Women and minorities got caught holding our breaths, waiting for our next “Savior.” In doing so, last night’s midterm results, wherein the GOP took control of congress, were a punch in the gut this morning.

I can’t recall voting in a mid-term election before yesterday with the vivid detail I imagine I will later recall this one. I know I did, but never before were the results as devastating. In the past I was guilty during a general election of just checking a box because I recognized a name or knew a family. Not because the state of our government and our country doesn’t matter to me, but because I didn’t feel I knew enough or that I was smart enough—maybe I felt I didn’t have enough “skin in the game,” so to speak.

I’m slowly adjusting my thinking. I did a bit of political writing before the 2012 election. I expressed my frustration with both parties and revealed that I didn’t identify with either one. As a result, an essay I wrote is included in the upcoming book, 51%: Women and the Future of Politics (http://womenandpolitics.us). That essay was adapted from a post I wrote which was featured and got some traction on BlogHer. “The Enlightened Middle Majority and Why The Sides Are Alienating Us,” was later honored by BlogHer amid the 2013 Voices of the Year in the Op Ed category. It was written as a follow-up to another BlogHer featured post, “My Friends Think I’m the Only Liberal They Know. I Don’t Know What I Am.” And when Yahoo! Voices existed I was excited to be counted as a contributor with an original piece entitled, "Am I the Only White Person in America Offended by Racism and the Tea Party?" My post was bound to be controversial, which is why they selected it. Your clicks and comments would have been much appreciated, but I chickened out. I didn’t promote my Racism/Tea Party post, and thus it fizzled into the ether.

But what if a discussion about bigotry and the blatant factor it is in the utter constipation that has become our government had taken wing? What if my post had inspired a conversation that led to some sort of progress back when John Baynor and Barack Obama couldn’t keep their distaste for one another away from rolling cameras? What if it had gone viral? What if it had the power to activate voters and voices and breed new politicians at all levels of government? What if it had the power to activate women to say, “Hey I’m pissed, too,” possibly preventing the erosion of women’s rights we’ve suffered since 2012 and before? ...What? It's possible. Women earned the right to step into that booth and vote their hearts and their minds and their truth less than one hundred years ago. Many exist who wish they could control what we do behind that proverbial curtain, or wish we didn’t have the right to vote at all. They are the ones preaching absolution through political action. And they are the ones who won last night.

Instead of the beautiful, progressive growth Obama’s election felt like at first, and could have validated in our society, his presidency has spurred a vapid effort to quash women and minorities. Women’s rights supporters yield ground every day, week, month to Tea Party supporters and conservatives. Because we don’t gather each and every Sunday, because we aren’t as organized, because we aren’t in each other’s faces, talking about our truth week after week, and maybe because we have a perceived “Savior” on the horizon, we lose. Even though conservatives lack a clear frontrunner, they won because they’re organized. They came together despite their ideological differences, and they took action toward one goal: to overtake our government. Brandishing those words is scary, but that’s what happened. The most worrisome issues will likely pass in committee. And the two thirds of registered voters who hit the snooze yesterday and in the years before won’t even notice.

It astounds me that we’re still having a discussion about same sex marriage, for instance. Since Obama’s reelection, progress that was made in the fight for women’s and gay rights has slipped, and now it will only slip further. Many in the middle likely felt they didn’t have an alternative to re-electing President Obama in 2012, because of our fear that what happened yesterday would happen, the events of which underscore the flaws in our two-party, push/pull/dig-in-your-heels system (and which don’t begin to call out the squiggly delegate maps that have completely skewed things to give advantage to those who already have plenty).

Leading up to the 2014 Midterms, we had no vocal leader, inspirer, activator, and it showed. While we sat waiting, political analysts and publishers weighed the odds of how and when they’ll get the most votes or sell the most books. No leaders stepped up to fan the flames, and thus they died. We’ve been waiting for Hillary to announce her candidacy for president. And because she hasn’t, we didn’t. We didn’t engage. We didn’t take lessons from the conservatives’ handbook. We didn’t have signs on our gathering houses reminding our flocks to get out and vote; the words not said reminding every parishioner of the message and the stakes and the end game and the promise of life everlasting…if they vote properly.

