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Don’t Touch My Stuff!

I hate sharing.

I hate it like I hate getting up at the crack of dawn.

I hate it like I hate cleaning.

The other day, my brother looked at me and said, “You’re really bad at sharing.”

And I said, “Huh, yeah I am.”

It’s totally true. When I was little, I used to sell sticks of gum to my siblings. “That’ll be 25 cents,” I’d say, and the little naive things would do it because they trusted me. The beginnings of my entrepreneurship stirred even as my parents swiftly ended my first venture.

When whoever I’m with orders something, I get excited because I expect to get a taste. When they assume the same, however, reaching over for my glass/mug/plate, I feel a bristling: Excuse me? Can you ask?, and I wonder where I get off.

~     ~     ~

I started making excuses for myself: It’s because my siblings broke everything when I was little! All my dolls were ruined! We had to fight for the yummiest of everything! I blame my childhood for my current state!

My mom even agreed with me, saying that’s probably where my penurious ways stem from. And I placate myself by saying that I give to my church, I even sponsor a child in India, for goodness sake!

But I have a hard time with the little things, like paying for someone’s coffee or ice cream or movie ticket. I never even THINK to offer these things, and I’m shocked when someone says to me, “Oh, I got this.” I wonder when they’ll expect me to pay them back, and I keep a tally in my head of how much I owe.

Generosity goes beyond money. Am I generous with my time? Yes, far more so than with my things. I am much more likely to make time in my week to see a friend than I am to buy someone a gift. You need help with something? I love helping. You want me to buy you gas? That one’s a little tougher.

I must be afraid of something. Afraid of being taken advantage of. Afraid of getting less than my share.

Maybe it’s about trust.

I want a generous spirit. I want to hold my hands open to those I love, as well as to my church and others in need. I’m sitting at a coffee shop right now, and I’m wondering why I didn’t offer to buy my friend’s coffee. Maybe that’s where it starts? Unsolicited moments of generosity.

Maybe you can train yourself to being generous?

Has someone ever taught you something about yourself? If it was a flaw, how are you working to grow?

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Good Time Saturday Night

I am sitting in a darkened home. Three children are asleep upstairs and the refrigerator hums as I type.

[I felt my body being jostled and there she was, all seven-years of her, shaking me. I’d fallen asleep watching Master Chef Jr. at 8:30. That does not fly when you haven’t seen each other in months and there is still so much to talk about.]

What did we talk about?

She told me about school and how “first grade is so boring.” (“Boring” seems to be the new word.) I asked her why.

“All we do is sit at desks and do math.”

“That sounds pretty boring,” I said.

“I miss kindergarten.”

Don’t we all.

“I wish I were your teacher. Then we could have fun and learn at the same time.”

But I shouldn’t have said it because I saw her eyes dart for a moment with the thought of it.

We watched the oldest brother play flag football, losing terribly. They played tag because let’s face it, I wasn’t feeling it. We sang Lorde’s “Royals” and Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” and a thousand other songs. Catherine, everyone is looking at us ’cause you’re singing.

And?

They got over it pretty quickly and joined in. Don’t worry. We weren’t too obnoxious.

He threw his body and contorted himself in all different shapes until finally I said,

“You watch it. No hospital runs until after I eat my dinner.”

They thought that was the funniest thing. Oh, Catherine said she won’t take us to the hospital until after she eats. Better be careful! 

We laughed in the pizza place waiting for our order. The middle boy shook my soda till all the bubbles filled the bottle. We almost took the wrong food. I forgot to order the mozzarella sticks. We licked our fingers.

They told me about their new babysitter, who sounded nice.

But she, as though concerned for my feelings, leaned over and whispered in my ear,

“You’re funner.”

I read Angelina Ballerina, did not give in to the half-hearted request for more, smoothed hair, turned out lights.

The 10, 9, and 5-year-old are now 11, 10, and 7. They still guess that I’m in my thirties, wonder where my children are, and ask if I can have sleepovers.

Not bad for a Saturday night.

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Where I’m From

I am from a thought-filled bed –

from pumpkin-pie candles and oak bookshelves.

 

I am from the white house on the slope,

homegrown apples and sage.

 

I am from the golden honey –

the towering pine whose long gone limbs

I remember as if they were my own.

 

I’m from dinners on the porch and too much laughing,

from an open-hearted mama and a dream-big father.

I’m from not enough cleaning and just the right living

and from stacks of books that beg reading.

 

I’m from “don’t wish your childhood away” and “try new food always”

and “Jesus called them one by one.”

