Writing/Making Art

I spend a lot of time getting myself to the computer to write, and think a lot about where stories begin and how to get them from my head to the page.

Libel

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

libel

A word about my understanding of libel laws.

I’ve been concerned about this since I started writing personal essays and memoir. The stance I take is to be very careful about the information I share about living people. If I know them quite well, I try hard to work with them to see what they are comfortable with me sharing. If I don’t know them as well, I will either still inform them I am writing or I will hide their identities as well as I can. I try also to never write something that isn’t true, and I consider very carefully whether my words can hurt someone’s reputation.

Melania Trump has filed a libel suit against a blogger in Maryland. The Trump lawyers seem, from what I am seeing, to roll deep. They are reaching farther than we thought. And Trump himself has said many times that he would rewrite libel laws if given a chance, which would drastically restrict freedom of speech. So please know what your rights currently are.

I am not a lawyer, and so this is absoutley NOT legal counsel, but I am concerned about my writer friends.

In order for what you write to be considered libel, you have to write something that sullied someone’s reputation. I.E. you have written something that is counter to the other person’s perceived reputation, that is both false AND believable enough that the piece of writing can hurt that person’s ability to function in society. Trump has said so many things on the record himself that simply repeating what he has said is not (in my understanding) considered libel. Nor is telling the truth. And obviously what has been said has not damaged the Trumps’ ability to prosper, so there is that, too.

Also of note, satire is usually well-protected. For instance, if someone calls Trump an Oompa-Loompa, no one of sound mind believes that Trump is actually a fictional character invented by Roald Dahl for the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you are a satirist, you should be safe.

Know your rights.

Please be careful right now.

Why My Posts Have Been Sporadic Lately

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

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My posting on the blog has been a bit dodgy this summer (dodgy, huh, I must be reading too much Harry Potter with the boys). Sometimes, in the past, less-than-consistent posting has meant good things are happening (feeling healthy, vacation, etc.) and sometimes that has meant bad things are happening (you know, feeling sick and such). This time around it has meant something different, something I have never attempted before.

I am working on writing an entire book, and it scares the bejeezus out of me.

80,000 words is a fairly standard length for a collections of essays or memoir. My goal is to get at least those 80,000 words into a first draft by next summer. I began about a month ago. So, three hundred words at a time I have plugging along with occasional super productive days of 600 words. This gives me weekends off and is achievable even on bad health days (like earlier in this week I had written about 500 in the morning and spent the afternoon in the ER with shortness of breath). Which is really important considering…

It is going to be a collection of essays around what it is like to be one of those people who floats on the edge of healthy and sick all the time. It will have episodes that illustrate what the depths of brain fog feel like, what being in pain does to your ability to parent, how hard it is to get dairy-free food in Wisconsin. Some chapters (like that last one) are sillier than others. It alternates between the hard and the easy, just like my life does. The tough ones take it out of me as I relive times when I felt overwhelmed and uncertain and scared. And as anyone who ever did theater knows, making someone laugh can be harder than making someone cry, so the goofier chapters aren’t a walk in the park either. It is kind of more exhausting than I had anticipated!  At any rate, it certainly wouldn’t do to sacrifice the healthy days I have overextending myself writing too much at once. That would be quite self-destructive.

There is also the emotional tightrope I’ve been walking daily between anxiety and audacity, humility enough to say, “This isn’t working” and the confidence enough to say, “Now this is working!” Not going to lie, it is messing with my head. It is simultaneously as terrifying as jumping out of an airplane and as boring as a 1.2 on a treadmill facing a brick wall. I am beat tired.

So there have been fewer other posts. I have some in the works – I want to write about our glacier tour in Alaska, about the beginning of the school year, about a Little House on the Prairie Cookbook – but it is going to be slow going.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am off to calculate how many words I have written so far against my goal total…

Dang, only five percent.

But that’s a lot higher than zero!

In a Land of Twelve Kinds of Cupcakes…

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

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For my younger son’s seventh birthday we had an experimental bake-off as one of his presents.  He is always coming up with flavor combinations he wants to try, be it a lemon peanut butter cup (which was actually amazing) to an apple orange soymilk smoothie (a lot less amazing). He has wanted to experiment with cupcake flavors forever, so when he got home from school we had a whole table of ingredients and sprinkles and frosting ready to mess around with. We whipped up basic vanilla and chocolate batter and set out all of our extracts (vanilla, almond, peppermint, orange, lemon, coconut and anise) all of the fruit in the house, nuts and candies and toffee bits and chocolate chips and marshmallows and food coloring and Teddy Grahams.

