Writer With a Capital "W"

This rose bush grows up through the center of a hedge-bush in front of our house. Every time they trim it (like yesterday), the head gets chopped off the rose bush, but it keep sneaking roses out the top and front of the hedge. I love it.

I started out writing a post on my insecurities about writing, specifically my desire to do more of it, but my lack of inspiration or motivation. I asked questions like, "Can I be a "real" writer (the kind with a capital "W") if I don't have stories burning inside me begging to be written?" I even tried really hard to set aside my excuses and face up to the fact that I just plain haven't made time for writing in my life.

And that's where I stopped. And then I erased it all. Because that's really what it comes down to, isn't it? I can say I haven't written because I haven't had the stories, but perhaps I haven't had the stories because I haven't been writing. I haven't been developing my craft, so I wouldn't be prepared even if a story came along.

I tried to go further in this post just now, but again, I've erased it. It gets too whiny. So I'll ask this instead: What are your thoughts on artistic inspiration? Is a bit of talent enough to pursue artistic endeavors with, or do you have to have passion for it as well?

I know the answer to this probably depends on the person, but I'm interested in seeing others' thoughts on it.

Writing Honestly

It looks like I haven't written anything on here for awhile. In truth, I've written, I just haven't posted anything for awhile.

I've been working on a post about dreams--the waking kind, the kind that help motivate and inspire and guide our lives. In fact, if you were really on top of things, you might have seen part of it when I posted it for about 20 minutes the other day. I had started the post a week or so before, and then came back to it a few days ago determined to "post something" on the blog. So I rattled off a second half for that post and put it up, which (temporarily) made me feel good about myself and like I had accomplished something.

But it didn't feel right. I knew I hadn't finished the post in the same spirit which had originally prompted it. This was confirmed when my wonderful, honest husband informed me that I had gotten stuck in metaphor, not given enough of my own thoughts, not made a connection between myself and the metaphors, ended flippantly, and essentially "wimped out."

Ouch.

He was right. I pulled the post down and hoped nobody had seen it.

I realized that my goal that day had been simply to post, not to explore my own thoughts or to search for truth, be it personal or universal. I was seeking self-gratification and a minor sense of achievement, where if I'd done the post justice I could have found self-fulfillment and a sense not only of achievement but of gratitude and satisfaction.

So, the post sits in my drafts folder, where it will remain until I've revised both my writing and my thinking. Because you, readers, deserve better. And I know better. And I deserve better, too.

Morning Affirmation

I now use about half the M&Ms, but this was my first batch and I was excited.

I tend to be very hard on myself, especially in the domestic sphere. I'm not a good housekeeper, and I'm very aware of that fact (though apparently not aware enough to have fixed it yet). But in the midst of my self-criticism, there are moments that make me say, "See, I'm not so bad." These moments affirm, uplift, and encourage me.

Eating homemade granola is my morning affirmation. When I push my spoon into a bowl of granola, I find myself thinking things like this: I'm eating something healthy. I MADE this healthy food. Even the dark chocolate M&Ms will just give me extra endorphins. Those dried blueberries are full of antioxidants. I'm not such a bad housewife. After all, I MADE this. My mom used to make granola. I'm not such a bad mom.


My logic on some of those may be flawed, but on days like today, when my granola container sits empty, I miss it desperately.

What's really funny, though, is that it makes me feel like a better wife and mother even though I'm the only one who eats it. Ryan's body can't handle that much fiber, and Cimorene can't handle the mix of crunchy and chewy.

But it doesn't matter. It still gives me the affirmation I crave. And so I'll keep making it. In fact, I'll go make some now.

For My Mother (who deserves a creative title, but I can't quite get there right now)

Four generations of women. (And that's Cim, not Mari; they look so much alike!)

As Cim has moved into the toddler stage, I've suddenly discovered new things that I'm grateful to my mother for. Most of these were not from my toddler years, but they're things I never really thought to be grateful for until now.

Thank you, Mom, for telling me "be careful" when I climbed trees, instead of "that's too dangerous."

