My Grandfather's Table is a story that flows between the nurturing, love, and nourishment that was freely given me as a child, against the shame and struggle of untold secrets.  I suppose it's fitting that my trip across country to attend a Laura Munson Haven Retreat would be a story of contrasts as well. 

The train ride out wasn't so bad, despite the fact that I was planted in coach for thirty plus hours. Thirty-four, to be exact. Which would prove nothing compared to the trip home, but that was only a whisper in my mind at the time. 

I arrived in Whitefish, Montana after midnight, and secured my rental car key from the little honor-system lock box inside the early twentieth century, sturdy and somehow familiar brick of the train station. I hit the unlock button on the keyfob, the lock button, and caught sight of lights waiting for me less than half a block away. I slogged, slipped and slid my way through the alleyway. The task was complicated by my heavy laptop backpack/purse and the tether of large suitcase and smaller matching carryon my seasoned business traveling husband had rigged up for me. 

I am not seasoned for business travel in the least, though here I was doing it. I was sweating beneath my layers, at the same time each intake of breath felt like menthol against my teeth as I hauled too much gear, alone, in the dark, in a strange town, to a waiting rental car, to drive myself about twenty minutes to a Super 8 in Kalispell that I prayed would be clean and ready for my arrival. And it was, despite Laura's disappointment at my interim location. "You're here to experience Whitefish," a town she promotes and features with tangible and deserving pride in her book, "This Is Not the Story You Think It Is." 

This whole trip was a Candid Camera exercise in giving up control and attempting to shift some focus to myself and my writing: a mammoth task. I've been a stay-at-home mom for over ten years. I have been the chief decision-maker, gluten-free, non-toxic food-chooser, taxi-driver of my long-sought son's destiny, for nearly every moment of his eleven years outside of my body. It took six years of loss, disappointment, surgeries, charting, research, self-teaching & self-deprivation to bring him to existence. Letting go, leaving his admirable, albeit vacillating, sweet positivity at the prospect of Mommy being away for eight days for the first time in his or my twenty-seven year old daughter's, and twenty-five year old stepdaughter's lives, at times felt like he was being ripped out of me again. 

I've been a mother my entire adult life. It's my job, my joy, my lifeblood. The only things I've been longer than I've been a mother, are a daughter, a sister, a singer, and a sometimes writer. I haven't even been a wife longer than I've been a mother, because my husband and I met when our girls were five and three. And I didn't figure out the writer piece of my puzzling ADD brain until I was forty-five years old.  When, as our oldest two embarked on their individual tentative forays into adulthood, taking one to New York and the other to Florida, for the first time, what was a necessary choice (a move across country, briefly to California) for our youngest didn't feel like a good choice for the older two. 

Once again, here I was torn. This trip and the two weeks leading up to it felt like I was conjoined twins trying to keep one foot in what's always been--motherhood, wife, safe, control, not claiming my soul as a writer and not holding myself accountable to finish a book--and the other foot reaching forward to Destiny, to what has niggled, and at times shouted at me ever since my fifth grade teacher encouraged my writing. Occasionally it was loud enough to actually get me to sit down at a keyboard and do the work; to write the vortex of words and stories that swirled within me. For a time the ADD would be quelled, my sometimes quiet, sometimes feverish release finally giving up it's hold on my mind. But doubt and self-criticism and responsibility and disdain for the preposity, the frivolity of the idea of my non-collegeate self being a *Writer*, would inevitably return to reign once again. 

And the fear: the thought of writing about what's kept my story locked within me has seized me with steel-tipped talons. I know it's precisely what I must do to release the power it's had over me since I was five years old. Five is also when I sang my first solo in church. I was a very small singer with a big voice who couldn't form the words to tell my parents of the sadness that singed my memories of an otherwise happy childhood, that tinted them with the lens of shame and knowing too much. I can't see my story through, and therefore move forward without doing something big, something uncomfortable and unfamiliar, something that makes my skin prickle and my hackles raise at the financial nonsense of it, even as the other part of me plants its feet, crosses its arms and says through gritted teeth, "You must."  Another moment she’s gentle; she places her hands over mine, looks into my eyes in the mirror and says, "You know what you must do, you just don't want to face it." Words I've said to a friend before. I had to be my own friend, when as usual I didn't fully express to anyone the conflict that plagued me about taking this trip. 

