blogging

The Results of Asking Me


On Monday I asked and some of you responded. Today I will reply to the questions my gentle readers put to me about myself.

Silverstar asked,

What is your dream vacation? If you had all the money needed, where would you go?

I don’t dream about vacationing. I find vacations stressful and physically/emotionally draining. I always have, which is why I am so poorly traveled at my age. One would think that a 45 year old woman who lived on her own until ten years ago would have been all over the world or her own country at the very least. Not true. And the reason? The act of traveling rattles me. And if I were rich beyond worries and the pesky inconveniences of mere mortals? It would still rattle me. However, since Rob is once again in the running for an overseas project, I have been thinking about places we might visit. There are the obvious suspects – London, Paris, Spain but I would like to see Greece. My friend Leslie traveled a lot and ended up summering in Greece and nearly settled down there when a local woman took a shine to her and offered to take her into her business. She didn’t have any children and wanted Les to help her run her shop and take it over someday. Leslie was tempted but in the end returned to Iowa and finished school. I wonder if she ever thinks about that anymore? I would like to spend time on some tiny island. Real time. A month or more. Just kick back. Eat fresh and local and walk everywhere I went – no mad tourist rush to see ruins or anything. Just live.

Daisyfae wanted to know,

What is the strangest, or most unexpected, thing you’ve ever done in public? That thing where your friends, or you, have to say “I can’t believe you (I) just did that!”

I was in university and there was this frat boy who worked in the dishroom of the dorm cafeteria where my friends and I lived. His name was Scott and he was a body builder. Very tan. Very buff. And as white blond as Boo Radley. Back in those days, I swore like a long shoreman (that is the expression, right?) and my girlfriends and I strove to be as crass and unflappable as any of the guys we knew. It was a point of honor. I think it may have had something to do with all the “having it all and frying it up in a pan” feminism thing that was going on at the time.

Scott made it a game to try and one up us or embarrass us, but he lost the game more than he won. When he didn’t, his scalp would get so red his hair looked like it was in danger of catching fire and his ears looked ready to combust. So we had more incentive than he did to win in our war of dirty words.

One Friday night though he got the better of Sarah’s friend Laura. I don’t remember the conversation now but he did his little snoopy dance taunt as she swore revenge. And he professed that we would never again get the better of him.

I saw him out that night at one of the dance clubs (actually we called them “bars” then). He was surrounded by a gaggle of sorority girls. We referred to them as “muffs”. Short for “muffins”, of course. Scott was the kind of guy who wouldn’t acknowledge you in public when he was with his fraternity or sorority peeps because it would have meant ‘fessing up to the fact that, unlike most of them, he had to hold down a job to bankroll his lifestyle rather than simply phoning home to the parental units for funding.

I’ll confess to having had a couple of kamikazees and I came up with a brilliant plan for ending his little contest with us forever. Something I knew he would never have the balls to top. I flounced over to him in my best muff imitation, wiggled past the entourage and sidled right up to him, draped an arm across his shoulder and purred – loudly – into his ear,

“You were great last night. I hope we can do it again tonight. You know where to find me when you’re done here.”

And then, for good measure, I nipped and licked his ear. ‘Cause that’s the way I rolled.

And, he never did find a way to top that.

Lora asked,

what is the bravest thing you’ve ever done?
what do you miss most about America?

Brave is subjective. But in my opinion, the bravest thing I ever did was put my late husband into a nursing home when he become too much for me to care for without quitting my job, which was never really an option. I was lucky that my own family was very supportive because his wasn’t and even my BFF, who was wonderful and a rock, commented that she could never have done that. She would have quit her job if she’d had to but could never put someone in a home.

