The English Geek

Back Yard

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in our backyard. I'd be out there for hours practicing as much of my bars routine as I could on the swing set. I'd play with our dog Brittney or with one of the cats. Before Dad put the fence up, I'd wander around the corn field behind our property, watching morning glories to see if I could spot them opening or closing. (The farmer who owned the field did not like my wanderings, and I was afraid of him, but I liked that cool, dirty, peaceful wandering too much to let fear stop me.) Or I'd move my favorite chair (a rocking lawn chair with bright green floral canvas upholstery) into my favorite spot on our shady patio, the west corner by the peach tree, and read all afternoon.

Sometimes Becky would come outside with me, but in my clearest memories, I am alone—except I can hear the kids who live on the other side of the field. I was happy in my little backyard paradise, but I was also lonely. It's strange: I talked to Kendell just this weekend, when we went out to dinner, about that lonely kid, and how I can't really say she's just who I used to be since I feel like she's still here; then I found myself thinking about her again this Easter Sunday, when we sat on the patio together, eating dinner.

By "we" I mean a lot of people: my kids and husband, my sisters, my mom, my brothers-in-law, two of my nieces and one of their husbands. The little kids were playing in the grass, laughing and chasing and pushing the babies on the swing. While we ate dinner, I made sure to sit in my favorite spot on the patio, which I still love even though the peach tree and the chaise are gone. I especially love it on spring afternoons and evenings, when the sun hits the back of your head so you are both in shade and sunlight at the same time. It has long been a place of solace for me, that spot in the backyard. Perhaps even a holy place, sometimes.

I ate last because I was avoiding the first rush at the food, and then I took some photos of Haley with her boyfriend Adam who came to the party but had to leave early. When I came back to my food, all the grown ups and the teenagers had gathered around the table, and as I ate we started talking. Random stuff at first, and then something hard my sister is experiencing, and then, somehow, to our teenage exploits. As we talked and laughed, I found myself sitting back. Not talking, almost not listening to the stories. Just settling myself; just letting that specific moment sink into my bones so I could keep it, somehow, forever. Between my sister and my daughter. All of us laughing. Sharing sorrow and wisdom.

I always love my family. But in that hour of talking, laughing, crying a little, eating a bit, I loved them so much. Enough that I didn't mind my old ghosts being brought up (Yes, I did sluff an entire semester of high school my junior year), which sometimes bothers me. I loved them and I wanted to keep that feeling. I thought of my dad, who one day—perhaps a spring afternoon like this one, lovely and warm with just a slight breeze to keep the edge off, and the mountains still snowy and the grass turning green—stopped pruning the honey locust in the backyard and left his saw in the crotch; it's still there, every year swallowed a little bit more by living tree. I thought about last year and how I thought it would be the last year we did this, and how I am glad we had one more, just so we could have that moment. I thought about our strangeness and our wrong choices and the paths we've taken. I thought about all the things I hoped for myself and the things I still hope my children obtain.

I thought about that lonely girl I used to be.

I cannot say the loneliness is cured. But in that moment—it was gone. I held the memory of my childhood self in the cup of my mind and wished I could tell her, somehow: not always. There will be people you can't imagine yet who will love you.

There were Easter eggs this year, colored by my kids who were all, even Kaleb, slightly disinterested. There was a lovely service at church. I made my favorite cake; we had Easter baskets and chocolate and even Peeps. The kids hunted for eggs. But that time on the patio: that was Easter to me, the best Easter thing, better even than my favorite caramel-filled chocolate eggs. The sense of time folding which can happen in the places we felt something intensely, as if the emotion left an echo you can still feel years later. That old loneliness whispered to me, but I could whisper back to it something more comforting.

on Driving: along, past, through

Yesterday, Haley blogged about driving down by the lake. " didnt ask anyone, or even tell anyone i went. but it was just what my heart needed," she wrote. "i turned the radio off, and drove slow so i could just look at it. it was seriously what i needed right then. hopefully i don't get in trouble for going without asking. aaaand yeah. i hope i can make peace with all of my troubles."

Oh, my.

Those pervasive adolescent heartaches. I remember. I talk to her a little bit about my teenagehood but not all of the stories. I don't want to glorify the mistakes I made. I don't want it to seem wild and romantic and edgy. I don't want it to be tempting. Because I don't want her, or any of my kids, to feel what I felt. So I have worked hard to (hopefully) keep them away from the wild and romantic and edgy stuff.

But I can't keep them away from heartache. It finds you. All of your life, it is always a possibility. It's fairly intense when you're a teenager of course. It feels more magnified somehow. Maybe because you don't have the perspective yet of old sorrows and new ones.

That is not me downplaying how she feels. It is me acknowledging it, which I think is important for teenagers to know. The way you feel is the way you feel. Someone telling you to stop feeling it or, worse, that you don't deserve to feel that way, you haven't earned  your heartache, because it could be so much worse or he wasn't dating you then or it's not like you're my only friend or any of the other reasons people offer—all that does is make you doubt what you feel. You have to move through it to move past it. You can't just skip it.