The Friday before the Sunday I was to leave, I placed my first real paycheck in eleven years, for a new part-time endeavor as director, communications and media for Upright Farms, an exciting startup, on my husband's desk. I hadn't told him it was coming. He got choked up. I did, too. We embraced. With my family's intervention and unyielding support, pride and encouragement at the front end, I paid for my own travel expenses along the way. It felt a little Thelma & Louise. Like having choices. Like driving off a cliff but having one of those giant cushions meeting me at the bottom. I know that more will come. I know that I have the skills, the talent, and that I can deliver. 

And after this retreat that is Haven, that was a haven for my writer's soul, after placing myself in Laura Munson's, her business manager, David's, the other brilliant, open, talented attendees', our very capable and supremely talented vegan chef, Emma Love's, and Walking Lightly Ranch's grower, Wes's, warm embrace--after challenging myself with stepping away from what's comfortable and pressing through what's scary as hell, after learning about silence (a condition I always feel compelled to fill with too many words), and brevity (something I may never conquer, but awareness is the first step), I know that I can deliver on this memoir, on the many books that, when I grant myself permission to write, can't spring from my fingertips to meet ruffled and bound pages fast enough. 

Patience is key for me. Knowing and plodding and doing it despite what does or doesn't make sense is essential. Between writing, work compiling my first GANE Possible Publication which I hope to release late spring, blessed work, an audition and BEING CAST in Listen to Your Mother (our performance is this Thursday in Valparaiso, Indiana), it's taken me all this time to fully process my reentry into reality--to process what this chapter really meant to my life, to my future, to my family. It felt like I was away for a month. It's crazy that after two welcomed spring-like days, Michigan pines drooping with a March snow weeks later, these words finally began to release about a journey that took me to where conifers climb the sky.  I found myself at home as I wandered the Flathead Valley of northwestern Montana. A wrong turn in the glorious sunshine took me around glistening Flathead Lake, her gentle ripples revealing pebbles beneath a bit of lapping shoreline particularly close to the road. My heart sighed. Lake is so comforting to this Midwest girl. Much like Michigan, the entire Flathead Valley around Whitefish, Montana, is full of them.

I was eventually brave enough to set out to Glacier National Park, though not brave enough to walk alone into the woods.  There were a couple of cars, and two cross-country skiers eventually met me back at my car, but the creak of soaring cedars and icicles thawing kept me close to the lodge and to Lake McDonald, itself. I took a walk around, listened to timeless echoes of children playing among the now empty cabins, jumping off the dock into a lake that was currently hidden by snow and watched over by me and a lone, tilting, wordless snowman. I forced myself to breathe, to take it in, to revel in my new tentative and unfamiliar moments of freedom.  And silence.

Safely behind the wheel again, I drove to Whitefish, and enjoyed a delectable sushi dinner at Wasabi, where a beautifully framed review Laura wrote, watches over their entrance like a proud momma.  She should be proud.  Whitefish is a wonderful, throwback little town.  It’s people are warm, Huckleberries are everything they’re preported to be, and it’s home to warm gluten-free buckwheat crepes, at the crêperies, where I enjoyed them stuffed with smoked salmon and dill havarti, not once, but twice.  The second time a deserved bonus and a hearty, protein rich meal when my train was delayed from its morning departure.  I wouldn’t know until much later how fortunate I was to have enjoyed it. 

Despite the delay, which was ruled by a less than perfect $#!+storm of Montana's version of "blizzard,” 40-car freighter derailment and an avalanche in Glacier National Park all of which botched up all manner of travel from points west to Seattle, I made it home. Despite feeling more like livestock than passenger on an Empire Builder that had already traversed the frozen miles of tundra between Chicago and Shelby, Montana, where laden buses met from all points west to finally board--meaning things like the barely tolerable hygiene (sorta like camping clean, only worse) of a train on the way out crumbled to filth, empty soap dispensers, and insufficient food stores--I crept closer to Chicago, where my bleary-eyed son and coffee-fueled husband would collect me at 4:30 am, instead of 4 pm the day before, I am here.  

My two lunches in the dining car provided a chance to sit and talk with other passengers without guilt, without feeling like I was *supposed* to be writing on this train--a task which proved more difficult on the ride back. The combined lurching and noise induced a rare motion headache despite adopting earplugs as part of my permanent ensemble by around Fargo.

