Quiet Courage and Small Moments

I love to put a microscope on small moments of change and growth and empathy and courage that, because they are not flashy or huge, often go by unnoticed.

Of Solar Flares and Other Things I Can’t Control

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Chronic illness demands a lot from you. It demands nearly round the clock attention, a humming background of vigilance all day, every day. On the surface it may appear that you are baking a cake, or watching a TV show, or playing a board game. Deeper down you are noticing, noticing, noticing. Is this symptom new? Is this symptom a problem? Did I do something wrong? Do I need to adjust what I am doing now, or my plans for the week, or my plans for the rest of my life? Should I trust this bad day is temporary? Should I limit my dreams for my future so that I am not perpetually discontented with what I have? Should I keep dreaming because hope makes me happy? Do I need to act now, right now, right this very minute? Or do I have time to wait?

Should I let my noticing be more like meditation, letting myself feel, acknowledging the fear and anxiety and sadness as it moves through me and then away? Letting it float in and out as it will without trying to force happiness in and force unhappiness out? Should I cultivate peacefulness and patience in the face of uncertainty? Should I take a deep breath and also acknowledge how difficult that in itself can be?

Or should I fight? Should I punch and dig and scrounge and battle and end up muddied and exhausted but victorious?

Earlier in the week it felt as if I was being shocked all over, from thinnest top layer of skin, to deep within my muscles, to my bones. The shocks moved and traveled and paused and started again with an inconsistency that was close to maddening. It happens often. Not every day, but often enough.

The only force inside or outside of myself that seems to correlate with this sensation, the electrical shocks, the hive full of bees stinging, the sharp prickles and stabbings, seems to be solar storms. I have tracked food and activities and mood, the state of relationships with my children and my husband and creator forces, barometer graphs and humidity charts and political climate. When balls of gas suddenly explode from the sun, hurling energy towards earth that can disrupt radio towers and satellites, I feel this particular symptom.

So, should I dismiss this correlation as silly? Instead of scouring the heavens for answers, should I only scour the earth? Do I take all the energy I have and use it in looking for a different reason why, a different drug for relief, a different cause behind this debilitation? Do I notice and then do I fight? Should I act on my behalf, doing something, anything to try to make this better?

Or do I accept the energy coming in and out of my body, do I feel it without judging the waves of pain that come at irregular intervals, do I sit with as much calm as I can?

I am fairly certain that you cannot fight the sun.

Not without burning yourself up into a crisp.

Small Changes

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Shoes

I am always amazed by subtle, small changes. Small changes do not openly share all the complexities that led to that moment where something is different but no one can quite tell what. One small change, or the desire to make just one small change, may look invisible. But, the stars that had to align, the consciousness that had to shift, the bravery that had to be called forth is real, though unseen.

There is a woman who exercises the same time I do, here and there, now and again. She has some trouble walking and when I had trouble walking I noticed what brand of shoes she wore. It was helpful information I might need to use sooner rather than later. I made me a bit sad, though, because the shoes were olive green and tan and while they looked flattering on her they are not colors I wanted to have to wear.

She just switched over to fuchsia sneakers. A vibrant happy color. An athletic, as opposed to orthopedic, shoe. A shoe that carried over to the rest of her wardrobe that now included a very pale, but definitely pink, shirt. I kept looking at them, and I could feel her looking at me looking at them and she seemed a little agitated. I never got to explain that I liked them. I hope I get a chance to another day, and that my looking didn’t cause her doubt.

I know for me changing to that bright pink shoe would have entailed so many little steps of courage. There would have been the step to acknowledge that I did indeed want to be a person who struts around in neon colors. There would have been the step to give myself permission to think of myself as athletic, when I cannot run a marathon but I do exercise every day. There would have been the step to convince myself that the expense of the shoe was acceptable from a practical standpoint and from a joyful standpoint. There would have been the step where I mustered the courage to go to the serious athletic shoe department for the first time and asked for help if I needed it. There would have been the step where I put them on in public and was finally okay with being seen as a person who wanted and owned and wore bright pink shoes. A person who might be approached for being bold in this way. A person who might feel like an imposter looking bolder than they feel.

The small shiver of a frown that crossed her face let me know that there was at least one of these moments for her, at least one of these steps to get from the tan and olive shoes to these magenta ones.  There was at least one moment of doubt and one moment of courage that led to this.

I am amazed by small changes, and so happy when I see them.

Lists

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Binders

I seemed to have a difficult time making up a Christmas list this year. I had requested a couple of books (Humans of New York and one with close-up snowflake photography by Kenneth Libbrecht and Patricia Rasmussen) and nice white binders for my recipe collection (I know you are jealous! But, seriously, I love them). I remembered that my one pepper mill was broken, and there was a small charm I wanted. But beyond that, I didn’t have a grand wish list, which was beginning to annoy friends and family.