And what she might not know is that while I would rather she just tell me where she's going, I understand it, too. She has a cell phone so I could still track her down, and being somewhere no one knows is part of it. Part of the way that just driving makes you feel better. She doesn't know that I wouldn't get upset because this is a story I don't think I ever told her.

When I was at my worst teenage phase, I would get up every morning. I would get ready for school and then leave in my car. I would actually drive to the high school. I would pull into the parking lot. And then I would just sit there. Getting out of my car and walking into that building? The thing I couldn't do. I couldn't sit at a desk with books spread open before me, learning stuff like geography or history or a squared + b squared = C squared or all the other stuff that seemed so completely useless because it wasn't teaching me what I really needed to know, which was what do I do with all of this? I couldn't sit there with all of them, pretending I was OK, and ignoring all the "that girl is weird" under-the-breath muttered comments, and managing to act normal like everyone else.

So I'd leave the parking lot. I'd go to 7-11 and with the change I'd scrounged up from my mother's purse or my sisters' pockets or maybe under the couch, buy a large coffee and put three Irish Creme creamers in it and five ice cubes to cool it down. I'd put five dollars of gas in the tank using the gas card I stole from my dad. And then I'd drive. I'd drive anywhere, aimless. Crying and singing along to the boom box on the seat next to me. (A.M. radio, remember?) I'd drive past the enormous houses of the wealthy on the east side. And I would always end up in the mountains.

No one knew where I was. My mom assumed I was at school. My teachers had forgotten I existed and my friends were busy justifying themselves or suffering in their own way. There was something to that—to knowing that no one knew where I was. It was like disappearing, somehow. And everything hurt less because I didn't really exist if no one knew where I was.

When it was time for school to be over, I'd drive home. I could manage (sort of) the pretending-to-be-normal thing when I was at home. I'd pretend to do homework when really I was writing poetry or angry diatribes. I'd answer the phone when the automated call from the high school came, keeping my mom from knowing I'd sluffed again.

And then I'd do the same thing the next day.

None of this was noble or good of me. Or good for me, maybe. Except—the driving. The aimless wandering. The movement towards the mountains, where I'd park and sit on my hood and feel, just for a minute, finally a white peace.

So no. I'm not upset. I totally understand. I understand the need to drive along peaceful landscapes in order to move through what is painful.

I get it.

Nothing to Do With Christmas

Sometime between yesterday and today, I set myself the goal of blogging every day until Christmas. I don't know why this goal seems so pressing and important—but there I was, snuggled down in my flannel sheets, just on that delicious edge of consciousness when you know sleep is about to overtake you and there is absolutely nothing in the world that could stop you from slipping under:

except remembering that I hadn't blogged yet.

This thing that has been swirling around in my head has nothing to do with Christmas. Mostly. It has to do with memory, though, which seems to me is a main component to the Christmas spirit. Here is the memory:

It's May or June, and I am pissed. I'm 18, and I'm like a puzzle: torn into bits but finally starting to put myself together for real. This new structure I am forming is taking a different shape, both figuratively and literally, and my friends aren't altogether fond of it. I'm no longer needed. Actually, I'm sort of embarrassing, and that is the thing that's got me pissed: My second-best friend, whom I've forgiven for puking on my favorite steel-toed boots, covered for with her mom, and held secrets for that I've still never told anyone, bought tickets for the Depeche Mode concert—but not one for me. As she was going with my used-to-be boyfriend, this is an obvious message: she's not sleeping with him (unless that is a secret she never told) but he is her new best friend, no "second" about it.

As I had in the past when I was angry, I hopped in my car and turned on some music. Angry driving is best done accompanied by The Cult, of course, preferably "Wild Flower" as loud as possible. Only, in this brave new world I've entered, my mom, instead of my best friend, is in the car with me. There are many perks to having your mom around—not having to worry about finding quarters under the floor mats to use as gas money is a big one—but loud punk music is not one of them. As I watched her hand reach for the dial and actually turn down my music, I realized just how far I had come in my transformation: angry music might never soothe again.

I think this memory has been so vivid because I've had the chance to hang out with Haley more than usual lately. Sometimes when we're driving around, and she's got her radio station on, I can remember nearly exactly how it felt to drive around aimlessly with your friend, how the world seemed full of possibility that could surprise you at the very next corner (because, back then, it was and it did). How you knew your friend understood what you needed, wanted, thought, and felt because you assumed she needed, wanted, thought, and felt the same things. How the perfect song on the radio would feel like karma and angels and all the planets aligning to create that very perfect moment. Only a best friend can bring that sort of joy.

Except, I can't remember it at all, really, that joy. So much has happened since I was last that girl in the passenger seat next to my best friend driving nowhere important. My perspective has skewed and knowledge slid across my vision in nearly-transparent layers that block me from feeling that wild hopefulness. As the mother (instead of the best friend) I know what perils hide in those limitless possibilities and how the loss of a best friend, second- or otherwise, is a wound that is some ways worse than any other—how that friend, by holding your dreams, your thoughts, your desires and despairs and secrets in the cup of her hand also cradles power, too. Sharp, wounding power. All she has to do is drop them or, worse, scatter them with her breath.

