Wondering

Jesus the Toddler

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

This is not going to be about what Jesus was like as an actual toddler (although it’d be fun to imagine what a prayer to Jesus-as-toddler might be, a la Ricky Bobby’s prayer to Jesus-as-baby, “Dear Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Baby Jesus, in your golden, fleece diapers, with your curled-up, fat, balled-up little fists pawin’ at the air.”)

Instead, this is about flipping the usual parenting analogy. Most spiritual analogies that involve parenting have God as the Heavenly Parent and us as the unruly, slightly stupid, and really stubborn children. Here, we’re the parent and Jesus is the toddler.

Let me set it up.

I was reading Isaiah last week (in my 3-year-long journey to read the Bible from beginning to end, yes, I’m only up to Isaiah) and came across this from 59:9,10,12:

So there is no justice among us,
we know nothing about right living.
We look for light but find only darkness.
We look for bright skies but walk in gloom.
We grope like the blind along a wall,
feeling our way like people without eyes….
For our sins are piled up before God
and testify against us.

And the image of our sins piled up before God struck me. I imagined a tower of blocks — childhood toy blocks. Probably because those are the kinds of tall piles I’ve made, over and over, while playing with children, both mine and others’.

I stack the blocks and the kid knocks them down — gleefully. And cries, “Again!” I race to build as much of the tower as I can before the kid knocks it down. And then we do it all over again, and again, and again. The kid has endless energy for knocking that tower down.

Isn’t this like Jesus? We’ve got this tower of sins that blocks us from God and Jesus knocks it down. That’s what Christians celebrate at Easter.

I have a vivid mental image of a particular little boy I had in children’s worship last year who’d let me build a tower of blocks as tall as him before he’d bust it down with the most delicious belly laugh and victorious jumping up and down. I like this image for Jesus scattering my tower of sins because it punctures my angst and navel-gazing with a KAPOW!

But I’m not done.

Here’s where the analogy stretches a little, because it isn’t Jesus begging us to build up the tower of our sins again, it’s us. We take the things we’ve already been forgiven of, things that are laying scattered on the floor, and stack them back up. We cannot give them up.

I guess I’m assuming things about you, but I can tell you with full confidence that there’s a lot I have a hard time giving up.

  • Any stupid or unkind thing I’ve said.
  • Confidences I failed to keep.
  • Plans to help someone that I never acted on.
  • Disciplines I haven’t been able to keep up.
  • An unwise decision I made in college that I asked forgiveness for several times because I kept forgetting whether I’d done it.
  • Excessive use of sarcasm with my children.
  • Irritability with my family.
  • Anger and bitterness that I can leave on the floor for months before letting them sneak back up into a wall.
  • Crippling disappointment — I say “crippling” because there’s plenty of fleeting disappointment, but I’m talking about that Job-level of complaint, “I’ve done so many things right. Why isn’t X going like I want it to?” Which is really this in disguise: “I’d run my life so much better than you, God!”
  • The need to both be right and be acknowledged as right. About way too many things.
I ask to be forgiven and Jesus knocks down my tower, KAPOW. Then, while we’re laughing and gleeful, I scoop a few blocks back and stack them. Jesus knocks them down with a karate kick this time. I try to hide the tower, to prevent him from knocking it down, so I build it behind me. But he finds it and body slams it. Even while I’m smiling at some of those blocks that flew all the way across the room, out of my reach (for now), my fingers scrabble for other blocks and…. You get the picture.
In real life, I, the adult, get tired of this game long before the toddler does. Loooong before. Similarly, Jesus does not tire of knocking down my tower of sins. He’ll do it every time I ask.
What kind of difference might it make to pray, “Jesus, I’m tired, so tired of building up this particular tower. Help me keep that block on the floor”?
My prayers are getting simpler as I get older. And I tend not to dictate as much to God exactly how things should look or go, at least as far as my spiritual life goes. Because I don’t want to limit God’s creativity. Maybe, if I notice the tower I keep rebuilding and admit my exhaustion and ask for help, instead of just knocking it down, Jesus will shrink those blocks, a little more every time I ask, until they’re so small that I go to rebuild it and can’t find them. There may be new blocks, but at least Jesus will have taken care of those old ones.
What’s in your tower? Are you as tired as I am of rebuilding with the same $%*^ blocks, over and over again?

 

Ask the tough questions and then get to work

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

Last month, I was singleminded about getting my physical house in order, and only seven of the original 50some bulleted tasks remain. I did it. But I didn’t do it for its own sake. I took the month off from all my other obligations so I’d be set free to throw myself into my writing as I haven’t in several months.

So yesterday, I was terrified.

I’d had the build-up. Now it was time for the pay-off. And I choked. I retreated for the entire day in laundry (9 loads, no joke), groceries, bill paying, household filing, and kid wrangling. My heart thumped hard and I was as jittery as if I were about to go on stage to dance. All day. Because I had to return to normal life after my big task was over. No more complete focus on one thing; now I have to negotiate all the needs and schedules and emotions and move ahead.

I have a number of friends going through something like this, but on a far deeper level. They are past the intense period of caring for a dying loved one, which has such a purity of purpose that normal life can’t hope to compete. They’re past the all-consuming period of public grief, when family and friends gather around and cry and laugh and hold each other up. They are at normal life. Without the woman they love. They’ve got to go back to negotiating a variety of needs and schedules and emotions, all while being constantly reminded of who is missing, because she was part of normal life, too, once.

That’s hard. Way harder than my task.

But none of us can avoid it. Oh, we can. There are all kinds of ways to avoid how hard it is. Let’s use the 7 deadly sins as an organizing factor:

Lust, gluttony, and greed: throwing yourself into an other (whether person, food, drink, or thing) to distract you from what you’re feeling.
Sloth: this one can be either checking out and retreating, or becoming so busy that you flit on the surface of everthying.
Wrath: it’s easy to let everything feed your sense that the world has wronged you, especially when you have been horribly wronged; anger at yourself fits here, too.
Envy: after all, it’s so easy for all those other people (is it?).
Pride: the temptation to act as if everything is fine, that you’re handling it all, that it isn’t hard so everyone will look at you in awe and wonder.

