I have not been writing much this year. I am not quite myself, and I feel a little adrift. Writing has always been my creative outlet, and since my daughter died my emotional release valve. Writing is how I understand the world, process pain, document joy, try out crazy ideas, and express thoughts I could never say out loud. It is frustrating to lose a tool that keeps me sane, but it occurred to me the other day that there is a good reason why writing is eluding me. I know why it took me the better part of a day to write a blog post for work and why when I sit down to write in the evening the blinking cursor stares me down.
I am out of words.
Writing is giving me a holiday because my brain is tired. I spent the last half of 2022 and all of 2023 preparing a 900-page edited volume for the Jane Addams Papers and writing my own book about women and Abraham Lincoln. Of course I am out of words. I used them all up!
And it is true I am not quite myself without them. I am adrift. But I am only a little adrift, which is to me, to quote Lincoln, a matter of profound wonder. I have been doing okay without writing for these first two months of 2024. I have been calmly weathering my missing words because I have a second tool to keep me sane. Watercolor.
Last July, my therapist suggested watercolor. We are working on my obsession with control and the anxiety that overtakes me when I don’t have it. She believed watercolor might help me feel the power of letting go, that learning to go with the flow of the water and the color making their own way across the paper might show me how calming it can be to loosen my grip. As a bonus, she was certain watercolor could compliment my writing.
I was skeptical. I am an old dog and afraid of new tricks. I assumed painting would frustrate me. I am not artistic, I said. I can’t draw, I said. Failure will make me sad, I said.
On my first day of painting, I ate all those stupid, doubting, self-defeating words. And I have been painting ever since, completing, thus far, nearly 100 small watercolors. I do let the water and the color have a say, and I love the imperfect paths and the unexpected visions they reveal to me. I admit I try to control the water and the color more than my therapist would like, but I am learning to let go, becoming chill with imperfection, and laughing all the way. When I sit down to paint, I am as calm as I am when I sit down on my yoga mat. For a half hour or so I express myself in color instead of words; and there is so much joy in every silly, little painting I produce. In fact, I laugh deeper down in my belly at my failures.
I haven’t been writing this year, this is true. But I have been painting. And I am learning that expression is sometimes silent. I am discovering that painting is another way for me to understand the world. In my watercolors, I have documented joy, tried out a couple of crazy ideas, expressed some thoughts I could never say out loud or even write, and processed a lot of pain about by daughter, my dad, and my dog. Painting has become a part of my soul.
But enough already, missing words. I want to pursue the idea that watercolor might compliment my writing. Come back now please. I need to write. I feel you close as I write this post, and I want you back. Now, please. I want to introduce you to watercolor.
In the shower the other day, I threw a bar of soap with an uninspired floral scent over the glass shower wall. I am an afficionado of strong scented, beautifully crafted soaps, and this bar was a dud. I deserved better. I was aiming for the sink, where the soap loser could await its fated deposit into the garbage bin. Instead, the thick bar slid down the inner side of the sink nearest the shower, traveled across the bottom of the basin and picked up speed, ramping up the other side of the sink. The soap then flew up into the steamy air before landing with a plop into a small drinking cup perched on the top of the sink. I squealed. It was like a three-point shot from midcourt at the buzzer.
But there were no cheering fans to adore me. No partner to call to the bathroom to share the story of my sensational shot. No handy family member or friend to regale with my dramatic telling. No one but me to care that a story of soap was a joyful beginning to another morning of my life on the planet.
You see, along with the momentous moments of life, I also need to share the mundane and the absurdities. When I read an interesting news article, get lost in a great book, or see a person in a taco suit on my noontime walk, I want to tell someone about it. I need to tell someone about it. For me, it’s less interesting, less great, and far less funny if I can’t share it. Mack was like that, too. She wanted the people around her to take part in the things that amused her, and those amusements were enhanced by the sharing. She is the one I most wanted to call to share the story of Stacy’s spectacular soap shot.
