courage

Climbing

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

 

Charlotte Doyle
The title page for the book The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi with a black and white illustration of the bow of a sailing ship

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There is a passage in the children’s book The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi that I’ve been thinking about a lot throughout the pandemic and shutdown. The premise of the book is that our protagonist, Charlotte Doyle, was put on a ship from England by herself in 1832 to join her family in the United States. She wasn’t supposed to be the only passenger, but she ends up being the only passenger, the only child, the only girl or woman on the voyage. The captain promises to look out for her-they are from the same class after all and he can’t have her falling in with the uncouth sailors-until it becomes clear that the men are going to stage a mutiny and she eventually realizes that they had just cause because the captain is cruel. She decides to join the crew, who have justified suspicions about her initial closeness to the captain, and so is presented with an initiation rite to solidify her place and her protection with them. She has to climb the tallest mast up to the crow’s nest and back down again.

It’s a terrifying task. The heights alone are bad enough to frighten anyone her age, much less the rough and unstable rigging. The swaying of the ship becomes more and more pronounced the higher she climbs. At some point she realizes that her reward for braving this seemingly insurmountable obstacle is that she will have to do this same impossible thing multiple times a day as part of her work for the crew for the rest of the voyage. It truly seems unthinkable until it is done. Then it becomes just part of her life.

We keep being presented with terrifying or incredibly difficult tasks where the reward for facing them is that we get to keep facing them over and over, but with now some new measure of familiarity and experience.

About a month ago I took my first COVID test because I was symptomatic. With all my chronic illnesses, with all my pain and fatigue and prickly skin and fog throughout the years-even when I went to the ER with chest pains and had to rule out a heart attack and even when I’ve had walking pneumonia- I have never had shortness of breath. I have never felt like I was gulping for air, that every few breaths I had to concentrate to consciously expand and fill my lungs against the constriction of my ribcage. I asked my doctor if taking a COVID test was appropriate and she sent me to their respiratory clinic-a converted immediate care center where I was to wait in the car when I arrived so that the whole staff could get into multiple layers of PPE. When I was allowed in, I was the only patient, and was given a second mask to go over my cloth one. Plastic sheeting narrowed the lobby into a ribbon of a hallway so that all the soft surfaces of the waiting room had a barrier between me and them. I told the doctor all of my symptoms, as much of my backstory with chronic illness as I could. We did a chest x-ray in another thoroughly sterilized room. It was explained to me that this particular COVID test doesn’t have false positives but there is a ten percent incidence of a false negative, so even with a negative I would need to quarantine for ten days after being symptomatic. At the end of the appointment I would take the test by driving to the back of the building and sitting in my parked car, head leaning against the headrest as the nasal swab went further up than I expected. I went home, had my husband get my brand-new prescription inhaler from the pharmacy. I limited my movement inside my own house so that I had less contact with my kids, wiped down everything I touched and waited two tense days for the negative result.

I was terrified. From years of doctors not taking me seriously I was terrified to speak to a new one. From years of chronic illness I knew that if I had contracted COVID that it might be horribly difficult to fight off. I might not be able to. From years of my children covertly worrying about my health I knew that this could wreck any emotional well-being we had carved out of isolation and disruption. The building I went into for care looked like the set of a horror movie where I was not meant to make it past the first act. The idea that I might have been around other people who didn’t have fifteen layers of protection between us felt like the worst mortal sin I could have carried. Not knowing what was causing my shortness of breath sent me into a purgatory not knowing how long I might have to live in not knowing-it might have been forever.

Now? The memory of feeling so terrified that day that I couldn’t silence alarm bells pounding through my brain has faded just a few weeks past my quarantine ending. I don’t know and can’t say whether it becoming a normal “something-I-did” is psychologically healthy in the long run, but it is protective now. I have data in my mind of what would need to happen if I was sick again, or if one of the kids was, or if someone else in my family was. I would not need to contemplate every foothold and rough rope as I climbed a second time, experience would have given me ease with something I would rather have absolutely no familiarity with at all. But that choice wasn’t up to me. My reward for doing something terrifying is that I would know how to deal with it myself again, or be able to carefully shepherd someone else I love through the process.

