lest they miss any of the dazzling words that tumble from your lips. Dazzling words have never tumbled from your lips- that’s why you write. At social gatherings most of the people you meet have never heard of you or your book, but there are usually a couple of people who are dying to talk to you. Mostly they want to know three things: if Oprah has read your book, if you’ve signed a deal for the movie rights, and whether your agent could take a look at something they’ve been working on. Sometimes they want to know if you’ve met and could introduce them to the “Fifty Shades of Grey” lady. You don’t even know where to begin with these questions.

You did have a brief sense that life had changed when the local librarians knew you by name, but then you found out it was because you have broken all previous records for overdue fines.

Now that you are an award winning novelist, you are actually earning money from what you love to do. If you were to check on your book sales, which you have firmly disciplined yourself not to do, you would find that even while you were sleeping, somewhere in the world people were buying your book. Two people to be exact. Cha-ching! Three bucks goes into the kitty. How on earth did you sleep soundly at night before becoming an award winning author?

But enough with basking in the dewy glow. Even you, an award winning author, must work and since your laptop is dead and you can’t find the charger, why not tackle the accumulated mess in your office? Well, there are a thousand reasons why not. Somewhere in the sloping hill of paper that is cascading from your desk is a partial draft of your next book. Your award winning novel was once just such an unsightly abomination to you, a heaving, shifting wedge of ruined characters and flailing plot twists. And now it sits on your bookshelf, a shining beacon to your hard work. Actually, fifty of them sit on your bookshelf because you are supposed to be at a book fair tomorrow where you will sit and smile and say, “Yes, this is my novel. It won an award this past spring. Would you like me to sign it?” Over and over and over again. And you will remind yourself that this is what you dreamed of, and worked for.

So you, the award winning author, will let this thought carry you along through your day, a day that will be a little like yesterday and a little like tomorrow and not so very different from the days you had two years ago before you were an award winning novelist. You won’t be jetting to Chicago to lunch with Oprah, and you will not face the temptation of running off with the leading man from the movie made of your book. Your daughter will still drop your grandson off for babysitting three afternoons a week, and your husband will still swat you on the bottom and say “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” when he crosses the room. There will still be people out there writing the next versions of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, and you will never be one of them. It turns out, for you, the award winning novelist, the fruits of your labor is the labor itself. And that, my friend, is a pretty good gig if you can get it.

What happened between me and Anne

This is not a paid advertisement, although it might as well be.

I had coffee in D.C. with a friend and afterwards he bought me a book by one of his favored authors, Anne Lamott. The book, called “Some Assembly Required,” is her journal of the first year of her grandson’s life. I’m reading it, savoring it, laughing out loud at it, and am now a fan of all things Anne Lamott. I fully intend to read everything she’s ever written, and will write in the future. I am now money in her back pocket.

I do this with writers, fall in love, gobble up their every word, pine for their next book. I am very faithful. Michael Chabon, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Franzen, you will have me forever. But I feel a kinship with Anne Lamott. She is a writer. I am a writer. She is a messed up person of faith. I am a messed up person of faith. She is a grandmother. I am a grandmother. She is an anxious worrier with friends who impart great wisdom to her which she mostly ignores. I am not an anxious worrier, but my husband is, which is why I am determined to find ways to read parts of her books to him. He needs her. He needs the kind of friends she has. He has me, but he doesn’t appreciate me. Anne doesn’t always appreciate her friends either. Her die hard, last resort friend whom she only turns to when she is on the verge of spinning off into outerspace from anxiety, she calls Horrible Bonnie. Horrible, because Bonnie never worries.

I never worry either. I am very, very laid back. I am sure that my husband sometimes thinks of me as Horrible Lara. Worriers like to be validated in their worrying. Worriers worry about people who don’t worry. We make them crazy. We are icing on the cake of worries. They have to wring their hands doubletime to make up for all the ways in which we are failing to hold the universe together. But anyway, back to Anne Lamott.

I am sure that if I were to meet Anne, we would soon be best friends. How could she not feel the same way about me as I now feel about her? There is only one thing about Anne that bothers me. She has a more highly evolved work ethic than I do. She must have, because she is about my same age, but she has written over a dozen books and I have written just one. My one is a very good book, but still… Maybe Anne has written so many more books than I have because she is such a worrier and she worries that if she doesn’t write lots of books, people won’t want to be her friend. But I want to be her friend in spite of the fact that she’s written lots of books! So once she and I are friends, she can slow way down with all that book a year business. That can’t be good for her health.

The thing about Anne is, she writes not only novels, but also books about her life. Maybe I should be writing books about my life too. How hard can that be? You live a certain amount of time, then you write about it. It’s probably much easier than making up a bunch of people and then having to figure out what they’ve done with their lives before you can even write the book. Maybe, once Anne and I are friends, and seeing as how she already has so many books about her, she will want to write a book about me. I’m not that fascinating, but neither is she and she’s managed to write lots of funny books about herself. Anne would be able to spice me right up.

Anne lives in San Francisco and I live in Baltimore so that will make being best friends challenging, but it will be fun to fly back and forth to see each other. Being friends with Anne may actually improve my productivity as a writer. Although it’s hard to imagine how Anne even has time to live her life with all the writing she does. Anne is so prolific that it’s kind of annoying. I enjoy reading Anne’s books and they make me want to write more, and better, but Anne herself makes me feel kind of lazy. And who wants a friend who makes you feel like an underachiever? Anne’s problem is she just keeps on writing, even when the rest of us are stuck. Anne could make being stuck as a writer into a book.

Which is too bad, because I really think we could have been friends.