Instead, I threw the soap in the bin where it belonged, got dressed, and went downstairs to my home office to start my day. No one to tell, so I put the soap out of my mind; what do little dogs know of soap and midcourt shots at the buzzer? I did wonder, however, if my ex-husband Kevin got a little twinge in his stomach at the moment I squealed over that soap. The twinge like a ghost of the past giving him a strange sense that he had been saved from another drawn-out telling of a silly story, Stacy’s eyes wide as she told it with her hands and her eyeballs and her words, fast like a child, chattering on and on and starting the story all over again.
Clearly, I didn’t forget about the soap. I’m writing about the soap story because it got me analyzing myself in the context of this new quiet life of mine. I am a storytelling chatterbox living alone, and that has been of surprising consequence to me, I suppose, and I’m just now realizing it. Oh, I text or call my daughter Savannah several times a week, and she indulges my stories when I tell them. My sister will tolerate my stories while she has a cocktail in hand. My mother, who lives far away, always appears to be listening to my stories when I tell them, but really I think she is just measuring the size of my eyeballs as I jabber on, telling the story two or three times to make sure she hears it all. And, I also have friends, near and far, with whom I will relate a story or two, if I remember a good one when I see them.
Yet I think it is true, that living alone has altered the rhythm of my storytelling, narrowed my eyes and dimmed the sparkle. This realization of diminished, daily storytelling is another clue to me that I am struggling to adjust to living alone, to relying on myself for everything that I want and need. For fifty-three years I lived with my family, then college roommates, and then a husband and daughters. For fifty-three years, I had a captive audience. I’ve only been solo for two years, and almost all of that time during a global pandemic. Such a change was bound to be dramatic, radical even, and it has altered many rhythms of my life.
And that’s okay. Good, maybe. Or, perhaps, even great. The altered rhythm of a heart demands attention, requires assessment, suggests treatment. Why not the rhythms of a life?
What the altered rhythm of my storytelling means going forward, I do not know. I realize now that I have always found joy in sharing the stories of my life, particularly the silly ones, and also in sharing my observations about the world. Perhaps that is why since living alone I have taken to Instagram. It is no true substitute, of course, but it has given me an outlet, especially on the many days in each week when there are only the walls and the dogs to hear my stories and random observations.
I miss the chattering, the animated telling, and the instant gratification of getting the words, the thought or the story, into the ears and the heart and the funny bone of someone I care about. Not a great reflection of myself, centered as it is upon my ego. But that statement is the truest statement I have written about myself in a long time.
Perhaps I should learn how to enjoy unusual occurrences like spectacular soap shots all by myself in the same way I learned how to use a drill and to cook for one. With practice. And cursing. Lots and lots of people are content to live quietly, laugh on the inside, and leave it to other people to tell the stories. Why couldn’t I just be one of them? Because, if I am honest, I am not and likely never will be quiet. I’m a talker. Talking is what I do.
Perhaps I should start a special journal to record my soap stories. Writing them out and reading them later might provide a similar feeling to the satisfaction I get from talking to people. Nah. This option sounds like a lot work, a little pathetic, and slightly off the mark. Before this introspective rambling, I never thought of myself as a performer, but now I wonder if that might be part of it.
Perhaps living alone is not for me, after all. Maybe I am one of those people who needs a partner, a captive audience with whom to share my daily soap stories. Or maybe it is going to take so much time to get used to living alone that I will never get used to living alone. Goodness. I hope not. On both counts, I hope not. Because I am a long way from healthy enough to live with somebody else, and I may not be for a long time or ever. Besides, although I admit I am needy of attention, the peace and privilege of making all the rules and curating every corner of my house and my yard, all on my own, is too lovely to give up. And, I know for certain, that having to compromise only with dogs and myself provides the most blissful environment in which to figure out what ails me and what heals me.
For now, maybe I’ll just talk to the walls or tell my stories to myself, out loud, while I take my daily walk. What if some, or a lot, of the people we see muttering to themselves on city streets, aren’t mentally ill, but people just like me. Chatterboxes with no one to tell their stores. Hmm… That’s an interesting idea to ponder on a Saturday afternoon, blustery with indoor weather.
I think, I’ll just try telling my stories to the dogs, and see how it goes.