Even so, because of every bit of it, I am perhaps more here than I've ever been in my life. I couldn't wait to sleep in my own bed. I couldn't wait to make love to my husband. I couldn't wait to hug my son again and again, to talk to my daughters on the phone. 

My husband's prolific home cooking greeted me, leftover and spilling from the fridge.  He made crock-pot(?!) chicken into soup, pork BBQ, another grilled chicken and then turkey meatloaf upon my return.  Although I'm sure they didn't eat as many vegetables as I did, thanks to Emma Love, and as suspected they both had mild colds when I got home, they too survived and grew even closer. And I am reassured that one thing they wouldn’t do if left to their own devices for too long again (like when I'm on a book tour someday) is starve. It all tasted so much better than cardboard gluten-free crackers and tinned emergency meat made into chicken salad from mayonnaise, mustard and relish packets on a grimy, insufficiently stocked train. But even that tasted good at the time.

The sun, when it manages to shine this spring, is brighter. The day is new.  

Thank you, Amtrak, for bringing me home. I am better for having made this trek. Though if I am brave enough to revisit your mode in the future, or brave enough to apply for a do-over via #AmtrakResidency (they would’t be interested in my small potatoes—they’re looking for much bigger fish), which I still believe has legs, a sleeper car will be involved. I will not miss not sleeping among the roughnecks. Nor will I miss trying to find a non-existent soft spot for my hips, over a bar my coat can't possibly cushion between two coach seats. This warrior MommaWriter is too damn seasoned, now too worldly a "business traveler" for that nonsense, ever again.

What about you? Always dreamed of writing on a train? Did you? Would you apply for an #AmtrakResidency??  Do tell me about it in the comments!


Yours in Wellness Always,
--Kim Jorgensen Gane, (c) 2014, all rights reserved


I'm participating in a Blog Hop with Laura next week with a new post, but couldn't let another moment pass without acknowledging everything the experience with her in Montana has meant to me. So many brave, beautiful hearts!

It is midnight, with a looming government shutdown, and we are at an impasse over needed but flawed Healthcare Reform.

It seems like the appropriate time to address a response to my “Enlightened Middle Majority” post that I was shocked to find the week before I attended BlogHer’13 as a Voices of the Year Honoree in the op-ed category for precisely the post in question.  I deeply wished I’d Googled “Enlightened Middle Majority” long before the night I did so as a lazy way to link to my post.  I had to read Dani’s post of The Cute Conservative twice (maybe thrice), because the first time all I kept thinking was, "She said I'm a gifted writer!"  She called for me to be honest, so this is me, being honest:  Dani describes herself as a “bona-fide journalist,” who likely has a college education, and I'm *just* a mom, so I confess I was deeply honored by her assessment.

In light of recent events, I submit to Dani, however adorable, generous and gifted a writer she may be, that it is precisely the GOP’s denial of the existence of the Enlightened Middle Majority that cost them the last two elections. 

It is the failure to acknowledge that we are a powerful force that may well lose both the Republicans and the Democrats the next one.  If “the sides” continue to devalue and ignore us, and continue the unreasonable, childish, divisive nonsense of President Obama’s reign (and I include him in that assessment—we did not vote him King and high ruler, we voted for him to represent we, the people), future elections could be unwinnable by either side.  

AUTHOR UPDATE 10/15/13:  And apparently it's something we're talking about.

I believe 2016 is the year a woman can not only win, but it might be the year she should run as an independent [thinker].  Too many of us only continue to become more disillusioned with and disappointed in anything the Republicans or the Democrats traditionally represent.  Both sides need a time-out equally, because together they have been completely self-serving and ineffective and they’ve collectively left our country even more disabled than it was post-Bush.  

I am the girl who regularly felt like the only conservative in the room when she lived in California, and who often feels like the only liberal in existence back in her hometown.  I once balked at the idea of an open political debate, but I’m always free to vote my conscience once I close that proverbial curtain.   I remain frustrated and pissed off, and come time to vote again, I will remember, and my keyboard will continue to ring loud and clear.