And I’m guilty. I personally did nothing in advance of the 2014 Midterm election to organize or to engage all those I know – all those who nod with me, who whisper, “me, too” – to vote. I see now that many of them didn’t. It was chilling to wake up to the reality of what each and every one of us allowed. And why did we allow it?

Because the shame of rape and abortion and domestic violence still keeps us silent.

A Facebook friend posted that a man grabbed her ass while waiting in line last night to vote. If that isn’t an ugly, frightening metaphor for precisely what happened to women and the marginalized during this election, I don’t know what is. (She wasn’t silent. I applaud her for calling the scum out.) We gain ground, but then because we are silent in between the “big” elections the rain pounds and the mudslides begin. We think it’s only the presidency that matters. We think we need a leader to show us the way. Because we’re marginalized, we think we don’t know enough or we don’t matter enough or we can’t make a big enough difference. And we’re guilty, and we’re silent, and we don’t want anyone to know our secrets. So we do nothing. We say nothing.

Little people can accomplish so much when they band together and take action. Doing something gets results better than passive activism, which takes place when we click and forget. Like the #YesAllWomen social media campaign in response to Elliot Rodgers,’ as it turns out, not so bizarre acts of terrorism against women,  (source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175850/), we’ve shown what can happen when you and I have the guts to have open conversations in a real and meaningful way. But unlike religious conservatives, we’re not following it up with political organization and action that can lead to the sort of change we say we want to see in our society. We’re too busy dodging the title of feminist, while our clicks lull us into a false sense of security. So that when action is needed, we hit snooze rather than wake up and show up at the voting booth.

Did the #YesAllWomen Twitter swell prompt the trolls to come out in force? Yes. Did it showcase some frightening, pervasive patterns among young women and girls who didn’t get it? It did. A completely screwed up mindset (yes, rape culture) exists toward women, and we need to change it.

Like French Montana’s acid rap Pop That and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, etc., etc., music beats into kids’ brains through their ear buds (source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/cakeshep/10-songs-perhaps-just-as-rapey-as-blurred-lines-f7az). They get “news” and images of what’s truth and what’s important from places like TMZ. The TMZ network “reports” in a “newsroom” style discussion. Speculation and humor inspire clicks rather than actual facts. Next to inflammatory headlines, a perpetual sidebar of ads with degrading links for bigger breasts, flatter tummies, and smaller waists degrades our body image – in our own minds, our value withers. A smorgasbord of mental drivel pops up for kids to consume and consume some more — it’s no wonder girls’ and boys’ brains are full of “rapey” themes that confirm their worth only if they’re skinny enough. It’s no wonder they begin to think rape and domestic violence is totally acceptable. Nay, cool. My generation grew up ashamed of our thoughts if they were “impure.” Our youth today are conversely ashamed of too chaste ones, of not being ghetto enough. We middles who don’t speak up, who didn’t show up, who because of shame and because we’re afraid they’ll think it’s okay don’t speak to our kids, are up against an almost insurmountable hurdle.

On the other side of the spectrum are messages that tell us we’re going to hell unless we find redemption and vote the right way. On not-so-super-Tuesday, a creep can grab a woman’s ass waiting in line to vote, but once he casts his vote correctly and shows up to testify on Sunday, the keys to the gates of Heaven are his, so who cares?

The great motivator for silence is shame. We’re ashamed of our sexual histories, of our choices, even when choice was taken from us, as in the case of rape and domestic violence. As in the case of recent domestic violence victim, Janay Rice, we can’t help but be aware of how victims are mistreated and blamed. There are thousands of blog posts and articles weighing in on why she married Ray Rice after the beating we all got to witness and speculate on, thanks to victim mishandling and the leak of a security video by the NFL. Which brought about another round of hash tags, #WhyIStayed and #WhyILeft.

