For My Writing Group E-zine

I started reading Anita Diament’s The Red Tent last week. I had discovered that my time on the elliptical machine went exponentially faster if my nose was buried in a book while my shoulder was against the grindstone. I discovered this fact while reading Annie Proulx’s book, That Old Ace in the Hole, but after a few sessions on the elliptical, I devoured the rest of the book over a weekend. I promised myself that I would only read The Red Tent while I was exercising, hoping that the allure of a good book would get me to the gym more often.

It worked. I went every day last week, reading about 20 pages at each 30 minute workout. Unfortunately, I had no plans last night, so I stayed up late and finished the book.

The Red Tent is one of “those” books. You know the kind. The ones where you can smell the river, feel the sand in your mouth. Those books that make you cry at the end, the emotional release necessary at the end of any love affair, because that is what the end of a good book is, the end of a love affair.

I loved the Red Tent because it was about the bonding of women, the stories of women, the need of women to tell their stories. I felt Leah’s hunger for a girl to pass her stories down to, I feel the same need myself. Although I can type my stories into the page of the computer, how do I show the computer the nuances of oatmeal cookies and my grandmother’s fudge? It’s not the same. I cannot celebrate the computer’s first menstrual cycle with memories of my own.

Instead, I joined Women Writing for (a) Change. I had heard about this group of nuns who encouraged women to write for years before I saw them read their work at the Muse Concert in the fall of 2003. I signed up and paid my deposit during the intermission. I entered my first circle of smiling faces on January 26, 2004.

I wrote tentatively at first, carefully following Kathy Wade’s writing prompts, doing my homework, coming to class with four copies. I was happy if I wrote one story, usually about a page long. I remember the first time a story spilled over to the second page, crossing the line on the computer screen.

One day, the damn burst and the words just started coming…and coming…and consuming my thoughts. I did readback lines in my sleep. Every thought was a metaphor, an alliteration. I woke up thinking of words, I went to bed composing haiku’s. It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life.

I read my work and people listened. The women listened. They sighed at the end of my stories. I flushed with pride.

I listened to the words of sister writers. I sighed at the end of their stories. I flushed with pride. To be in such company.

When Mary asked me to attend a Strategic Planning meeting for a Capital Campaign, I was curious, but not surprised. Every nonprofit needs accounting help. It turns out she didn’t need accounting help. She needed energy. She needed enthusiasm. She needed people who understood the value surrounding the circle and would assist in spreading that value into perpetuity.

I had no intention of taking a leadership role. I enjoyed my anonymity at Women Writing for (a) Change. I was in charge in every other aspect of my life…at home, at work, in caring for my aging mother. It was nice to have an activity as just a participant. I wanted to help. Afterall, I had received so much already in my short time at the school, but I was already so busy, being a mom, running my firm, caring for my mother, looking for the perfect man…

When Mary Jo opened the third meeting with a desire for a volunteer chair, I shrank in my chair. But then she started describing the job. She needed someone who liked to show off in front of large groups of people. I love to show off, regardless of the size of the audience. She needed someone to run the Strategic Planning meetings. I have lots of experience running meetings. She needed someone who would enjoy talking to the press and who could think on her feet. Why, I was pretty good at that, too. I surprised no one more than myself when I raised my hand.

Some of you might be thinking like I did, might be thinking that you’d like to help, but what with the kids, and the spouse and all the other draws on your time, you just don’t know what your contribution could possibly be. We have a place for you. We have a job for you. We need your help. We want your help. You can help.

We have listed the chairs of the various committees. Every single committee we have could use an extra hand, an extra head to problem solve, and extra voice to make phone calls. If you don’t want to talk to the committee chairs, talk to me. I’ll put you to work. I will put you to work side by side with the women of Women Writing for (a) Change. We are creating our own Red Tent, a place for women to relax, to become themselves, to find their voices and to raise those voices to the rooftops.

Trust me, you will love every minute of it.

Ordinary

She wakes before her alarm, after dreams of calico kittens and tethered bridges swaying across canyons. She pulls on her slippers, her ragged morning clothes, and rouses her sleeping children. The microwave sings her coffee to life. She sips the sweet morning music. Just another ordinary day.

With a “brush your teeth” and “comb your hair” and “don’t forget your trumpet”, she whisks her ten year old off to school. Clutching his lunch money and shouldering his backpack, he gives nary a wave goodbye nor backward glance after perfunctory “have a good day” and “I love you” s exchanged. Just another ordinary day.

