Coming....Out? sort of, anyway.

I love reading, and I truly admire authors who are successful enough to have published. I am awe-full, and horribly, horribly jealous. This is why; and why I hope maybe, one day, it might change.

I remember being a kid -- a really young kid, still in single digits. I remember playing -- with my Barbies, although they weren't my favorites, with My Little Ponies and baby dolls and my brother's GIJoes -- with, really, any apropriate, even *vaguely* anthropomorphised toys I could find. I even seem to recall perhaps anthropomorphising leaves and twigs and flowers when nothing else was available (like, we were at my Grandma's way out in the country & hadn't taken toys or they had been left inside when we kids were pushed out the door and told to go roam the field and forest but don't go further than the stream, you know which one!

I remember that, with these, I created elaborate, almost soap-opera-like storylines, some that would continue for days and some that were episodic shorts. Some, even, were complete in and of themselves. But they were definitely stories, each with a beginning, a middle and an end. If, for some reason, I couldn't complete a specific storyline in a given play session, I would stay awake after I was supposed to be asleep and plot it all out in my head.

Sadly, as I got older, I started listening to the outer voices. They weren't saying things like, "You can't do that." "You're no good." Instead, they were saying things like, "You should be thinking about your math and science." "Learn to cook and clean; those are skillls that will serve you as an adult." I learned to say and do what those voices -- the adults in my life -- told me. And as I got older, I lost track of the authentic, ME voices. I lost something essential to my emotional health. And it's only continued as I got older.

In high school (those of you who know me in Real Life will probably remember) I had a string of random, disastrous, long-lasting relationships. I stayed in them, as you may or may not know, out of guilt. I had this idea of what each of them needed from a relationship, and I strove to mold myself to that idea, whether it was true to me or not. And it almost always was not. I'm lucky enough to still be good friends with ONE of those guys.

I had one year of college where I was able to break free of the molds I had been struggling to feel all my life. I was able to live in the dorms and just be, without worrying about my whether I was meeting my mom's expectations, or anyone else's. I experimented with my sexuality (just a bit; I still managed to be a Good Girl) and with my voice. I took a creative writing class, but it focused mostly on poetry. I liked the poetry, but it wasn't what I wanted; I was looking forward to the prose portion, but the instructor left it for the last 3 weeks of a 12-week course, and just sort of...turned us loose with no real attempt to direct us (probably because she was a poet.) That was pretty much disastrous, and scared me away for a long time from trying my skills again.

Then came kids and family obligations and life.

Sometimes, I feel like I fail as a girl, and know I'd make an even worse guy. I am not confident in my persona as a wife or mother, and I *know* I'm not the greatest of housewives. But I'm an excellent reader, and I convince myself I'm a slightly-better-than-decent friend. I'm good at the technical aspects of writing -- I know research, and I can string together some pretty effective arguments when I need to. Essays, check. And I can, if pressed, paint one HELL of a word-picture. But the creative end of it? I don't know.

I read author interviews, and there's a sameness to them: "I am just a vessel for the Muse." "The characters tell me their stories and I write them down." "I get these plot bunnies and I have to chase after them..."

I don't hear those Voices any more. I loved those Voices, and I miss them.

I don't argue about stuff, and I don't often offer my opinion unless I feel very strongly. I have learned that there are people who don't hear you, and sometimes those are the people closest to you, the ones you most need to have hear. So it's hard for me. I worry sometimes I've killed off that part of me that dreams and travels and Speaks to me. I hope not, and I have occasional flashes that keep that hope alive.

So, this is me, coming out of my hiding place, letting the Voices know they can come back and see me. My head is open for business. Just be kind -- or go away; don't let me think you're listening if you're really not.

Dear Santa, All I Want for Christmas is...

Kitchen goodies!!

I need spatulas (silicone, please) for scraping bowls
wooden spoons
hand towels

I would like to have:

French Onion Soup bowls

kitchenaid mixer



More cast-iron!



I would love to have:

more vintage Pyrex Cinderella-style mixing bowls.

thanks for thinking of me!

Love,

tracykitn

Halloween

First, a picture of the boys, rear view. DinoBoy on the left, VelcroBoy as Grey Moth on the right.

Next, DH's Jack-o-Lanterns

*RAWR*

"I'm a MOTH."

Porcelain doll

reflections...

Life has got me thinking lately about mortality (not my own) and how we deal with it, and the aftermath and how we deal with THAT, and the guilt that comes, not from the things we've done that turned out to be stupid, but more the things we haven't done, for whatever reason, that we wish we had.

And, yeah. Most convoluted sentence EVAR, I know. But I was thinking, specifically, about two deaths in my family (names withheld to protect the innocent.)