This good, God-loving girl is deeply grateful to have come out of a public school system that had a fantastic English department, from which I actually managed to learn, despite not doing a lick of homework.  Had I done some of it, had I taken advantage of the one community college opportunity I did have, but walked away from because all I wanted to do was get out of Dodge and away from my stigmatized family, I often wonder what I might have been capable of, or had the confidence to purse, much earlier in life.  I couldn’t get back to Dodge fast enough, and my son will likely be a 4th generation graduate from that same public school.  Due to cuts in education and the stresses to the system I described in my “Enlightened Middle Majority” post, he won't likely receive the same preparation for written communication that I enjoyed despite myself.  I don’t know how colleges will decide whether or not he deserves to attend when this year his school has eliminated grades in favor of rubrics and matrixes and individual ”growth” assessments.  I guess it’ll be determined exclusively by who is lucky enough to afford it, which is looking like an only scarier prospect by then.  We still haven’t been able to help our second grown daughter.

I respect the position the Cute Conservative holds dear that comes from her religious upbringing, and would equally enjoy sharing a happy hour barstool and a couple hours of lively debate with her.  As long as we establish that being more pious doesn’t make her more deserving of God’s love than me, and it doesn’t mean she believes in God *more* than I do…only that she believes in a building and in a book, and in her interpretation of God, or the Universe, or whatever.  What I hoped to express in my post, something on which I think we agree, is that we can both live in this world, love God (or not) and love our country; neither of us any more or any less deserving of representation than the other.  

I am a complex creature.  We are all complex creatures.  For any number of reasons, many of us hold positions and beliefs that can be claimed by either “side” at any given time, but to answer her question, yes, I am passionate about the things in which I believe, just like she is.  

My frustration remains with the loudest voices being those to the farthest of any side, via the sensationalism that our media perpetuates for ratings.  Most importantly, from my first featured post, “My Friends Think I’m the Only Liberal They Know:  I Don’t Know What I Am,” “I’m deeply concerned about my ability to determine what the truth really is and to whom I should listen. If the Republicans are full of crap, and the Democrats are full of crap, and the media is full of crap, where in the world does the truth lie, and who the hell is shoveling it?”  (And who the hell knew anyone would read it?!)

Dani asked whether or not I am opposed to drilling for new oil.  I was opposed to and offended by the ridicule and Rudy Giuliani’s offish behavior that lead to the chant at the 2012 RNC that diminished something important to me—which lead me to feel that they could never hear me, would never listen.  

I presume I am like the vast majority of Americans, who are in favor of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, but I’m not willing to passively drink the drill-baby-drill Kool-Aid.  I am fully aware that the oil lobby pushes something we can probably most all agree on as a divisive issue meant to distract from our efforts toward biofuels, conservation and green jobs.  Hello.  They’re jobs.  And they’re not fracking up our earth.  To be fair, here is an excellent article on “The Truth About Fracking.”  As long as the “gassholes,” as Kevin refers to the frackers, are required to handle the waste water with better than best practices as some of the natural gas companies are forward-thinking enough to do, I’m becoming open-minded, and I most assuredly don’t want the feds fracking up the issue.  I’m from Michigan, heart of the Great Lakes, and I don’t believe it belongs here, where companies may or may not feel compelled to protect the precious resource the greatest collection of fresh water is to the entire country.  And I wonder often how green jobs could possibly be a bad thing, except for the fact that they don’t make the already most profitable industry in the world more money (and incidentally, according to Kevin, neither does fracking, so who really are the “gassholes” drilling up that debate)? 

Dani responded to the issue of abortion in her post, so here we go yet again.  And honestly, her implying that perhaps I’m less worthy of God’s love because of the position on abortion I share with many women and men, is the only problem I had with her otherwise thoughtful rebuttal.  

I try not to be a sheep.  I try to think and reason and live my life with awareness.  In the comments of “My Friends Think,” I said, “Why must everything be so black and white?  Liberal vs. conservative, welfare vs. being cut off completely, Christian men vs. "all" women.  Of course I understand that [it isn’t really men against women, but because we mostly hear from men on political issues,] liberals behave like they can swing the women's vote by saying conservatives are taking away abortion, and conservatives try to keep everyone in their corner by saying, ‘Watch out!  Pretty soon every woman will be entitled to a free abortion and she'll be doing it every other month because she'll be using it as birth control and you'll have to pay for it!’  Geez!  Can we just STOP already?”  And then in the comments for “Enlightened Middle,” I said, “But here we are getting mired in the issue of abortion once again [and again, and again].  We must ask ourselves, who benefits from constantly pushing the issue back in our faces?  Take abortion off the damn table.  Then see what happens, then see what we talk about and what, as a nation, we can accomplish.”  