So quickly, so rapidly, the circumstances of our lives have changed. Our understanding of the world has changed. In some ways, irrevocably. Some things that have needed to change have finally broken open. Just like the mutiny on Charlotte’s ship, building wealth on the broken backs of people you couldn’t care less about has inevitable consequences. Some things that should never have come to pass are terrifyingly present and a clean cold light is shining on them. For example, a country’s leader who barely looked up from a Tweet or a golf club as 160,000 of his people died. I marvel pretty much every day at some new understanding or revolution or horror that in ordinary times would have been years in the making (or undoing) but now happen and become a new reality in the blink of an eye. Because it’s all so fast it’s exhausting and hard and it’s difficult to give each moment the depth and detail of exploration it deserves. But it all changing so rapidly gives room for new ways of thinking about ourselves, our world, how we have always operated within it and whether that is at all acceptable to our souls.

We keep climbing to the top of the main mast, gritting our teeth against fear, keeping as intense a focus as we can on splintering wood or fraying knots or the wide gap between footholds big enough to swallow us up if we slip. And when we get to the top and realize we are proved capable of doing what seemed impossible just a little while before, there is some exhilaration and freedom to look out from those dizzying heights to see ourselves and the world differently. When we come back down to the deck there are crew members who have become friends waiting to do this hard work every day. We now belong to each other in ways we hadn’t before. Our reward for facing down the impossible fear is to keep showing up, to keep facing it for as long as it takes with other people who are showing up with us to do the same.

Loser

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

wilted-flower

I have been meditating on the idea of loss this morning. Fear of loss, the imagined specter of what might be, is horribly powerful. The fear of attack, the fear of hunger, the fear of oppression, the fear of disability, the fear of failure, the fear of war. The loss of dreams, loved ones, security, ability.

What is one of Donald Trump’s greatest insults, one he uses all the time?

Loser.

We are terrified of loss, and terrified that that loss will define us in ways that make us less than. Others will see the taint of loss in us, and we will no longer be good enough, worthy enough.

Failures of empathy are often failures of imagination, we do not want to imagine how horrible it would feel to sit with the losses that other people do. It seems contagious. This is why many people shy away from the grieving, or take up protective denial at how bad a situation is. Truly understanding what someone else is going through makes us acutely aware that it could happen to us, and that is frightening.

Life is frightening, and having evidence at our fingertips that it is capricious is more so. Some people want to believe that when misfortune happens the unfortunate person brought it upon themselves-poor choices, lack of faith in God, excessive vices, ignorance. Some people don’t want to believe the situation is as bad as it seems-they diminish someone else’s hardships as a way of distancing themselves.

Those of us who have felt loss that was stinging and life-altering will wonder for a long time if we did something to cause it, we hide how bad it was away from our loved ones out of compassion as we don’t want you to feel frightened. But, if you have felt deep loss, deep oppression you know in your bones that Trump’s assertion is all a lie. Experiencing the losses of life are not indicative of your worth as a human being, they are an inescapable part of being human.

We can compound the effects of loss upon people by being too frightened to face it, to look it in the eye. And if you have yet to really experience loss you will be even more frightened. This is where privilege comes in. I had the privileges of being white, straight, middle class, educated, thin enough, pretty enough, Christian enough, free from sexual abuse. By the time I got to college, I had two beloved grandparents die, and that was the most I really knew of loss. And my fear of losing anything was palpable, it felt, at the time unendurable. When you haven’t lost much yet, losing feels like it will be worse than death.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who have had more than their share of loss, and looking at other people’s losses might sink them with the weight of all the unfairness of the world. Adding other people’s losses onto their hearts is too great a burden, and they may turn away.

Loss is something we will all have in common, if we don’t already.

To have a leader who looks at anyone who has ever lost anything as a “loser”, with all the degrading connotations that implies, is unconscionable. If that was the only despicable thing he had ever done, it would have been enough for me.

Although, I suspect he is more frightened of loss than any of us will ever be. He has done everything in his power his entire life to ensure he never has to endure the sting of loss even once. And his lack of human feeling matches the measure of his fear of being a “loser”.