I can check the “done it” box in each of those categories. The flitting busy-ness version of sloth, oh, just yesterday. I’ve even consciously embraced some of them as a temporary coping or reward strategy, and encouraged others to do the same — temporary being the key. They don’t work as long-term strategies.

All of which keeps bringing me back to the homily given at my friend’s funeral last week, in which we were encouraged to ask the tough questions, and then roll up our sleeves and get to work.

In my anxious state, what are the tough questions?

What am I so anxious about?
Am I afraid that the work will be hard? That what I produce will suck beyond my ability to fix it? That I’ll never be published? That I’ll never validate all these years of working at my writing? That my husband’s stress as the sole breadwinner will have been in vain?
That if I decide to self-publish, nobody will buy it?
That my discipline won’t be enough?
That I’ll drop right back into the spiral of discouragement and frustration and self-recrimination I wallowed in this fall?
That I can’t untangle the lack of concrete success from my sense of self-worth?

Now I’m getting somewhere. That last one brought tears burning at the back of my eyes. What makes me worthy? Is it publishing success? Number of page views on this blog? Acclaim as a school volunteer? A clear sidewalk and driveway, even though I shovel by hand? A well-run household? Thriving children? Financial stability? Following through on my intentions? All of the above? None?

I’m a religious lady, and I know the “right answer”: I’m a child of God. That is enough. Should be enough. Also, I’m not worthy. I cannot earn what is most important: it’s all grace.

But how to get to a point where the above answers feel inspiring and freeing? The only strategy I have is to not shy away or distract myself from asking those questions. Repeatedly. And then to roll up my sleeves and get to work. To do Barbara O’Neal’s 20-minute win. To keep the momentum going. To look for places to go deeper with my characters and my writing. And myself. To trust my vision. To keep up my spiritual practices. To talk over these things with friends, family, fellow writers.

And, right now, to make dinner so we won’t have to eat at Wendy’s after my daughter’s volleyball game this afternoon (a too-regular occurrence during my son’s soccer season). I’ll do a 20-minute win while I wait in the school pick-up line later this afternoon. I hope to get back to work this evening. That’s my negotiation today. Tomorrow’s will be different. That’s normal life.

What’s Your Superpower?

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

What if you were normal and all your friends were superheroes? And at your wedding reception, your superhero wife’s superhero ex-boyfriend (the Hypnotist) hypnotized her into not being able to see or hear you. He went a step further: when you tried to touch her, her reactions ranged between muscle spasms all the way to stopping breathing if you tried to hold her in her sleep. How would you get her to see you? To know that you didn’t abandon her?

This is a different take on the issue of invisibility in relationships than I’ve written about here and here, more malicious and focused (because everyone else can see the main character except his wife), but just as devastating. Thank you to a blog reader for alerting me to Andrew Kaufman’s marvelous novella, All My Friends Are Superheroes.

Woes of the newly married

The situation in the novella is unlikely, but it got me thinking. How common is it, shortly after being married, to stop truly seeing our spouse? Maybe the rest of you had a glorious honeymoon period, but I did not have a smooth transition to the married state. The actual living with another person was fine. The having someone there to send out to the store when I had an ice cream craving at 10 p.m. (we were living in the Bronx without a car, and I didn’t walk around by myself much after dark) was great, although I gained back the weight I’d lost my first year of graduate school. And other stuff was … enjoyable.

The tough part was the mental adjustment to being married. Being married put me in a different category than my fellow graduate students, none of whom were married. Professors were married. Students lived together or had long distance relationships, or none at all. I was a feminist studying to be a philosophy professor. What was I doing, under 30 and married?

The conventionality of being a wife bothered me. I didn’t think of myself as a conventional person, but there I was, doing the conventional thing. It was odd to feel simultaneously unusual and conventional. I was a little embarrassed to be married. That changed in time and as we got to know other young married couples. But it was an adjustment.

My poor husband. I burst into tears once because he bought whole milk. Was he trying to kill me? Didn’t he care about my family’s history of high cholesterol? How could he be so insensitive? I became obsessed with what patterns of behavior we might be establishing, inflexible about him doing the dishes when I cooked and folding the laundry when I washed, about me never ironing his shirts (back when he still wore ironed shirts), not even to act “wifely” in a self-aware yet ironic way.

All this is to say that I spent much of the first year of marriage wrapped up in my own internal drama (deciding to quit graduate school during that year didn’t help). I don’t know how much I truly “saw” my husband, how much I thought about his experience of our marriage. After 18 years, I think I’m better about that now. And I’ve come to terms with my conventionality — for goodness’ sake, I’m a Midwestern stay at home mom who drives a minivan.

Unusual superpowers 

Even though All My Friends Are Superheroes got me thinking about the heavier stuff above, it isn’t a heavy story. It’s warm-hearted, and charming, and sweet and funny. I loved the superhero names and descriptions. Most of these superheroes can’t fly, and they don’t have superstrength. Their superpowers are ordinary things magnified. Here are a few of my favorites:

If you arrive at a party and suddenly find yourself completely relaxed, there’s a good chance the Stress Bunny is there. Blessed with the ability to absorb the stress of everyone in a fifty-foot radius, the Stress Bunny is invited to every party, every outing.
Her power originates from her strict Catholic upbringing (p.33).

All through her youth, the Battery had two things: an overpowering father and an over-rebellious mind. In combination, these forces gave her the ability to store great amounts of emotional energy and release it in one blinding bolt. But beware: the Battery’s allegiances aren’t to good or evil, but simply against whatever stands in her way. Friend, foe or innocent bystander — the Battery’s emotional energy bursts are unpredictable and she will strike at will (p.32)

Mr. Opportunity knocks on doors and stands there. You’d be surprised how few doors get answered (p.75).

