WordSisters

Tag: wordsisters

  • On Being a Parent

    credit to www.maddiegdesigns.com
    credit to http://www.maddiegdesigns.com

    In the early morning hours I woke to a death squeal. I stood with my ear pressed to the bedroom door. I didn’t want to open the door and have whatever was making that noise escape into our room. I also didn’t want to see what lay on the other side.

    If this was Antonio or Crystel needing me I would have been upstairs in a moment.

    Either this was a cat injured or another animal.

    Jody hadn’t moved from the bed. She sat upright watching me. To her credit she is often upstairs first in the morning and has to deal with any carnage brought in during the night by our three young cats.

    I heard rustling, then quiet. I waited. I turned the knob, peeked out the door.

    “It’s a bunny,” I said, relieved. I brushed away the cats. Took a piece of paper and touched the animal. It didn’t move.

    I opened our garage, retrieved a snow shovel that hadn’t been put away for the summer, and scooped up the cottontail. In the darkness I flipped it over our fence into the athletic field next door and went back to bed.

    That same morning, I was reading the Sunday paper. I could hear the dog barking in the backyard. I took another sip of coffee and thumbed through the Variety section.

    Jody came downstairs from the upper level. She had been on a work conference call. Maybe the barking got to her.

    “The dog has a bunny,” she said looking out the patio door.

    I went outside. This baby bunny was still alive. It was smaller than the one last night. I picked it up and held it in my hands.

    Antonio came up behind me. “Here, I’ll take it.” He held out his cupped palms.

    I handed the bundle carefully to him. He used his swimming towel to make a nest for the bunny in a small cardboard box and took the bunny to his room.

    His being up complicated matters. In crept the concern about how he would regard my actions with this injured animal and how I wanted to raise him as a compassionate person. There would be no flipping this baby rabbit over the fence.

    I Googled how to raise bunnies. It didn’t look good.

    “Antonio, it says that you should put the bunny back where you found it. Maybe it will go back to its den.”

    He took the bunny and lay it under a bush. Ten minutes later the bunny still hadn’t moved. Antonio retrieved the bunny and felt its body for the injury.

    “Should we wake Crystel?” he asked.

    “No.” I was hoping I would have the situation resolved by the time she awoke. I went through a list of possibilities and ended with the idea that taking the bunny two miles to Woodlake Nature Center and leaving it by the bird feeder would be the most humane act and something that Antonio could live with. Maybe a hawk would swoop it up.

    “It’s the circle of life,” I told Antonio on the drive over.

    At Woodlake we sat on the bench watching the birds fly back and forth to the feeders. Antonio cradled the bunny in his arms. I pulled up dead grass and made a nest for the bunny near the feeder. Antonio lay him gently down.

    Once home, Crystel met us at the door.

    “You didn’t wake me,” she accused.

    Back at Woodlake, Crystel picked up the bunny and petted it. “Can we keep it?”

    “No, Crystel. This is the best thing.”

    She carried the bunny away from me singing, “It’s the circle of life little bunny.”

    Cradling the bunny in the crook of her arm, she pulled dead grass with the other to fluff up the nest.

    “His mother won’t find him,” she said.

    “You’re right. Not this time.”

    The bunny lay on her soft white polo sleeve.

    “Hey, that’s my jacket.”

    She laughed. “I know.”

    I gave her a cockeyed glance.

    She knew me well enough to know that I loved being her mother and that I wouldn’t mind the hours I spent on this tiny bunny because it had to do with her and Antonio. Even though it meant that the Sunday paper would end up in the recycling bin unread and I’d be doing an extra load of wash later that day.

    I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  • What Was This Farm Girl Doing at AWP?

    Ellen, Brenda, and Jill Members of my Writing Group
    Ellen, Brenda, Elizabeth and Jill
    Members of my Writing Group

    The Association of Writers and Writers Program (AWP) had their annual Conference and Bookfair this past weekend in Minneapolis and over 13,000 people attended, including me.

    I could have left after the first panel discussion I attended: Stranger than Fiction: Personal Essay in the Age of the Internet. I got my money’s worth in the first hour of the four-day conference.

    I heard, “What is our truth and are we doing that on the page?”

    I heard, “I allow myself to be a person who can change.”

    I heard, “Let’s put out shit that matters.”

    Those few words gave me the courage to own my story in its entirety.

    When asked what I write it was easy for me to say, memoir, adopting infants from Guatemala, raising them with another woman, etc…but I generally would not say the whole of it.

    Fear of how people would see me was part of that.

    But, no one else can tell my story.

    My completed memoir manuscript, House of Fire, uses fire as a metaphor for the dysfunction in my family of 14 growing up on a Wisconsin farm. I interweave the incest that defined my childhood and teenage years with how I healed. The book describes how my partner, Jody and I, intentionally created a safe healthy family by adopting and raising two infants from Guatemala.

    I’ve spent over thirty years working on myself to have my past not define me.

    And, to that end, I’ve been successful.

    I contain multitudes: the Tae Kwon Do black belt who is a goof who loves to spar at the Dojang, the mother of two twelve-year olds, the police reserve officer, the human resources manager, the soon to be Assistant Scoutmaster, the writer and author, and the woman who married her partner last August.

    I’m also the woman who suffered repeated sexual abuse, who had a hushed-up abortion after I was impregnated at 14 by one of my brothers, who was pregnant again within a year by another brother, who gave up a son and never saw him again.

    What I wanted most in my early twenties was to know that people could not only survive what I did, but heal and live a good life.

    Now, my book, House of Fire, will help me be that person for others.

    I didn’t go home after that first hour of the AWP conference. I remained among my tribe of 13,000 writers.

    I also have another tribe who I hope to reach through the printed and spoken word.

  • My MCL Sprain is Trying to Age Me

    My MCL Sprain is Trying to Age Me

    Years ago before I was a black belt and the children were young
    Years ago before I was a black belt and before the children were 2nd Dan

    It’s become this independent burning sensation on the inner part of my knee.
    Oh, there it is, I’ll say, when I feel it. Then I’ll take an ibuprofen.
    I’ve Googled, What is that burning? Does that mean my MCL is healing? Or, that it’s getting worse? An MCL sprain is a nag.
    I didn’t listen to the nag in Tae Kwon Do even though I felt a twinge in my knee that told me to take it easy. I’m not that old, I said to myself. I’ll kick my way through it. And, besides, at that point it was just a minor annoyance. I didn’t ice my knee after class because my knee would be okay the next day just like it always was.

    My former self.
    My former self with Jody.

    The next morning, I almost fell getting out of bed. I couldn’t bear my weight. Without warning I was transported to my chronological age of 56 year(s), 6 month(s), and 2 day(s).
    I hobbled for weeks before I went to the doctor.
    I wanted to know if I was injuring myself beyond repair for not listening to the nag and I wanted the medical term for what was badgering me.
    An MCL injury is a sprain or tear to the medial collateral ligament. The MCL is a band of tissue on the inside of your knee.
    I refuse to let my MCL age me.
    11034339_10205241803538815_4078779682495764301_oI’ve continued to kick at Tae Kwon Do (just maybe a little slower, a little lower and a little more carefully).

    I stood all night long as a Police Reserve Officer at a middle school dance (well, maybe I sat for a moment on the bleachers in the darkened gym).

    I still walked 3 miles at lunch time, (okay, a few times I turned around because I didn’t think that I could walk through the pain).
    Sometimes, I don’t appreciate my health until it diminishes. Then all I want is to be returned to my former self. And then I read a Facebook post about someone who has it a lot worse than me. That is where I presently am. Feeling the burn, taking ibuprofen. Putting it into perspective.