 

I’m from cozy Christmas mornings and the yellow lights.

I’m from New and Old England,

sun-warmed vegetables and raspberry jam.

 

From sea-fishing, lake-fishing, ice-fishing,

when long-gone family breathe life again

for just that moment on the water,

 

and scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings

tell us the world.

 

[This is part of a link-up with SheLoves Magazine]

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Painting in the Temporary

I’ve been rearranging my bedroom for the past few weeks. Yes, it takes me a long time. Partly because I’ve only devoted small chunks of time to pondering the feng shui of this girlhood bedroom of mine, and partly because something is in the way.

I think I need to paint my bedroom.

This is not a huge development for most of you. But look at it this way:

1. I haven’t changed the color of my room since high school.

2. I don’t like doing big projects and I especially don’t like doing them alone.

3. Alone, you say? What about your sister?

4. Oh, right, she’s moved out and designing her own a-little-bit-too-big-for-one-person bedroom.

So that’s the crux of it. I sit on my bed and look around. Maybe the bookshelves should go here? Maybe I need more bookshelves (well, that’s a definite)? Maybe I should move my pictures to the other wall? Maybe I’m the most indecisive domestic there is? And all of this wondering is stuck because I feel like I need to paint over the white compound marks her posters so cunningly covered, but I don’t have the heart to do it all alone.

~     ~     ~

When we were little girls – maybe nine and ten – we painted our room “Frosted Cranberry.” We huddled our beds in the middle, draped old sheets over everything, and Mom taught us how to roll the thick dark paint on the walls. I was terrible at edging so Mom did that, carefully maneuvering around the moulding with the same attention to detail she brings to weeding the garden.

That is the color I think of when I remember being a little girl.

The deep cranberry of Laura Ingalls Wilder Club, writing inventive and terrible short stories about murders in a small town, trying to start a business – any business – because entrepreneurialship is in my blood, and, probably the best, the color of two twin beds sitting parallel with a little rug in between.

~     ~     ~

If “Frosted Cranberry” is the color of my childhood, and “Waterfall” is the color of my teenage hood, what should be the color of my young adulthood?

I think there is a tiny part of me that is afraid to commit to this place in the form of new paint.

How long will I call this room mine?

How long will I actually spend in this little white house?

And how many hours do I want to devote to a project that will take me far too long for what it is?

But I am reminded that temporary things deserve as much beauty and commitment as non-temporary things. I get stuck when I think that way; if I’m always waiting for certainty, I’ll never do anything. Before I know it, I’ll be living in a room with worn-through carpet and peeling-off paint.

Why live in a room whose walls are covered in compound and the smoke of beautiful candles burned years ago? Does it matter if I’m here only one more year?

Wouldn’t I rather be surrounded by beauty?

I know that I could elicit help from a brother or a friend. Maybe I will. My sister would probably even come home for the weekend and slap some paint on these walls.

But I’m the only one choosing the paint.

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Good Things #?!

I can’t remember the last time I was dutiful and wrote a Good Things post on an actual Monday. I may need to reevaluate my plan.

Here are some good things, regardless.

megjaySmack in my twenty-something-face. A friend posted this on Facebook and I love TED Talks. Here, Meg Jay talks to twenty-somethings about what happens when we buy into the lie that “twenty is the new thirty.” It’s frustrating when you see glimmers of yourself.

Music. You know when you finally start doing something you should’ve been doing all along and you think What the heck have I been doing all along?! That’s how I felt after I started listening to The Oh Hellos – MONTHS after a friend recommended them to me. Here’s just a taste:

New Running Shoes. Not sure if this is a Good Thing or not…just kidding…Finally went for my first run since London and Switzerland and two days later I’m still feeling it and wondering if I’ll get it back. I will say, however, that new sneakers make running more fashionable, if not easier.

Birthdays. Who doesn’t like to celebrate birthdays? Today is my twin brother and sister’s 23rd, and hoorah for them! (See how sharp they are?!)

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Fresh out of college, fresh into life, and here’s to finding your own Good Things!

[Prize to whoever can count the number of times I used an interrobang in this post.]

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I Write Life

When I was a little girl, I was certain I would love only one man. In fact, I was pretty sure that we would grow up together, that he’d be a boy down the street and that suddenly one glorious summer evening we would both realize we’d loved each other all along. He’d touch my cheek (ala, Gilbert Blythe) and whisper some friendly tease as we began to imagine our future.