I suppose mothers hold our daughters' hopes, despairs and secrets, too. We could wield them like a power if we wanted. But while we lack the ability to create the experiences that best friends do, we have something more gentle and perhaps more enduring. We put gas in the car and slushies in the cup holders and a permanence into their world. We might turn down the radio but we aren't going anywhere.

I find myself at this unexpected crossroads. Well, I am not there yet, exactly, but I can see it coming up ahead. Haley, my daughter, my girl who nearly shares my birthday but is not myself reborn (she is so much stronger than that), is nearly grown. What will our relationship feel like as she speeds out into the world without me in the passenger seat? I hope I can continue being the permanent thing in her world. I hope that, whatever betrayals she experiences, they don't come from me; that I can be the place she comes home to.

A Light in Darkness

About two years before my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he had a sudden spike in what I'm convinced was a long-term, low-grade depression. He threatened to commit suicide and then spent some time in an inpatient mental hospital. One of the "prescriptions" his doctors gave him: stop reading so many dark books.

He followed this prescription; he put away the Steven King novels and whatever else that could be considered "dark." He started reading the scriptures more. Becky and I gave him the omnibus edition of The Lord of the Rings, and he read that, too. (It is, I believe, one of the last books he read and understood.)

That memory has resurfaced for me as I've read and thought about this article from the Wall Street Journal about the darkness in much of today's young adult literature. It argues that publishers let too much violence and swearing into the teen novels they publish, and that this darkness will help create teenagers who are troubled or depraved. And while I confess that there are a lot of "dark" teen novels published, I can say without doubt that they are not the only kind. There are plenty of lighter and/or brighter books published, despite the failure of the Amy in the article (who left her local Barnes and Noble defeated and empty-handed). As with all things, finding the right book requires effort, talking to others, reading reviews, and spending some time reading jacket copy. Still, the article insists that teen novels are dark, and that said darkness is "a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is."

There is much of me that rejects this argument. It is the same sunny-side-up logic that calls for the repeal of Planned Parenthood funding, the sort that believes that if we eliminate the darker options, people will therefore start to choose the sunnier parts. Happy, well-adjusted teens, the argument seems to go, will simply happen if we limit their reading to the cheery and uplifting. But adolescence, while admittedly full of its own pleasures, isn't always the sunniest place to be. Books about darkness don't create darkness. Darkness comes from the lives those adolescents have lived. Choices like drinking, doing drugs, becoming anorexic or bulimic, or cutting (which seems to be the topic that raises the most hackles) don't happen out of nowhere. They happen because teenagers are always on the brink of something, caught in the edgiest and intense part of becoming adults, and when you toss in some sort of trauma, darkness happens.

Of course, my own adolescent darkness also gives texture to my perspective. I can't answer the "do dark books create darkness?" question without thinking of my own dark self struggling through ages 15-18. I didn't constrain myself to just one genre as a teenager. My tastes ranged from V. C. Andrews to L. M. Montgomery. I read a lot of Danielle Steel and all of Harry Harrison's West of Eden trilogy. My favorite novel was Little Women(I know! Paint that picture for yourself: white-blonde girl dressed in black clothes, black suede fringed jacket and silver-toed combat boots immersed in Jo's adventures), but I'd plunge myself into the world of nearly any book—so long as it took me out of my own reality. Reading had always been intensely pleasurable for me, but at that time in my life it was also an intense escape, a brief salve before I stepped back into my ache. The difficult, gory, supernatural, or foreboding things I read about still brought me escape because even though the novels presented things of a dark color, the hue was different from mine.

I do wonder: if I'd immersed myself in happy-happy-joy-joy sorts of books (examples of which I cannot proffer), would they have made it easier for me to deal with my troubles? I cannot say either way, because it didn't happen. Did reading about bad, violent things happening to other people make my own bad violences worse? Perhaps. Maybe, like my dad, my depression was exacerbated by some of what I read. Or dark books made it easier to step into darkness, because it was familiar. Perhaps the books cast a certain glamour upon the darkness. Or, perhaps the opposite: they made me feel normal because they helped me know that I wasn't the only unhappy person in the world. Or maybe all of those things were true. Maybe the solution to my problems—as with all of adolescent angst—was multifarious. Books, as well as life, shoved me into darkness, but life—including books—eventually taught me how to deal.

The writer of the WSJ article places, I believe, too much importance on books themselves. That sentence seems very nearly sacrilegious for a person like me—libriarian, bibliophile, logophile, aspiring writer, obsessive reader who always has a book in her purse. With my very soul I know that books can evoke change in readers, both for good and bad, but I also know they are not the only force in a reader's life. External experiences, the real stuff those teenagers are living through, evoke much more change. And you can be sure that the violence, swearing, drinking, drugging, and cutting they are reading about they didn't discover in a novel. They discovered it in their lives, through their experiences.

The article also doesn't allow for personal reading preference. Whatever the cause, I am just never going to be the reader that's satisfied by fluffy novels.  I'm just not. Reading happy-happy-joy-joy novels with improbably happy endings feels like a waste of my time. I continue to be drawn to the dark side in the sense that I like reality in the novels I read. I don't like novels that end with an undeserved fairy tale. I like my characters to suffer and learn and become better because that is also how I live. One of my librarian friends just today nailed my reading preferences as she made a suggestion for a book she thought I'd like. "If I finish a book and I loved it but can't exactly explain why, then I know it's a book you'll love," she said. "If I finish it and I'm sort of sad, I know it will make you happy." I laughed and agreed and we shared the "there's a book for every reader" that's become my librarian mantra. Some teens are drawn to dark reads because that is just the kind of book they like to read.