And America? I miss HyVee. It is a grocery chain and the stores are open 24hrs with a pharmacy, diner, deli, and a Starbucks. Dee (aka BabyD) and I often ate their during the week and always on Sunday mornings. During the months I took off after Will died, I went to Starbucks every morning after dropping Dee off at school. The clerks all knew me. The young man at the Starbucks had my order started as soon as he saw me. The pharmacists knew my allergies and would phone the DR’s for me to get refills if I forgot. Oh, and there was a bank open there seven days a week. Nothing as capitalistically wonderful exists here in Canada.

And then my dear Sally threw this spanner into the works,

Where would you be in your life if Will was still alive and healthy? What would your life look like if you and Rob had been together from the outset? How did you and Will get together?

I almost saved this for last. It reminded me of my sister, DNOS, asking me last fall if I thought Will and I would still be together today if he hadn’t died. I don’t entertain myself with those types of daydreams or fantasies. I know that a lot of people do spend time mourning what should have been or what was supposed to be, but I don’t believe in that kind of entitlement. There is no such thing as should have or supposed to have been. Our futures are not set in stone. The future is mutable and dependent on events that are occurring right now and that is all we have control over and even that is sometimes not a given.

Will and I had talked about moving back to my hometown because it was clear to us that we needed physical distance from his mother and that in order to raise a family, a couple really needed to be in proximity to extended family. If he hadn’t been ill, we wouldn’t have needed IVF so Dee would not exist, but we’d likely have a couple of older children – eight or nine years old at least. And beyond that, I can’t say. I am not the same person ten years on and he wouldn’t have been either.

As to Rob, the fact that he and I were not even born in the same country and met as a direct result of dead spouses begs the question of how fate could have brought us together in our late teens or early twenties in the first place. I would say that we wouldn’t have happened at all, but let’s say that destiny had other ideas. When we discussed Sally’s question Rob pointed out the fact that he is not the man he was at nineteen when he and Shelley married. I am certainly not the girl I was at nineteen , and in spite of the fact that I was at school and taking care of myself – I was hardly a real grown-up.

I didn’t think I’d have been as likely to have children had it been Rob and I, simply because we are both so lukewarm on the soul-fulfilling wonders of parenthood. He didn’t agree, but I think the longer we’d have been childless – and it could have lasted as long as the mid to late twenties because I think we’d have both pursued school, degrees and careers – the less likely we’d have been to trade the idea of “us” for the idea of “family”. Beyond that, I can’t say.

When Will got sick, I shut down that time line. I mourned it heavily for the first year and less and less and by the day of his death, I considered it closed and was interested only in the real possibilities and not lamenting “what if’s” or “it’s not fair” or “we were supposed to”.

And though I wonder about Rob’s past – because it seems so much bigger in terms of what he accomplished than my own life – I think of us from here on.

How did Will and I meet? One of my very first blog posts is a recounting of “our” story that I wrote when I was about four months out. The story is there.

Sharon wanted to know,

What book would you write if you knew that, no matter the genre or topic or length, it would be a success?

I wish I could write an epic. Something hardcore science and trilogy length. I have an idea and even titles, but I don’t have the stamina for the research to make it happen. But if none of that mattered, and I could  half-ass it like say, the new book The Strain, or take something that was a cool idea, but I didn’t have the chops to make it more than mediocre, like The Twilight books, I would go for it.

Alicia‘s question was about books,

What book have you owned the longest? Not exactly what’s the oldest book on your shelf, because that could be a hand-me-down or a collector’s item… but which book among the ones you currently own was the first one you bought/received?

This was exactly easy. I have three picture books that my Uncle Jimmy gave me in 1969 for my birthday. One is Peter Pan. I love the pictures. Especially the one where Tiger Lily is nearly engulfed by the rising tide in the lagoon but still refusing to tell Hook where Peter is. I also have Cinderella and Twas the Night Before Christmas. They are in terrible shape. Which is sad, but I keep them anyway.

I also have a complete collection of the Through Golden Windows collections of short stories and novel excerpts for children. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have them, so I must have been three or so when my parents got them for us. I have them because no one else wanted them. I have read them all, even the collection of poetry.