I declined a friend’s offer to share a post I wrote in response to the #YesAllWomen campaign, “#YesAllWomen: Abortion, Rape and Why Shame Can’t Keep Us Silent” (source: originally posted on BlogHer, http://www.blogher.com/yesallwomen-abortion-rape-and-why-shame-cant-keep-us-silent). Though I hoped it would contribute to the discussion, I wasn’t prepared to lead it, and the post decidedly did not appear on my own website. I told myself it was because I work so hard to focus on the positive. My #YesAllWomen post was anything but positive. It was about my own experience with rape and why maintaining women’s reproductive rights is so important to me as a woman who ended an unplanned pregnancy, and who later chose life and became a single mom at only twenty. Later still, I battled six years of infertility with a constant question running in my head of whether or not I was paying for my sexual history. I was not. There were physical and emotional reasons. But I never spoke to anyone about my feelings because of the shame. Even now, as a relative grownup, I’m not sure I’m ready for my small town to lump me with, “you libs,” or weigh in on whether I’m going to hell or whether I’m crazy. But I feel worse this morning about what my silence – yes mine, and yours –cost us last night.

In follow up to my #YesAllWomen post, I also wrote this poem of sorts, because in addition to two grown daughters, I have an eleven-year-old son at home:

My fellow Enlightened Middle Moms of daughters and sons: we have important voices and we need to use them. Because we sat passively by and allowed it, last night we were raped at the polls. This morning and every morning that follows we need to tell everyone about it who will listen. Silence equals permission. Not being silent can shut down an aggressor, as told in “The View From the Victim Room,” an amazing Modern Love piece by Courtney Queeney, a woman who refused to be silent after she was beaten by her boyfriend (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/fashion/the-view-from-the-victim-room-modern-love.html?_r=0). We mustn’t give permission with our silence any longer.

Whether or not you agree with my thoughts and beliefs, I encourage women, the marginalized, and mothers especially, to do the following:

·      Whatever your medium, use your voice

·      Hold your politicians accountable

·      Consider becoming a politician yourself

·      Gather & Check In: Participate in thought-provoking, productive conversations about the state of our country and      
       anything else about which you feel passionate

·      Don’t chicken out!

·      If you are concerned about reproductive rights, consider going public about why

·      And for God’s sake, talk to your kids

·      Talk to groups of kids

·      Talk to and engage each other

Speaking out is how progress occurs. This is how we call out bullies and tell them we're not having it anymore. Talking about rape and how objectification has impacted our own lives is how we teach young people—both boys and girls—that it’s wrong. Open discussions around the dinner table about current events are how we help kids identify the mixed messages with which they are inundated. Rather than preaching at them, asking kids questions and listening with open ears to what they think and sharing both our own experience and our own questions is how we can encourage kids to share and discuss their own uncertainty at home. If we don’t, they’ll figure out how they’re supposed to feel based on what their friends on SnapChat or Instagram have to say on a given day. Communicating is how we elevate awareness and let others know they're not alone if they feel the same, or afford those who disagree the opportunity to give thoughtful rebuttal. And parents, exhibit for your kids that we can disagree respectfully and still be friends. It gives kids power. Power to stand up to a bully or to a rapist, power to vote their truth, power to own how they feel. Power to no longer keep silent.  

Just as spirituality doesn't belong only to the Christians, however, neither does politics or the responsibility for our collective future belong only to those who identify with either the Democrats or the Republicans. And it certainly doesn’t belong only to the menfolk. Every ideology thinks they're the only ones going to Heaven. Despite that, conservatives have successfully banded together as a scary, up and coming political party. In the case of politics, each ideology thinks they’re the only ones with the right answers for our country. When the best, fairest, most progressive answers most certainly share bits and pieces of each one.  

I believe that political ads have grown more distasteful and polarizing to cause those of us who don't identify with either party to turn away and not be active. Maybe their purpose is to compel us to cover our eyes and our ears—to stuff our mouths with our fists and just pick a side, any side.  