He was beside himself. The four of us, him, me, my husband and my older son would make three different experimental flavors each, and we started plotting and planning and dicing and mixing. In no particular order we ended up with…

  • Peanut butter-banana-chocolate with chocolate frosting
  • Lemon-banana-vanilla with yellow lemon-vanilla frosting
  • Maple-pecan-vanilla with cream cheese frosting
  • Chocolate-marshmallow with chocolate frosting and Teddy Grahams
  • Peppermint-chocolate-sprinkles with chocolate frosting and holiday sprinkles
  • Vanilla-strawberry with vanilla frosting and red sprinkles
  • Chocolate-Rice Krispies with purple-tinted vanilla frosting
  • Orange-chocolate-chocolate chip with orange-tinted vanilla frosting
  • Vanilla-almond-cherry jelly bean with pink-tinted vanilla frosting and a red jelly bean
  • Lemon zest-chocolate chip-vanilla with orange-tinted vanilla frosting
  • Vanilla-orange-pine nut-freeze dried strawberry with orange marmalade vanilla frosting
  • Classic chocolate with teal-tinted peppermint vanilla frosting and pastel sprinkles

The cupcake production was going full tilt…until it came grinding to a halt. In the midst of us all being excited about trying our cupcakes out for dessert that night, my husband casually mentioned that we could have friends and family test them out the next day at the huge family birthday in our little guy’s honor. That stopped him dead in his tracks. He suddenly refused to do any more – even though he had only come up with two of his three designs. Even though he had been so bouncy before. Even though the only reason we had to come up with this idea was that we knew it would make him extravagantly happy. He stopped.

We should have known. Our seven-year-old is terrified of other people’s reactions to his creative work. He has been known to throw Lego creations when they don’t work out, or to literally not move once he feels he is being watched too closely. He dances joyfully at home and messes around with a guitar, but the thought of taking lessons for either paralyzes his fun.

He sat angry on the couch as first I tried to coax out of him what was wrong, then his father took a turn. Eventually my husband was able to get him to admit that he was worried other people might hate his cupcakes. We first reassured him that people would love them, and if they didn’t it would be okay. When that was met with a skeptic scowl, we then reassured him that only our little family of four would ever taste them if that would make him happiest. My husband got him to design his last cupcake-the classic chocolate one with the elaborate topping.

 

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He is my child, for sure.

I am the one who procrastinated on writing papers until the last moment because if they turned out badly I could blame it on the time crunch. I am the one who was given an opportunity to write the introduction to an online curriculum series in college and turned it down because it made me too nervous. I am the one who decided I would rather be “well-rounded” than put all my energy into ballet. I am the one who got solos, but would then show up to voice lessons and even competitions woefully underprepared. I am the one who refused to let anyone coach me on my monologue audition I would perform just once for over twenty colleges’ theater departments.

Sometimes my fears honed my actual work into a fine point – my almost late papers taught me how to get an “A” even with limited time by using my (not-often-used) laser focus, my monologue got me admission into ten different theater departments. But then I kept shooting myself in the foot. I didn’t go into theater for fear of a lifetime of rejections. I don’t dance or sing anymore except in my own kitchen. I still write though, and I am trying for my youngest to show him that putting your creative work out there in the world is incredibly difficult, especially for him and for me, but that it really is the only way to be happy. It is the only way to be true to yourself, to be honest with who you are and what you bring to the world – putting your work out there for other people to see.

The beauty of living in a land with twelve kinds of cupcake is that you haven’t put all your hopes and dreams into just one cupcake. When you make just one, you are scared of your aunt who doesn’t care for chocolate, worried about the cousin who is allergic to nuts, terrified that another cousin will think it is too boring or that your grandpa with think it too crazy or that your grandma will say she likes it even if she really doesn’t.  When you have twelve different kinds of cupcakes, twelve experiments of flavor and texture and color it is okay that the jelly beans fell out of the bottom of one but left a delicate delicious flavor. It is okay that the peanut butter banana was too dense, it’s a great surprise that lemon and banana together is light and airy. It is more than okay to make a classic chocolate cupcake perfectly simple and beautiful decorated.

I am trying to take my own lesson from this. Right now I am grateful I am letting myself send so many cupcakes into the world, because I am less worried about each one being perfect.

I have, out there in submission-land and in no particular order…

  • A very short piece about school shooting fears
  • A very long piece about a hurricane evacuation while I taught high school
  • A medium piece about being mistreated as a patient with chronic illness
  • A rewrite of a blog piece about speech delays, open heart surgery and one-syllable words
  • A rejected piece about science fairs and art that turned into a blog post

And

  • An accepted piece about baby food, insecurity and watermelon

 

Eventually, in the sixth hour of his family party, our youngest let other people try out his cupcakes, once the big cake had been served, once the numbers of guests dwindled and he felt happy and content and comfortable with sharing his creativity. I think it went well, and I hope both he and I remember that while sharing can be scary, there are tricks to make it less so. And, ultimately, even if you are temporarily paralyzed with fear, moving forward anyways is worth it.

