Getting Real About Me (and Anxiety)

I've always tried to be honest. I've written this blog with honesty over the years. It started as an exercise for a fledgling writer, and now it remains long after the writer has hung up his keyboard. Maybe another short story or two will find its way from my fingertips, but not just yet...

I wrote with honesty about my first wife's suicide and her struggles with post-partum anxiety and psychosis. I wrote about my kids, grief, finding love again... all with honesty. I've told stories about my father's cancer and the boy I almost killed in high school.

Today, I'm mustering that honesty to talk about my own mental health. About two months ago, I began ruminating--the process of going over and over the same mental ground with no resolution. The ruminations grew claws and panic attacks soon followed. On Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving, after a few short hours of sleep and a lot of ceiling gazing, I told Kim (my wife) I needed to see the doctor. I have no idea why anxiety cranked the heat this fall. I've staggered through times of trouble and rumination without my brain and body conspiring in such an insidious way in the past. Life is good right now. Really good... but the bitch anxiety doesn't care.

I've been on medication for five weeks now--one of those "six to eight weeks for full therapeutic dose" meds. I've gone back to see a therapist I first visited five years ago. Headspace has become my favorite app over the past few days.

We don't talk about mental health enough in this country--not yet. Not even after mass shootings and rising suicide rates. We don't talk about mental health in real, constructive ways. The disease model has dragged its feet through several incarnations of the DSM. We talk of "illness." Anyone diagnosed with anxiety, depression, OCD, or any number of other convenient labels is often deemed as sick or weak.

There's not a damn thing weak about having anxiety. It's a bitch. It undermines my good feelings and lets those ruminating lies run free. It's stolen my sleep. It made Thanksgiving dinner a marathon of "getting through" with all the chaos and bustle and family. It kicked me hard a couple of times on Christmas morning. I've kept plugging along, taking my pills, working on mindfulness, reminding myself that I haven't always felt this way and will not always feel this way.

I write a love letter to Kim every day. I use an add-on to have it delivered to her email inbox every morning. I've been doing this for more than five years now. This blog post is her love letter today. If it helps one person, good. If it reminds one person that they are not alone, good. If it gives one person pause before calling someone struggling with depression or anxiety or you-name-it weak, good. I love you, Kim. You give me courage.

It's time we all acknowledged that mental health is simply healthcare. It's the real thing to do--the only honest thing to do.

Loving Hard Through the Horror of Being Five

This past weekend, my five-year-old son, Elliot, asked me if he was going to die.

Those words carry weight. "Daddy, am I going to die?"

The tears came soon after, big eye-welling tears because somewhere in his five-year-old brain, he'd made the connection. Real horror came to my son, and nothing could touch him in quite the same way again. Maybe he'd caught just enough of the news or someone talking about the news to shake his frame. Maybe not. The knowing comes for all of us but in different ways.

I remember being five. I remember the day an ambulance came and carried my father away, how my mother didn't come home until nearly midnight, and how my brother spoke of dropping out of school and going to work. It was early fall 1980--the beginning of my brother's senior year. A brain tumor had come for my father.

I remember other things about being young: my grandparents staying with us while Mom was away with Dad. There were trips to see neurologists and CAT scans and other things which seem like bloodletting and leeches now, but delivered state-of-the-art medical care in 1980. Dad changed. He aged faster and vomited often from the cocktail of medications and radiation. He died nine years later, catatonic, in the same hospital where he had been diagnosed.

I also remember how I cried when I thought Kermit the Frog was going to die at the end of The Muppet Movie. Somehow, my five-year-old brain knew, just like Elliot's. Innocence evaporated. Poof. And no horror is truly greater than the loss of that childish innocence. Once it's gone, there is no return. That has always haunted me more than anything. It's the true darkness in the basement, the stranger lurking outside, or the danger in the woods. For me, it wound around the thing which ate my father from the inside out.

My son faces new monsters. We've done horrible things to each other. We've built an artificial world with social media used to insult, divide, and destroy each other. We've killed each other with startling efficiency in Las Vegas, Orlando, Newtown... All that horror, all that innocence lost. We can't go back, and I'm not sure how we can go forward. Where would we go?

What does a five-year-old do after asking, "Daddy, am I going to die?" Where can he go to be safe again?

I have no magic to restore the world--I can't even change what my son now knows. But we play together. We decorate the yard for Halloween and bake cookies at Christmas. We take trips and awe at mountains, hunting for a glimpse of illusive big-horned sheep. We read books together and hug often. We both know, and that knowing makes us love hard.

And love, in the end, is the only thing that really matters.

Playing Through my Midlife Crisis

I'm officially calling my midlife crisis. About two weeks ago, I started a new hobby which ties together several life threads...