The main character even talks about the difficulties this style of superhero has:

Try it, right now; boil down your personality and abilities to a single phrase or image. If you can do that, you’re probably a superhero already.

Part of the problem with finding your superhero name is that it may refer to something you don’t like about yourself. It may actually be the part of yourself you hate the most, would pay money to get rid of (p.71).

The Big Question

What is your superpower? What is mine? It’s easier to come up with someone else’s superpower first, so I’ll do my husband.

I’d call him Mr. It’ll Work Out, because he lives as if things are going to work out. This superpower only works in ordinary life situations; i.e. it doesn’t prevent people around him from getting or dying from cancer. But he doesn’t get stressed or anxious, not even about new things or experiences. And the thing is, things usually work out. It makes him a great person to have around, and a great leader. I both rely on this calmness and security, and get irritated by it (because it makes my anxiety seem so meaningless).

As for myself, I could be some combination of some superheroes in the book: Mistress Cleanasyougo, the Dancer, with a bit of the Battery thrown in. But I’m going to go on a limb and call myself The Presence. I have a strong physical presence; people always think I’m taller than I am. I have a strong presence on stage when I’m dancing. My face and entire body will radiate my emotional state, which will affect those around me. If you’ve known me awhile, I reveal myself as very passionate about many things, and I can express myself quite forcefully. I’ve got an effective “don’t you even think about doing that” parenting look I can put on. I don’t know if it’s as true these days, but people used to find me intimidating. A few people have told me that, before they knew me, they were scared of me.

There are mitigating factors, of course, but if I’m looking for a trait that has both positives and negatives, I think that’s it.

So, sharing time. What is your superhero name?

Somewhere Between a Whine and a Rant

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

Here’s what I want to know: what I can give up being consistent on. Seriously. Some adult function that I can let slide and not have horrible consequences. I’ve done a bunch of blog posts about things it’s better to pay continual attention to: people in your family and around you, pride and fear, and choosing to be miserable. Every week, if not every day, I read posts on writing like this, Day After Day After Day–Showing Up At The Page No Matter What, a post I actually find encouraging, but there again is the consistency thing. There is so much information whizzing past me, every piece saying, “pay attention to me and follow up on this because this is important!”

What can I give up?

Money

I have to keep up with the bills because otherwise I’d be wasting money on late fees and ruining my credit, credit that we’re going to have to use this Spring to buy one, if not two, vehicles. I’m not going to drop tithing, either. Money is definitely not the place to drop the ball.

House

I’m already as minimal as I can get with house cleaning — neat in the public areas of the house, but clean, not so much. I couldn’t get much less clean without getting into health hazard levels. To keep it real, while there are no clothes on my bedroom floor, here is my “chairdrobe” this morning.

Body

I exercise several times a week, not so much for the long term good of it, but because I love to move and Zumba and Pilates and the like make me happy. Also, they make it possible for me to dance in church with control and without injury, and I promised God that I would dance more if I got back in shape. I’ve broken enough promises to God that I want to keep at least this one.

I could give up dying my hair, but then I’d be less attractive, and I’m not giving that up until I’m forced to. Besides, that costs less than $8 and takes only 45 minutes every 6 or so weeks. Not a burden.

Can’t give up washing my face twice a day or I’ll break out like a teenager; I’ve done that already and I’m not going back.

Can’t give up brushing my teeth and I floss some. Of course, I really should floss more. So now I’ve added to my list of things I should be consistent on but aren’t. My terrible teeth have cost us at least $1,000 out of pocket, over insurance, every year for the last four years. Gotta take care of the teeth.

Cooking

I am weary of cooking, and looking up recipes in Pinterest or wherever is not inspiring. Yet I am committed to making home cooked food whenever possible and sitting down all four of us for dinner as often as possible (which is pretty much every day). So I shop and cook and try to get the people in my life to eat a variety of foods with food value. This is often not a joy. Despite my nonsensical answers and my snapped retort of, “food,” to the question, “What’s for dinner?” my people insist on asking my least favorite question every day. I should be more consistent (there it is again!) about teaching the kids to cook so they can share this burden with me. This category is also affiliated with the Money category: the less I cook, the more we eat out, the more money we spend on food, the more crap we eat, the more weight we gain, etc. So for money, health, and family togetherness, I can’t give up or cut down on cooking.

Kids

I will admit to you fine people that I don’t freeform play with my kids anymore. That said, I do concrete things with them: play tennis or racquetball, go for a bike ride, go to the book store, watch a movie, do my daughter’s hair, talk about books with my son, etc. I will play a board game once a year, at most. More often than not, I’m the one who encourages them to be in charge of themselves, to determine their own entertainment — skills that are necessary in this life.

I help with homework, as well as insist that it be done before dinner and before screen time. I’m the monitor of screen time. I’m the policer of snacks, but also the provider of baked goods and periodic junk that I find disgusting but that makes them shout for joy. I’m the facilitator of lessons and teams, the chauffeur to and from friends’ houses, the one who teaches them skills they’ll need to become independent members of society while making sure they take those steps of independence (even when I must nag a bit to accomplish it). That’s my job: I’m the stay-at-home mom. There’s nothing to give up here.

Reading

I read somewhere between 85 and 100 books a years. Most of these are quick-read middle grade/young adult fiction and romance novels, with a bunch of nonfiction, memoir, and serious-minded book club fiction thrown in. This is both for pleasure and escape and for “work”: I want to be a published novelist, so I need to read. I need to know what’s being published in my chosen area. I need to be inspired by good books to remind myself why I do what I do. So no slacking off there, either.

Blogs, though. I could cut down on those, even the ones I read for professional writerly development. Some are encouraging and galvanizing, but they can easily be a time suck and made my brain all foggy and unable to be consistent about the things that matter.