House quiet, coffee weaving olfactory webs, she stares at the blank page of the computer screen. When the words come, which they often do, she closes her eyes as her fingers fly across the keyboard, software correcting her spelling. When they don’t come, she furrows her brow and reads the words of others. Fickle lovers, those phrases. Embracing arms that cocoon her in warmth one day, leave her shivering and alone on others. Today, she has something to say, in between phone calls and recalcitrant teenagers with tummy aches. Just another ordinary day.

She showers and dresses, a staff meeting on the agenda for the day, a chance to reconnect with women she loves like sisters. Her work back burners concerns of silent cell phones and empty email boxes. She stops at the grocery, stops at the nursing home, stops at the gym to work that flab into frenzy. Somedays, she never stops.

Porkchops sauteing, broccoli simmering, pasta boiling on the stove, she slices strips of pear to complete her dinner preparations. Three hungry boys and the kitchen clock tick tocks the time left until they are grown and gone, following closely on the calloused heels of her own youth. Just another ordinary day.

Slipping between the sheets, she checks her alarms, settles down, snores to the lilting lullabies from the playlist she created for him. Mostly, her sleep is peaceful. Night sounds whistle and moan in her oblivious slumber. Just another ordinary day sliding into another ordinary night.

THIS is her life.

This IS her life.

This is HER life.

This is her LIFE.

Passage

Every night, I floss my teeth, brush my teeth, wash my face and put on all this fancy Mary Kay face stuff before I climb into bed. Every morning, I slap the alarm, sleep an extra 15 minutes, climb out of bed, make my bed, make coffee, wake the boys and check my email. Every week, I remind Kevin to take out the trash, I clean my kitchen counters, I do the laundry, I go to my writing class. Every month, I pay bills, balance my check book, read the Sun Magazine and go to my discussion group.

And so I mark the passage of time.

My youngest son’s head steadily creeps higher and higher, ominously closer to the height of my own as I pull him in for a morning hug. My drive to work encompasses the bare branches of the trees and the bushes, and my mind moves back to the summer when I admired their lush green, and the fall with their rich reds and yellows, and I am reminded that soon, the greening will begin again and the cycle goes on and on and on.

And so I mark the passage of time.

Today feels alone, but not necessarily lonely. Lonely has been a companion of mine, has watched the passage of time with me and shaken her critical finger, but lately, she seems to have found another friend.

I embrace the alone, long to love it.

My garden awaits me, hungers for my caress. The winter chill still keeps me inside, but like imprisoned passion, we gaze at each other, hands outstretched, our hearts quickening at the thought of the pleasures awaiting us in each other’s company once the weather warms. It won’t be long. The flowers will come. Scott will cut the grass every week. The days will lengthen. The star studded nights will quicken my heart. The calendar turns and I turn with it.

And so I mark the passage of time.

Thoughts on Life, Love and the Secret to Everlasting Happiness

I have struggled at the page the past few months, as my infrequent posts have attested. Most of this is due to the malevolent force that now reads my blog through a litigical eye, but it’s also due to my own reticence of posting about my love life.

Or lack thereof.

Or….abundance thereof, depending on how you look at things.

I have spent the past 40 days doing a spiritual exercise relating to abundance. Sort of, abundance training, abundance reprogramming. In this exercise, for forty days, I meditated on 10 principles of abundance, and then I wrote about the meditation. By virtue of the principles of multiplication, as you would logically deduce, over the course of the 40 days, each principle was considered 4 different times.

It’s amazing how good I feel after those 40 days.

Much of the training has to do with accepting Divine Love and reprogramming yourself to accept that the Goddess is within each of us, which makes each of Goddess-like.

I am a Goddess.

The Goddess within me is the source of my own abundance, and I have only to trust in that abundance.

All that you want to be, you’ll be in the end…Moody Blues…or something like that

I bought myself a bookcase for Christmas. On the day after Christmas, in a burst of inspiration, I opened the box and pulled out the makings of the bookcase. I read the directions.

They made me sick to my stomach.

I couldn’t do this. I’m not mechanically inclined. I needed a man to help me.

I asked the Wedding Guy to help me. He happily accepted…except he lives in Columbus and has only been down here once since the wedding, and I wasn’t ready for him to meet my boys.