Thank you for just rolling your eyes and pointing at the shower all the times I came home as a mud-monster. (I remember at least once that I swam in the "bug water" just to see what you'd say when I came home.)

Thank you for letting me ride horses bareback and giving me permission to go in the "bat cave" without you there. I knew you trusted me to be responsible, and so I more often was.

Thank you for letting me go for a bike ride with that teenage boy in Taiwan (I was five, but I was in love, and I day-dreamed about him for years).

Thank you for letting us stay up late to finish the book(s) when Dad read to us.

Thank you for making car trips so much fun with books, the Three D's, and more.

Thank you for having the guts to haul your kids around on big adventures. Museums, national monuments, foreign countries, amusement parks, rock climbing--only now am I realizing just how much energy that took. (And you wonder why you're so tired these days?)

Thank you for teaching me to plane wood and to crochet, to backpack and to watch Pride and Prejudice. Thank you for making my brothers push-mow the lawn, not me. You taught me that a girl could do anything, but didn't always have to, and that it was okay to sometimes expect different things from boys and girls.

Thank you for taking time to develop your own talents, such as attending sewing seminars and doing karate with us. There are times these days that I have to remind myself it's okay to still be my own person as well as a mother.

Thank you for setting the boundaries and then leaving me to explore within them, geographically and behaviorally.

Thank you for providing a childhood that was safe and yet bursting with freedom.

I love you, Mom.

Surviving my own Stupidity, or Why Eleven Year Olds Shouldn't go Cow Tipping

Inspired by my friend Cindy (who was, in turn, inspired by "Anne of Green Gables"), I decided to write about a time when my own stupidity nearly got me killed.

As I looked back on my early years, I found enough instances to make me scared for what escapades my own children will get up to. Not all of the instances lend themselves to story telling, but a few are worth describing. So, after a bit of pondering, I've decided to write about a night full of adventure, danger, and, yes, stupidity.

I was ten or eleven at the time. The exact age escapes me, but since most of my best adventures occurred around that age, it's safe to assume it was one of those two. It started with with some plotting between two best friends, me and Jessica.

This picture's a year or two after the adventure.

I would have been just a little younger.

I don't know whose idea it originally was, but both of us concluded that it was somehow essential to our growing-up experience that we go cow tipping.

My house was the obvious choice when it came to staging the endeavor. The property just behind my house was over 70 acres with a herd of about 20 cows. Nobody lived there, and we had permission to play on the property. We usually avoided the cows and stuck to the barns, though--after all, barns didn't stamp their feet and snort at you if you got too close to their babies.

One momma cow in particular always made me nervous. She was huge and red, and she had one horn. And she didn't like kids.  This and other concerns, however, were incidental to our current adventure. After all, the cows would be asleep.

We went to bed at a reasonable hour--or at least, we went to my room, where we sat around wearing dark sweatshirts and debating whether or not to bring a flashlight. Finally we decided against it; after all, there were no city lights around, and the moon and stars were always bright enough to see by. Besides, we wouldn't want to run the risk of waking the cows up early by shining a light in their faces.

We waited until the fireflies were gone. We waited until it was completely dark. Even darker than we'd expected, actually, because clouds were completely covering the sky.

Carefully, we snuck out the window. (Actually, we weren't that careful, because I had floor-to-ceiling windows in my room, so all we had to do was slide it up a couple feet and step out onto the porch. Still, it seemed cooler to sneak out the window than to go into the next room over and use the door.)

The most likely place to find the herd was near the barns. We'd rarely ever seen the cows go into a barn, but they were fed near the barns, so it made sense that they'd sleep there.

Gravel crunched loudly under our feet, but it was too dark to avoid all the rocks and sink holes on the over-land route, so we stuck to the road. Soon the barns loomed, brown-black mountains against the blue-black of everything else. We could barely see their outlines. Still no sign of the cows.

"Where are they?" I whispered, "Do you see them?"
"No. Probably just a little further. Isn't the hay behind the barn?" Jessica whispered back.