Uncle Keith’s inquiring mind wanted to know,

Would you rather be a vampire or werewolf? Why?

Another easy one. Werewolf. Why? Because it is a once a month thing and as a woman, I have been dealing with an affliction once a month since I was a young teen. The hairy thing is something I deal with now as I go through menopause and I am totally okay with spending some down time all alone in a small windowless room because – aside from the windowless thing – I do that already as a writer.

As a werewolf, I would retain my reflection and the ability to have garlic, which I love. I would not be restricted to the night or have to worry about bursting into flames. As long as Rob took care to have me secured during my monthly, I wouldn’t be a danger to anyone and wouldn’t arouse any angry mobs or hunters.

And, of course, I would not have to die, be buried and dig my way out of a coffin and grave with my bare hands. Or be more pasty looking than I already am.

Cindy asked two questions,

How do you motivate yourself? In writing, blogging, and just in general.

There is nothing tangible that drives me to write or blog. I have always written and for most of my life my audience was limited to non-existent. I think writers in general are compelled to write.

Like most people, however, I am motivated by the results. I blog. People read and, hopefully, comment. I do yoga, and my legs and bum look better. I walk daily and I do not get fat(ter). I give things away and the universe seems pleased with me. I offer friendship and (in most cases) get some back. Cause/effect is the oldest motivator.

So do you feel like it’s true? And if so what would be the new challenge and complete life change?

I am not colorful or charismatic. Gray is my favorite colour and I wear a lot of black and earth tones. And no one follows me really. I am a very small fish in the pond who watches more than she interacts or is noticed. However, I do like people who are deep thinking and have passion for something that is evident from time to time. And I am quick to react but bold and courageous only when I need to be and that is, thankfully, not often anymore.

I’ve had a complete life change really. The States to Canada. Working to SAHM. Teacher to writer. Widow to Wife. I am shifting to novels from short stories, which is a challenge.

Minor life change things? I am not disciplined enough. I haven’t pared down to the essentials-only yet. I still care too much about what other people think of me. I am not yet fully content with my body image. But really, I haven’t anything to complain about – aside from the weather. It just isn’t sunny enough or warm enough yet.

Marsha wanted to know,

Great minds are similar–don’t you think?

In my opinion, kindred spirits find each other and exchange ideas that are clearly simpatico. Rob and I had that kind of connection from the start and I still seem able to “read his mind”.

“Get out of my head,” he will say when I anticipate something he is about to say or finish a sentence for him.

I don’t know that being on the same wave-length makes minds great because some hive mentalities are not healthy or productive, but generally, birds flock by type.

 

So there you have it. If you have follow-up questions, leave a comment and I will get to it later today. I have a field trip, yoga and novel revising filling up most of my morning and early afternoon today so be patient.

I asked Rob if he was going to do this meme thing and he didn’t think he had readers enough to bother to ask for questions. You could leave him a nagging suggestion to do this on his blog today while you wait for me.

Damned If You Do


I read The Globe and Mail fairly regularly. One of the columnists, Sarah Hampson, has a semi-regular feature on relationships with a tendency to view marriage as a glass half empty. Because she is divorced, she focuses about half or more of her columns on divorce – the process and the aftermath. She is playing to her strength and the fact that divorce is one of the most common of denominators in many people’s lives anymore. Cynicism shouldn’t be a given, but she has a jaundiced eye. There are many divorced people who do not cast such a world-weary glance at the institution of marriage or love in general, but she isn’t one of them – though she will give credit where it is due.

Her most recent piece was on the Obamas’ Broadway date night and their tendency to promote their marriage as a successful one – which by all accounts it is. Her issue though is that they don’t air the dirty laundry as much as they try too hard to put a good face on their relationship, or at least that is what I read between the lines. She feels that the Obamas are being disingenuous.