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S.T.E.A.M Punk

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Science Fair

 

Our public elementary school calls itself a “Math and Science Academy”. It is a great petri dish for the sons and daughters of all sorts of engineers, a starter culture for future scientists and mathematicians. There is a heavy emphasis on STEM here. STEM is an effort to add more Science, Technology, Engineering and Math into the curriculum. Our school has integrated engineering lessons into each grade level, and prides itself on its science fair. Pardon me, its STEM fair. Oh wait, I stand corrected. As I look at our application packet I found out that its name has changed again. This time it will be a STEAM fair.

What does the “A” stand for, you may be wondering. Arithmetic? Archeology? Astrophysics? Nope. It stands for Art. We are trying to cram all of Art, the entirety of anything that could be called artistry into one little letter.

My husband is an engineer, and my two sons are scientifically inclined. But, they are also my sons and I have been, and still am, a singing, dancing, writing, literature-loving, theater-going, right-brained kind of girl. Believe me, I don’t want them to go through school so focused on data and numbers that they don’t see the beauty of the world around them. To be fair, their school has dedicated art and music teachers, and my six-year-old asked me the other day if I knew who Piet Mondrian was. I asked back incredulously, “Do you?” While I appreciate the idea of adding more art to my kids’ lives, Art shouldn’t be a token subject, shoe-horned into a science fair.

While Science, Technology and Engineering are considered distinct subjects in their own rights, Art (as just one letter of STEAM) is jammed together as if it only encompassed one discipline. Right away I could break “Art” into, at the very least, visual and performance art. On the visual side of things, I can think of the distinct crafts of sculpting, painting, drawing, makeup and hair design, animation, cinematography, photography, interior design, fashion design, floral arrangement, graphic design, lighting design, illustration, weaving and ceramics. On the performing side of things, I can think of the distinct crafts of acting, dancing, singing, improvisation, playing an instrument, directing, stand-up comedy, puppetry and motivational speaking. This doesn’t even include the artistic endeavors of creative writers that don’t fit neatly into the above categories: poetry and memoir and novels and graphic novels and screenplays and plays. What a disservice to shove all of that into the single “A” that is allowed.

But my main criticism of trying to create a STEAM fair is that pesky requirement of all science fairs – that students learn and apply the scientific method. Each project must propose a hypothesis, set up an experiment with multiple controls and just one variable to see if the hypothesis is correct, record the findings and report your conclusions. It is a rigorous and disciplined METHOD for examining the world, and if it is not as rigorous, disciplined and objective as possible, the experiment is at best a waste of time and resources. I have great respect for the scientific method as a critical tool for examining and bettering the world.

And I had a great time mocking the scientific method as I tried to figure out what an “Arts” based project would look like.

For my STEAM Fair project, my hypothesis is that my impression of Hillary Clinton is funnier than my impression of Bernie Sanders.

In controlling the variables of my experiment, I have already decided to pick two candidates of the same political party and level of fame.

I will perform impressions thirty seconds in duration, for the exact same audience members on two separate days.

I will have three assistants record notes, one will record the number of people who laughed at each impression, the second will record the duration of laughter from the first guffaw to the last sigh with a stopwatch and the third will have a decibel meter to record how loud the laughter gets.

I will be only varying my voice, facial expressions and mannerisms to reflect each character – the words spoken in each impression will be identical.

Update: My results were inconclusive as no one laughed. For future experiments I would perhaps vary the words spoken by each candidate to reflect a satirized version of what they might normally say.

Now, let me be clear – All great artists, in every field of artistry, experiment. None use the scientific method.

There are far too many variables to account for. When an improv troupe skewers Clinton and Sanders they use different actors, different mannerisms, and different lines for different audiences as they experiment. Every variable changes and shifts, and more often than not they still get a laugh. They get to the same desired outcome with a million different formulas. The opposite is generally true of a baking soda papier-mache volcano, where only one formula will give you the desired outcome – a giant mess on the elementary school gym floor.

It is very rare that an artist would want to, or be able to, test one variable at a time. When Picasso painted “The Old Guitarist” he did not present us with an expressionist version in a full spectrum of color alongside his blue-toned melancholy piece to see what effect color had on the guitarist’s emotional impact. His blue period might be the closest we come to seeing an artist experimenting with one variable at a time, but his subject matter over those years was far from a scientifically sound control. He didn’t tint photographs of fuzzy ducklings blue to see if simply “the color blue” was enough to alter our perception of the duckling. He still experimented with subject matter and perspective and materials and negative space, while he experimented with the color blue.