Word Games

Okay, here’s something I could give up, not easily, but I could. However, I need a little nonsense. I’d be giving up word games so I could be more consistent and efficient in other areas, which is the point of these complaints: I’m tired of being consistent and efficient. It’s so good to say, every day, “I’m going to play for awhile.” But the truth is that I play too much. I’m too oddly committed to doing nothing after the kids are in bed. There’s no reason to do nothing every night. It’s pure laziness, which I support now and then, but I know I’m crossing the line into sloth.

Screeeeech.

Here’s where I screech to a halt. I’m sick of myself before I even get to the biggies: marriage, family, friends, writing.

I have a perfectly ordinary middle class life. I don’t overschedule my children or myself, but I have a nice mix of responsibilities and aspirational activities to keep me engaged in the world. I don’t see my friends or family enough, but that’s mostly because of my strong hermit tendencies. I may have a secret desire to get a gold medal in getting the kids to school on time with everything they need for their day including a hug and kiss, but that’s just silly. I have nothing to complain about and everything to be on-my-knees grateful about.

What I’m sensing here is my old friend Resistance. It isn’t that I’m doing too much. It’s that I’m not doing enough of the things that matter. I’m not writing enough. I’m not being consistent enough in dozens of areas. I was all impressed with my consistency and efficiency pre-whine, but then I read an article called 5 Ways Your Brain Tricks You Into Sticking with Bad Habits, by Dennis Hong, that included this nugget:

It’s not because your brain hates you; it’s because your brain likes efficiency, and mindless habits are efficient. See, what your brain really wants is to shift into autopilot, to turn your life into repetitive patterns and create heuristics — mental shortcuts that help you get through the day using the least amount of brain power necessary.

Which, in turn, reminds me of my recent research on the Judean desert for the middle book about David and Saul. In an amazing book, Desert and Shepherd in Our Biblical Heritage, Nogah Hareuveni talks how desert paths are formed by grazing sheep, goats, ibex and deer, hundreds of narrow tracks crisscrossing hills that often all look the same. They can lead you to the best way to get to your destination or to likely water holes, but at the same time, they themselves can mislead and confuse you.

“Yet these grazing tracks, so typical of the desert, are a hazard to the wayfarer. Sometimes the trail traverses a steep slope and becomes ever narrower until it reaches the edge of an abyss. Above and below it numerous light-colored tracks glimmer, some of them broad and conspicuous, so that the track followed gets lost in the proliferation. Are you still on the right path or have you lost your way without noticing the intersections?” (p.96)

I’m trudging along a path that I have created in my brain, and which my brain desperately wants to remain on, whether it’s leading me where I want to go or not. I am Resisting mightily the development of new habits that would be better than some comfortable old ones. And when I manage to head out on a new path, I drift back to the old one way too soon.

The bad habits article says that it takes 10 weeks (not the old 6 I was taught) to develop a solid, new habit. That would take me to Dec. 4, the week before my birthday. Now that I have all this new insight, I’m going to go for it. Last year at exactly this time, I managed to add the new habit of regular exercise, which messed up the writing habits I’d been cruising on before that, and which I’ve never fully recovered from.

I’ve got to make it specific, though.

** No turning on the tv to catch just a bit of the news after husband and kids leave the house in the morning. Also, no trolling the internet. None. Save that for lunch. After delivering departing hugs and kisses, go straight upstairs, get dressed, do your Bible reading and prayer, have breakfast (still watch the previous day’s Live with Kelly and Michael while eating — I can’t get rid of ALL my silly habits at once). If I do that, I can get in an hour of work when my brain is most lively before it’s time to head to the gym. **

That’s it for now. I’m not going to try to revolutionize my entire schedule in one fell swoop. If making that change doesn’t bleed over into my bad evening habits, I’ll revisit this process in the new year.

I started this post whining and wound up ranting against my own Resistance. I’m really glad I let myself wallow in the whine. Without that, I’d still be thinking “too much” was my problem and I wouldn’t be any closer to making a difference.

 

Cures for Invisibility?

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

I shouldn’t write this tonight. I had a nap today. This may sound like a lovely way to spend an afternoon, but when I nap, I wake up queasy and (there is no better way to put it) bitchy. In other words, a terrible time to write a thoughtful blog post, but it’s been over a week since my last one, and that’s way too long.

But I want to put the invisibility thing to bed (since I probably won’t be able to sleep tonight, something needs to go to bed).

Not so fast

I was talking about Calling Invisible Women with a woman in her 70s, who was surprised by one of the themes of the novel (that women in their 50s feel invisible and powerless), because in her experience, women in their 50s were often at the height of their career, powerful in their organizations, courageous in speaking out.

True. I can think of lots of women who fit that description. And that’s part of the solution for the women in the book. They treat their invisibility as a superpower, making life better around them, but at least Clover’s family still doesn’t notice. At the end of the novel, one invisible woman (a Russian mail order bride) travels far to meet Clover and deliver one of the best pep talks ever. I had to bring the book back to the library, so I don’t have the exact quote, but it essentially goes like this: we’ve been acting like we’re Chechnya, but we’re not little victims to be squashed by big, bad Russia (aka pharmaceutical company). With the power of our voices, our stories, our media savvy (or that of our children), our insistence on being heard, we are Russia.

And, indeed, the invisible women get cracking and the ensuing media blitz brings the pharmaceutical company to its knees, many women get their jobs back, and they have lives more vibrant than before they became invisible.

So the woman at the height of her courage and powers is one part of the story of women in their 50s. But so is the woman who drifted along, cutting everyone else slack, making excuses for everyone, and found herself doing all the drudge work and getting no recognition for everything she gave up for the sake of others.