Even before 51%: Women and the Future of Politics is released, I'm grateful that being involved with the pending publication has empowered me to discuss things that are important to me, that fall neither to the right nor to the left, or that at any given time fall to both. From many of your nods and responses, public and private, knowing I'm not alone is gratifying. Even disagreements are gratifying (source: http://www.cuteconservative.com/blog/2012/05/03/to-the-enlightened-middle-majority-its-time-to-be-honest/), because it means we're alive and it means we’re having a conversation.

51% validated me as a writer and as an essayist. But I believe the publisher’s decision to wait – one can only assume for Hillary to announce her candidacy for president – based on the goals and import of the content versus the goal of selling the most books, has been a terrible missed opportunity. Whether or not the book ever comes out, or whether I’m still in it after publishing this essay, I still have a voice and a responsibility to speak out and to frickin’ VOTE. We all do, whatever our beliefs.

I may be “just” an Enlightened Middle Mom, but my thoughts matter. I’m fighting for my daughters’ and my son’s and my nieces’ and my someday grandchildren’s future. I’m fighting for girls to believe they have the right to say no, and to make reproductive choices that are right for them if no isn’t heard. Or if we give our yes to the wrong guy and biology wins over pharmaceuticals, or even if we make a youthful mistake. I’m fighting for boys to believe and to understand that they are worthy of waiting for that yes, and to recognize yes as the gift it is.

And yes, as a young unwed mother whose daughter saved her life, and later as a married woman who struggled with six years of infertility, believe me, I recognize that life is a gift. I’m all about life and possible. But the potential for life is not more important than my life. And as I said in, The Enlightened Middle, “…children deserve so much more than to merely exist.” Let’s do a better job of taking care of the mothers and children who are already living and breathing, starving, neglected and abused in our country before we cast stones about when life begins and what every single speck is worth – as long as it’s the right demographic and nobody has to pay for the prevention of its existence, for the termination of it, or for its care and feeding.

Any amount of controversy or flack we must endure will be worthwhile if we can give voice to those who have felt drowned out by the extremists bumping chests and posturing for attention. You know, the ones who are now strutting about the yard crowing.  Even those of us who can’t pick a party deserve to be heard. Because this is still a free country. Or at least, it was.

Instead of rolling our eyes and changing the channel, or worse, waiting breathless and wordless and action-less for our “Savior” to announce, let us pay attention. Let us hold our politicians and ourselves accountable. I have the same right as anyone else to not sit idly by, but rather to pay attention, to care, to question, to express myself and to vote my beliefs. And you do, too – starting today.

I hope to incite folks who are as frustrated and as guilty as I am this morning to never let this happen again. Inform yourselves. Feel responsible. Whatever your beliefs or whatever you think you know, research and question. Look inward and review objectively the state of your own families over the last fifteen years or so, your truth, the state of the world as you know it. If we don’t speak out, we make no progress. Let us uncover our ears and take off our blinders. Let’s forgive ourselves, and rather than keep silent, let’s wear our shame close to our hearts but boldly on our lapels. Because uncovering our mouths and using our keyboards is where our power lies. Let’s get involved. Our hard work and sweat and heartbreak have benefited many who aren't looking out for us in the least. Let us look out for ourselves. Whoever you are, wherever you sit, I invite you to participate in the conversation. All the Enlightened Middle Moms out there need to join in a collective dialogue. We need to share our stories of rape, of abortion, of single motherhood, of all of it, as in my case, and speak openly about why reproductive rights are so essential to our survival, and not only during an election cycle. We have a lot of work to do before 2016 to halt this slip back into black and white era Pleasantville politics, and it needs to start today.  