In the end, it was so dark we didn't see them at all. But just as we passed the barn, we heard them. They were close. They seemed to be all around us, in fact. And they were definitely not asleep.

My mind was suddenly filled with the image of Big Red, and the size of hole her one horn could leave in me.

Being the confident, fearless eleven-year-olds that we were, we made a break for the covered hay bales. These were giant round bales, stacked two-high and mostly covered with plastic. The stack was 3 times our height, and we scrambled up and perched on the highest point we could find, shivering and listening to the cows chew their cuds. You don't know how ominous a sound that is until those cows have you surrounded in the dark.

I don't know how long we waited. We pretended to each other that we were just hanging out waiting for them to fall asleep so we could tip a few and go home; in truth, we were clinging to the hay for dear life waiting for our chance to run.

Eventually the herd moved off, and we dared to come down. We crunched our way back up the gravel road a bit more quickly than we'd come, slid my window up, and went to bed, promising to "try again another time."

We never did.

Surprises of Spring

Behind our house there's a steep downhill slope which quickly becomes a mass of evergreen trees. It looks so thick that I've never actually gone down there (which is strange for me, because once-upon-a-time I would have felt an irresistible need to explore such a place). 

A few days before Easter I walked out of the garage and looked over the hill, and I saw something white amidst the green.

Curious, I clambered down a few feet. This is what I saw:

This gorgeous lily was fighting its way up through the weeds and scratchy evergreens around it.

After exclaiming over it with Ryan, we came up with this theory: Someone bought a potted lilly. It died (or appeared to). They tossed it off the top of the hill to get rid of it.

But despite the circumstances and surroundings, it bloomed again.

Because it was a few days before Easter, my thoughts went first to resurrection. Then they turned to how we shouldn't judge others, because we don't know when someone might be spiritually sleeping instead of spiritually dead. Then I thought of Joseph in Egypt, who excelled and bloomed wherever he was placed.

By that point I didn't know what to write a blog post about, I just knew I wanted to share my beautiful lilly, which is in a place where nobody else is likely to ever see it (unless I drag them off behind my house to show them, which I admit I've already done with one friend).

So here it is, friends. Take your own lesson from it, or take your pick from those mentioned above. And don't forget to look around to see what surprises spring might throw your way.

Confessions of Ignorance

Today I followed a link to an article entitled, "50 things you should not say to autism parents." As I read the list, the thought that kept going through my mind was, how could someone think something like that, let alone say it? I don't know a lot about autism, but I do know enough to not say something like, "He just needs to apply himself more."

But, of course, it's easy to scoff at these types of comments when they're about something I think should be common sense. It's easy to forget that what may seem obviously rude or insensitive to me may be innocently-intended, merely a comment made in ignorance.

And now that I've given you a paragraph of abstract generalizations, here's my concrete example.

During Fall semester of 2010, I met an amazing girl named Cindy. We were in a class together, and though we'd only interacted a couple of times, we found out we had the same favorite author (those of you who aren't readers may not understand the instant bond that can create), and we became Facebook friends.

One day Cindy missed class, and I saw that she had posted something about not feeling well. I posted that I hoped she got better soon, and when I saw her in class a couple days later, we had a conversation something like this (it was a year and a half ago, so obviously it's not verbatim):

Me: "I'm glad you're here. I saw on Facebook that you weren't feeling well, and I saw you coughing today, but I'm glad you were well enough to come."


Cindy: "Oh, yeah, I had a rough day the other day. I have Cystic Fibrosis, so I always have a cough even when I'm not sick, but I do get sick a lot."


Me: "Oh man. Kind of like pregnancy, I guess, where you just never really feel well and it just kind of wears you down."

Yup. There it is folks. This is where you should be thinking things like, How could she even try to compare a life-long and ultimately fatal genetic illness with a temporary condition that brings so much joy at its conclusion? Or, That's so insensitive of her to say something like that when pregnancy is something so many women with Cystic Fibrosis can only dream about.