Yes, I'm making YouTube videos. I'm an amateur (as my kids remind me), but it's a fun hobby. And it's my excuse to play with toys, buy old stuff, and open collectibles from yesteryear. That was the plan at least. And then Elliot intervened:



Oh, there still will be plenty of old junk, but I think Elliot and I will have some fun playing games together. Even at five, the kid is drawn to YouTube and enjoys watching himself on the little screen.



So for now he's my production buddy. I'll do some solo stuff (boring) and some Elliot stuff (awesome). I'll let him play with some old toys from my childhood and go head-to-head with some modern games. This hobby is my chance to hunt for Aaron the Kid while fully engaging in life as Aaron the Dad. And while Owen and Max haven't been featured in a video (yet), they are watching them. This might be a great way to sneak some parenting messages past them...



Please subscribe to the YouTube channel (if that's your thing) and see where this adventure goes...

On Being a "Difficult" Parent

I'm officially intransigent. I think that means "difficult."

The last time Max had an infusion, one of his inflammation markers was elevated. I've learned that predicting a Crohn's flare up can be a guessing game er, prediction activity involving a slew of lab results and reports of clinical symptoms.

He'd just had an ear infection and ten days on antibiotics, so wonky labs could have been innocuous or a "false positive." It was also one result from a few inflammation markers checked every infusion--and the other numbers were fine. Evidently his GI specialist didn't think so, and through a rather uncomfortable round of "let's play triangulating communication" with me and his nurse a week after those labs, I learned he wanted to move Max to a six week rather than eight week infusion schedule.

Look, I know my kid is sick. He spent nearly five weeks in the hospital last winter before having three surgeries through June. But--and this is pretty crucial--Max hasn't reported a Crohn's symptom since the first surgery liberated him of a very sick colon.

I don't harbor illusions that my child is healed and cured of this disease. We travel to Kansas City for infusions every couple of months (I guess six weeks now) since last January. We make sure he takes his vitamins and anti-anxiety meds. I monitor how much he eats, his exercise--everything. I am not happy that the doctor is changing treatment based on a single lab result one time and the apparent dismissal of my explanation that Max has been symptom free (through the nurse triangulation channel, of course). I certainly am not happy such a thing happens without any examination or discussion with the patient.

In fact, his specialist used the word "intransigent" in an email to the nurse with whom we were triangulating to describe my attitude toward Max's symptoms in the past. Go on, look it up. Google that bad boy. Kind of sounds like an insult, right?

Before Max's hospital marathon, I may have misread some symptoms. I may have not understood the gravity of the disease and how things could spiral quickly. Max also struggles with anxiety, and I know the anxiety contributed to his downward spiral. This is how things happen with chronic diseases as families learn to manage and cope.

Things are different now. He has no colon. I monitor him more closely. He's receiving treatment and therapy to manage the anxiety And he's been doing well.

But now I'm a "difficult" parent. Intransigent. Pig-headed and stubborn and, in his specialist's opinion, blind to what's really going on with Max.

No.

I live with Max. I know what's going on. I know how many times he has a bowel movement every day. I know how he's feeling and what his worries are. I know what math group he's in and the book his reading group is devouring. I know his favorite Pokemon and the name he uses on Minecraft servers. I know he asked for a pill form of Benadryl before his infusions (given before Remicade) and I know the specialist hasn't bothered to change those orders to meet his request since making that request nearly six months ago. I also know that same specialist never had a conversation with Max's surgeon last spring. I know that's not necessarily how medicine works, but I know that's how I work. I know I expect more communication than a couple of phone calls with a nurse and a naughty note about me from the specialist to that nurse. I know I'm frustrated and sometimes mad as hell.

And I know, most of all, I love my son and will advocate for him to the best of my ability,

If that makes me "difficult," bring it on.

"My dad is pure evil." 

(Elliot, age 5)

Living in Fear

My son, Max, turns ten at the end of the month. In December 2011, only about a week and a half after his youngest brother, Elliot, was born, we rushed Max to Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri because of blood in his stool, a positive test for malicious bacteria, and some joint pain. Five days, several blood tests, a colonoscopy, and sundry medications later, Max was discharged with a diagnosis of Crohn's disease.

He's had struggles over the last four years, little Crohn's/Colitis related things that anyone familiar with this monster will know well. Things took a nose dive this past December, and between mid-December and the end of January, Max spent five weeks in the hospital. The doctors tried new meds and more meds, but in the end, my almost ten-year-old had his colon removed on January 20th. All of it.

I do not like to live in fear. Show me the monster, and I will meet it head-on. Now that Max has had a very necessary surgery, he's living with a "temporary" colostomy bag. Temporary in quotes? Yes. He's had one subsequent surgery to resection/restructure his small bowl, and we should have another to "reconnect" his "parts" down the road. Here's the fear and frustration part: his GI specialist and surgeon disagree as to the timing of this final surgery. The GI doctor is full of "what ifs" and "possible problems." Talking to him is a lesson in bodily horror, something with which I struggle, both as a writer and a human. Yes, there are possible problems if we reconnect. The surgeon is more optimistic. Neither agree--neither have even spoken to each other as of this writing--but we are faced with a decision: When to do the final surgery.