And what is the measurement you can use to see if your hypothesis for a work of art was correct? Public reaction? Favorable critiques? Popularity? Unpopularity? Anger, sadness, longevity, laughter? Art is, above all, subjective, not objective. There is no objective experiment, nor any objective measurement for a work of art. But, in spite of its subjectivity, data can still be taken, the results can still be analyzed, and new experiments performed, new ground broken and new power discovered. I would LOVE to see an art fair like that, one full of experimentation, of breaking new ground and new forms, and exploring new talent.

Art doesn’t deserve to be shoved in next to scientific experiments, just because we haven’t made the room for it. The value of the scientific method, or teaching children to critically explore the world around them for concrete and actionable solutions, shouldn’t be diluted because we didn’t give Art any room to breathe. And you are just making it awkward for everyone if I have to explain my Clinton/Sanders experiment again, especially next to the second-grader who just won first place with his wonderfully thorough presentation of which liquid cleans a penny best. (Coca-Cola, his hypothesis was proven out by his experiment, it’s Coca-Cola).

 

The Liebster Award

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

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Hi, everybody!

Over the weekend I was honored by Reflections of a Bear, a blog and blogger out of Australia who found me through chronic illness tags. She nominated me for The Liebster Award, which is a way for bloggers to recognize other bloggers and introduce websites they like to more people. How very cool is that?!?

The rules of The Liebster Award are a little like a chain letter with a positive spin (there are no threats of bad luck if you choose not to continue it). If you are nominated you include a link back to your nominator’s site (which I would do regardless because it is a great resource for people with chronic illness and very funny-if you check out her site now you will get to read about a ridiculous spider infestation!) Next you answer questions they’ve asked of you. Then you nominate five or more bloggers who have less than 1000 followers and who you would love to pass this award on to.  Then you ask them at least 10 questions of your own.

So…..let’s roll!

1. Why do you blog?

At first my blogging began as an “author page”, a website I could include with submissions to show literary magazines that I had a “platform”. I had been working on creative non-fiction essays off and on and wanted to prove that I lived in a modern world and could navigate things like blogs and social media. All very clinical and business-like, that’s where it began. But now I love my blog as a space where I can clarify who I am, what I care about, what bothers me, what I’ve discovered. It has been a place to find my own voice and explore my own world. When I am able to reach out to other people through it, when I find common ground with people I already know and love or new friends from the other side of the world, that is just amazing. I also am able to give my writing a home when it is too odd to find a home somewhere else, which makes me remember that I always have a place where I am loved even when I am too odd to fit elsewhere.

2. What is your most embarrassing ‘brain fog’ or awkward moments?

With fibromyalgia fog, I’ve mixed up words while reading Green Eggs and Ham before and had my, at the time, five-year-old have to correct me. I’ve told the kids to get in an “envelope” instead of an elevator before. Most of my fog is related to not getting the right words out at the right time, so being met with confused looks or little kids correcting me often is fairly embarrassing! 

3. If you could wake up with a superpower tomorrow, what would it be?

This might be cliché, but I would love to fly. I’m fairly terrified of heights, mostly because I’m a terrible klutz; I’ve even tripped over a painted line in a parking lot before. I could enjoy heights so much more if I knew being klutzy wouldn’t lead to my imminent death. If I tripped at the Grand Canyon and made it look like a super cool take-off instead, how fun would that be?

4. Share one odd rule or saying that your family has, or had when you were growing up?

When I was a kid everybody in my immediate family (myself, my parents and my three younger brothers) would yell out, “Peanut butter!” as soon as they walked in the door. Whoever was home would yell back, “Jelly”. It’s sort of a call and response to let you know that the person coming into the house is friendly, and that the person who’s home understands that someone just walked in. That way you know who is where and no one gets sneaked up on. You can reverse the order if need be, too. I’ll still call out “Peanut butter” on nights when my husband’s flight comes in really late and I hear someone walking around downstairs at midnight. If he doesn’t call back softly “Jelly” I get a little panicky that someone else just broke into the house. That way, too, he knows I’m awake and doesn’t have to tiptoe to bed.

5. Something you hated as a child and now you love? (The answer cannot be naps!)

Tomatoes. I would eat ketchup, tomato soup and tomato sauce as a child, but I absolutely hated tomatoes. Now fresh tomatoes are one of my favorite parts of summer. We end up with about fifty from our garden and I can’t wait to chop them up and toss them with balsamic vinegar for bruschetta. I also have a perfume that smells like tomato plants which is one of the stranger things I’ve asked my husband to get me for Christmas. True story. I will say though, I have always hated ham, and I’m fairly certain I always will.