I thought this way for years, really, as a young girl reading Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, and Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. It’s possible I even wrote an 83-page novella (by hand) about a girl name Willa realizing the same thing about her friend Peter as they splashed each other in the secret pond in the woods. (If that isn’t some not-so-secret sexual tension in my 12-year-old writing, I don’t know what would be.)

And then one day, it occurred to me:

If I say I want to grow up with the boy I marry, that means I have to KNOW HIM NOW.

And I looked around at the boys I knew, and though I loved them dearly, I quickly revised my dream.

Never mind. I think it’s much better to meet later, in college, to be more grown up. Never mind. I’ll wait.

So I grew up, still thinking I would love one man and one man forever.

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The summer after my junior year, I interned at a publishing house in Boston. One of my tasks was to edit the text in their new database. I was responsible for fixing bizarre spaces in the mid dle of w ord s and checking line breaks, and in the process of doing this, I read some strange and awful and thought-provoking books. One was a memoir by a woman whose name I don’t remember. It had a light blue cover and it was mostly filled with a string of lovers, each one daring and handsome, social and introverted, crazy and calm. The image I have most strongly from her book is a story of her and one of her lovers (she was in her late fifties by now, I think) and they are in one of their apartments. It’s been a day of lounging around, eating and love making, and I don’t know what happened exactly, but I remember distinctly feeling a sense of her happiness. That she viewed this doomed relationship with love and tenderness. She still thought of this man fondly, despite their different paths and the pain they both felt.

I was twenty-one years old.

So I sat in my gray cubicle and in my self-righteousness, I thought: I don’t know how this is possible. She writes about these men – these men she didn’t stay with who broke her heart or who had their hearts broken by her – and she is smiling. I can feel it in her words. She is smiling at the memories with them, even as she realizes the relationships are dead.

I couldn’t understand her ability to find joy in something that was broken, and I couldn’t understand that she had loved more than one man.

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It’s three years later, and I can say with full honesty that I have loved more than one man. I might even say I’ve loved a small handful, none of them perfectly, some of them with false-starts of returned love, some of them even unwittingly requested by the receiver. If it’s taught me anything – this loving – it’s that each time is different and each time is imperfect and each time

I didn’t know how to end that sentence. Mostly because I’m not entirely sure what loving has taught me. I’d like to think that each time I get a little better at it, at both feeling it and showing it. At both being myself and enjoying someone else.

I’m glad, at twenty-four, that I can say I’ve loved more than one man. Not because it isn’t beautiful to be given that gift, but because I needed to break out of the idea of myself. I needed to see what it meant to live life instead of write it. I like to think that when I’m sixty-five, I will be telling my stories of love and un-love with a smile on my face. Because even though these men were not meant for me nor I for them, there is a reason one of us was drawn to the other, and that reason is worth telling.

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Good Things #10: Surprise Chances

I am sitting in the lunchroom of my Alma Mater. Refrigerators are buzzing, a handful of workers are prepping for lunch, but otherwise, I am alone with contemplative music and the inevitable lesson plans stretching out before me.

I never planned on working here. It fell into my lap (or my inbox, if we’re being technical), and before I knew it I had this amazing opportunity to teach English to roughly 30 international students. I was excited and scared and had that typical OH-MY-GOSH feeling which seems to accompany a lot of what I do. I would say that feeling has subsided a little, after a day and a half of orientation and collaboration with other teachers. I would say that – and it would be a little true.

I don’t know quite what to think about being on this campus again. It’s in an entirely different capacity (What? I am teaching? It’s hard enough being professional during the school year!), and I’m loving getting to know my co-teacher and the others who will be working with me.

[Accents are crazy, by the way. Midwesterners are so easygoing, at the least the ones I’m meeting, and they say all the city-names wrong. There’s also a South African on our teaching team, and I am finding it hard to suppress my desire to just sit back and bask in his voice.]

We had a welcome night, and I looked around at roughly 100 Asian faces and it reminded me of attending the Global Young Leadership Conference in high school (that’s where the photo’s from…of course, I was taking the picture…). That was one of the most formative experiences of my life (not least because I was sixteen in Washington, DC and New York City for the first time, and all the accompanying catastrophes occurred). That is what stretches before these students, only in a completely foreign country. I could feel their skins shivering with excitement.

It all starts Monday morning at 8:00. I will walk into the classroom with confidence (or the air of it) and a crazy hectic three weeks will begin. I didn’t think I’d get the chance to be here again – the place I learned how to read a poem without wanting to hurl the book at the wall – and I certainly never thought I’d get the chance to teach in its classrooms.