I do not like to live in fear.

I've learned all too well that life will bring tragedy regardless of what we do. I lost my father to brain cancer, my first wife to postpartum psychosis, and Max has this awful disease. None of them "asked" for it with dangerous living. This isn't another story of someone "getting what he deserves." I cannot and will not believe in a prosperity gospel when two good, caring adults and one innocent child face such monsters. Bad things happen to everyone, and we are defined by how we respond.

So what to do about Max? In two hours, I'll listen to his surgeon make a case for re-connection. Max has expressed his lack of love for the bag--something that if things do not go well after re-connection, he may have to live with, anyway. I've always been one to steer into the storm rather than trying to run. The storm is coming either way, and when we lie to ourselves about having control... well, that's a fast track to fear.

I will not live in fear.

Getting Up*

My oldest son competed in his first middle school track meet last night. When I was in high school, we called various members of the team hogs, dogs, and frogs--throwers, runners, and jumpers. Owen decided to try a little bit of everything: shot put, long jump, and the 200 meter dash. So I guess he was a hog-dog-frog... the image is a little terrifying.

This happened during the 200:

Yes, that's my son on the ground. He's fast on the soccer field, but a straight sprint might not be his thing. After the race, he was worried I'd be upset because he didn't perform well. Think about it for a minute, especially those of you who are parents. Would you be upset?

My answer--which came in the form of a question as my answers often do**: What did you do after you fell?

Owen: I got up.

Me: And then?

Owen: I finished the race.

That's all that mattered to me. I felt for him. Going down hard in front of a stand full of parents and your peers is tough, especially in 7th grade. Maybe I broke some parenting rule when I shared this photo, but no, I don't think so. I'm much prouder of a boy who crashes hard and still finishes than one who wins all the time. No one--anywhere/anyone--wins all the time.

Life is more about what you do when the bad shit happens.


*I really, really despise the word "get," but here it feels somehow appropriate. Forgive my lazy verb choice.

**I wonder if it's difficult to have me as a father?

On Bullying

I know I've written about bullying before, but recent events have hurt someone dear to me. Please forgive. I'm starting this at 4-something in the morning because I'm mad. In my neck of the woods, we sometimes say "pissed" when one is this mad. Not "pissed" drunk like our friends across the pond, but "pissed off."

I am.

I'm tired of bullies. I'm tired of them at my job as a middle school/high school guidance counselor and I'm tired of the unfortunate reality that bullies exist as adults, too. Once upon a time, I believed in some fairy tale version of adulthood in which all the bullies matured and shed their evil skin. Like all fairy tales, this one is fiction.

Bullies are everywhere and every age, and if they've shed any skin, it's only to grown a more insidious one in its place. 

The bullies at school are sneaky. A teacher turns away and one boy punches another. They wait until I pass during lunch duty, and call their target names. In many ways, the girls are worst. I could relate scores of personal examples from my job, and it wouldn't take much to do a simple Google search and find stacks of digital articles on the subject.

Females--girls and grown women--like to do their bullying in different ways than boys. They often ostracize and exclude. They post hideous untruths online and laugh when their target's life falls apart. They've found ways to belittle via social media I shudder to recall. The motives are varied, but one constant keeps surfacing: if one is the bully, it steers attention to someone else. In the bully's mind, as long as someone else is the target, it's not her.

It hurts me to watch the cruelty at my job and hurts me in my neighborhood. Yes, my neighborhood lives in the shadow of a bully and I'm tired of it. Just like the girls at school, adult bullies ostracize and exclude. They manipulate and maneuver to make sure the target is not them. Sometimes the cruelty wears the most subtle cloak--for example, repeatedly leaving someone's name off a mailing list about neighborhood activities.

I was the target of bullying in middle school. The ride from my school to the high school for band class in 7th grade was especially agonizing. We would load the unsupervised bus--because let's be honest about the driver's ability to both drive and make sure passengers weren't being douche bags--and take a five minute jaunt from one school to the other. I heard "fag" and "gay" more times than I could count during those five minutes. A group of boys a year or two older than me would hound me after school during an arduous walk home. The walk was only four blocks, but it felt like four hundred.

Sometimes I feel so powerless when confronted with bullying at my job. It's especially difficult as an adult in my own neighborhood. No one--not one living creature--has the right to make anyone else feel like those ass hats made me feel in middle school. It turns my stomach that so many continue their cruelty long after the bus engine has gone cold.

So what do we do? Talk about it... write about it. Stand up and be counted among those who will not tolerate such behavior. There are more victims than bullies, and like most forms of darkness, this one cannot stand the light.