The antidote, the key to empathy, the key to really understanding and alleviating suffering, is then bravery. Facing down your fear that something horrible will happen, because if you live long enough something always will, is imperative. Difficult and excruciating, but imperative. Face your fear of loss with as stout a heart as you can, knowing that this scares every single one of us, too. Then we can actually take practical steps to truly help each other

Expecto Patronum

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

expecto-patronum

These are dark days. Exhausting days. Days that promise a new affront to decency and stability every damn hour.

I am trying.

I have been filling a journal with things that make me happy, unfailingly happy.

Activities.

Songs to dance along to.

Song to sing along with.

Foods.

Movies and TV shows.

Reminders to take my medicine on time.

Reminders to breathe.

Lists of things I want to teach the boys.

Things I can do to make my environment more orderly.

Beautiful things.

Silly things.

Lists of painters I love.

Lists of comic strips that make me smile.

Reminders to stretch.

A list of exercise classes I can get to quickly.

Nail polish colors.

Names of people I love.

Inside jokes with my husband.

Lists of things with soothing textures-smooth stones and fluffy hair and grass.

Descriptions of places I love.

Little things I can to do show my family I love them.

 

Anything I can think of to pierce the darkness, it goes in the journal.

 

I flip through it whenever I need to, and I need to almost hourly right now.

 

I am not going to lose my soul to this fight.

Expecto Patronum.

I’ll Get to You Soon

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

midnight

It’s a new year.

It’s finally a new year.

You know those years when, at the end, you recap and try to enumerate everything you did, everything that changed, everything important to you, and then realize there is no way it all could have happened in one year? That you must have Hermione’s ability to turn back time and have lived each day as thirty hours instead of twenty-four?

2016 was definitely one of those years.

It doesn’t surprise me much that my whole little family has been sick, that we spent New Year’s Eve at home, in bed by 8:45 for the boys and 10:00 for the adults, that I took a two hour nap with my sick youngest child and then laid still in bed while he napped for another hour after I woke up.

This was a year of emotionally processing everything at breakneck speed. This was a year of having your head hit the pillow and the phone ring seconds after you fall asleep. This was a year of poring through stacks of research and finding the answer you’re looking for with bleary bloodshot eyes when you’ve gone too far to give up. This was a year of turning on a dime, being willing to change course and direction with a second’s notice. This was a year of finding that the things you took for granted could disappear. This was a year of pushing yourself past the point of exhaustion to catch at the beautiful truth that has made all of it worthwhile. This was a year of affirming that so much of life is worth putting in thirty hours when you only have twenty-four.

But.

I am tired.

I feel like I’ve aged all those extra hours this year. They line my face in a way I don’t recognize, so that even in my transcendently happy moments they are still there. My body needs healing and strength. My soul does, too. The brief span between Christmas and New Year’s usually affords me enough time, enough rest to steel myself to begin it all again. Enough time to refocus, to make lists, to take stock, to start.

Even when I am sick, it has been enough. I am always sick. I even picked up a few more chronic conditions this year, in the midst of everything else that happened.

This year feels different.

Welcome 2017.

I’ll get to you soon.

I think I’m going to need a few minutes though.

Why My Posts Have Been Sporadic Lately

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

sky.JPG

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!

Chugach, Bears and a Suburban Mom

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment
Bears
These were bears we saw from a bus, several hundred yards away. When you know you’re protected, they’re a lot cuter. Awww.

The first Saturday morning of our family vacation found the four of us at the Albert Loop trailhead near the Eagle River Nature Center of Chugach State Park, Alaska. This was supposed to be an easy, well-kept, three mile loop that would take us past crystal clear streams to a spectacular view of a mountain valley. We assured our nine and seven-year-old that they would be able to handle the hike by showing them through phone apps how far we had hiked other days: one and a quarter miles around University Lake next to our hotel, one and a half miles on the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail in Anchorage. Just wandering around the fourth of July fair was probably a couple of miles when it was all said and done. We all felt pretty confident.