6. What is the most delicious food you have ever eaten?

I am Irish-American and Italian-American, and I say very affectionately that I appreciate the Irish side for the music, and the Italian side for the food. One of my favorite Italian dishes is a stuffed artichoke. You trim an artichoke of all its spikes, spread the leaves apart, cram each leaf with seasoned breadcrumbs, garlic and parmesan cheese, top with a lemon slice and steam it for a good length of time. You eat it leaf by leaf, scraping the tender bottom and breadcrumbs off with your teeth and discarding the rest until you get to the heart. It is a process, both to make it and eat it, and I’ve had to adapt it now that I can’t eat dairy, but it is always my favorite.

7. If you were an animal, what would you be, and why?

A hedgehog. Just so damn cute, and a little prickly. Sums me up pretty well, I think.

8. One little thing that annoys you more than it should?

I inherited this one from my mother. It drives me up a wall when someone says, “very unique”. Unique means “one of a kind”. There cannot be varying degrees of “one-of-a-kindness”. You cannot be “very unique”. If a broadcaster says this phrase I’m apt to yell at the screen.

9. If you could magically play one instrument perfectly, which would you choose?

Electric guitar. I guess this kind of goes against my favorite animal, as an electric guitar isn’t exactly cute and cuddly. There is something screechy and bad ass and full of swagger in a guitar. It’s a guy’s game, usually, and I would love to shake that up. I would love to have an alter ego that is all yelling and bravado and power. Maybe I need a tattoo of a hedgehog with an ax, blend the two.  

10. Favorite Quote?

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Zora Neale Hurston

This is the one quote that has gotten through my hardest times. The year I developed constant pain and didn’t understand why. The years I didn’t know what to do with my life. The years that were lonely and apart from people I love. I believe in this pattern, very deeply. I have had enough experience with the settling power of answers, of finally knowing, that it helps me weather uncertainty and confusion even when it is very painful.

11. Share a silly joke that makes you laugh.

I absolutely loved the TV show 30 Rock. There is a moment in an early episode where Liz Lemon walks in on Jack getting fitted for a tuxedo and asks, “Why are you wearing a tux?” to which Jack replies, “It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?”

 

Now I would like to nominate

Scott  at Sparky Boy Thoughts for magical, speculative fiction that gives you one scene of a feature length tale every day

Dawn Claflin for excellent resources and support for fellow writers

Melibelle in Tokyo for thoughtful posts about teaching, family and culture

Peter at Off and On The Alaska Parkinson’s Rag for resources for Parkinson’s Disease and excellent comic strips illuminating what living with PD is like

Mom of 3 Misses for a newer blog on anxiety and grief

 

Here are my questions for you…

  1. Why do you blog?
  2. Who is your favorite author, or alternately, what is your favorite book?
  3. What is your favorite childhood memory?
  4. Who has been the most influential person in your life and why?
  5. What would an ideal vacation/get away look like?
  6. What is one thing you do exceptionally well, but you can’t often talk about it because it would seem like bragging? (I am very calm around bees, mentioned this once and the other person felt I was judging her for panicking around bees. I don’t tell people about this skill often because of this!)
  7. What is your favorite food?
  8. Have you ever practiced an acceptance speech in the bathroom mirror, and if so what award was it that you “accepted”?
  9. What makes you laugh?
  10. What is something you would like to see happen in your lifetime?

Play

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Play

A few months ago I had to put a writing project on pause.

It was going to be an essay about my first year with an undiagnosed pain and fatigue disease. In my head I had named it the year everything almost fell apart. Everything was in tatters, held together with the barest of threads. I felt like, in our little family, that I held all of our lives in my arms, while my body felt like it was literally being ripped limb from limb. My boys were just four and one, and on the heels of the recession my husband was traveling internationally almost every week-making sure to do everything that was asked of him so he could never be seen as expendable.

I paused my writing because I suddenly didn’t have the distance I needed to delve back into that year. A new undiagnosed problem began taking over, and emotionally I didn’t think I could relive “The Year Everything Almost Fell Apart” in real time and in retrospect all at once. I am still undiagnosed, but thankfully have started to be able to manage the problem so that I can get back to normal life.

And the story has started knocking on my door again. It won’t leave me be. The year, the whole year, wants to have its story told. Every time I try to divert my attention to something lighter, something fun or frivolous or at least shinier and less tattered, the year comes back. It looks at me the way my oldest son did at the time, wide eyes, furrowed brow, sadness that shouldn’t weigh down such tiny shoulders, asking me to make sense of everything. To please put life back in order, to explain why and how things went wrong and how to fix them. I couldn’t for him then, but the year is asking me to please do so now, to make amends for failing him.