Because--let me annunciate this very clearly so we can all understand, girls and boys--abortion was debated and decided, it’s an amendment to the constitution.  My life is not less important than the potential for life, and Christians simply don’t have the right to make that decision for me or for my daughters or for my nieces, based on their book’s and their place of worship’s religious morality, because not everyone shares it (I so wanted to capitalize that).  And who says their morality is best—oh, I know they do, loudly, even as funding that feeds many children and mothers that already live and breathe on this earth is again and again threatened.  None of us will really know until we get *up there,* if there is an up there, which I happen to believe there is.  I happen to believe that I will be judged as an imperfect human being that was created in his image on my life as a whole, not on one high moral position on this one issue, or even whether or not I, myself had an abortion.  

It might surprise Dani to know that I was once a thoughtful, smart, capable Midwestern girl with a good Christian upbringing—and then my Christian family fell apart and the bottom fell out.  I was raised singing in my church my whole childhood.  My grandmother held court in the front pew every Sunday, and was one of the driving forces that built the church of my youth.  She was also one scrappy lady.  When I became a single mother at twenty, my church had nothing to offer me.  No compassion or empathy was bestowed by anyone, except my grandmother.  She had forced her eldest daughter to give up a child for adoption.  She was glad that things were different for me—that I had a choice.  While my church may have smited me, this didn’t stop me from believing in God, and in fact, were it not for my strong belief in God, neither my daughter nor I would be alive today.  I hope I have taught my children to appreciate God in the world around them; to be kind, to be respectful of others, and especially to honor themselves, because I didn’t honor myself for many years.  

My first child saved me from myself and put me back on track and I have always put all of my children first.  But my life and everything I believed in, including myself and my Christian upbringing, was absolutely shaken for a long while.  I could never presume to make such a choice for any other woman.  And make no mistake; it is an issue of supreme importance to women, because it is about our bodies, our business, it is our lives that are changed and impacted most by choosing whether and when to have children.  Women and children live in poverty in vastly greater numbers than men, which has been the case all over the world and throughout history.

“The Church” is an EXclusive club rather than an INclusive one:  follow their doctrines; look alike, think alike, or risk being ostracized if you’re different or if you fall.  Home schooling is a largely Christian choice because it blocks perceived liberal teachers from the opportunity to infect Christian children with their wacky views.  Then they wonder what went wrong when a *good* Christian girl leaves the baby she didn’t understand she was having to die in a dumpster because she wasn’t taught sex education.   How many good Christian girls have crossed state or county lines to have secret abortions, and how many good Christian boys have paid for them?  Look at the devastating rate of suicide when, God-forbid, a promising Christian boy or girl turns out to be gay. 

Above all, I stand by my call for more common sense than I perceive here in politics and for peaceful, respectful discourse like I pray I’m delivering, to replace posturing and bullying, particularly when so much of that is greed-based.  That’s my problem with the whole system…perhaps it isn’t as much the two parties, as it is the lobbies that have made it nearly impossible to gauge what’s truly best for our country.  

We are a nation of hungry and seemingly no one has enough.  It’s all about beating the other guy and grabbing the *most* market share, and if possible, kicking the other guy completely out of the sandbox.  So yeah, I’m a let’s share the sandbox kind of girl, but I don’t think that’s being weak.  I think it’s being sensible.  There truly is enough sand for us all, but we need to position ourselves properly to claim our share of it.  I don’t need a bigger share than the next guy…I just need enough to take care of my family—which right now is a pretty scary proposition with all four of us adults currently unemployed.  I don’t think the next guy should have to give me some of his if I haven’t worked for it, but neither do I think he should be allowed to hurt others to get his.  Sadly, that’s precisely what goes on in the name of progress.  People are being hurt.  Our country is being hurt.  

Here’s another example about which I’m pretty passionate:  Infertility means that our species can’t reproduce, which ultimately equals extinction.  In recent years when we do manage to reproduce, 1 in 75 children between the ages of 6 and 17 present with some form of neurological deficit (encephalopathy, aka “autism”).  According to the people that live with them and know them best of all, the vast majority of children considered on the autism spectrum are not born that way; something in our society makes them that way.  I see a big problem there, and it’s a problem that isn’t being acknowledged by the powers that be, or adequately addressed with healthcare reform.  Look at how our system is taxed by aging and retiring Baby Boomers and be afraid, because we haven’t seen anything yet.  I live in a small town, there are far more rest homes here than it seems our small area should need.  When so many children become adults who can’t hold jobs, who tax the system further, whose parents are financially wiped out and completely used up from caring for them their entire lives, when marriages are further stressed and broken because of it…we don’t have a huge problem brewing, it’s here.  Where’s the acknowledgement?  Where’s the accountability?  