We showed up about an hour before the nature center actually opened and read the notices pinned to the door to get oriented. There were bears nearby, and what we needed to do was to stay together and stay loud. You never want to surprise a bear, but he will steer clear of you if you are noisy and generally annoying. If a bear approaches you, you should stand your ground, and never ever run as they may begin a chase. Another chart explained all the reasons why standing your ground is helpful. A guidebook I had assured us that only polar bears stalk humans, and we were thousands of miles from polar bear habitat. As a last resort you could use your bear spray if the bear charged. We didn’t have bear spray (before researching this trip I wondered if bear spray was for spraying on ourselves to repel bears or if it was for spraying at the bears-for the record it’s something you spray in a bear’s face).

I

Got

Nervous.

We live in the suburbs of Chicago. When I camped as a little girl the most you had to worry about was a raccoon in your tent. A goose coming at you aggressively. A squirrel getting a little too familiar with humans and peeing all over your gear. No bears. No moose. Nothing really… deadly.

And here I was about to march my kids through bear territory for a vacation memory. Without a guide. Without other people on the path. Without bear spray (God help me, if I ever had to use it I’d probably spray myself in the face instead and just be putting a peppery garnish on the bear’s next meal).

But, I do tend to get anxious when there is nothing really to be afraid of. My husband looked like he was still game, so I swallowed it down and we started off. He didn’t look nervous until we were hemmed into a narrow pathway with very high grasses on all sides of us.

Up until that moment we had been talking casually, searching the trees and shrubs around us for less intimidating wildlife. Once we got to the grasses the need to keep noisy became something we both felt strongly about. The boys were confused as to why we needed to keep chatting about nothing, so my genius husband got them talking about the app “My Singing Monsters”. I swear to you that they did not stop talking over the next hour and a half. About two minutes into the boys talking, I realized that they would keep us constantly conversating, but they weren’t particularly loud. I added in claps, loud cheerleading claps with an ever-changing rhythm. We trudged on, past the grasses and through thickets of trees and mosquitos, scaring away every animal within earshot. Except a Great Horned owl. He did, however, seem annoyed.

About three quarters of a mile in we came across a path sign saying that the normal trail had been washed away by recent rainstorms. We could retreat or follow a bypass route. Hoping that the bypass wouldn’t take us back into low-visibility grass, we stomped forward. The trail became a mass of tangled roots that we couldn’t ignore, so our attention became divided between watching the forest and watching our feet. I clapped even louder and faster, exhorting the boys to be careful as we still had a long ways to go and we could not carry them if they got a twisted ankle. My husband was leading the way, and the boys followed him and I brought up the rear, listening to chatter about how to get new monsters on an app and clapping furiously “We will, we will, rock you.” This was definitely not the serene, life-affirming communion with nature we had been promised. At one point I know I was singing Macklemore’s “Ceiling Can’t Hold Us” at the top of my lungs.

Then off to my left I heard something. It sounded like the loud exhale of a very large creature at about the height of my shoulder and ten feet away. I tried to explain to my husband that I heard something. He looked around, decided he hadn’t seen anything and kept going. Between the mosquitos and the large mammal I was sure was right next to me, I wasn’t about to stop and get super quiet to find out what it really was. (Later my husband would confess that he looked in the trees far away, not the shrubs near me, and excitedly said, “Aw man, I wish you had explained where to look, I bet something was there, that would have been awesome!” to which I replied, “Are you insane?!?”)

We advanced on a bridge and were able to relax for a moment, me shaking out my hands, my husband asking the boys to pause on the “My Singing Monsters” talk for a second. There were crystal clear streams, and interesting birds, and most importantly less trees so we could tell that at least here there were no bears within a hundred-yard radius. We took pictures and trudged on.

Finally we finished, unscathed if a little jumpy. The nature center was finally open and we overheard a worker explain that lots of people saw black bears on the path just in the last day or so. Later on I would tell my husband, “And no one will see any today, you’re welcome other hikers. I did the heavy lifting of scaring them away for you.” He guessed that they were probably the sort of people who were hoping to see a bear in his natural habitat. To that I shrugged and gave a look as if to say, “Sucks to be them, I’m all about the self-preservation.” And I’ll be damned if some hikers think that them seeing a bear is more important than me not seeing my baby boys being eaten by black bears on a family vacation.