More than anything, what the WSJ article fails to observe is that books, like any media, require parental involvement. Not in the sense of "gatekeeping" or "those who think it's appropriate to guide what young people read." I'm not going to rely on publishers to not publish books that might be problematic to my opinion for what is appropriate for my kids to read. Instead, I am going to rely on myself, and I do this by actually reading the same books my children read. Or at the very least, thumbing through, reading bits and pieces, or reading about the books on the numerous book review sites available. But I don't stop there: I also try to talk to my kids about what they read. I've been known to spout off long emails about the virtuous (or non-) actions of a certain character and what I think about them. I talk about why Bella and Edward are complete idiots and why the ending to Mockingjay wasn't as bad as everyone things it is. I've even taught my kids to spot typos and grammatical errors in the books they read; they bring them to me so we can chuckle over them. We talk about what is good writing and what isn't; they know it is OK to put down a book if they don't like it or if its issues are too intense for them. They've even stopped reading books because there was too much swearing for their comfort. This comes not because I am a stellar example (trust me, they've heard me swear before), but because of that one simple act: we talk about books. I use books for one of the exact reasons they exist: to teach. Yes, even novels teach something and I think it's our job as parents to use them as teaching opportunities, not to ban them or make them forbidden.

Despite the admonition to "guide what young people read," what I want more is to teach my young people how to think. In that way, books—be they dark or sunny—as well as movies, music, and even, yes, the dreaded and much-despised (by me) video games can help move their intelligence forward. Of course, I don't always get things right. I don't read everything my kids read. But I do pay attention to what they are reading, just as I do with what movies they go to or what songs I buy for them. Instead of pretending that darkness doesn't exist, I am trying to give them at least one light to hold up against it.

Perception

Yesterday morning, I found myself standing on the sidewalk in our neighborhood, talking to my friend Jamie for a few minutes. The woman who lives in the house we were standing in front of opened her front room drapes and, at that instant, right in the middle of talking to Jamie, I had this weird little moment. I wondered how that woman, who I know from church and from her blog, but not really well, sees me.

I go through the world thinking a certain way about myself, and I assume everyone else thinks the same: a flighty woman who's almostput together, late to everything. A bit unreliable but with good intentions. Strong opinions that I rarely share out loud. A messy pony tail more often than not.

I don't think I portray strong, confident womanhood or exceptional success. Nothing out of the ordinary except for the fact that I often, even at my advanced age of 39, walk around with a naked face. But right there on the sidewalk, I had the thought: maybe other people, people who know me in passing, don't see me in the same way I see myself.

I think this thought grew out of something someone else said at church. She was talking about something disheartening that had happened to her, and how she couldn't start feeling better about it, couldn't move past it, until she let go of her own feelings of self pity. She was entitled to feel hurt, she explained, but not to hold onto it. Do *I* hold on to self pity? I asked myself. And the nearly immediate answer was I hold on to everything. 

And I do. Not really in the sense of forgiving others, but I do tend to hold on tight to my feelings of justified damage. I forgive the person who did whatever it was that hurt, but I hold on to the hurt. I remember cruel things people have said, for whatever reason, and then I rub my tongue over them. I keep my wounds fresh and red; I continue looking for proof that what was said was the truth. I think I do this because it is a sort of panacea: it is easier to hurt and worry over yesterday's damage than to believe today will be damage-free---and then have my expectations slashed.

But it's also why I probably don't see myself in the most positive light. This is an old, old habit, from way back in my gothy days. I didn't understand this then, but one reason I dressed all in black was to create a sort of anti-judgement force field around myself. If I dressed that way then people would judge me a certain way, and I knewthey would judge me that way, so I could expect the eye rolls and the shaking heads and the whispers behind their hands. What if I didn't dress that way, though, and the judgements happened anyway?

Now, of course, I don't look gothy anymore. But I still project my force field by assuming that others will see me in a certain (negative) light---so I see myself that way first. It's a twisted sort of protection, more damaging than I intend. By now perhaps the habit is so ingrained in me that I will never overcome it. But I feel a sort of inspiration to at least try, to assume that others perceive good things about me, and maybe then I can, too.

Running with Ghosts

During what my mother refers to as my "black days"—my rebellious gothy unhappiness—I had one really, really bad stretch when I was perhaps completely dysfunctional. Absolutely unable to endure going to classes, where pretending to be normal or OK or fine was an impossibility, I would still get up in the mornings. I would shower and do my hair and get dressed in my black clothes, I would fling a book bag into the back seat of my car and leave the house. That hour of pretending for my mother I could manage. But I never pointed my car in the direction of the high school. Instead, I would travel a specific, meandering route: 7-11 for an extra-large coffee downgraded from black bitterness with an Irish Creme creamer; up the hill into the wealthy side of town past a specific boy's house and the houses where he sometimes appeared; past other large houses I admired simply for their beauty; back down another hill past my own house to make sure it was empty. I could have gone home then, since my mom had left for work and my dad was...well, somewhere (he wasn't working then, a fact that probably exacerbated my general darkness), but if I had any coffee left, I'd turn around and drive into Mapleton, the little town just southeast of us.