Big Changes need to occur where Big Food and Big Pharma and their cohabitation is concerned (ie, Food and Drug should not be one entity), and I don’t see that happening fast enough, because not enough people are talking about it, are even aware of it, and many still think it doesn’t apply to them.  

I want Big Food and Big Pharma held accountable for the toxic load of crap they have together foisted on our society, on women’s reproductive organs, and on our ever-increasingly damaged children.  I want to hear more people screaming about it in the streets, more parents crying foul and advocating for their broken children.  But many of them are too damn tired, and many others aren’t quite sure they know what they know because they’re bullied and badgered or bribed with coupons and left to feel inept, unworthy and guilty by judgy doctors and other parents and *studies* that are sponsored by government and Big Pharma.  The same guilty that made my Christian upbringing sensibility feel that maybe I deserved infertility.  I didn’t .  No one deserves infertility.  It is merely another condition of our broken society that needs healing, and my son is here to tell you that Obamacare isn’t the answer.  

I am in favor of further examination of healthcare reform before needed changes are adopted, for starters, because as it sits now, I feel it aims to take away my choices as a parent and as an American.  The math is beyond flawed when I will be fined because I can’t afford to purchase insurance.  I don’t even know what that makes me, besides pissed off and disappointed…besides vocal and willing to stand up now and be heard and my numbers counted because that’s where I think the Enlightened Middle Majority comes in.  Many of the answers aren’t black and white where issues like the environment and the future of our children that are already walking on this earth are concerned; they aren’t merely Democrat or Republican, Liberal or Christian, man or woman—they are American--which leaves us in a big fat crap shoot where tomorrow and the next election is concerned.   Enlightened Middle Majority to me means that with various issues I could be found leaning to either side of the aisle, that I can’t identify with one or the other, because, just like a marriage or a good debate, neither party can possibly be right all the time...and when they only want what they want when they want it, regardless of what’s truly right for America, it’s time for all the mommas of the world, Dani (mother or not) and me included, to deliver a serious time out to determine where in the middle the truth lies.

Large corporations (too many of them foreign-owned) are calling the shots and they’re calling them based entirely on greed and an agenda to get their guy elected.  Both “sides” are punishing Americans when things don’t go their way.  That’s a scary, scary situation in my book, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on, and that’s precisely where the Enlightened Middle Majority will no longer passively graze, oblivious.  We need to come together and be heard and be willing to fight in the most sensible and respectful and aware of ways--for America.

I began my freshman year of high school as a girl from a seemingly solid Midwestern family who regularly sang in church, and ended it as a girl whose parents were divorced, who no longer attended church, or believed in anything.  I was instantly re-imagined from protestant good girl to hapless promiscuous girl.  So it came as no surprise when I was barely out of teenagerhood, and I suddenly had to reinvent myself as a single mom.  Later on, I met the man who would become my husband and my daughter’s daddy, and then I had to learn to co-parent, and to be a step-mom.  Some years later, my husband wanted to open a restaurant, and I became a restaurateur, and too soon a solo-restaurateur, when he accepted a job offer in his field that took him on the road for much of most weeks.

Then a new reinvention came after we closed our restaurant and I became a somewhat (OK, maybe radically) possessed researcher of holistic healing which helped me to overcome my infertility and finally have the baby I’d longed six years for.  That success brought about another reinvention when I had to learn how to parent teenagers and a high needs infant at the same time.  All my thinking had to shift when I had to parent that infant in very different ways than I’d parented my girls.

Reinvention isn’t anything new in my life, though its process never occurred to me until recently with the ultimate reinvention:  Midlife Crisis.

Many of those previous reinventions occurred as reactions to the actions of others or to situations.  They didn’t happen from a place of self-discovery, and they weren’t in the least motivated by any sense of seeking, or of finding myself.