Notebooks 2010

These are my notebooks from that year. Each post-it note is flagging a journal entry with a clue to my illness. The pages in-between are my journal entries describing the different colors suffering took for each of us, the way thirty-year-olds and four-year-olds and one-year-olds process fear and uncertainty and sadness and anger. It’s time to read them again. It is time to try to tell the story of a year in a few thousand words, so that it can be put on a shelf, ordered and meaningful and done. This will take time, but what choice do I have? The year won’t let me be.

Valentine Gifts

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Valentine gifts

It is time for gifts again, smaller gifts than at Christmas, but it’s time to show our loved ones how much we appreciate having them around.

My younger son is squirreled away in the playroom and has commanded us several times, “Do not come in here.” I know this is his order when he is working on a present for someone and doesn’t want to ruin the surprise. With Valentine’s Day coming up, it is very possible that he has three presents he is working on in there- one for his brother, one for his father and one for me. We get a little nervous when he emerges an hour later and there is smudged ink all over his arms, and a stamp like a tattoo on his right wrist. My husband asks him, “I won’t invade your privacy, but if you look like that, is the room pretty messy, too?”

He nods, “A little.”

He tells us he will clean it up, and my older son offers to help, as long as he’s allowed in the room. He is, and the two of them go back and forth with wet paper towels, and assure us that everything is cleaned up. It could be a sketch, or a 3-D paper sculpture of a caterpillar, a comic strip, or a handprint. Last Christmas he made a series of diagrams: instructions, to go with a handful of Legos. He had created a Lego set he and his brother could build together. I was so impressed!

And I am so curious about my gift.

I’m the sort of person who wants to know what a movie is about before I see it. I’ll watch trailers, read think-pieces about how the director felt or what the actors endured, listen to gossip about backstage antics. My husband does not. He wants very much to be surprised. He even gets annoyed when the opening credits to a reality show give away almost everything that is going to happen, yelling, “We’re already watching it! You don’t have to sell us on it! Mute it, and tell me when the opening’s over.”

Sometimes I’m glad he is so strict in his I want to be surprised point of view. A few years ago my oldest son wanted to buy me a Christmas present, and he was confident he had thought up something perfect. My husband was the one to take him shopping, so of course he knew what I had gotten. I pestered my husband a bit, trying to get him to reveal what was bought, because my curiosity had gotten the better of me. This was the first time either of the boys had wanted to buy me something, and that my guy had something specific in mind. I wondered what he thought of me, how well he knew me, what he got me!

My husband put me in my place quickly saying, “I am not going to let you ruin his surprise. He really came up with something perfect, and I want him to get your full reaction as you open it.” That Christmas I opened up two brand-new cardboard-sided notebooks, with blue and white patterns on the front. Exactly the sort of notebook I used for writing in, the same kind I often stockpile since I go through them so quickly. Just the right decoration, and in my favorite color, too. I could not believe how perfect his three dollar present was, and how thoughtful he had been to come up with the idea in the first place. And as an added bonus, my husband got an extra present of me admitting that he had been right.

My husband also got the chance to surprise me with a gift, one I didn’t see coming at all. He was going to be out of town when some important blood test results of mine were going to be coming in. It was going to be emotionally rough, no matter which way they went. If they were positive, I would finally know what was wrong but have to deal with curing a disease – a tumor, or kidney disease, or adrenal failure. If they were negative there would be no big disease to handle, but also no answers as to why I felt horrible. A pair of soft flannel pajamas came in the mail, the perfect way to comfort someone when you can’t physically be there to hold them. A gift that would be appropriate to use in a hospital bed after surgery or to cuddle on the couch researching alternative medicine. It was such a lovely surprise.

So, I won’t peek to see what present is being made in the playroom. All three presents, and the surprise of getting them, make me feel so very loved. And that, I’m pretty sure, is supposed to be the point of gift-giving, and Valentine’s Day, in the first place.

Pause

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

pause

Back in August, I had set myself a schedule for writing, that I would complete a 1,500 word essay for the first Wednesday of every month as part of an on-going column. I am going to put that on hold for a little while.

The premise of the column Pain and Joy was that I had learned a lot about all sorts of pain that I’d wanted to share, and that I am learning about joy and want to report on that as well. This month was originally going to be a “pain” installment, specifically “The Pain of Existential Dread”. My original thought was to go into the worry and fear I felt when I was suffering from an unknown illness and detailing how that fear seemed to infect my oldest who was then four. So, five years after this originally happened, I felt like things were under control and I had the distance I needed to tackle this subject. However, five years later I am again in the thick of an unknown illness. I am worried, again, about how severe this new illness might be, about how much my quality of life will be diminished, about how drastic the “cure” will be. I am back in the swamp of not knowing, of waiting ages to see a specialist, and of trying to maintain some psychological buoyancy during the process.