On the outside, my long-haired chihuahua mix is golden and gorgeous. Her fur is the blended color of sunshine and fields of wheat turning autumn shades of amber. Her face is chiseled and dainty, and her delicate, pointed snout and dreamy, doe eyes would place Bug in the cute-as-a-bug category of dogs even without the glorious ears that stretch up as if to reach me when I call her name. Bug is sweet and gentle, my lamb, my snuggles, my dear littlest one.
On the inside of Bug, however, are scars and shadows on her willowy bones from anxieties I will never understand. She must be carried up the staircase to bed, but she scrambles down the steps quickly to breakfast all by herself every morning. She trembles at the sound of thunder, but she is brave in her demand that squirrels stay off our porch. She’s shy around men and distrustful of people in uniforms, but she adores the six people she has invited into her nervous little heart.
I adore Miss Bug for her goofy, heartwarming cuteness, even though loving her has required an acceptance of quirky, contradictory, and sometimes infuriating behaviors, like her interminable searching for the poop spot that will allow the least amount of contact of her precious butt with itchy or wet or unfamiliar surfaces. Patience is as important as love in my tending of Bug. If she were a human child, I would have her tested for Asperger Syndrome and practice strategies to improve her social skills and make her more comfortable with the spontaneous, unexpected things that pop up when you are a living creature on this crazy planet. But, Bug is dog, just seven pounds, and even though her neuroses have neuroses, she’s not that much trouble.
Most of the time.
Last night, though, around 3 a.m., just a couple hours after I had stopped reading and settled into a deep sleep, a scream like a banshee from nightmares pierced the quiet dark. My heart jumped like a startled frog into my throat, and I sat bolt upright in bed. I lunged for Pepper, my middle-aged Pomeranian with congestive heart failure, my mind going straight to painful heart attack. But she was sitting up, engaging her annoyance gurgle, having also been yanked from peaceful slumber by the terrible screech. I reached then for Bug, who sleeps on the pillow next to me. She wasn’t there, but I could hear her squeaking and struggling. I found her wiggling body tucked under and between our two pillows, her head pushed through the slats of the headboard. I pulled her free, and she melted into my arms. And then as if we were members of a freaky, psychically-connected chorus, all three of us let out long, whispery sighs.
I’ll never know for certain, but I think in her sleep Bug must have dreamed herself into that pickle between and under the pillows, woke up with her head in that scary and dark place between the headboard and the wall, and screamed out in holy horror.
Pepper rolled over on her back and went right back to sleep, while I tucked Bug under my arm, cuddling her deep into the comforter. I took some deep, meditative breaths to ease my body back into rest, and then I remembered I had heard that scream once before. A couple of years ago, while running up the long hallway of the loft where we lived in St. Louis, Bug screamed like a banshee from nightmares and fainted dead away. I thought she really was dead, limp in my arms when I picked her up. After a minute or two, however, she woke up and I rushed her to the vet. There was nothing at all wrong with her. The vet surmised that she might have twisted her leg or hyperextended her tiny knee while running fast, that she might have felt pain or a twinge or took an unexpected skid that scared her so badly she fainted.
Two years ago, I took my screaming, fainting chihuahua to the vet. Last night, I cuddled my screaming, terrified chihuahua and showered her with love and patience until she fell back into an easy slumber. Once her breathing was even and she was tucked away in a good dream, I closed my eyes and joined my funny little family in sleep.
I have not been writing much this year. I am not quite myself, and I feel a little adrift. Writing has always been my creative outlet, and since my daughter died my emotional release valve. Writing is how I understand the world, process pain, document joy, try out crazy ideas, and express thoughts I could never say out loud. It is frustrating to lose a tool that keeps me sane, but it occurred to me the other day that there is a good reason why writing is eluding me. I know why it took me the better part of a day to write a blog post for work and why when I sit down to write in the evening the blinking cursor stares me down.
I was skeptical. I am an old dog and afraid of new tricks. I assumed painting would frustrate me. I am not artistic, I said. I can’t draw, I said. Failure will make me sad, I said.
Being Mack's Momma Bear 