I asked Mickey to help me. He happily accepted…except that meant I would have to call him and arrange a time and I just never got around to that.

I asked Robert to help me. He happily accepted…except Robert doesn’t drive and every time we got together to do something, it was clear on the other side of town.

I asked the Last First Date guy to help me. He happily accepted…except I don’t see him very often and when I do, I usually forget all about assembling a bookcase.

So the bookcase lay in pieces on the carpet in my bedroom. I would gingerly pad around it in my bare feet on my way from the bathroom to my bed at night, stepping carefully over the boards. I powered up the electric screwdriver, arranged the pieces to match the picture on the instructions, but that’s as far as I ever got.

Truth be told, every time I looked at that sprawled out bookcase, it made me sick to my stomach. It seemed so beyond my capabilities, on the one hand, but I also hated the thought that I couldn’t do it myself.

I put the damn thing together yesterday.

It took me probably three hours, start to finish.

I’m so fucking proud of myself.

The real accomplishment, though, is not in the construction of the bookcase, but in learning to be happy with Betty, just as Betty, not as a part of a couple involving someone else. It has been three years since I was in a “relationship”. Three years. And during those three years I focused ungodly amounts of energy trying to change that aspect of my life. I turned off the flow of prospective suitors in November after I hit fifty first dates in a year, and through the end of 2005, that stream slowed to a trickle, finally stopping with the Last First Date in January.

By some unseemly miracle, there are still three men on the periphery of my life. I stopped trying to prod any of them towards anything other than what they were. On the periphery of my life. Not center stage, not even on the stage. Backstage.

If the Universe has plans for any of them as something more, then I’m sure it will happen. If the Universe plans for them to fade into the sunset, then I will simply take 2006 off, giving my heart a well deserved rest. I had a dateless weekend last weekend, this next weekend looks like more of the same, and the first weekend in March is shaping up to be a VERY busy weekend. Such is life.

I’m okay with that. I’m enjoying my time off. Which is not to say that I don’t look forward to kissing all three of these men, fickle female that I am.

I have made no commitments to anyone…other than myself.

Don’t ask me to choose. I’m abdicating that responsibility. I like all three of them.

I’m trusting a power greater than myself to guide me.

And right now, she’s saying, “Take it easy, Betty.”

I’m gonna take it easy.

Chronicles

I am becoming friends with my mother, now that I have coffee with her several times a week, now that I am not in a caretaking role. We sit together as friends, as we once did when I was in college and we lived together. Our relationship changed when she moved in with me in 1986 and I assumed more of a caretaking role. I didn’t like that role. It soured our friendship. I was frustrated by my mother’s weaknesses, primarily because I was afraid of becoming like her and because it was my mother’s weakness that allowed my father’s atrocities to go on for so long. She was not the cause of the violence, the assault on the innocence of all four of her daughters, but she enabled him to pursue his sickness for decades without so much as a hint of consequence. I have had trouble forgiving my mother for that.

One of the byproducts of my coffee breaks with my mother is the discovery that over the past several years, my mother had developed a new hobby. She spends the bulk of her time watching television, old movies on Turner Movie Classics in particular, and the stars of those old films have become her best friends. Never much of a socialite, her later years have been spent sharing meals and laughter with the likes of Clark Gable and Betty Davis. In keeping with these forged friendships, my mother started keeping a journal chronicling the deaths of these old friends of hers. She doesn’t scour obituaries. Other than myself and my children, she knows almost no one in Cincinnati, despite having lived here for twenty years. She watches the news, instead, and with precise detail, records the deaths of the one time movie greats. She has accumulated five years’ worth of celebrity demise. Of course, she also records when any of her childhood friends pass away, or any of her relatives, but mostly, the books contain details of the lives of friends she has never met.

She gleans whatever information she can from the news reports; birth dates, date of death, cause of death, rise to fame, listing of movies, marriages, children and anything else she can recall from the talk shows and newscasts or her own still vivid imagination and memory. She writes it all down in her journal.

For Christmas this past year, she asked me for supplies to upgrade her celebrity archives. She asked for a three ring binder, with lined paper, and tabs so that she could organized the pages. And red ink pens. Certain information needed to be written in red ink. I was afraid to ask what.

My brother called me at work at 3:30 on Thursday, February 9, 2006. Anita, my office manager, called out to me, “Betty, your brother on line 1.”