Hillary doesn’t have an exclusive on leadership. Progress could have been made had we all stood up as leaders. If we continue holding our breaths, we continue to yield ground in the fight for our reproductive rights, for gay rights, in the fight to no longer be marginalized, to no longer be held down by the thumbs of the 1%. Whether the former First Lady/Senator/Secretary of State does or whether she doesn’t become the first Mrs. President, we are, each one of us, responsible for taking the lead in gaining back the ground we’ve lost. Today I believe that Hillary is the most qualified and prepared individual to lead our country. I wish like hell she would thumb her nose at the Democratic Party to run as an Independent. She could be that much stronger with those of us in the middle leading the charge than she will be with us tagging along behind. 

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!

I wrote an end of the year wrap up post similar to the one I wrote last year, but it didn't feel honest, sincere or meaningful.  It actually felt a lot like recycling, so I didn't publish it.  

What is honest?  FEAR:  I’m scared $#!+less, every stinking day.

So when, thanks to blogging buddy, Blogger Idol 2013, THE Lois Alter Mark, whom I intend to meet IRL in 2014, I discovered the book, “Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave,”  

The stakes were so, so very high, that I became so, so very careful.  Afraid to fail, but just as afraid to succeed.  Certainly afraid to put myself out there to be judged, and yet I yearned for the accolades again.  I yearned not to be ignored and stigmatized as a single mom.  I didn't feel welcome in the church I'd grown up singing in.  In fact I was stricken from the membership rolls because I wasn't tithing.  Tithing?!  I had to return bottles and cans from my dad's office for the deposit to buy bread and milk and eggs to feed my child!  One heaping paper bagful was $4, give or take ten cents.

Life was hard.  Life was a state of constant fear.  And I began to believe that would be my reality forever.  Even after I married, it still proved our reality, because together we seemed to suck the joy out of everything.  Life was so hard as we worked to recover from our respective single parenting and divorce, we knew only hard and we kept living it.  I see it in our daughters still sometimes, which is what makes me ache to prove to them, to prove to my husband that life can be joy-filled.  Not easy necessarily, but that a time will come when we can relax and ENJOY all our hard work.  Maybe just a little?

That's been our story:  Hard.  Work.  Plodding.  It's what has defined us.  But it hasn't served us, and it sure as hell hasn't made us rich--the harder we work, the more we seem to struggle.  Whatever we've each "done wrong" which determined that we don't deserve joy and happiness is what we've allowed to define us.  That's been our story.  Single mother, divorced father, job losers, failed restaurateurs....  ENOUGH!  I think this is the year that we will choose how we define ourselves.  At least I intend to!

Patty has a chapter in her book about surfing the Great Lakes.  I don't think it's an accident that it was my hometown, St. Joseph, where she took such a plunge.  In winter!  She says, "Michigan folks must be made of heartier stuff than New Yorkers."  While I don't know about that, I do know we are hearty, indeed.  We take a lickin' and keep on tickin'.  We're right smack in the middle of one of the longest, coldest winters in decades.  If I could see that lake through the blizzard we’re currently weathering, I wouldn’t be able to imagine for a moment surfing it.  But as Erica said from Third Coast Surf Shop, where Patty & Patrick rented their surfboard, "I'm from here, I can surf in the summer."  

Patty asked me on Facebook whether I really live in St. Joseph.  I proudly display a picture by Mark Parren of our little red-roofed light house as one of my cover photos.  But Patty probably didn't recognize it because it was likely encased in a feet-, not inches-, thick sarcophagus of glacial ice at that time of year.  So, yeah.  I've been on a quest to overcome my fear of success as well as my fear of failure over the last two years, but I don't feel the need to surf Lake Michigan in winter to prove it.  I sure as hell, however, want to meet the woman who did and lived to write about it!

Patty quotes her surfing coach, Patrick, as saying, “Strength and courage has always been there, you're just uncovering it in different ways."

I think strength and courage can hide behind hard work.  Taking a licking and perseverance doesn't equate to happiness and fulfillment.  And in 2013 it barely equated to food on the table.  I make an effort to regularly be positive, or I keep my fingers to myself.  There’s enough negativity among social media outlets.  But that’s the truth.  As wonderful as it was in many ways for me personally, 2013 was our scariest year yet financially.