Maybe this is a particularly lively fear for me since I’ve mostly been a stay-at-home mom for 14 years. Yes, I’ve done freelance work, and in-office work for a couple of years, not to mention the novel writing. But it’s so easy to make excuses for everyone else’s stress and not insist on things I might’ve insisted on in the past. To let things slide. Sometimes, this is a kind thing to do, but it can get to be a nasty habit that I can see leading to accepting invisibility.

Invisibility might not always be so bad

My older friend also remembered when men in general stopped noticing her — it was a relief. Freeing, even.

I can see that, and celebrate that, eve. But it’s complicated for me. I no longer get catcalls and rude suggestions from idiots driving by, and I don’t miss them one bit. I no longer have the internal debate: am I in a public enough place to be safe to give that guy the finger? I don’t have to think about what I’m wearing to try to minimize attention. But I’d miss the occasional moment of recognition of me as an attractive woman by cashiers, waiters, etc. Those are nice little moments.

However, I can’t stop myself from growing older. Those moments will go away and I’ll have to rely on my friends to tell me how amazing I look in my turtleneck (which we’re all wearing because we feel bad about our necks). When it happens, I’m sure it’ll be fine. It already is fine. I’ll remember to treat it as something freeing.

We’re back to seeing

I’ve written about seeing before, both the power of being seen and allowing yourself to be seen. I’ve even thrown God into the mix. That’s what this book comes down to: seeing. Making sure that I pay attention, both to my own life and to the people around me. Looking cashiers in the eye when I thank them. Making sure I keep handing over household chores to the kids. Nudging the grandkids to help with dinnertime chores (even though my mother slips up the stairs from the beach so quietly and does almost all the work before we get up to the house). Thanking my husband for doing his regular stuff around the house. Not giving up so easily on relationship issues. Showing what’s really behind the mirage of omni-competence. Paying attention.

Real invisibility

While anyone of any racial or socio-economic group can be taken for granted in their family unit, the novel mostly focuses on middle class, mostly white women. They are a couple of nods to women who the characters recognize are possibly more invisible than they are: hotel maids. Hotel maids here stand for all those people, mostly minorities, often immigrants, who do the crappiest, most thankless jobs, who work long hours for low pay, who are easy to ignore, who many people often prefer to ignore. If I decry invisibility for myself, I have to decry it for them, too. If I pay attention to my own life and my friends’ and families’ lives, I have to pay attention to their lives, too.

One more person to pay attention to

Thank you, Jeanne Ray, for writing this dystopian novel for the middle-aged woman. I don’t think it’ll take off as a subgenre like the YA dystopian novel has, and I’m not sure I’d get into it if it did, but Calling Invisible Women gave me a lot to think about while entertaining me. And that’s always a good thing.

 

Are You Testing Your Invisibility?

~ Natalie Hart ~ 3 Comments

I’ve been avoiding writing about this book (Calling Invisible Women, by Jeanne Ray), but there’s too much in there that hits too close to home. Clover is a fiftysomething mother of two (1 college student, 1 recent college graduate), married to a crazy-busy pediatrician, a dog owner, and writer of a gardening column for the local newspaper. She has one little brief blip of invisibility before becoming completely invisible: voice still there, body still there, but she cannot be seen. Her family doesn’t notice. For several weeks. As long as she does all her regular tasks (including sex with her husband), they don’t know anything is seriously amiss.

I picked up the novel in the library because of the cover and title, read the blurb and put it back. “No,” I thought, “that’s way too depressing to be as funny as the blurb implies.” I walked two steps away, pivoted, and picked it up again. Read the first line: “I first noticed I was missing on a Thursday.” Loved the off-hand tone of it, so I gritted my teeth and got it. I was going to read it like it was medicine.

And it was. The book is truly funny and the tone is comic throughout, yet I was on the verge of tears, if not actually crying, almost the entire time. Luckily, it’s a fairly short book (246 pages), and a fast read, so it wasn’t a terribly long time. But still.

The best parts of the book were when we meet the other invisible women and go along as they discover how to use their invisibility like a superpower. An ex-teacher goes to school on the bus (naked, so nobody can tell there’s a person there), whispering in the ears of bullies as their conscience, making sure shunned kids have a place to sit in the lunch room, interrupting cheaters, and generally making life at school better, fairer. Another slips off her clothes in the middle of a bank robbery and foils it. They hold naked meetings so they don’t have to pay for the hotel conference room. They learn how this happened to them (there is a physical reason, it isn’t magic), band together, confront the problem, and achieve a pretty good level of victory.

But Clover’s interactions with her family and the world at large made me so sad. Even a little panicky. I’ve got tears pressuring behind my eyes right now just thinking about it. As long as she’s wearing clothes, the vast majority of people don’t notice that the clothes are floating in midair. Even her doctor responds to her statement, “I am invisible,” with a bland, “We get a lot of that in here,” not even looking up at her from her chart as he talks. The only one who notices and didn’t know other invisible women first, was her best friend.

This is a nightmare that is too easy for me to imagine being real. The first time it happens, Clover panics and wakes up her son to ask whether he sees her. There’s some silly back and forth, including this nugget, “If you feel like I don’t appreciate you, well…it’s because I don’t. I will again, but not until at least ten, okay?” She’s visible by the end of the conversation. Next time, it’s permanent. She didn’t plan on testing her family, but the first time, when she stood in front of her husband as just a nightgown floating in air, and he didn’t notice, but kept up an ordinary conversation, she dismissed it as her own mental illness. And then it becomes a test, a dare.

Aren’t there tons of ways you test the people who love you? If I don’t change the toilet paper roll, how long will it take for someone else to do it? Will anyone notice that I cut/dyed/changed my hair? If I do job X that person Y usually does, will they thank me for it if I don’t mention it? If I don’t plan a night out with the husband, how long before he suggests it? If I don’t hand the camera to someone else and ask to have my picture taken, will anyone notice that there’s little evidence that I’m part of the family? Or that I’m sometimes part of the fun? Maybe it’s just me, but I bet I’m not alone.