For My Future Granddaughter

I bought one of these on eBay a few weeks ago:

LEGO 21110 Research Institute

I paid a premium, quite a bit higher than retail. The set, rather small and originally retailing for just $19.95, has made quite a few Lego resellers fat stacks of profit as they scooped them by the cart load and flipped on eBay, Amazon, and other you-sell-it sites. I'll admit I do a little Lego "investing," too, but not on the scale as major resellers. I've held onto a few Star Wars sets and made a few bucks. Kim can tell you about the Monster Fighters Haunted House on a shelf out in the garage. (Or maybe she can't... it's packed neatly in an inconspicuous brown box.)

One of the big rules of Lego investing is one should enter at a low price. It's frighteningly like the stock market, at at web sites like Brickpicker.com, it's treated as such. Buy low and sell high. Hold for the long term or occasionally find one of those glorious penny stocks which appreciates rapidly and can be sold short term for huge profits. The cheapest Research Institute available on eBay US as of this writing will cost you $70.04 including shipping. Yes, more than triple the MSRP.

So why break such a cardinal rule to get my hands on this set? Do I see the price rising even higher?

Sure, maybe. But this one isn't for sale. I wanted to grab a RI for my granddaughter. (This is where the audience gasps, thinking something like, "Isn't your oldest kid like a freshmen in high school?")

Look, this isn't a family blog, per se, but no one here is pregnant.

I'm looking down the road here. Waaaaay down the road.  Lego's Research Institute made a huge splash largely because... look closely at the box... it features three female scientists. It garnered a lot of media attention last month, including this article from the New York Times, this op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, and an online petition to resurrect the set after its too-short life.

So I mentioned I'm looking down the road. Waaaaay down the road, but the RI isn't about "investing" in the traditional sense. I want to gift this to my future granddaughter because her world (hopefully) will be different than the one in which we live. I want to give it to her and let her know how happy I am she is able to do whatever she wants. I want her to know how happy I am she lives in a world in which a toy set featuring female scientists is no longer a big deal because everyone knows women can kick ass at anything they do.

That's the best investment I can imagine and a world in which I want everyone to live.

I Planned to Discuss Perserverance, but I Gave Up

My kids give up too easily. I'm not sure if it's their generation's epidemic or anything, but I notice it with some of the kids at school, too. The district where I work even had a school improvement plan a year or so ago focused on trying to build perseverance in our students.

We gave up. I wonder what that says...

Seriously, though, kids raised on the world at the click of a mouse quit easily. For example (I'm always armed with them): my ten-year-old and video games. I can imagine the groans. "Video games? Really? I came here for a reasonable discussion about an important topic." Work with me. Video games have been a significant part of our modern tapestry, and love them or leave them, they aren't going anywhere. Owen loves to play games. He spends a quite possibly unreasonable amount of time in front of his computer, a television, or his 3DS. Yes, he plays plenty of games. Most modern games have built in learning curves to keep kids playing at a relatively simply level until they're really good. It's one of the major advances behind the scenes--face it, graphics and sound take all the glory, but a game's artificial intelligence has taken big strides.

Where Owen stumbles, however, is when he attempts anything with a lengthy quest or story or--Zeus forbid--a retro game. He wants to love The Legend of Zelda, but it's hard. He's started several games and given in when the going is tough from "start."

Okay, I'm being a bit harsh. I remember the hours Owen spent trying to conquer various shortcuts on Mario Kart Wii... the kid will stick with something, sometimes. But you go back a little further, Zelda, Mega Man, even Earthworm Jim or Ghouls and Ghosts for Sega Genesis, and he's done. And it isn't just Owen. I do see it at school, as both a teacher and a counselor. Kids give up when any task is too hard. Instead of trying again. And again. And again.

Maybe our tools, like the AI on those new video games, are just too powerful. Why work hard when a machine will do the heavy lifting? Why think and muddle through a problem when Google can probably cough up 10,000 solutions within a fraction of a second?

What I want here is good, old-fashioned stubbornness. I crave the kind of tenacity which kept me and my buddies up all night, stumbling through Hyrule's dark dungeons without the benefit of dozens of online walk-throughs and wikis. Anyone of my generation who played the original Metal Gear on NES will remember how damn hard it was just to get Snake to the first building without dying.

As a writer, perseverance has been my greatest ally. I set out to qualify for active status in the Horror Writers Association about seven years ago. It took a few years to sell my first professional rate piece, and this summer, I've been able to finally make that third qualifying sale. Seven years. Technology has made "success" as a writer far to easy to achieve. Someone turns down your story? Simply self-publish through the miracle of ebooks or the Interweb^TM. But none of these quick fixes will ever help a writer hone his or her craft. Perseverance is priceless.

I want my kids to stick with difficult tasks. I want them to ask tough questions and solve challenging problems. I want them to never, ever quit. And I'll work all the rest of my days to make sure they know the value of perseverance. 