Looking inward began when we moved across the entire country from both of our daughters, and from any of the female support system I’d enjoyed and relied upon for much of my adult life.  Moving from Michigan to California wasn’t anything I ever imagined I’d do, and it wasn’t anything I wanted to do.  I pouted and I wallowed that first year away.  I was so desperately alone, and because transition of any kind isn’t easy for me, my brain got confused and I forgot how to function.  My son got sick, and I couldn’t remember what to do to make him well.  I couldn’t grasp the brands of my favorite supplements, foods, any semblance of an action plan wherein I could see myself ever feeling normal again. 

I was completely mired in this dull, marine layer version of my life.  

I had no confidence, I knew no one, and no one seemed to care to get to know me.  I couldn’t fathom what I might tell anyone about myself anyway, because I lacked any identity there, or frankly anywhere.

My marriage was at its most difficult point ever, I disliked myself and my husband, and I was barely worthwhile as a mother to my son, let alone as a human being in the world.  When I couldn’t stand myself any longer, I began to think about reinvention from within.

No one knew me in California.  This was my chance to become anything I wanted to become.  There were no labels, there was no family history to define me, and there certainly were no expectations, never mind the fact that absolutely no one cared or gave me a thought anyway—they were too mired in their own version of survival, too stuck in their own traffic.  

How did I want to be remembered, and how did I want to impact the future for my children beyond their day-to-day care and feeding?  I could no longer survive as that person who put herself down and put herself last and who disbelieved in herself, and my deepest fear was that my husband and I wouldn’t survive at all. 

I wanted to go back to Michigan, but I didn’t want to do it without him.  I didn’t have a choice.  I had to make a life for myself in California.  I didn’t have many friends, so I needed to be my friend, and I hoped that would allow me to once again be my husband’s.  

For me, the answer was and remains writing. 

When your soul is that of a writer who isn’t writing, the stories are swimming in your head, whether you write them down or not.  You feel like a crazy person.  You talk to yourself, you talk to your dogs; you can’t get your bearing.  Even if the lake or the ocean is always west, you get off on the wrong exit on the freeway because your mind is cluttered with all the stories--you forget to pick up your kid, or you forget to clean dog puke off the carpet.   

I seem to have lost my funny from when I first began blogging, in part because a dual midlife crisis while raising a young boy is hard, but also because I’m not as afflicted with self-diagnosed ADD anymore, so I simply don’t screw up as much.  I’m focused and I’m driven.  I have a purpose and I have goals.  The stories don’t fester in my head as much, because they’re alive and breathing on my computer screen.  I wish my sense of humor wasn’t the thing I had to give up…but perhaps when life gets a bit easier, I’ll find it again.  And even though life still isn't easy, I feel more fulfilled and more content within myself than ever before.

Tell me in the comments, where are you on your path to being your own best friend?

It’s back to work, and I find myself still reeling, hung over, really, but not in an alcohol-induced haze, more in a mind-still-blown haze from my weekend spent with almost 5000 other remarkable women, and a few men, at #BlogHer13 in Chicago.

I say other, because one of the most remarkable discoveries, reminders, I got this weekend was that I, too, am a remarkable woman.  This is something I tell myself sometimes, but don’t really believe.

I go through the laundry list:  You had a child alone at the age of twenty, whom you raised alone for the first 7 years of her life, you owned and operated a restaurant as a white woman whose husband was only home on the weekends, in a 98% black, severely socioeconomically depressed city for three years, you usually successfully managed a blended family and raised two beautiful, loving, remarkable women, you healed your own infertility and successfully added a beautiful baby boy to the then teen his&hers daughters you already had, recovered him from and prevented further vaccine damage, and you survived a two-year stint an entire country away from said daughters, and used (half of) that time to grow and discover yourself and you didn’t (quite) manage to kill your husband (not my story to tell, yet).   

And then there’s the professional stuff that’s happened in the last two years:  you were featured on BlogHer 3.5 times, you submitted an essay which was accepted for inclusion in a book that’ll be out later this year, and the theme for that essay earned you a Voices of the Year Honoree nod from BlogHer.  You wrote and taught Creative Writing for Fourth Graders to your son’s class over three sessions, and spoke before the local Depression and Bipolar Alliance about the connection between gluten intolerance and depression, anxiety, bipolar, and neurodegenerative disease.  You have so much more in you, just busting to get out, and all the while, you’re working again on your novel about a woman dealing with infertility.  Almost forgot, you taught yourself and built two complete websites all on your own.

It’s everything, it’s so much, and yet it’s nothing compared to some women.  This struck me over and over again, particularly as I listened to the other Voices of the Year Honorees who read their beautiful pieces to us on a stage, emceed by none other than The Queen, Latifah, herself.