I’ve done a better job, I think, of letting myself get the inexpensive things that either I need or that would make me happy throughout the year. The cheap extra pair of sunglasses I keep in the car or my purse, so if I’m foggy and light sensitive I do not break down sobbing over misplacing the only pair I have. One extra pair of jeans, so that if laundry day is late I’m not faced with only having a dirty or chalk-covered pants to wear. A song I like downloaded on a whim. A treat purchased because I would like a treat. I don’t have the same backlog of needs or wants that I used to, and I hope do not take that for granted. I am very lucky.

The other issue is, really, that most things I want cannot be bought or given. I really am not trying to be coy or philosophical here, expounding on the important things money can’t buy. In totally literal terms, I want dairy-free candy. Dairy-free candy is really hard to come by.

This note was even in my stocking at my parents’ house:

santa

I assured Santa that the IOU was totally not necessary, and on my end I took the time to make a ton of dairy-free Christmas cookies.

But the other things I want, no one else can get for me. If I want to feel reasonably healthy, I am the one who needs to exercise and go to bed on time. If I want to feel sane and calm I am the one who has to reflect and journal and type and prioritize and set boundaries. I get enormous amounts of love and support from my husband and kids and family to make those goals a reality, but they cannot do those things for me. So as Christmas approached my resolution list grew much faster than my gift list. Here are a few:

My Resolutions for 2015

  1. Remember that an hour spent away from the kids to exercise is better than being mentally and physically checked out for a whole day.
  2. Try not to talk about my physical symptoms so much in front of the kids. My oldest now tells us about every tiny paper cut, abrasion or hangnail he has all day long. I suspect that he sees griping about aches and pains as a way Mommy gets attention, and is replicating it. I don’t want that to be my only narrative, and I don’t want him to become a hypochondriac.
  3. Be ready to take a good hard look at why the house is constantly messy. Be ready for some hard realizations about myself and how I operate, and what I model. When I spent all my time cleaning, before, I was able to have a clean home. I don’t have time for that anymore, and need to look at not making the mess in the first place. I don’t know yet how to do that.
  4. Be brave enough to admit that I do not know how to do my hair or make-up. I probably should have learned at 14, but I didn’t, so here I am twenty-some-odd-years later wanting to figure it out and knowing I’ll endure all those teenage mistakes in front of other moms at drop-off and pick-up. I would like to look more polished on occasion.
  5. Eat less fried food. I like fried food.
  6. Remember to be me.
  7. Eat more vegetables. More vegetables that are not fried. See #5.
  8. Teach my kids about religion. My goal for next Christmas is to not be sitting in a booth at Steak ‘n’ Shake in December with my five-year-old asking, “So, who is Jesus again?” They should know, they should know the religions that shaped the world, they should know why people believe and what they believe.
  9. Watch more movies, listen to more music.
  10. Make and eat pecan pie before 2015 is out. I did not make myself dairy-free pecan pie this Thanksgiving, and I regret it.
  11. Make sure I tell the people I love that I love them more often.

The things I want most have to come from some action on my part, which is exhausting. But it also makes me realize how much power I have to shape my own life, for better or worse all year long.

Punishment

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

workout

I would like to add an author’s note here.  This post was written before the controversy around 19 Kids and Counting, before we knew that Josh Duggar had victimized his sisters and other young girls, before his hypocrisy in condemning homosexual couples paired with him soliciting extramarital affairs.  I could take this post down, but I still feel a connection to the idea that we sometimes punish ourselves with TV shows and Instagram accounts and celebrity reality shows, taunting ourselves with what we can’t have.  For the record, I did seem to think they were doing a good job raising children and am currently shaking my head realizing that all I knew was an highly edited version of their lives-not what really went on. 

I used to watch 19 Kids and Counting each afternoon when I exercised at our local rec center. And by “used to” I mean I watched it daily up until a week ago.

The Duggars kind of fascinate me.

Obviously, their life is very different from mine. Rural Arkansas and its lack of diversity is a different world from the suburbs of Chicago, and as a one-time public school teacher I don’t really agree that homeschooling is the way to go, and I generally wear pants and low-cut tops whenever I feel like it, modesty be damned. Their Christianity doesn’t resemble mine, especially when I mix it with Buddhism or scientific inquiry. Oh, and I have seventeen less children than the Duggars do.