I was pretty sure he wasn’t calling me to wish me an early Happy Valentine’s Day. My brother calls on occasion, just to say hi, and although I call him at work just to chit chat once in awhile, he never has. I was pretty sure I knew what he was going to say. We had talked a week before. He had asked for permission to issue a “Do Not Resuscitate” order for my father, who had been failing fast over the past few months.

Personally, I thought that order should have been issued 30 years ago, but I kept that to myself.

With a broken voice, Roger said, “Betty, I don’t know quite how to tell you this, but Dad died about 10 minutes ago.”

I said the usual stuff, asked if he was ok, asked for the details of what happened, told my brother I loved him, told him I would tell Mom, asked if he wanted help in telling the rest of our siblings. I agreed to call Kathy and John. Roger would tell Evie and Roberta.

I hung up the telephone, sat for a minute in stunned silence. It was finally over. It was over. He was gone. The tears started, the relief was indescribable. I was not sorry he was gone. But emotions of all sorts make me cry, and I didn’t want to cry alone. I got up from my desk and went to find Michelle. She held me while I slobbered all over her shoulder. My dear, wonderful Michelle. My business partner, my good friend, the one person in my life right now who really gets what I go through, who understands the tricks our minds play on us.

My tears didn’t last long. It was February, and we work in an accounting firm. It was Thursday, and we had 12 audit reports due to Ohio Capital the next day. We had already submitted half of them, but the other half were on my desk or close to it and I had to get them finished before I could leave. I also had a proposal for a huge audit that was due the next day that I hadn’t even started.

It sounds harsh, reading this now, that I would even think of work when I had just learned that my father had passed away. I hadn’t seen him for four years. The last time I saw him, his first words to me were a request for money. I had said goodbye to my father many, many years before, perhaps before I could even talk.

I stayed at the office until 9:00pm, finishing up everything that couldn’t wait until Tuesday. I drove directly over to the nursing home, arriving around 9:30. I’d never been to the nursing home that late. All was quiet. No residents sprawled in wheel chairs in the hall. No tentative stepping ladies with walkers navigating the carpeted walk ways. Just quiet.

I walked into my mother’s room. She and her roommate were still awake watching Betty Grable on Turner Movie Classics. Mom was smiling at the television screen. I pulled my chair close to my mother’s bedside, took her hand in mine and waited for her to turn her eyes to me. When she did, I spoke softly, saying, “Mom, Dad died this afternoon.”

Her eyebrows furrowed together and she gripped my hand a little tighter.

“He did?” she questioned. “What time?”

“Around 3:15” I answered.

“What did he die of?” Her voice quivered in the quiet.

“Roger said he just stopped breathing. You know he wasn’t doing well at all these past few weeks.”

She nodded her head. One tear shimmered across her cheek. She leaned back in her bed and looked at me, a thousand words passing between us, unsaid. This was her husband of twenty three years, the father of her five wonderful children, the man she divorced thirty years before. She sighed audibly.

“Well,” she said, “Hand me my book.”

A Seven Month Gift Certificate

As you may remember from this post, my father almost died in July. He redeemed his gift certificate today. At the age of 74, he gave up the fight this afternoon. May his soul rest in peace.

I will write more later. This is a complicated time for me. He was not a nice man, in fact, he was down right evil. The havoc he wreaked in my life, the lives of my sisters, the lives of my step sisters, the lives of who knows how many others, will have long reaching effects for decades and generations to come.

I don't think he ever intended this to be his legacy, but it is what it is.

How does one write a eulogy for someone like this? Good parts of me come from him, as do good parts of my siblings. Perhaps I focus on that. But to ignore the horror of our childhoods feels like an invalidation of the little girl who will now be able to sleep a little easier.

Valentine's Day-Last Year

I wrote this after Valentine's Day last year. This year is likely to be a little different, but one never knows. I survived last year, I'll survive this year, regardless what the universe sends. My boys are already discussing their plans.

I'm one lucky woman, regardless.


Women Writing for (a) Change
February 15, 2005
Elizabeth J. Winters Waite

Love

Even as a child, I had a plan for Valentine’s Day. I wrote poems for my friends, told them I was doing it, so they would feel honor bound to give me a valentine. It usually worked. There was no fate as tragic as a cardless Valentine’s Day. I still believe that.