As I commented on Feminista Jones’ post about Queen Latifah emceeing the #BlogHer13 Voices of the Year Reception: 

“I have adored Queen Latifah ever since ‘Bringing Down the House,’ and probably well before.  For her heart, strength, humor, obvious intelligence, talent on SO many levels, and her spectacular beauty that is the antithesis of petite, she is a role model who tells me to be myself even when a huge part of me wants to hide because I'm not the size zero I once was.  My family placed far too much importance on looks.  It's been a battle to find the midlife value in my own heart and my own intelligence and my own voice.  In a moment of false clarity, my weight can wash away all I’ve gained.  I'm five feet tall.  It isn't difficult to simply look over me; to not see me at all, [or to not see myself]. 

This is my brain shit, not yours, and you probably have enough of your own shit and don't even think to look past.  When I write, when I blog, I perceive that people recognize my intelligence and hear my voice first and, I pray, accept me for my heart before they see my size.  Writing, posting is bliss because for the moment *I* can forget.  I thought I was growing past it.  But even among all of [the women of all kinds, races, shapes and sizes], even attending as a #BlogHer13 Voices of the Year Honoree, at times it was insurmountable to introduce myself.” 

Why do we discount ourselves?  Why is it that I can sit in a room full to the brim of other midlife bloggers, recognize myself in them, yet feel too self-conscious to reach out to them as they have reached out to me after BlogHer?  Many of the Generation Fabulous women have since generously put out their arms and welcomed me into their fold.  How is it that I didn’t know before I attended that panel discussion that there are so many midlife women bloggers out there? 

How is it that we are still so underrepresented in every facet of life: corporate boards, politics, sponsorship, etc., etc.??  How is it that we so often don’t even recognize it?  We are 51% of the population (hence the book, 51%: Women and the Future of Politics), and yet we represent less than 19% of congress?  It seems we are largely complacent with being slotted into the role of teachers and school board members, raising the children, building the foundation of our future—all vitally important stuff that many of us probably don’t want to leave to the men.  But the fact that we are not nurtured to do otherwise isn’t good enough.  The fact that many of us don’t even think to seek otherwise isn’t good enough. 

And woe to those of us who didn’t attend college.   Whether or not it’s truth, the lack of a college education, time spent staying home with our children and the consequential holes in our resumes, can paralyze many of us with fear.  It halted me.  I allowed my lack of a college education to stop me from becoming something more, from finishing my book, from seeking and touching more of me.  

Until I left my hometown in Michigan, hit San Diego and was forced to take a hard look at myself, I existed, I loved, I enjoyed life to a degree…I wanted more, but I was holding my breath. 

I’m no slouch.  Two college level creative writing courses in San Diego, a modicum of encouragement from my professors, and I haven’t looked back…but what if…?

Well, as Kelly Wickham of Mocha Momma said in her Voices of the Year reading about being a single mom that resonated with me so deeply, “that is unacceptable.”  Kelly also wrote in “Untold Stories are Sometimes Secrets,” about,” feeling invisible as a person of color at times.”  I want her to know that I often felt invisible as a very short woman before I was heavy, and only more so now as a short heavy woman.  Perhaps we all put on our own invisibility cloaks for any number of reasons…acne, too large breasts, bad teeth…the list of things we can’t magically change about ourselves goes on.

Before #BlogHer14, here’s something I can change:  I will endeavor to stand proud, to embrace all that I am, inside and out, to *believe* myself to be your peer, just as Queen Latifah tells me. 

Before #BlogHer14, I will reach out to other women.  I will return the embrace of Generation Fabulous, and follow in their well-forged steps.  I.  Will.  Finish.  Bluebirds.  I will seek more speaking opportunities, I will query publications.  I will get paid for my writing.  And as of tonight, I am going to submit my book to a publisher! 

And come #BlogHer14, I will extend my hand to you no matter what I weigh, and I will help wake up the next generation of fabulous women to all they already are, even if they don’t get to witness people like Sheryl Sandberg and Rita Arens and Kelly Wickham and the almost 5000 strong of us amazing, powerful, diverse women for themselves.

What halts you in your tracks?  Or how have you managed to overcome your own personal invisibility cloak?
If you heard about the #JudyBlumeProject at #BlogHer13, SUBMISSIONS ARE STILL OPEN!!