What does it mean when they fail the test? It might mean that they don’t love you, but not necessarily. It might mean that they’re wrapped up in their own dramas and anxieties, with some tendency to take you for granted on the side. No matter what, it sucks for you. You feel crappy when they fail. After the first interaction with her husband, Clover cries out, “‘He didn’t notice!’ A pure grief washed through me. It was bigger than the problem at hand” (p.27).

But you also feel kind of crappy when they pass, because you’ve expended time and energy scheming and imagining both scenarios and every one of your interactions is fraught with suspense and expectation. And all the negotiating with yourself to explain every nuance. Clover does this, too: “The next morning when he leaned in and kissed my shoulder, my neck, I started to think about it all another way. Maybe Arthur didn’t see me because he knew me so well and his vision automatically filled in all the things I was, based on the slightest hint of shape or scent. Maybe when you’ve been with someone so long you don’t so much see them as you project them onto things. Arthur could have been making love to my twenty-year-old self, my forty-year-old self…Anyway, this morning, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt” (p.48).

But it’s also kind of irresistible. Another character asks Clover why she doesn’t just tell her family. She admits that it would be better if they knew, “But after awhile it just becomes a point of pride. You start to wonder just how far it can go” (p.151).

Yet it isn’t only pride, it’s also fear. Fear of being unloved. Fear of being unlovable. And hurt. Hurt from all the times your loved ones have failed you in the past. Not to mention humiliation. It’s humiliating to feel like you’re begging for attention. Clover puts this messy soup together this way: “Maybe because we were timid and hurt, having already spend so many years feeling invisible before the truth of the matter kicked in. If we didn’t have the starch to tell our own families that no one could see us, then how could we be ready to tell the world?” (p.157).

Not to mention the mingled guilt and anger in those who’ve been tested. Anger at the person for putting them in that position, but also guilt at being neglectful and clueless. Hurt that the tester didn’t trust them.

It ends pretty well for the characters in the book, and Clover does apologize for testing them, but reading this has convinced me of the stupidity of testing. I’m going to stop it. In fact, I already have stopped it. I changed a door in our kitchen yesterday, and instead of waiting to see who’d notice, I told everyone that I did something big in the kitchen. My daughter wanted to know so she could anticipate it. My son didn’t want me to tell him what, so he could see whether he noticed right away — he did. And I tagged my husband in the Facebook post that had the picture of what I did. When I see that the toilet paper roll needs changing, I’m going to change it. I’m going to open curtains (while teasing my family about really being vampires). When we’re having people over for brunch and I’m busy cooking, I’m going to ask my husband to make the bed instead of wishing that he’d notice that the bed needed making and being hurt when he doesn’t. There’s more, some silly, some deeper, but you get the picture.

And there are more convictions to come because of this book, but I’ll save that for a future post.

 

How Do You Feel About Sarcasm?

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

In two YA/MG books I’ve read this summer, the female protagonist is sarcastic, both in her own head and with others: Hourglass, by Myra McEntire, and Kepler’s Dream, by Juliet Bell. (Gorgeous covers, both.)

They are very different novels, but Emerson (from Hourglass) and Ella (from Kepler) both use sarcasm as a protective shield. In Emerson’s case, she’s 17, so she self-consciously uses it to keep people distant from her because she sees dead people, spent time in a psych ward, and has secretly gone off her meds — she wants to protect others from her crazy.

Ella has been stuck at what she calls Broken Family Camp with her severe grandmother (who she’s never met) in New Mexico while her mother undergoes a stem cell transplant for leukemia in Seattle. She takes refuge in her sarcastic observations about the people and the place she’s stuck in.

Wisecracking, sarcastic, kick-butt heroines are “in” now. I support the trend to have strong female protagonists, but I wish they didn’t always have to be so sarcastic. Because the thing the character does to keep everyone else at arm’s length or as a sign of her disaffection, keeps me feeling distant from the character I’m supposed to be attaching to. It does to me what it does to everyone else in the story. Being party to the character’s interior talk rarely helps, because they seem so distant from their own emotions. And in the 11-year-old character, it made her seem a little old for her age.

I kept reading both those books, despite feeling an initial disconnect with the point of view characters, and they turned into wonderful stories. Emerson and Ella grew on me as their situations got both better and worse, and as they showed more vulnerability and connected to the people around them. Hourglass is a fast-moving story with loads of tension and strange stuff happening and secrets and paranormal business. Kepler’s Dream is a quieter story, not as flashy and not at all paranormal. But as Ella got to know the people and the landscape at her grandmother’s, the sarcastic names she gave them became more affectionate. At the end of the book, when she slyly clues her grandmother (Violet Von Stern, which is an awesome name) in to the nickname she calls Violet — the GM, for General Major of the Good Grammar Correctional Facility — I got teary, because it was a sign of comfort and security in their relationship, especially when Violet gets the joke on herself.

Another book I read this summer, The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, had multiple characters who were sarcastic and disaffected and kept everyone at a distance, and I could barely finish it. I found almost all the characters unpleasant, distasteful, whiney, bratty, and mean. I have not picked up the sequel, and I won’t. I don’t want to spend any more time with those people.

But it’s an interesting thing to think about as a writer: what do you do when your character’s coping mechanism keeps the reader distant as well? How do you keep them reading until your character starts to mature? Do you show a core of sincerity behind the sarcasm to tide the reader over until the character grows? Some other positive character trait? It brings home to me how difficult sarcasm is, as a voice, to balance. How much is too much?