Well, I know that NOW.

This is something that I've felt bad about for the last year and a half, but I'm sure that, just like parents of children with autism, my friend Cindy gets insensitive comments like that all the time.

Getting to know Cindy provided an incentive for me to educate myself about Cystic Fibrosis. (If, like me in 2010, you have no idea what it is other than that it's "something medical," I recommend you read Cindy's own explanation of it here.) While I still don't know or understand all the many ways it affects the lives of those who have it and their immediate families, I at least have a basic understanding of what it is, and I'm slightly less likely to make ignorantly hurtful comments in the future.

I learned something valuable about myself from that conversation above, though. I learned that I'm in the biggest danger of making these types of comments when I'm faced with something I don't know anything about and I grasp at straws for a way I can relate it to my own experience. It's something most of us do automatically, because our own experience is the frame on which we stretch our view of the world.

But what if, instead of trying to relate it back to myself, I had focused on Cindy? What if I'd said, "What is Cystic Fibrosis?" and then really listened?

Nearly a year after my conversation with Cindy, I was staying with my mother when a friend came to celebrate her daughter's birthday with us. Her daughter had died years before, at the age of 10. She'd had Cystic Fibrosis.

Again I automatically tried to find a way to relate, mentioning that I had a friend from college who had Cystic Fibrosis. This time, however, I caught myself at that point and started to listen. And thanks to what I had learned from Cindy, I was able to better understand and be a sympathetic ear as this friend talked about her daughter's struggles.

I'm not always good at stepping outside myself. I'm not always eager to admit my ignorance. But I'm trying to learn from it, and I request the patience and forgiveness of each of you around me as you struggle every day with things I don't understand.

Feeling Beautiful

This is me attempting to smile and raise my eyebrows.

As many of you know, the day after I came home from the hospital after having Mariel, I ended up back at the ER. I had lost control of the left side of my face, and had no idea why. Turns out neither did the doctors. I had something they call "Bell's Palsy," which is what they diagnose when something affects the facial nerves but they don't know what. They said it could be a virus, strain from having the baby, pressure from an earache I'd had, or any number of other things. They prescribed me a steroid and an antiviral and sent me home.

One of the interesting things about Bell's Palsy is that not only do they have no real idea what causes it, they have no way of predicting how long it will last. They told me that most patients get better within two weeks, but for some it lasts months, or even years, before suddenly going away. Some never get better.

Honestly, I was so exhausted that I didn't care how long it might last. I was just glad that it wasn't anything serious, and I was anxious to take my two-day-old baby and go home. Sure, it was annoying that I'd have to sleep with an eyepatch on to keep my left eye closed; sure it bothered me that my taste buds weren't working right. But really, all that mattered at the moment was sleep. (Of course, that was the day that Cimorene woke up from her nap with a fever of 103 degrees. Sleep didn't really happen for another week.)

When I called my mom and told her the diagnosis, she commented, "Well, at least you're not single and trying to catch the attention of a guy." That was the first moment that it occurred to me to care how I looked. For a split second, my brain asked, "Will it bother Ryan that half of my face doesn't work? Will he think I'm ugly?"

But almost as soon as the worry entered, it left again. This was Ryan we were talking about, the man who could tell me honestly that he thought I was beautiful when I was morning sick and had just been puking. He thought I was pretty when I was out of shape and red-faced from running after a frisbee. He told me I was beautiful through both my pregnancies as my body changed shape and made me more and more uncomfortable. He told me I was beautiful as I was dealing with post-partum depression and was frustrated that it was taking so long to lose the baby weight from Cimorene. He liked me with makeup or without it, in grubby clothes or a ball gown. No, I didn't have to worry about Ryan. He'd still think I was beautiful.

And sure enough, one of the first things Ryan did that evening when he saw me was tell me he thought I was beautiful. Then he carried our sick and screaming toddler back into the doctor's examining room so that I could sit out in the lobby with our two-day-old baby and rest a little. And then he made dinner when we got home.

Yeah, he's that amazing.