We ate granola bars and went to the bathroom and set back out for the half-mile hike that EVERYBODY takes. A lady in a skirt and flip-flops preceded us, holding her iPad up to take pictures on this fifteen minute, totally cleared path. A bunch of other tourists like us walked up and down the trails, totally sure that they would not be part of a bear attack that day. And we were finally able to get quiet for a second and actually enjoy the view.

Chugach.JPG

And as much as I was eventually teased for looking like a crazy lady, clapping and yelling through a state park, the kids and my husband and I all decided that that was enough adventure for us for one day. Possibly for the whole summer.

Orlando

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

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When horrible things happen I want to circle the wagons. I want to take the people I love and hold them next to me. I begin to imagine a new life where I take my children to the highest loneliest mountain cabin to keep them away from the world, or at least the world of humans.

The day of the Newtown shootings we were packing our bags to go downtown, to see the Christmas tree at Daley Plaza. I spent the day with a hole in my heart and a fake smile on my face trying to make our trip fun and breezy. It was meant to be a time for my two boys to explore the marvel of Chicago, the wonder of what can happen when millions of people come together to build and create. I hid in my heart the knowledge that just one stranger coming together with one small safe school could destroy, could obliterate everything. I don’t want my children to know that.

Today I dropped them off at camp and am relieved for a few hours to grieve for Orlando, away from having to explain why I am grieving. I am not hiding them away from the world, but I am hiding them away from the hateful things I have seen, read and heard. There is a deep pit of disgust in my stomach knowing that there are people in my own country who have said, of innocent people being murdered, that because they were gay they deserved to die. I am scared for my Muslim friends and neighbors who must have heard the identity of the shooter with a horrified gasp, knowing that they would be put on trial for crimes they did not commit. I am furious that a Republican “friend” is almost gleeful that the shooter was a registered Democrat because that “proves” something. I am enraged that people who want to restrict gun control laws are now saying, “This guy was on an FBI watch list and we didn’t stop him?” Our government’s hands are tied, we cannot block even highly suspicious people from access to guns because that might restrict the rights of responsible gun owners; the CDC is not even allowed to study what might possibly cause so many gun-related deaths because Congress will not allow it. We aren’t allowed to even mention limiting access to military grade guns or extending background checks, because, we are told, it is a slippery slope and all guns would be pried out of citizens’ hands. If we suggest ugly homophobia may have contributed to this, we are pushing some sort value-diluting agenda. I want to scream. I don’t want my children to see me scream.

Because I want to have a plan when I see them again.

I want to review what I have tried to instill in my boys. Have I taught them to celebrate love and to be as wary of hate as of a rattlesnake? Have I made sure to teach them to love people both similar and dissimilar to them? Have I told them that when horrible things happen people are scared and want that fear to subside-which means they may hurt people in an effort to feel safe themselves? Have I taught them that people are capable of horrors, and that stemming those horrors is often the responsibility and duty of ordinary people bearing witness and being a force for good? Have I taught them that we should grieve, but we cannot let grief overwhelm us because our ability to make the world a better place would be stunted? Have I taught them that they matter, and that what they do day in and day out can change the course of history? That drops of kindness in a bucket, once enough have gathered, will spill over and cleanse us all? Have I taught them to speak up, and taught them that it is hard work to do so, and that hard work is often necessary in life?

If I have not done these things, I haven’t done enough to help. I need to make a plan to teach them these things. This is my path forward, the only thing that keeps me from hiding myself and hiding them so far away that no one can touch them. A life without being touched by another human being isn’t a real life. We have to figure out how to live in this world one way or another.

Essay at Quail Bell Magazine

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

Dusk

 

Hi Everybody!

An opportunity came up  with Quail Bell Magazine to submit essays to them about summer nostalgia. Since previous submissions were fine (I checked and double checked) I sent in this blog post from last summer: Night Light. It is about summer bonfires and what we learn on the edge of darkness and light. They picked it up and published it online just in time for the holiday weekend!

I’m ready to welcome summer, and I am excited to be published where (according to their tagline) “Fairy punks, feminist witches and quirky birds are welcome”.

Hope you are able to check it out!

Love,

Kristin

 

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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~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

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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.