They seem to be good parents. I understand how reality shows can be edited, but from what I can see they instruct their children with patience and love. They seem to be thoughtful about how to foster good relationships and how they instill values like kindness and respect and purpose into their offspring. I quietly cheer them on when I hear more kids or grandkids are on the way. These are people who want children, see them as a blessing and seem to know how to raise them to be decent human beings. I got to see babies and cuddle them vicariously as my own got older and older. I got to see how excited these women were to find themselves pregnant again.

I had to stop watching this show.

Watching it was a way of punishing myself, flooding myself with images of a chapter of my life that is closing. It is unlikely, very unlikely, that I will be having any more babies. Having fibromyalgia is difficult with two fairly independent children; I cannot imagine how much pain I would be in going back to newborn days when sleep deprivation goes on for months and months. And, according to some blood tests, the chance of me even becoming pregnant again is very low- as low as it would be for a woman ten or fifteen years older.

I have been intensely angry at my body, though I hadn’t realized it.

I have quietly and persistently been furious with my body for all of the things it cannot do. I am angry when I can’t play at the playground with my kids or take them to the pool, when at a fun run I am even slower than a three-year-old and a woman who is recovering from surgery, when I can’t stay up late without major consequences. I am furious at what I can’t have: the shoes I can’t wear because they jar my spine, the food I can’t eat because it makes pain run up and down my arms, the plans I have to cancel because I cannot do one more thing.

The babies I can’t have.

Not that I was planning on having more anyways.

Watching the off-the-charts fertility of the Duggars was a super subtle way of admonishing my body, reminding it of its shortcomings. That I watched it while exercising, which I don’t want to do but I have to do every day so I don’t feel even sicker, was the sneakiest way ever to be mean to myself.

So, I stopped.

It’s a small turning point, one that would be invisible to the people who see me on the elliptical machine every afternoon, but I think it’s an important one. And so far my body seems relieved that the activity I put it through every day isn’t rooted in so much anger and disappointment. It feels happier.

Lego Destruction

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Legos

Legos can be…tricky.  Like a blank page and all the words in the English language, a bucket full of pieces seems to offer infinite possibilities for creation.  When you get into constructing your vision you start to see all the problems: how two pieces won’t actually fit, or how it doesn’t look how you imagined it or how it could fall apart at any second.  It can be difficult when it looks easy.

My youngest had been working very hard and very frantically at building a spaceship with Legos. Because he wanted it to be something no one had ever dreamed up before, his older brother and I couldn’t help with its architecture. We couldn’t really point out where a wing could be reinforced or where landing gear could sit without being knocked off the first time it “landed”. He had a vision we couldn’t see yet.

I had been casually calling out to the living room, “Hey buddy, dinner’s almost ready,” while getting out dishes and turning off timers. As I brought one thing after another to the kitchen table, I could glimpse him with the Legos on the couch. I could sense him getting angrier and angrier, and I just assumed he was mad at me for interrupting his game. A little annoyed that he was getting annoyed, I tried one last time to get him to the table to eat. “Hey, come on now, you need to come to the table. I gave you fair warning that it was time.” At that he let out an anguished cry and threw his whole spaceship to the ground. It broke, scattering hard-edged colors in every direction.

“What on earth was that?” This is not a destructive kid. Except for one strange week near his fourth birthday, he has never thrown or broken anything.

He screamed back at me, “I couldn’t get it right!” With his eyes scrunched tight and hot tears coming down, I could see him as an adult throwing a thick manuscript into a fire.  A bitter, worn, angry old man willing to call his work garbage because it wasn’t what he wanted it to be.  Destroying every word, every sentence, every page all at once.

When he looked down at what had really become of his spaceship, he saw that not one part could be salvaged.  The horror of what he had done overwhelmed him.  I’ve never seen him sob so hard.

I held him for a while but I couldn’t really calm him down.  I tried to convince him that maybe using the bathroom, eating, resting would help.  Eventually he sat in his own chair in the kitchen, quiet. Even more quietly, he slid out of his chair and into the living room.  He sat on the rug and for the next twenty minutes he rebuilt his spaceship. When he was done he came back to the table and ate his now-cold dinner without a word.  His older brother and I ate silently, watching it unfold.

I’ve heard experts say please, please let your children fail when they are still children. Let them lose a game, mess up a friendship, fall off the playground without intervening so much.  Their lives are going to be filled with problems and they need practice solving them when the stakes aren’t so high. Let them work through difficulty instead of rescuing them. This time, even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t rescue him from his creative frustration and I certainly wasn’t able to comfort him. I got to watch him decide what to do about that demon that told him his creation wasn’t good enough, wasn’t right. He wept over the aftermath of destroying it. He decided on his own that it was imperative to try again.

At bedtime, I told him I was proud of him. One day it might be an entire manuscript that he wants to hurl violently away.  And maybe some memory of this, quiet and still, will make him pause before he can do it.