Mapleton is a pretentious place. It's full of large houses whose architecture is faux-country, surrounded by wide green lawns and horse pastures beyond the backyards. As you move east, toward the mountain, the houses grow larger and larger. Ponds appear in yards; turrets bloom on roof lines. Driving through the excess of wealth and privilege in my humiliating car was a sort of purposeful sprinkling of salt on wounds. I'd drive and cry, wandering the meandering roads, polluting the private lanes by ignoring the "private property" signs just to turn around in those wide, immaculate white driveways. I'd eventually work my way out of the neighborhoods and onto the canyon road, where I'd drive nearly to the top, to a little meadow we called The Party Spot, tucked away from the road. I'd sit there in my car, draining the coffee dregs, building my cocoon of impermeable sadness. 

It took my mom at least three months to figure out what I was doing each morning. This was, of course, in the ancient days before things like school websites made it much easier for parents to track their student's truancy. All I had to do was make sure I was home before the school's automated call was made (3:17 p.m.), intersect it, and I was off the hook. Luckily the mail came at about the same time, so I could rip up the increasingly frequent notices the high school insisted on sending. I'm not sure how she finally figured it out, but it was well into November of my junior year—nearly too late for me to dare driving that car so high into the canyon anyway. 

I don’t think of those days often, as life continues teaching me that whatever your old scars might be, there are always new ones to be made. I do dream about them sometimes, but yesterday I found myself nearly reliving them. Kendell's parents live in Mapleton now (although they didn't live there during my Black Days); their need for him to mow their lawn coincided with my need for a long run, so I decided to run my ten miles through some of my old sobbing grounds.

So I ran. Down the long main street in the tiny town tucked up close to the mountains. I ran to where it ends atop a great hill, “private property” signs indicating it’s no longer road but personal lane. I turned around and there were the mountains of my childhood and adolescence, splotched red, with just a cheekbone of The Face visible. I ran back down the street and then up a canyon and then back to my in laws’ house, and all the while I had a ghost with me.

Usually when I encounter my old self I feel her disappointment in my everyday, normal, average life. This time, though, she only drove slowly behind me, whispering out the window. She was just a companion, my old self, edging me on up the road. The yellowing trees dripped over the edge of the street, the gravel spoke under my feet, my invisible presence kept time; my breath doubled in my ears. I thought about how her wounds are still mine and yet those I have now are not even imaginable to her. She’s caught up in that cocoon and thinks the painful things she has now are the only ones she’ll ever have—thinks that when she grows up, and leaves, and becomes someone amazing, nothing will hurt her again. The ache in my lungs and the deep pulse I get in my pelvis during long runs: that physical pain isn’t what matters. She’d get that. But the other things, the stuff I keep hidden and no one knows: she wasn’t sure what to think of that. It gave her pause and an odd sense of hope, a flutter of light: she could see I coped anyway, or at least better than she was.

As I turned the corner to Kendell’s parents’ house, I thought about running with ghosts. I wanted a word to label what I was feeling. Not sadness, really. Melancholy, perhaps. I did feel, though, feel full of something unnamable. Can a single ten-mile run change a person? Because as I ran the last block, I thought of how I haven’t changed since I was that girl—I still get all sorts of bittercrazy over wanting one of those big, beautiful houses, too; I still feel the pull of the mountains and that deep sense of relief when I enter their presence—and also how I have. It has everything to do with the word "cope." That girl so caught up in her troubles that she was unable to cope still had something I don't anymore: the ability to feel, really feel. I've lost it. Certainly, it almost undid me. I still see the rippling repercussions of those days in my life. But that ability to experience emotion, even the rough parts? I want that back. I want the ghost of who I used to be to make me strong again.  

on Normal, Successful, and the Meaning of Life. Maybe.

Yesterday, while cleaning my bathrooms, I was thinking about success, and normalcy, and The Meaning of Life. (I was also singing along, in a vague and thoughtless way, to my "play everything" MP3 list, but that hardly matters to the narrative unless you happen to be fourteen and find your mother generally annoying but excruciatingly annoying when she's singing.) Because here's the deal: this weekend is my twenty-year high school reunion. And somewhere between the last reunion and this one, the edict that declared Amy Sorensen as Uninviteable to Reunions was lifted.

Meaning they invited me.

Meaning I had to decide whether or not I would go.

You have to understand: I keep in touch with one person I went to high school with, Jenn. And by "keep in touch" I mean: I send her a Christmas card every year. And I'm her Facebook friend, which allows me occasional glimpses into her life. The relationships I had in high school were all complicated by stuff like boyfriend stealing, socioeconomic levels, jealousy, and insecurity. Normal adolescent angst, I know, but nothing you could build a life-long friendship upon. (My one life-long friendship from adolescence, with Chris, maybe was helped along by the fact that we didn't go to the same high school. Well, and the fact that she is fabulous and wonderful and always has my back---in the non-backstabbing sense.)