I have to admit #SomeNerve has made me feel a little feisty, a little defensive perhaps about my choices over the last two years.  Patty describes Barry's near-death experience on a plane.  This makes me think of our near death financially, which has spurred in me an "ef-it" attitude about what I choose to do to contribute to my family.  I simply can't abide the idea of waiting tables or tending bar or being someone's administrative assistant.  Been there, done all those things.  

Maybe some would say I've had a responsibility to do those things to bring in cash--that I should have done whatever it took to pay the bills, but my husband was already doing that.  We can't both be miserable and unfulfilled and disbelieving, what then would that do to our son?  And maybe I can have an influence on his actions and desire toward living a fulfilled life rather than just plodding through—he has taken up photography, and I think I might have inspired that just a little.  And I've felt a deep calling to do something very different from what I’ve done that didn’t fulfill me in the past.  

Fear of death is a big one for many people, but I have longevity in my genes with a grandpa who lived to be 100 years old.  Patty’s book has inspired me to want to work harder not to screw that up.  And if I have half my life left to look forward to, I want to make the most of it, and I want to help influence the happiness of others.  The saying, Life is Too Short...not to grab every moment.  Yet, while we're raising kids, we spend many of those years in a kind of standby mode.  We hover and we put all our energy into our children, and often very little into ourselves. 

When I look back on my life, much like someone having a near death experience might, I can see that all the pieces have come together in this moment.  I can pull together all my life experience to have an impact on others, and that's what I want to do with the second half of my life.  That's the beauty of growing older:  Perspective.  Hindsight.  That's what I hope to take advantage of, and what I’ve been diligently self-teaching over the last two years.  

I said to Patty the other night as we were Facebook chatting, that overcoming fear is the path I've been on for the last two years, and her book articulates it so beautifully. Wouldn't it be wonderful to help people to be brave well before they reach midlife? Why does it take so many of us so long? I haven't answered that question yet. But I keep trying. We allow so many other things to define us, I suppose, maybe this is when we finally begin to seek to define ourselves. But why the hell can't we be nurtured and encouraged to do that all our lives?  Why isn't happiness and fulfillment always reason enough to do or to choose something?

Maybe it's because I've already been a mom for 27 years by the end of this month, but I've stood by long enough.  Now I wish to put as much energy into raising myself and others up as I have and will continue to spend, raising my kids.  And just as my husband continues to plod and to work, I will continue to seek that summit.  Which of us will get there first?  I hope it's me, so I can show him the light.

Previously West Coast Posse was largely directed at women.  You’ll note that I’m kind of in the middle of an overhaul here, and I've seen so many men, my own husband included, defeated and in pain over the last several years of economic uncertainty and job loss, that I feel compelled to bring everyone with me along on this glorious ride of self-discovery & fulfillment.  And I believe deeply that my grandfather's influence, his way of embracing people and life and food and gathering and celebrating every moment, can be key in seeing that to fruition.  I hope you’ll see evidence of that as my “GANE Empowered Wellness: GANE Possible” section develops.  That will be my #SomeNerve Challenge, by the way:  finishing that book (don’t worry, Bluebirds is still developing its wings), living it, promoting it, speaking about it, fully embracing the philosophy of MORE, doing cooking demonstrations (some together!) and teaching others to embrace MORE in 2014.  And I don’t think it’s an accident that my husband loved feeding people when we owned our restaurant—loved feeding the guys in the firehouse—or that we’ve since learned to do it in ways that help us maintain wellness, despite the stress we’ve been under.

The world needs MORE of us to feel happy and fulfilled--and you matter!  Yes, I'm talking to you!  If my path, if our path to get there can influence yours in a positive way, even when it’s bumpy, even when it’s scary, even when a positive attitude is at its most difficult to reach, I hope you'll hold on tight and come along for the ride.  

This time next year, when I’m creeping up on 49, I know the hindsight will be worth it!


This is posted as part of a Blog Hop over at Midlife Boulevard.  Our topic was: There's Nothing Wrong with Aging.