How Video Games Saved My Life

Some of my earliest memories start with video games. When I was five, the family received an Intellivision II from Santa Claus. We spent hours playing Burgertime and Astrosmash. I wore callouses on my fingers on the black disc and burned holes through the keypad. My brother, twelve years older than me, and I played marathon sessions and bonded over strategy and high scores.

Yes kids, video game consoles used to look like this. No WiFi, either.

Soon enough, my brother graduated from high school and moved to college. I grew up and so did the gaming systems. There was a brief affair with Atari 7800. The family purchased our first home computer when I was in middle school, a Laser 128 (Apple IIe knockoff). Gaming continued with Conan and Montezuma's Revenge played from floppy disks.

Conan was a helluva lot more difficult than it looks.

Video games were my friends--not my only friends--but good buddies during some trying times. My father developed a brain tumor when I was in kindergarten. He and Mom were gone most of the year and part of the next. Once my sister (ten years older than me) left for college, I was left at home with an ailing father and overworked mother. Games were an outlet, a way to manage and control something in a life where so much seemed out of control. When things were really bad at home, when my father resembled a man thirty years his senior with dementia, I met the Nintendo Entertainment System. Three of my buddies spent the night with a rented NES and The Legend of Zelda on my birthday in 7th grade. I mowed lawns that summer with my brother to earn enough money for my own NES. I played it into the ground.

Hooray! A golden triangle!

I grew older... Sega Genesis... SNES... N64... my friends and I played too many seasons of Super Tecmo Bowl to count. We lost countless hours in basements with Mario Kart and Goldeneye 007. A few Madden Football tournaments earned me one of two Cs in college. (Why go to Survey of Art History on Friday afternoon when I was making history on a virtual football field?) Capcom's Resident Evil 2 and Konami's Castlevania: Symphony of the Night got me through a rough student teaching semester. Video games have always been an escape, a way to let off steam. When I found myself dumped and alone in a new town during the fall of 1998, Metal Gear Solid and Bushido Blade were there.

Yes, games have been with me a long time. When my thirteen-year-old stepson found me playing an emulated copy of Symphony of the Night the other day, he told Kim, "you've got a good man there, Mom."

Awwww shucks... I'm just a fan boy.

I hope so. I hope so. 

My Favorite Yeast Bread Recipe

This really is a bread recipe, not some hack or spam post. Enough folks have asked for this recipe, I thought I'd share--especially now, during the cold winter holiday season when the smell of baking bread is the only thing that keeps me going some days. This is my favorite yeast bread (maybe my favorite thing to bake, hands down).

Grandma Joy's Refrigerator Roll Dough

Start with:
1/2 cup warm water
1 package yeast (I always use rapid rise)
1 tablespoon white sugar

Stir yeast and sugar in the water to dissolve. Let this react for about 5-10 minutes until the yeast foams. While you are waiting...

Combine:

2/3 cup white sugar
2/3 cup melted and cooled butter (or margarine; I prefer butter)
2 cups warm water
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs

Add the yeast mixture. Then mix in 6-8 cups of flour. You want to use a majority of white flour because whole wheat flour will not rise the same as white flour. I usually use 8 full cups with 7 being white flour and one whole wheat for good measure. I always use unbleached/enriched flour.

Knead for 5-7 minutes until smooth and elastic. Kneading can be a real cardiovascular workout. Here's some good technique to try:


Let the dough rise for about an hour in a lightly floured bowl. Make sure to cover with plastic wrap and a towel. When doubled, punch down and divide into two lumps. I always place them in lightly floured gallon freezer bags and send to the refrigerator. When you are ready to use the dough, you can make all sorts of goodies--from dinner rolls to donuts. One of my favorites, of course, is the good old fashioned cinnamon roll. Shape, cut, etc., and let rise for a while (the longer you wait, the more puffy/air-filled the dough will become, but you run the risk of it falling or drying out). Bake for 15-20 minutes in a preheated 350 degree oven. If you like soft crust, brush with butter before removing from your pan to cool on a rack.

And just how does one roll out cinnamon rolls?


Much better than that crap from a can or impotent frozen rolls. Just my humble opinion. Enjoy!

*I didn't make the videos, but I did make this:

Know This

I proposed to Kim on Saturday.

I want the world to love her like I do. My best tools are these words--even when they fall short.

So how can I tell you about Kim? Where are my best words?

I hold three of my stories very close to my heart. They were autobiographical in a way (as most good fiction can be). Real events, locations, and people inspired them. I won no awards for these stories (one was nominated and made a very short list), although each has garnered a fair share of attention.

The Battered Suitcase published "Reciprocity"  way back in September 2008. Yes, it's my big fish story, and yes, there might be spoilers. It's a story of struggling to fit in, a story of understanding who you are and trying to find a way for that you to fit with the rest of the world. It's a story which could have been tragic, but ends with a flash of gold.