I tried it, once, in a romance manuscript. I love a wisecracking romance heroine, and I’m pretty snarky in my own head, so I thought I could pull it off, but it didn’t work for me, didn’t sound right. I had to rewrite it with the character generally being more sincere and only very occasionally sarcastic (and even then, the ms. isn’t seeing the light of day). Now that I think of it, there aren’t any sarcastic characters in the first David and Saul manuscript: David is made fun of for being so honest and upright, Saul is sometimes cruel and closed-up and sometimes open, Samuel can be cryptic but with a sense of humor, David’s oldest brother doesn’t hide his meanness. So they certainly aren’t all pleasant, but no sarcastic wisecrackers.

As David matures through the next two books, he won’t be able to remain so honest and upright: he lies to priests, pretends to be crazy, has to figure out how to survive on the run, becomes a mercenary while lying to his host king. He has to learn how to be diplomatic, which is all about maintaining an aura of sincerity while twisting the truth to your purposes. But no sarcasm. I seem to have a problem with it.

How do you respond to a sarcastic main character?

Revisiting the “I Wonders”

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

I’ve had the writing blahs. More accurately, the revision blahs. The first book in my planned trilogy (imaginative retelling of the biblical story of David and Saul in young adult novels) is finished. It’s been read by close to a dozen people and is in the hands of a publisher that will hopefully look at it some time this year. That means I move on to the second novel, which is complete in messy draft 1 form.

In late spring, I dutifully read the draft and noted where I needed to “show not tell,” where I needed more information, where I’d gotten the emotional tenor wrong. To the left are 3 of the 8 pages of notes I have — two lines of teeny chicken-scratches per line on the page, not to mention the stuff scribbled in margins, added in post-its, and written on the manuscript pages.

It hasn’t been as bad as pulling teeth. I had 11 of those pulled as a child, one of which had to be broken apart in my mouth and taken out in chunks, at a time when pain management wasn’t as good as it is now (or Australian dentists just thought we needed to be tougher). So revising this ms. hasn’t gone to that level.

But close.

In his book, The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes about what he calls Resistance (and, yes, it’s always capitalized): whatever it is within you that blocks you from living your fullest life, from doing whatever creative thing you feel the pull to do. The following is from the excerpt that appears on the book’s page on his website:

“Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard or smelled. But it can be felt. It is experienced as a force field emanating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its intention is to shove the creator away, distract him, sap his energy, incapacitate him.

If Resistance wins, the work doesn’t get written.”

I’ve got Resistance bad, in a way I never did for the first book. I called it any number of things over the summer.

1. My usual summer ADD when the kids are home and extra kids are here and I’m ferrying people about to have their fun.
2. The heat. The first half of the summer was so hot it sapped all my drive.
3. Anxiety over the fate of book 1 (aka It Is You) at the publisher, because the submission did not come about in a normal way and they didn’t get it in the format their website says they prefer, but when the president of the company asks for it in his own way, that’s how you send it, and isn’t it good that the president asked for it and apparently read it and apparently sent it along to the young readers section, but I didn’t get the postcard that they typically send saying that they’ve received the manuscript, and does that mean they don’t have it, do I dare be obnoxious enough to send them a letter asking to confirm whether they have it and whether it contains what they need from me, or should I just trust the wheels that have already been set it motion….
4. Health issues, none of which are lastingly serious, but two of which did interrupt my life for a bit (pleurisy and some kind of neck something that had me moving like a robot).

But now the kids are in school, it’s not so hot, and my neck is mostly okay. The anxiety over It Is You is still there, but I’m working on trusting the process, and on recognizing that, publishing being what it is, when a publisher says I’ll hear from them, “very soon,” two months is well within that timeframe. And so I’ve been beating myself into the chair and choking my way through a few notes, which might cover one page. Ninety minutes of work a day, tops. This is the mark of an amateur, not a pro.

Giving myself serious talking-tos helps a bit. Bible reading and prayer helps. Reading inspiring, butt-kicking words from other writers, such as Justine Musk, Steven Pressfield, and Robin LeFever helps, too.

But none of that took hold until today. You know what it was? What got me into this project in the first place: the “I wonders.” The questions about all those details the Bible doesn’t think are interesting enough to include.

Where did David get water from before he settled in the caves at Adullam? Could he devise a dew catcher out of materials available to him? If he passed by Jebus, could he access the Gihon Spring? Would the Jebusites let a random traveler get water there? What is the landscape like from Gibeah to Nob? What kind of vegetation is around there? Would there be any shade for him? Any caves? What would the evening and day temperatures be?

So I’m obsessing again, one question leading to another leading to another leading my to visiting the Calvin College library again. And browsing through the stacks leads me to finds I didn’t search for. Which will lead me to more specificity in the world I write about, which will hopefully lead to a richer reader experience.

This is good. This is beating back Resistance. For now.

If you have any techniques for beating back your Resistance, I’d love to hear about it.

Anybody Else Need a Hand Slap?

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

No, I don’t mean a “you’ve been naughty” slap. Or a “stop that” slap. I’m talking about the practice of volleyball teams to slap hands with each other when a point doesn’t go their way. (Of course, nobody else finds it interesting, so I have no photo to go along with this.)

I have a hard time tearing myself away from Olympics coverage, which means I wind up seeing sports I’d never watched for any length of time before. I’ve been struck by how supportive volleyball teams are. After every point that goes their way, they huddle and clap each other on the back or shoulder. After points they lose, they make a point of going around to almost every player and slapping palms with them, as if saying, “alright, next one,” “we’re still good.” No matter what, they affirm that they are in it together.

It’s part of the rhythm of every point, with every team that I’ve seen.

Which makes me think about failure and disappointment in my life. I tend to make a big deal out of them. I stew about them for a while before I say anything, and when I do say something, I’m rather emotional (this may be an understatement). And then I mull it over afterwards. This takes a lot of time and way too much energy. Maybe that’s why the matter-of-fact hand slap looks so appealing: no emotion, no recrimination. Just an understanding that failure happens, it’ll happen to all of us, we have another chance to not fail in 30 seconds, meanwhile, I’m here for you.