It wasn't until a few days later that I realized just how much being married to Ryan has impacted my self-image. Once upon a time, I was very self-conscious. I wasn't as pretty as a lot of my friends, and in high school and my first couple years of college I tended to get overlooked by most guys. I worried about how I looked and was never very confident, even when friends and roommates told me I was looking great.

But last week, even the thought of not being able to move half of my face didn't scare me.

My Bell's Palsy is almost completely gone now. I can still feel it a little, but most people can't tell at all. I'm one of the lucky ones who got better in two weeks. But even more than feeling grateful that it's gone, I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for what it showed me about my relationship with my husband. I  already knew I had married an extraordinary man, but seeing some of the ways in which I've changed for the better because of being married to him makes me even more grateful.

Thank you, Ryan, for managing to convince me that I'm beautiful.

One Soul

We finally got a bench for my "piano"--a keyboard, actually, but it's the best I have--and I sat down yesterday afternoon to begin rebuilding one of my favorite Sunday afternoon traditions. When I was a teenager, Sunday afternoons were dedicated to music. I would pull out all our "churchy" music and play and sing, sometimes for hours. (This frequently got me out of tasks like helping prepare dinner, because my parents liked the music. I was a smart kid.) My younger brother James would frequently come and sing with me, and sometimes my dad would wander in for a song or two as well, but usually it was just me and the piano.

Yesterday I pulled silver and orange duct tape off the top of the box labeled, "Shannon's Piano Music," and grabbed the first book on the top. It was "The Light Within" by Janice Kapp Perry, a collection of songs I'd grown up on, easy to play and fairly easy for me to sing (if no one's listening and I don't have to worry about being a little off on the high notes).

I started on the first page and played through several of the songs without really thinking much, but when I got to the duet called, "How Great Shall Be Your Joy," my brain started buzzing. The words for the first verse are based on a scripture in the Doctrine and Covenants. It's a scripture I memorized first through this song, and later in early-morning seminary as a teenager.

D&C 18:15--And if it so be that ye should labor all your days in crying repentance unto this people, and bring, save it be one soul unto me, how great shall be your joy with him in the kingdom of my father!


This time, instead of my brain jumping to full-time missionaries like my brother James, who's currently in Denmark, I thought of my children. What greater joy could I have in the kingdom of God than to have my family there with me? What greater opportunity do I have to bring souls to Christ than when teaching my children?

But my brain kept going, because I've known too many wonderful parents who have children who have "opted out." Despite my best efforts, my children will have agency--that wonderful and terrible ability to make their own choices--and they may not choose to follow Christ.

And then a beautiful reality of this scripture hit me. One soul. Just one. God, who cares about the sparrows and the lilies and the hairs on our heads, cares about one soul. Including mine. Even if the only soul I bring to Christ is my own, I shall have joy.

I'll still do my best to help others, especially my children, to learn of Christ and come to Him. But in the end, the only soul I have control over is my own. I'll do everything I can to bring that one home to Him.

Scenes of Christmas



Setting up the tree.




Helping Daddy with the lights.




Daddy decorated Cim. She begged us to hang ornaments off her for the next week.




Our tree and presents on Christmas morning. (Half of the gifts are from the Dollar Tree or tag sales--shh!)




Cimorene discovers her stocking. It had a bear, which meant she automatically loved it.




"Look what I found! Can I keep it?"




Daddy got a stocking too. Santa was sneaky, so he had no idea he was getting one.




Santa's belly and red robe had nothing on mine!




The stocking stuffers were all Cim really needed for the day. Birds, a cat, and a glitter wand. Oh yeah.




Our pondering princess. She put the headbands on herself.




I'm not sure what she's trying to turn that bird into, but apparently it's not working.




Ryan had fun wrapping.




I loved his decorations. This box held the traditional bag of Doritos. :-D




"You better watch out..." --This song has never seemed so appropriate.

 

As an extra gift to me, Ryan changed the poopy diaper. Cimorene didn't care what was going on--she had her toys.