I remember the idea for "The World in Rubber, Soft and Malleable" (published first at A Fly in Amber in September 2009 and later, in a slightly revised version, in Triangulation: End of the Rainbow and my collection, The Saints are Dead) coming to me while I shuttled the family to and from church one Sunday. I think we forgot our donated Christmas gift that morning and I had to run back to the house to grab it.The extra doorways and disappearing townsfolk became one of my favorites. The protagonist makes a hard decision in the end--choosing what may appear a rockier path to remain true to himself. It might be a rockier path, but it leaves the protagonist, Andy, an entire town to cover with spray-painted murals. "The World in Rubber" was a finalist for the Million Writers Award and a story which moves me each time I read it.

And finally, one of my most personal tales, "Wanting It" from Shock Totem #3 (2011). This little tale took several revisions and gallons of blood/ink. I'm proud of the way it reads, the feelings it evokes, and the lasting impression in the final lines. It's a story about losing something you hold dear--and how that loss colors the rest of the world. Like "The World in Rubber," I wrote it in first person. It's autobiographical, even if fiction. Ellen Datlow was kind enough to include "Wanting It" as an honorable mention in The Best Horror of the Year  (even mentioning my name in the introduction... me=humbled).

These stories are my children born from some of the hardest years of my life. They each tell truths about love and loss, grief and hope. They're special to me. They're a part of me.

So who's Kim?

She's the magic goldfish from "Reciprocity"; she's every mural Andy paints in "The World in Rubber, Soft and Malleable"; she's the ghost who comes after the end of "Wanting It" and tells the narrator his dreams are true. She leans close and whispers in his ear.

Who's Kim? Read the stories when you have time and you'll understand.

Who's Kim? She's seen all my scars and called me beautiful.  Everyone on the planet should be so blessed.

And by the way--she said yes.

Some Things the World Needs to Know About My Mom

Hello again, blog.

The beauty of the internet (and the inherent danger, some may say) is the words put out here can last for a long time. I've heard people use words like "forever" but forever is a long time. That EMP coming from a giant comet will probably take care of the internet some day.

I digress.

This is about my mom. I'm writing it understanding these words might last a long time. They may reach far. They may not. But I'm writing it all the same.

I need the world to know a few things about my mom, especially why I respect her as much as anyone on the planet--even when we disagree. I need to world to know because Mom has been there and helped shape how I approach life.

My father had an "episode" in 1980, near the beginning of the school year. Paramedics rushed him to Clay County Memorial Hospital, and then on to Topeka for tests at a larger hospital. He had a brain tumor, malignant, and the cancer/treatment would slowly eat him away over the next nine years. He died in November, 1989. I was a freshmen in high school.

Mom filled those nine years with patience and caring. She took care of an ailing man--a man who was often out of touch with reality, a man who accused her of many awful, untrue things. A man who made all of us feel just a little unsafe from time to time. We made sometimes bi-weekly trips to Topeka so he could see specialists at the Menninger Clinic. She fought a legal battle, went to graduate school to increase her earning potential as the only salary in the house, and coached three sports to add a few dollars to each paycheck. I rode more buses than I care to count with the middle school girls' basketball team as an elementary student. Still, she rose early on Saturday mornings and made doughnuts for me to munch as I watched cartoons. I always had clean clothes, a full belly, and a warm home. She did all this while the man she married slipped into a grey shadow of who he was.

This is how I knew my mother and father.

She taught me about resiliency and toughness. She taught me how to put your head down and continue on when life hurled unimaginable horror at you. She taught me how to take care of your kids when things were eating away at you. She taught me about love.

She's helping me with the boys, now. She takes care of them when I am busy with my job, when I'm not able to be there, and when I need to be gone for me. She gives me breaks she never received. I've joked that she's my au pair. My nanny. 

We don't always see eye to eye--we don't share the same outlook on life, but she's been there. Always stubborn. Always loving.

My mother never remarried--not yet, anyway. In fact, even though Dad died in '89 and I didn't graduate until May of 1993, she didn't go on a date until I was out of the house.

Mom and I are different people. We've made some similar choices and some very different ones when confronted with harsh realities. We are different people, but I will always hold the utmost respect for her.

I've been blessed to have her in my life. I wouldn't be where I am now without her.

I've been blessed in many ways.

Stay tuned.

Disbanding the Booster Club

I've always wanted people to like me. 

It's been my greatest weakness and one which I share with plenty of the world's population. After all, humans are social creatures, right? Of course we are. But trying to live a life so others will "like" you leads down a steep, rocky slope to the badlands. It leads to anxiety, suffering, and unhappiness. I have no desire to wallow in that mire ever again.

Yesterday, our school's band director shared a nugget of wisdom he learned as an undergrad: when you take your first job, disband the booster club.

What? Throw away all the support? All the fundraising? All the advice?