I’m focusing here on those hundreds of little failures: anger and irritation flaming out, saying something that unintentionally hurts someone you care for, not doing something you say you’re going to do. I need to work on being more matter-of-fact about these. On giving myself or my loved ones the equivalent of a simple clap of palms together to acknowledge that this whatever didn’t work out the way we’d hoped, but we’re in it together, let’s get ready for the next thing.

There have been times I’ve done this well with the kids, when I’d send us all to our rooms without a big fuss when it was clear we weren’t working well together. But I didn’t do so well yesterday, when both my kids sprung sudden school activities on me that required outlays of money and time and which they’d never done before, so I let my irritation and anxiety get the better of me. Not horribly, and things will work out fine with both things, but I don’t like how I handled it. I need to give myself and the kids the hand slap and move on.

I might try to cultivate this for bigger things, too. As regular readers know, my family left our longtime church two months ago. It still makes me very emotional; I still cry during every church service we aren’t at our old church. It’s not a crime to cry in church, of course, but I’d like to stop being so actively sad so I can better get ready for the next thing. Because the next thing is upon me. We start at a new church soon, my husband in an official capacity, and I don’t want to give the new people the impression that I’m not happy to be there — because I am glad to be there, I’m still just sad about the other.

Do I need to work on the volleyball hand slap approach? Or is that impossible while I’m still grieving the place I left?

Let me throw in another analogy, just to keep things interesting. In my favorite summer TV show (other than the Olympics), So You Think You Can Dance, dancers are put in partnerships that last about half the season (unless one of them leaves the show and partnerships get shuffled). Some of those pairings have amazing chemistry from the beginning, some pairs have to work up to it. But then, when they reach the top 10, partnerships get switched every week, and every week they have to do their best with someone new. The winners are those who can make any partnership, any style of dance look good.

I had great and immediate chemistry with my prior church partner, but I can’t be with them anymore. I have a new partner. It isn’t the same as the old one, but it’s got its own style. It’ll do some things better, other things not as well. I need to give myself fully to this partnership, learn its strengths, and do everything I can to make this successful, which, in my terms, means that I serve God’s people and bring glory to God’s kingdom.

We’ll see on Sunday whether I managed to analogize myself out of crying.

 

 

 

Sputtin’ on Wisdom

~ Natalie Hart ~ 6 Comments

Spotten is a great word from my youth. It’s a warning that the joking you’re doing about church/God/the Bible is teetering on the line between affectionate and offensive. The line, of course, is subjective, but I’ll try not to go too far. [finally got the correct spelling from my father: a Dutch word meaning blasphemy]

In late 2010, I started reading at Genesis 1:1 with the intention to read the Bible all the way through from beginning to end. I had no timetable. Which was good, because two and a half years later, I’m only at Proverbs 9. There were a few hiccups, a few months-long pauses, but with the kids back in school this week, it’s my chance to get back into routine. Sometimes, it’s a pleasure; it was this project that got me going on reimagining the story of David and Saul. And sometimes it’s a struggle to find “the personal application.”

Like yesterday. Proverbs 6 & 7 are all about keeping away from the immoral woman, on and on about the immoral woman. Sure, I turned this into a warning to keep away from ideas or people who will try to seduce me away from what I know to be right and good, but there was a nagging voice in my head, “As if the man would be pure as the driven snow if only the bad woman didn’t thrust herself right up in his face and offer herself to him.” Hmph.

And then today’s selection (Prov. 8-9) had wisdom as a woman standing at the crossroads and city gates yelling at people. I grew up in Toronto and lived in NYC for several years and this description made me think of homeless people I’d see on the street — dirty, smelly, hair matted, ranting. For someone whose fourth sentence is, “Let me give you common sense” (8:3), screaming at passersby doesn’t seem like the most common-sense way to get your point across.

So I’m not starting off in a terribly holy mental place. It didn’t get much better with, “Good advice and success belong to me. Insight and strength are mine. Because of me, kings reign, and rules make just laws. Rulers lead with my help, and nobles make righteous judgments” (8:14-16). This is fine when about wisdom generally, but put in the mouth of my mentally imbalanced woman ranting on the corner, not so much.

How about our crazy lady coming out with this? “Unending riches, honor, wealth and justice are mine to distribute. My gifts are better than the purest gold, my wages better than sterling silver!” (8:17-19). And then she gets all trippy: “I was born before the oceans were created, before the springs bubbled forth their waters….I was there when [God] established the heavens, when he drew the horizon on the oceans. I was there when he established the deep fountains of the earth….And when he marked off the earth’s foundations, I was the architect at his side” (8:27-31).

So I was constantly fighting with myself, smirking at my mental images and trying to rein them in so I could find the message in there.

And then came this, which smacked me between the eyes. “But the wise, when rebuked, will love you all the more. Teach the wise, and they will be wiser. Teach the righteous, and they will learn more” (9:8-9).

The typical image of the wise person, or the person with the gift of wisdom, is of someone with something to say that you need to listen to. The person may come across as haranguing (see above) or as gentle, but he or she always has a message to improve your life. This is utterly different. This is the wise person as the one who is teachable, the one who is open to correction.

Someone recently told me that I had the gift of wisdom, which really surprised me. I think of myself as having an analytic and occasionally perceptive mind. Now and then, there’s a flash of insight or connection and I do have something to say. But my faults are ever before me. The things say are not always well-thought-out and are sometimes hurtful in ways in didn’t intend. My desires and plans so far outstrip my actions that it’s embarrassing. I have so much to learn.

And that’s where the 9:9 passage gets me: I can pursue wisdom by being teachable. And Christianity being what it is, it won’t be information I’ll be seeking. It’ll be my way of life, my ability to follow through, my regular practice of opening myself up to what I read in the Bible and what I hear from God in all the ways He communicates with me.

So even when my snarkiness gets in the way of what I’m reading, God can still sneak in and teach me.