And also there's this: I am a completely different person than I was in high school. And yeah, I know. People change. Everyone is different, twenty years later. But they all started out as normal, and changed from there. Not me. When those people knew me---as much as you "know" anyone when you're a teenager---I was a black-wearing, bleached-blonde, drinking-coffee-at-three-in-the-morning, sluffs-weeks-and-weeks-of-school, disdainful and pissed off and depressed kind of girl. I got in loud arguments with principals and I sat in silent back corners of classrooms, glowering; I mocked cheerleaders and football players and student body presidents, band geeks and AV geeks and AP scholars. They all, it seemed, tried desperately to obtain normal, while I scorned it. I didn't want to be normal. I wasn't destined for normal. My package of wounds was proof that my life would bring me anything but normal.

Yet here I am, twenty years later. And fairly normal. How do I show up to a reunion with my normal self on? I would feel like anyone I talked to was thinking "wow, she was a freak, but she turned out normal." Especially because stepping into that milieu would overwhelm me with my memories of trying so hard to be abnormal. "All that rebellion and weirdness," I think they would think, "and she still ended up in the same place we did: married, with children, living in suburbia." Well, sort of. Not in exactly the same place. A smaller house and smaller income than most of them.

Normal, but less successful.

So I'm scrubbing toilets, and I'm feeling bitter that three clean bathrooms are giving me this overwhelming feeling of success. When did a scrubbed bathtub and the absence of that goo that gathers at the bottom of the toothbrush cup make me feel like I had accomplished something? All the angst and the heartache and the black velvet amulet full of wounds which were going to make me someone extraordinary didn't do much of anything for me. I still ended up with rubber gloves on, a toilet brush in my hand, singing along to the new Train song and wondering if anyone of the male persuasion ever learns how to aim. Which is, of course, where most people end up.

When I gave up my goth-girl ways, I thought that striving for normal would bring me, eventually, to normal. That being normal would mean being successful. Being happy. But now that I am here in normal---admittedly, somewhere on the fringe of it, barely clinging on, but here at least---I feel like somewhere I took the wrong path. Like I wasn't honest with myself; like "normal" is a sort of jacket I pulled over my naked and abnormal self while what I should have done was walked with a little bit of bravery in my own skin. 

And really, when it comes down to it, that is what the idea of a high school reunion does to me (and the reason I really didn't care that I wasn't invited before) :  it opens up this great big contradiction. I mocked normal because I thought it was a form of pretending, and then I turned around and chased it. I became the person pretending to be normal. The person who holds up a clean bathroom or two as proof: look, look, can you see how normal I am? Because I don't know what scares me more. High school alumni looking at me and thinking "after all that rebellion, she turned out so normal." Or if they thought "wow, something's still odd about that girl."

That's a whole lot to pack into one dinner with some people I used to know. After all, that's what I do. I take a topic, and I think about it, and I unravel its edges, and I worry it some more, and then it's all a grungy, tangled mess in my brain. That tendency to sit in my (metaphorical) corner and overthink things is part of what fed my adolescent troubles, and twenty years later, I'm still doing it. Maybe in that sense, I haven't changed all that much. Maybe you can take the girl out of her black clothes (well, sort of), you can get her to grow out brunette and to exchange coffee for sleep---but you can't take the dark out of the girl.

However: my bathrooms are clean now.

Almost Long Enough To Be A Walk Down Memory Lane.

Saw this on Chris's blog and thought it would be fun. Steal if you want!

***20 YEARS AGO (1989)***
1) How old were you? almost 17
2) Who were you dating? In the eternal on/off relationship I had, I think we were OFF in March.
3) Where did you work? I didn't. Unless you count skipping school and hanging out at the park all day as work.
4) Where did you live? Springville, Utah
5) Where did you hang out? Kiwanas Park in Provo. A LOT. Also dance clubs, the basements of friends' houses. I did a lot of driving around by myself, drinking coffee and bawling.

6) Did you wear contacts and/or glasses? Yes, contacts. Since 3rd grade
7) Who were your best friends? Chris, Jennifer, Heidi, Lani
8) How many tattoos did you have? None
9) How many piercings did you have? 6---two on my left ear lobe, three on my right, and one on the top of my ear. That one HURT and I finally took it out six months later. I still have a scar there!
10) What kind of car did you drive? 1972 Ford Torino. Brown, with black plastic seats and an AM radio.
11) Had you been to a real party? Yes
12) Had you had your heart broken? Was in the process of it.
13) Were you Single/Dating/Taken/Married/Divorced? in love with someone who was never gonna love me back.
14) Any kids? No

***15 YEARS AGO (1994)***
1) How old were you? 22
2) Who were you dating? I was married!
3) Where did you work? WordPerfect
4) Where did you live? Orem, Utah
5) Where did you hang out? at home a lot---we'd just built our house the year before. Plus, I think we went to Los Hermanos at least once a week then, and twice a week very often.
6) Did you wear contacts and/or glasses? yes
7) Who were your best friends? Chris, Frank and Jessica, Mark and Brooke, James and Lisa
8) How many tattoos did you have? None
9) How many piercings di you have? Just down to 2 by now!
10) What kind of car did you drive? My favorite car we ever owned, a Honda Accord that was sort of a purple/taupe color. I loved that car and still wish we had it!
11) Had you been to a real party? Yes
12) Had you had your heart broken? Yes
13) Were you Single/Taken/Married/Divorced? Married
14) Any kids? No, but that was the year I got a cat for my birthday. Kendell still claims temporary insanity. (He detests cats)