His explanation: even though you might step on a few toes, it leaves you free to direct your band and run your own program without being beholden to a sea of sometimes disparate and not-so-reasonable voices. I live in a world of metaphor and didn't lose the correlation with my life. After Aimee died, I received support from scores of people and silent encouragement from even more. She touched many lives in Lawrence, undergraduate school at the University of Columbia, and all the way back to her childhood in St. Louis. Plenty of people wanted to give back. I get that. I respect it, too, and I'm grateful for those who care. I will always be grateful for those who care and share their love.

But I must make decisions for my life and the lives of my kids on my own. I continually feel pressure from those who would have me "be" Aimee--at least live my life as they assume it would be should she still be alive--but I'm not Aimee. Never was. Never will be. My life changed irrevocably with her death. I'm the director of this band and must do what is right for me and the boys--us. It might not be what someone else would choose. Likely, it won't be. I'll listen to advice, weigh its merits, but chose the path based on what we need.

Will I make mistakes? Sure. Will I take risks? Absolutely. Will there be hard days? Of course. Will there be joy and love and goodness? Of course--I know there will be plenty of love and goodness. The trail up the mountain is just as rocky as the way down--but I hear the lakes are clear and beautiful and the view breathtaking--much better than the swampland at the bottom of the hill.

Fearing the Unknown

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." 

H.P. Lovecraft, right? Fear sounds like a great topic for a horror writer's blog, especially during October. Just don't tell anyone I haven't finished a story since March, okay? Besides, I'm a human being before I'm a horror writer. And this human being has faced a lot of fear in his life. Note the past tense: faced.

Last night, someone very dear to me asked if I was "scared" of the future. I took a minute to feel the the question, weigh it a little, and try to understand my feelings before I responded.

No. Not scared. I don't fear the future anymore. While I wrestle a bit with the unknown, it's a much healthier relationship than fear. Fear paralyzes and leads to poor judgement. Fear kills dreams and clogs the pathways to achieving goals. Maybe a better word than fear is anticipation, that heightened sense of reality when expecting something important, something big. Something challenging but wholly good. 

And the future is good. Life is good, even when it is a struggle. Even when awful tragedy happens, I still have the choice to focus on hope and goodness and the gifts I've been given. Yes, it may be impossible to feel hope and goodness in the midst of the tragic event. I know--I've been there. But the lesson looks different seven months later. None of us make it through life without scars, but scars become stories, and stories remind us of the preciousness of each day. Besides--when "bad things" happen, they will do so whether I allow fear to eat away my life or not. An abundance of fear makes no one safer. That is the lie that fear whispers to us. 

Wasted energy, if you ask me. I'd rather save my energy for the road ahead.

So how do I feel about the future? Hopeful. Filled with a healthy level of anticipation. Ready to roll up my sleeves and go to work. It's good.

Communication Breakdown?

Has it been seventeen days since I last posted?

Radio silence here doesn't mean silence everywhere. In fact, I'm learning to be a better communicator than I have most of my adult life. I'm learning to say what needs to be said to those who need to hear, but doing so in ways which can deliver the message without malice or self-loathing or fear or worry or vindictiveness. I'm trying to be the best communicator I can, trying to cut away the noise and deliver the essence of the message.

It's hard.

Damn hard sometimes because words don't always do what you want them to. Words can't always translate emotions so others can feel you. Words are just words, simple tools, and sometimes fit like a broad-bladed screwdriver when a tiny one would do. Words can soothe a little but not take away the pain of losing a loved one, learning of tragedy, or facing your own mortality. Words are just words.

But I will take them.

Sometimes they are all I have.

The older boys and I have begun a daily ritual of taking "five minutes" one-on-one with Dad (me). I listen while they talk. Sometimes I share, too. Max, being six and a half, has his own super self-focused perspective on the days events. Once in a while he will surprise me, throwing in a big picture perspective that stretches well past his developmental age. Mostly, we talk about PE class or making a plaid pattern in art or what happened at recess. Owen has started really opening up to some "big talks" about life and our future. He surprises me a little, but then I realize he's my kid. I've never really done life halfway and don't want them to live that way either.

I wish we all (meaning everyone on the planet) had less fear when it came to communicating with one another. Maybe the fear stems from the insufficiency of language. Maybe the fear grows when we realize there really is no way to make someone we love know, really know what that love feels like inside of us.

I don't know. I will probably never have the answer, but I can live with it.

Communication breakdown?

No. Not at all.  

Museum Pieces

Purging the basement, I found several artifacts of my life. Each one could sprout several stories:

I worked at Hastings Entertainment in Lawrence back in '98.  What an odd and eventful year...

Many of you remember the story about how Aimee aimed our little boat toward the Tetons despite warnings to "stay within a mile of shore"? This is my face moments before the big freak out. 

 My last day of work at Ray's IGA after my senior year in high school. I met some life-long friends at that job. Some of them dumped a bucket of water on me as I was leaving.