I do not have a boyfriend this year, despite having set a record last week for four first dates in one week. I liked one of them, he hasn’t called since Thursday…. So, I was faced with the unfaceable, Valentine’s Day, without a Valentine. But, I had a plan. I have three sons, three sons who are handsome and kind and sensitive and who love their mother. Could that be enough? I thought so, but only if I worked it just right so that I didn’t feel deprived…or is it depraved?...

This was my plan. I would buy each of my boys a wonderful Valentine’s Day gift. Each of them had had a gift on their Christmas list that, combined with their other gifts, exceeded Santa’s budget. Perfect, I didn’t even have to ask them what they wanted. I told the boys I was buying them a gift for Valentine’s day, and that they should plan on getting me something. Hell, I’d even let them borrow my credit card if they wanted to pool their funds and get me something glittery from the jewelry counter at Target…hint hint. I told them each not to make plans, that I was going to have a fancy dinner that evening….steak and asparagus and wild rice and, an unexpected treat in the Waite house….cake, when it was no one’s birthday. The boys thought that was a great idea.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit jittery about this plan. I mean, I love my boys, deeply and passionately, but would it suffice? I was stewing about this on Sunday as I was driving in my car to pick up my son from a friend’s house. Did I mention that my period was due in three days? And I’m not on the pill anymore so the full force of my hormones were raging inside my sometimes neurotic head.

Now see, the plan was unraveling as we spoke. The plan had been to have all three boys, together, lovingly picking out a tasteful gift that I could ooh and aah over the next day. But Scott had to go bowling, and Kevin was at a friend’s. I had decided that it would be fine for Greg to pick out the present. I just couldn’t pick it out myself.

Greg, bless his heart, made the mistake, as he was getting into the car, of asking me if I was going to buy him the Nintendo DS that apparently I mentioned in passing a month ago I might buy him for Valentine’s Day. Its funny, but I could feel the monster rising inside me. I turned my monster head, feeling the scales popping out behind my neck and said, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Greg said, “You could buy it at Target. Its right there, we are passing it. You could buy the game system at Target, and there’s a game I want that I could buy, too.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Greg. It’s a gift. You don’t ask about gifts. You simply receive them gracefully and you give one back. You don’t ask what the person is going to give to you. You wait. Until you get it. Then you like it, regardless of what it is. Do you understand, young man?”

“Jeez, Mom, I was just asking because we are driving right by the store.”

“That’s right, we are driving right by the store, we are not going in, because this is so outrageous, Gregory Douglas Waite. You don’t quiz people about what they are buying you.”

Just then I realize, that we are driving by the store, and I will not be getting a Valentine’s gift! I already had the gifts for the three boys. By driving by the store, I would not get a gift! But it was too late. I was already in one of my PMS moods and an army of handsome hunks couldn’t have dragged me into the store at that point.

“Mom, why are you getting so mad about this?”

“I’m angry because gift giving is a two way street. Its not all about getting, it about giving, too. Here, I have made such an effort to get you Valentine’s Day gifts, and you boys have made no effort at all!”

“How do you know that, Mom? How do you know that! Sometimes, Mom, you make assumptions about people that just aren’t true.”

Oh..MY..God…it was one of those horrific parenting moments. Even through the fog of my hormones I could see that I had been wrong, that I had made a dreadful mistake, that I would have to ….gulp…apologize to my son.

“I’m sorry, Greg, you’re right. I shouldn’t make that assumption.”

Silence.

“Greg?”

“Yeah?”

Back came the PMS monster.

“When someone says I’m sorry, usually one says I’m sorry back.”

Sigh.

On Valentine’s Day, my two older boys had a choral concert. Kevin and I listened proudly. We had a late dinner after the concert…standing rib roast, au gratin potatoes, peas and cake. The menu changed when I ran out of time and didn’t make it to the grocery store. We opened our gifts. The boys were delighted. I got a DVD from Kevin, a necklace from Scott and flowers with this poem from Greg. It was my best Valentine’s Day ever.

The Word Of My Mom

My Mother's words are soft,

But a gentle breeze,

And when she decides to yell,

All feel the gentle beast,

The status of my mom,

Could be referred to as saint,

But you can just call her Betty,

To her it’s all the same,

My mom’s not about titles,

Or judging book covers,

She’s more about love,

This is the word of my mother,

The words that she speaks,

Turn into writings without flaw,

I feel sorry for those,

Who’ve not heard the word of my mom

By: Your loved and loving son,
Greg