***10 YEARS AGO (1999)***
1) How old were you? 27
2) Who were you dating? married to Kendell
3) Where did you work? I was a fulltime student
4) Where did you live? Orem
5) Where did you hang out? BYU library. I was in my last semester of college and needed to pile in another 18 credits.
6) Did you wear contacts and/or glasses? yes
7) Who were your best friends? Chris, Brooke, Jessica, Becky
8) How many tattoos did you have? None
9) How many piercings did you have? 2
10) What kind of car did you drive? White Camry #3.
11) Had you been to a real party? Yes
12) Had you had your heart broken? Yes
13) Were you Single/Taken/Married/Divorced? Married
14) Any kids? Yes---two, and I was unknowingly pregnant with Nathan

***TODAY (2009)***
1) How old are you? almost 37
2) Who are you dating? Married to Kendell
3) Where do you work? the public library
4) Where do you live? Orem
5) Where do you hang out? At home whenever I can!
6) Did you wear contacts and/or glasses? yes
7) Who were your best friends? Chris, Becky, Jamie, Wendy, Candace, and some other great friends! I still keep in touch with Jessica and Brooke, too!
8) How many tattoos did you have? none
9) How many piercings did you have? 2
10) What kind of car did you drive? Toyota Sienna or the Corolla, depending on who's driving furthest that day
11) Had you been to a real party? yes, but not for a long time
12) Had you had your heart broken? Twenty years later, that's an interesting question. It's broken many times and in far different ways than I expected when I was almost 17. I thought only boys could break you---man was I wrong!
13) Were you Single/Taken/Married/Divorced? Married
14) Any kids? 4 kids. I'd have one more but Kendell is absolutely, completely, and utterly finished.

A Lot of Significance for Just a Pair of Boots I Didn't Buy

On Saturday, Haley and I went to the mall. We had some returns and exchanges to do, and managed to find some excellent bargains—she swapped her too-small slippers for some that fit and she liked better anyway. She used the money from returning two shirts she didn't like (I’d bought them before I’d been informed that the Limited 2 is way too babyish for her now) to buy one pair of shoes she loves. She even had enough extra to pick up a few things at her new favorite store, Deb. Excellent bargains for me especially, because all of that exchanging meant I was out only about eleven bucks and came home with a happier daughter.

While she was trying on her perfect new shoes, I tried on a pair of boots. When I saw them on the shelf, I had a little heart flutter, and the palpitations weren't because of the giant 60% off sign. They were black, about mid-calf height, and laced up all the way, with a tough shape. "I don't have anything to wear with those," I kept telling myself, "why would I buy them?" But I tried them on anyway; I couldn't talk myself out of it. As I was tying them, I realized that I loved them immediately because my teenage self would have loved them. I would have worn them with black tights, and a short black skirt, and the black suede jacket with fringe I wish my pre-Kendell boyfriend would've let me keep. They’d’ve made me feel tough, like I could take on the world. Like no one could hurt me because, hello: look at my footwear. No one who wears these boots could be vulnerable. I would have loved those boots when I was 17.

At 36, though, I’d just look silly.

Plus they were too big for my calves.

I didn’t buy them, but the boots were a sort of answer to a question my psyche’s been picking at. About a month ago, Haley made a Facebook page for me. And then, a few days later, I started getting friend requests from people I knew in high school. When those names started popping up in my inbox, along with the innocuous title "friend request," a strange slurry of emotion rose up in my throat. There were requests from a few people I knew, and was sort-of friends with, in elementary school. Requests trickled in from people who were my friends in middle school and then, abruptly, simply weren’t. (I have a theory that the movie Cujo, which I rented for my 12^th birthday party, is to blame for the abruptness. It was a Beta copy, after all.) Some from people who wouldn’t have said hello to me in the halls at high school. Why were they putting me on their friends list? Was it some sort of trick? Would they think I was pathetic if I accepted their request?

I mentioned this to my sister on Christmas and she said something important. "You have to remember that people change, Amy." Have I changed? Not enough to trust them. I mean, I still accepted them as my Facebook friends. Curiosity over how people turned out trumps distrust. But even stranger were the friend requests that come from people I was friends with in high school, only things turned out badly. Accepting those people’s friend requests, and emailing with them a little bit, brought my question to mind: what part of me is still that high-school girl who desperately wants to belong somewhere but simply doesn’t? She is still in me, I’m certain, influencing things. I still probably make some decisions from that part of myself. I still wish I had that certain thing that most people have. Call it normalness, or social skills, or popularity even. Connecting with old high school acquaintances has reminded me that I’ve not ever been that person who is essential to things, the one that no one forgets. The one everyone wants to be friends with.

But I didn’t buy the boots.