My children (and I bet yours, too) are emotional sponges, and when something is off-kilter they sense it quickly and it colors their world almost immediately. Writing this piece right now feels like the wrong move to make. If I weren’t a parent, delving into my dark fears thoroughly and completely could be cathartic. It would be messy and ugly for a good long while, but it would be over and dealt with. Presenting a polished, articulated version of that fear to the world could open up conversations that I would be able then to discuss and I would not feel as alone. If I weren’t a parent.

I am a parent. There is the reality that if I dig deep into the dark places in my mind that it might be hard to climb back out-certainly not quickly enough to be present, completely present, for my children when they need me. What I learned the first time out with an unknown illness and the prospect of a scary diagnosis is that tears and anger are frightening to my kids, but that emotional distance is even scarier. I cannot be so absorbed in writing this right now, and risk that distance.

Also, immersing myself in this story means that for a while no other stories are being told-not the one about how the squirrels always try to eat the face off our pumpkins, not the one about my youngest child’s very first goal, not the one about how we spent all weekend as a family playing Risk, not the one about how our Christmas lists are coming along. The dominant story of “What will happen to me?” would be the one I would get trapped in, and if I’m trapped there, all of us eventually are trapped there. That isn’t really fair.

So, I have decided to pause the column, for now. I may write the next “Joy” installment. I may not. I might write short frothy pieces for a bit, or short cranky pieces. I may just journal. This illness is making life less predictable than I imagined, so I am going to give myself the grace and wiggle room to ignore self-imposed deadlines and goalposts. I am giving myself the luxury to write what and when and where and how I see fit for a while. That, I think, is something healthy I can do for myself and my family now that my health is suddenly, again, up for grabs.

Look, a Peep!

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

I love artists!

This might be a sort of obvious statement for me, along the lines of, “Oxygen is really wonderful stuff,” or “Since I have to eat every day, I’m really happy someone invented food” But, I do feel like it needs saying every once in a while.

I love all sorts of artists for the color and life they bring to the world, the unexpected juxtapositions of imagery and meaning, the metaphors and the details. The melancholy mood of Billie Holiday’s “Foolish Things”, or the violent wind that seems to shake Van Gogh’s White Roses, or William Butler Yeat’s “rough beast” that brings in a nightmare in “The Second Coming”: all are wonderful and terribly beautiful and full of imaginative life. I am transported by a vision or a feeling that I would have never arrived at without the compulsive need of an artist to create. It is amazing.

But, I also love artists for entirely selfish and narcissistic reasons. I love when I can see myself, my life, or what is important to me in the art around me. I love that this unknown photographer abandoned stuffy parlor portraits to capture this mother.

Mother and Child

I think that one of my friends finally softened into trusting me after see the same look on my face as the mother in this photograph has. For the first few weeks I knew my friend, she saw only my furrowed brow and heard only my scolding towards my children. Eventually I let my face soften into the same face in the picture, and I could feel her soften, too. Across a century I see myself.

I love that these animators chose to draw George and the Man with the Yellow Hat this way.

George

This comes from a longer episode of Curious George about Halloween. In this still, George has just been told that a frightening legend may have some truth to it. He grabs the Man’s face and stares hard into his eyes.

My oldest child’s birthday is towards the end of October, and whenever we go to the party store to find decorations for his celebrations we are bombarded by macabre costumes and props: knives and skeletons and blood and gore. My youngest could not bring himself to walk through this store, so I always carried him. When a motion detector would trip ghoulish noises, he would grab the sides of my face in his chubby tiny hands and straighten my head so that I could only stare into his eyes. I could not determine if he was trying to protect me from the scary things all around us, or if he needed steady, unwavering reassurance from me. How amazing that that gesture is universal enough that it made its way into this animation.

My youngest son recently got a book for his birthday, a book he loves and which contains a page that describes the protagonist child’s favorite dessert. On a plate, next to an elaborate and beautiful cake, is a small Peep chick. As soon as he caught it he yelped out loud and pointed at it and laughed and laughed. A Peep! Look right there! I love Peeps!

peep

He recognized himself in the pages of this book, and it made him fill with delight. Someone else who loves Peeps as much as he does, this character. I’m not sure if I should tell him that this particular book was inspired by him in the first place. My brother wrote it and my future sister-in-law illustrated it with him and his love of squirrels in mind. So the Peep was intended as a nod to him from the beginning, and when they saw him see it for the first time, they both lit up.