Here’s something for your listening pleasure. Loving this.

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July 5, 2013

I am sitting in a colorful floral dress. The tent I am under blocks the sun, but there is no denying the 95-degree heat, or the fact that there is a line of men standing at the front in three-piece suits. I am immediately grateful for my female status (and the accompanying summer dresses).

There are so many people sitting around me – many I know peripherally, a few I’ve known for over twenty years, their faces as familiar as family. July 5th, 2013 crept up on me, after a life of Dunkin’ Donuts Dunkaccinos and chocolate doughnuts, White Farms key lime pie ice cream, wiffle ball, touch-football, volley ball, “Tribute to the Best Song in the World”, Strong Bad, three goofballs talking and laughing over a beer.

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I have had the amazing privilege of watching one of my oldest friends marry one of my dearest friends. Not too many people can say that. As we all stood, singing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” I listened to the harmonies that filled the air in that tent, and I thought how beautifully lives were converging right in front of me. From the multi-colored florets made lovingly by women in the bride’s life to the music performed by gifted family, this wedding was like seeing their two souls overlaid.

~     ~     ~

The ceremony is over, we are standing, clapping, hooting, when suddenly music starts playing. They are singing – the newlyweds – singing and dancing and the bridal party joins in. A wedding flash mob? Yes, please. Make it to the Muppets’ “Life’s a Happy Song” and let me join in from the audience, surprising my family, and it’s even better.

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I sing “Life’s a piece of pie!” and run up the aisle to join the dancing. We’re all smiling, singing to the surprised audience, all these faces I have loved for so long, and I’m grateful to be part of this day.

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[Later, at the reception, I will need to leave the room as the bride dances with her father to Eva Cassidy’s rendition of “Fields of Gold.” I will rush past the groom’s mother whose eyes will also be glistening, I will run down the stairs and walk around the parking lot, crying alone in the hot summer evening. I won’t fully understand this strong reaction, but I will know that it’s all mixed in with growing up, friendships, changes, love that never happened and love that might happen, and the realization that the midwest is calling my friends away from me. All this will happen, but then I will wipe my eyes, run back up the stairs, and dance for the following three hours.]

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[Proof that I take my dancing a little too seriously. And that my friends are cool.]

Babies grow up and marry their great loves and change the lives of those around them.

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One Year Down

My first year of teaching is coming to a close. Back in August, as I was anticipating a new job and the frightening possibilities that lay head, I realized one thing: Failing is not an option.

What if I don’t do a good job?

What if I’m a terrible teacher?

What if no one learns and none of the kids like me?

For weeks, these thoughts infiltrated my mind, and I secretly contemplated throwing my hands up and running away. No thanks, I’ll get another waitressing job. Cleaning job. Administrative assistant job. Anything that doesn’t scare me as much as this does. 

But it was one of those things: I had a choice. Too often I find myself reeling with this sense that I don’t have control. I’ve always craved having the final say, controlling the situation; I blame being the oldest, along with my genes…But the truth is, we DO control a lot. We have the ability to press on, even when we fear a terrible outcome. I had the ability to work harder than I thought I could handle.

This year has been far from perfect. There is so much left to learn, and my second year of teaching will probably open my eyes to Just. How. Much. I’m excited to learn how to use each moment of class more effectively, how to explain concepts more clearly, and how to engage students in ways that fire them up to learn new things.

Saturday morning, I will be dressed in regalia, marching down a short aisle to celebrate the graduations of my senior Latin students. I will present two awards and talk about the hard work and skill of my class. They know how young I am, but they don’t know how close to their age I still feel.

I guess all of us have accomplished something pretty big this year.

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[On Going Back]

We all say the same thing: It’s a flash

and slug.

 

You can’t wrap up time in a pink box

and raise it high in definition. You can’t seal

an envelope with a slow, deliberate lick –

explain the work and love, hate and despair

of four years.

 

What do you say to two shining faces

that’s honest, loving, real?

 

Sometimes, I would forsake all the settledness

I’ve uncovered in these two stretched years

for one day surrounded by the me and yous

of that place.

 

Ponds are dark even when they’re shallow.

The paths around them hold every word

whispered, shouted, proclaimed

until you wonder if the very gravel

has ears.

 

So I tell them: Sometimes, I would forsake

all the settledness I’ve uncovered.

 

Mostly, though, I look with gentleness

at those long-tough times, and I praise God

for not giving me the choice.

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