And, leaving the mall, I felt a curious sort of happiness. I don’t have to buy the boots I loved when I was seventeen. I am more than that desperately-wanting-to-be-loved sixteen-year-old. I have changed, too. I’ve learned that people are going to hurt me, no matter what sort of armor I wear (be it all black clothes and tough boots or the more subtle toughening of my heart). I’m starting to learn how to deal with that fact, and what to do with the hurt, and even how to not let it make me bitter. Just starting. And maybe the changes haven’t drawn me any closer to being that person, the necessary person, but I have, somewhere in the years, made peace with the idea that I won’t ever be her. It is enough to be necessary to the handful of people I am necessary to. I can’t say that I don’t still have my dark and twisty teenage self still here, influencing me. In all honesty, I think that part of myself has a strength I need, despite the damage she also holds. I don’t want her to go away completely. The change, though, is that I’ve been able to become more than she was. Not in money, or worldly success, or even in the amount of friends I have—not in the way you desire to change when you’re a teenager. But there’s got to be some value in starting to make peace with who I am, stripped of everything worldly.

Good to know I don’t need the boots like I used to.

The Police: A Concert Review of Sorts

This summer marks the 20-year anniversary of my friend Chris and I meeting. Something far larger than me made sure we were in the same group at our telemarketing jobs, and we became instant friends—kindred spirits, you might say. She was one of my adolescent years’ biggest blessings; it is hard to explain what she means to me. Like no one else in my group of high-school friends, she had my back. She knew me and loved me and even took care of me when I was at my most unlovable phase. She is the keeper of all my past secrets. But we don’t get to see each other enough, now that we’re all grown up. So when the chance came up—even though I felt guilty about leaving my kids for the night—I went to The Police concert with her.

And I am so glad I did.

Because going to a concert like that reminds me of how it felt to be my old self. The scents of beer, cigarette smoke, bodies, warm grass, surrounded by pieces of conversation and laughter, and then the music: a sensory time-machine that made me remember things I forgot I had forgotten. I kept thinking that everyone else should be there, not just me and Chris, but all the friends I had sloughed off of me through processes of betrayal and back-stabbing. In between the opening act (Elvis Costello, who did a cool version of "Allison" with Sting himself) and the main event, we set off to find the bathrooms but instead actually did discover an old friend, Jennifer. If Chris is the keeper of my old secrets, then Jenn is the keeper of my hardest self. During our senior year Jenn and I were always together (Chris was working in Maryland as a nanny then), rebellious and angry and stupid. I made many life-changing decisions that year, and the Amy Jenn knew was almost nothing like the Amy I am now.

Jenn and I both nearly cried when we saw each other. Maybe we both felt the same way: that the other held memories that almost no one else does. What I wanted the reunion to feel like was equal, three old friends comparing life stories. A scene from a book. Instead I felt vaguely ashamed of my current existence, the smallness of a small-town librarian and mother. What happened to all that fiery ambition we both used to have? She’d done something with hers (ad-agency employee approving press passes and doing other glamorous things), but it was hard to confess I still haven’t managed to accomplish much. Plus, she’s still rail-thin (she always was) while I am...well, not.

After Chris and I said good-bye to Jenn (with promises of keeping in touch) and finally made it to the bathroom, I found myself thinking about that Amy I used to be, the one whose environment was founded in rebellion-as-religion. My greatest contempt was for people who seemed to be pretending. (Still is, really.) And yet, standing there surrounded by ghosts, dancing a bit to "Message in a Bottle," I wondered: when was I pretending? Was my down-with-church, vodka-drinking self who I really am? Or is it the person I am now, trying to live my religion and be a good mother, feeling guilty over not achieving housewifery-goddesshood? They are two nearly black-and-white different versions of myself, and I’m not sure which is the authentic one.

But what I did decide: I wasn’t ever pretending when it came to music. That is the truest face of my goth-girl incarnation, loving good music. How many concerts have Chris and I gone to together? Erasure and Boingo and Depeche Mode and INXS and Book of Love. Jenn and I, too: PIL, Peter Murphy, Ministry at the Speedway Café. I still listen to a ton of the same music I listened to at 17, or to musicians who were influenced by those bands. It wasn’t until the first encore, though, that I remembered just exactly what I loved most about The Police: their song "King of Pain." When they played it, another mini time-travel machine shoved me back to my despondent adolescent nights, when my soul really did feel like a black spot caught up there. It is good, despite my unsurity of authenticity, to no longer feel that black despair.

Twenty years ago, when Chris and I went to see Erasure together, going to a concert wasn’t just about the music. It was also about keeping an eye out for spottings of The Boy (the one you loved beyond reason or hope), or perhaps even sitting with him for a few minutes and feeling that never-to-be-repeated feeling of pure, hormone-edged adoration; about illegal substances snuck into the concert in the hidden inner pockets of leather jackets; about wild abandon. Now, of course, it’s about hanging out with old friends and telling yourself you deserve an evening away, worrying about traffic afterwards, checking the cell phone for missed calls from the kids. And about old friendships themselves, how they carry that unseen bundle of memory and old selves. How they matter as much because of the past as of the present. But it’s still about the music, how it weaves, somehow, around nearly every one of those old memories and old selves. Along with Chris, it was music I took with me from that Amy version, and I am glad to have both.