The first death was actually my grandmother, and it's been...well, it feels fairly recent, actually, but the truth is, it was nearly two years ago now. Because it happened in January while my DH was still deployed in Iraq, and he's been home for a year now. So. The thing about her is that now, I only have one grandparent left, and that absolutely kills me. I was lucky enough to have a very wonderful, loving family, all of it -- my parents loved their in-laws, their in-laws loved them... Heck, my two sets of grandparents even invited each other for extended family reunions and get-togethers and they had never met before my parents got together. THAT is how open and loving and wonderful they all were. My father's father died, and my mother's parents were RightThere helping and supporting and cooking and being wonderful. And the reverse -- someone in my mother's family died (not even a close relative) and my father's aunts and uncles descended en masse on my mother's family to help them mourn and say goodbye, some of them travelling from Delaware to Tennessee to be there for a funeral of someone they'd never met.

Sometimes, my little internet communities feel like this -- someone suffers a loss or disappointment and people they don't even know are coming out of the woodwork to offer sympathy or support because they have a mutual friend somewhere along the line.

And I always thought that my family was so awesome and strong and amazing to be like that, but I've kind of learned differently this year. 

See, on my father's side, his grandparents had 8 kids. Of those 8, 6 married, and three reproduced. One wanted to, but was, for whatever reason, unable, so they adopted a son. This son grew up feeling just as loved, just as much a part of the family as the biological cousins of his generation. The entire family was there giving their support when he married and had children of his own, and he was just the guy, you know? The one who just always showed up when he was needed. The one who would sit with you while you were in the hospital so whoever else had been there could go home and change, or go to the cafeteria and eat. The guy who pulled a paralysingly shy teenage girl out of herself at Christmas one year, talking about E.A. Poe, who she'd been studying in a HS lit class that year, and when he found out how much she'd loved reading his work, had snuck home to giftwrap his own Complete Works for her for a Christmas present.

I didn't even realize he was adopted until -- actually, it may have been that same year.

And then this year, he died. It was tragic. He was only a few years older than my own husband, he left behind a wife, a son in college, and a just-barely-teenage daughter. To say nothing of his devastated parents, his cousins... But sadly, his death has caused a rift in the family. His father was the only son of those amazing great-grandparents of mine. And when my great-grandmother died intestate, he bought the family home and property at auction, planning to leave it to his wonderful, loving, beloved son. Now that son is dead, he wants to leave it to his grandchildren. Sadly, some of his sisters have now decided to be ugly about that -- despite the fact that none of them are in any shape to buy the property, or will themselves be dead by the time it changes hands, or have no heirs of their own, they don't want it to go to anyone who doesn't share their blood. Apparently, nearly 50 years of love don't make a family, after all. I really want that property left to those kids because to me, the only difference between their blood and mine is that if someday one of my kids needs a transplant, they may not be able to provide what is needed (although I have no doubt that they would be the first in line volunteering for a test.) DNA doesn't even come into it. And I have NO IDEA how hurt they must be right now, still grieving their father and knowing that these people they've loved for years and thought of as family, extra grandmas, don't feel exactly the same way about them.

So, much as I love my older relatives, I am wary of them. I am mentally trying to write it off as some sort of weird manifestation of senility (they are all well into their 70s and 80s by now) and telling myself that if they were younger, in possession of their right minds, this would not be happening. And part of my is just so glad that I don't live nearby anymore, and don't have to see them often or hear what's going on. And I'm so, so sad for the world's loss. 

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." --John Donne So anyway... the guilt part (this is what I was actually setting out to write, I just got distracted by back-story.) I am feeling very guilty because part of me feels that I haven't really mourned for my grandmother. It's been two years, and I've cried nary a tear for her. And yet... Every moment of every day, my heart aches for her, just as it does for my other grandmother, who died while I was pregnant with my oldest child, just as it does for other dearly loved members of my family who died even before I reached my teens.  And I've mourned her, I really have. The thing is...I mourned her death years before it happened. She started suffering small strokes when I was a freshman in college. Eventually they got big enough that she couldn't care for herself, and the family (my parents and my father's brother) made the heart-breaking decision to put her in a nursing home very close to the same time my daughter was born. My sons never knew her outside of the nursing home, and she spent nearly ten years there, dying by inches. It was more obvious to me, as by that time I had a home and a family of my own, and wasn't visiting weekly the way my parents and siblings were; I was lucky to see her twice a year. And so I've been mourning her death for the entire lives of both my boys. By the time her body stopped, I had cried my tears. My mom with her mother. My dad's mother with my older son, his first Christmas.

Voices in my head

It would be so much easier if they were plotbunnies or characters. I could write something and my messed-up-ness and whining would be *something*...

Instead, it's random to-do lists and freaky useless guilt about nothing in particular or about all the things I wanted to do but didn't because I burnt out on math or got pregnant at 20 or just can't seem to stay on top of the housework.

Hell, sometimes it's guilt caused by the fact that my body just doesn't work the way I want it to, as a result of hormones, or just plain biology, or because I've let myself get out of shape.

Life keeps kicking me down and I angst about it at 1:30 in the morning, and then I wake up early the next day and face it down again and kick freaking back!

And that, my lovelies, is the true meaning of courage.




And now: Linkity of YUM: Men In Kilts (enjoy, my dears!)