SquirrelSquirrel 2

Seeing yourself in art never gets old. To see a piece of what you know and have lived reflected back to you, to see something that felt important to you lovingly captured in photos or drawings or poems or songs, it is a kind of magic. The kind of magic that makes you feel less alone and less apart from the rest of the world.

But, Only Hipsters Have Triangle Tattoos

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Maslow's

I am certainly not a hipster.

I also do not have any tattoos.

Yet.

But, lately, the tattoo I have been planning out in my head is a simple striped triangle. A representation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

My teacher friends might remember this concept from back in developmental psychology courses. The basic idea is that we are all motivated by irreducible needs, and that once we meet our basic needs we are able to climb higher to try to achieve more lofty ones. The concept is framed as a pyramid.

The base layer of the pyramid contains our basic biological and physiological needs – our need for air, water, food, shelter, sleep. These needs have to be met for us to move on to the next level.

The next level up contains our need for safety – protection from danger (whether that danger is a poisonous snake, a tornado, or a criminal), law and order, stability.

The level after that contains our need for love and belonging – friendship, affection, intimacy, romantic love, family.

The level after that contains our need for esteem – self-esteem, mastery, achievement, independence.

The level after that contains our cognitive needs – stretching our brains, learning, finding meaning.

The level after that contains our aesthetic needs – appreciation for, the search for and the creation of beauty.

The level after that is our need for self-actualization – becoming the highest version of yourself you are capable of becoming.

The last level is the need for transcendence – overcoming the limitations of human needs and human forms. It is complete spiritual fulfillment.

This seems like an orderly way to explain the motivation of human beings, that once the bottom rung of needs are met then we can seamlessly turn our attention to the next level and so on and so forth. When I turn back to this model in times of chaos, it provides me with a way to get my life back under control. When the pain or fatigue or depression that can be associated with fibromyalgia begin to severely limit my ability to function, I go back to the pyramid. I go back to the basics and make sure I take care of each level I can in order. It helps.

It also gives me an organizing principle for deciding what is most important for my children, for my family. Food, water, sleep, shelter first. We are very lucky that the first needs are securely taken care of. Safety is always next. This is such a part of our life that I can yell out to them at any given point, “What is my number one job as your mommy?” and they will yell back, “To keep us safe!” If there is a question of priorities, those win.

It helps stave off bad behavior, usually. Most tantrums come about when basic necessities are off – the boys haven’t eaten in a while, they stayed up too late, they feel sick and need rest and medicine. My youngest had a tantrum this morning because his need for safety was not being met to his liking. He thought he would have to get a shot at his doctor’s appointment when he did not. Once he felt safe (all of his vaccinations are up to date and he needed no boosters) the rest of the day fell into place.

This helps me prioritize what charities we support with the little extra we have. Charities that feed and clothe and shelter people get our attention first. Charities that keep people feeling safe and loved next. Charities that teach after that.  If you can do all of those at once, even better.

I taught in a public school and can tell you first hand how difficult it is for a child to learn if his basic needs, his need for safety or his need for belonging are not being met. Any programs that provide breakfast and a safe environment should be protected. Any wonderful people who can make a student feel like he or she is meant to be right there with them, who can make a student feel safe and accepted, should be truly appreciated. Then mastery and learning can happen. Not before. The pyramid as an organizing principle makes sense again.

But, and this is very, very important, we as humans are not always orderly. A shock, I know. We sacrifice having basic needs met to hit those higher levels. There are examples everywhere. We lose sleep night after night after night going for a promotion. We eat a plate of fries when the problem is not that we are hungry, but that we are lonely. We let obsessions with mastering a level on a video game run over our loved ones. We skip meals to fit into a gorgeous dress because we want above all else to be beautiful. We often choose to meet needs out of order.

And, if under extreme circumstances there is little to no possibility of having our basic needs met, we strive to fulfill any of the needs we have any chance of meeting. Gang members may find their need for belonging is stronger than their need for safety. During unspeakable horrors like the Holocaust, people have turned to learning and appreciation of beauty as the only needs they could fulfill or help others fulfill. Countless people have had to look at transcendence as the only need they could hope to meet in the midst of war or starvation or natural disaster. Our needs are irreducible.

I want a visual reminder that every person alive on earth has real needs.   A reminder that my needs are real, that the needs of other people are real, that meeting those needs is imperative. I want a reminder that this organization of those needs has often helped me and others, and I feel anchored by it.

I want a simple, striped, triangle tattoo.

I also would really, really like it if this tattoo didn’t also scream to the world, “I wish I were a twenty-something hipster who loves the clean lines of geometric shapes” when I am really a thirty-something conventional mom and former educator who actually prefers photo-realistic tattoos of things like flowers and insects and birds.

But,

That isn’t a real need.