Yes, McKinley Middle School's mascot... sorry to my friends from across the pond, but in American history the Redcoats were the bad guys (at least during the Revolution). Of course the picture looks more like a minuteman. How about the Fighting Minutemen? I don't get it, either. Every school in Clay Center was named after an assasinated president, too... Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley. If the high school was build five years later, it would have been a Kennedy. 

More coming. I know--you're holding your breath.

Our Neighborhood has a Plentiful Lack of Front Porches

The new front porch/deck is "done." Done as in: you can walk on it, sit on the new furniture, jump up and down, and even lean on the railing. I still need to add railing near the front door (on the opposite side of the deck) and do a little landscape work, but right now it's too damn hot.

I wanted to build a porch/deck for two reasons:

1. Aimee always wanted a front porch.

2. This is my house now, and by God, I'll build a damn porch if I want.

Our neighborhood is relatively "porch" free. This saddens me. It's an older neighborhood (most houses built in the early '60s), but not old enough to be part of the grand American porch tradition. The lack of front porches is a sorry development in residential architecture. I'm thrilled to have one.

I remember moving into the neighborhood--how Aimee lamented not knowing the neighbors like those she did when she was a girl. Eleven years later, I know the neighbors (most of them), well. They were there when Aimee died, swooping in to clean up the house and take care of things.They've been there through many ups and downs for over a decade.

The porch/deck isn't much--but it's enough. I can listen to the rustle of leaves from my pin oak and fire maple. I can wave to the neighbors as they drive by. I can sit and remember good times with my wife and dream of good times to come.

 

What I Mean When I Say "Homesick"

There comes a time during every vacation when I decide I'm ready to go home. Vacation is great--new adventures are great--but home... It's just home. Home brings comfort and routine; I spend less energy at home and can focus on other things. Damn I love those mountains, but until I buy my cabin, home is in Lawrence.

On Sunday night in Estes Park, while packing for home, I sank into a recliner in our rented cabin. A heavy weight pressed against me--it wasn't exactly the "grief landmine" feeling, but something close. I suddenly understood the easy comparison between losing my spouse and homesickness.

The only problem--when your partner dies, you can't go "home" again. Not to the same home.

Aimee has been gone for nearly three months now; an eternity in some ways (half of Elliot's life), but a blink in others. The first few weeks of April were muddy and slow and painful. Part of May vanished beneath "endings" (school, soccer, etc., etc., etc.). June has clipped along with my deck building project, Colorado, camps, art classes, and trips to the swimming pool. Day by day, the new normal takes root. It digs deeper. But this isn't quite home. It's a new place. A move without moving.

Baby steps...

Yes, this is why you learned the Pythagorean Theorem in high school: so you could build a deck. It's also handy for laying tile. I'm well beyond this point (attached the joists today), but I thought my students need to know that math is real. Look--I'm doing math.  Math is helping me guarantee a square corner. Yay, math!

(Somebody tell me to bend at the knees next time. My lower back is killing me.)

Our National Park Tradition

I feel another "significant" post brewing, but it will wait for another day. Today, I bring pictures from our recent trip to Rocky Mountain National Park and one of my favorite stories about Aimee.

National Parks were/are an obsession of ours--I still have our map of all National Parks hanging in the basement (with color-coded pins indicated which family member has been where). In 2000, Aimee and I took a road trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton. We camped for five nights--four of them in Yellowstone--and enjoyed all the sights. The view of the Tetons from Jackson Lake... spectacular. We rented a boat, a small craft with an outboard motor, and headed onto the lake. The boat's owner gave us a bit of advice which caused contention:

Stay within a mile of shore.

Of course, Aimee (being the adventurous type she was), aimed the boat for the mountains and gave it the gun. My knuckles whitened as I clutched the gunnels.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Staying a mile away from shore like he said," she said.

"No. No. No." I glanced over my shoulder at the swelling waves. The tiny boat would easily capsize in the middle of Jackson Lake. "He said within a mile of shore."

She didn't agree, of course, but the look of sheer-animal-panic on my face convinced her to turn our ship around. Aimee and I weren't able to share enough National Park adventures before her death (could there ever be enough National Park adventures?), but the boys and I will keep going...

I hiked to Fern Lake early on Saturday morning, the date which would have been our 11th wedding anniversary. Aimee and I made the same hike on our 6th wedding anniversary (June 16, 2007), just over a year after Max was born. I was early enough to miss the crowd (it's a tough hike, but a popular one) and have some alone time with the lake, the trees, the mountains, and my thoughts.

Elliot was not impressed by the lack of oxygen above tree line.

Max, Owen, and I on top of the world. Okay, at least on top of a granite formation on Trail Ridge Road. 

Max and Owen showed me how to scramble on the rocks near a waterfall. Going down was easier than up.

Owen, Elliot (in the stroller), and Max on the lookout for yellow bellied marmots. We always find marmots at the "alpine communities" stop on Trail Ridge Road.

Take care, and happy adventuring.