Interestingly, I ran across a blog piece the other night that said much the same thing only the targets were ordinary bloggers who write about themselves. The blogger questioned whether the women whose blogs she reads are really telling the truth about their relationships, mothering experiences or their sublime contentment with being single. The writer thought that perhaps they were fudging and putting on airs to maintain a façade in a game of one upmanship because … I don’t know … because if you are chronicling your life in the blogosphere (or living it in the public eye as the President and First Lady do) and you are not doing it reality tv show style – with dysfunction being the main ingredient – then you are not real? You are faking it? Happiness and contentment are not common? Misery and longing is the major theme of most lives? Real relationships have sticky thorn-like issues? The average single person would rather not be*?

I have touched on this subject a time or two. Recently even. And I don’t think I am deliberately cultivating a façade because I keep private details about my marriage and my children private. There is no fourth wall in blogging, but each blogger does establish boundaries with their audience. I can be as revealing (some would say TMI) as John and Kate, but the truth is, I don’t want to, and Rob and I are so not John and Kate and so not interested in being so. We do not have a dramatic life. We are two remarkably well-suited mates who live a pretty ordinary life that just happened to have an unusual beginning. If anything, I feel a bit guilty FOR BEING happy, content and right where I belong. It’s not as if this has always been the case and I marvel often how I ended up just exactly where I should be. 

I am not Dooce and my motivation for blogging is, as it has mostly always been, about writing. 

What I think Ms. Hampson and the blogger are about is projection. A Facebook acquaintance recently  posted an update that read,

“It’s all about them. It’s all about them.”

And what he meant was that regardless of how your life manifests in the public sphere, others will interpret it through their own experiences and the spot in life where they are currently residing and make whatever is going on about whatever is happening in someone else’s life about what is not going on in their own.

Ms. Hampson, for example, is divorced and writes about the experiences of the divorced and all the other downer topics that consume the single. Since I was single a long, long time,  I know those gray-colored lenses through which she peers and how they tint the landscape with a pessimistic and cynical hue. Naturally, she would see the Obamas’ as posing, flaunting and perhaps even trying to hard. It looks like that when you haven’t had a relationship that really fit.

My dear friend Cissy, whom I have known for twenty years and is the big sister I had to go out and find, has a marriage that to anyone not privy looks effortless and loving. It is certainly the latter. Cissy and her husband were my role models. Had I never met them, I wouldn’t have married at all because I didn’t learn much about marriage from my own parents beyond endurance. But Cissy’s marriage is not effortless. There has been ebb and flow and back again during their 25+ years. I have not been privy to the details but I have been assured time and again that issues come up and are dealt with and it stays between them. Where it belongs.

Here’s what I learned about marriage – quickly – that the person you talk to when things are at ebb tide is your spouse. People who “poll the audience”, so to speak, do themselves no favors and their relationships much harm.

I never discussed Will and I with anyone really. Things that came up stayed between us. And we worked at making time for each other and communicating regularly throughout our day and allowing each other space and individuality. I brought these lessons with me when I began dating Rob, and he in turn brought with him the very similar things he’d learned from his marriage to Shelley. And key to this? Our relationship is about us. 

I am a writer. A blogger. I open small windows into my daily life just like everyone else in my genre. Just excerpts. Little splices really. It might seem like an Obama photo op, but I don’t think the world is a worse place because happy, successful couples share their lives. It is certainly healthier than the Spencer and Heidi’s of the world. Or the John and Kate’s. Give me a First Couple who date after 16 years of marriage and obviously delight in one another any day.

 

*My Auntie is 78 years old and never married. She will be the first to admit that she has known lonliness, knows it still from time to time, but she is not sorry she never married. She has more friends than my mother – and that is a feat – and she is never home between her social life, her volunteering and the army of devoted nieces and nephews who include her in every family function imaginable. And Auntie is not an isolated example. I know people in my own peer group and even people in the blogosphere who are not lamenting the single life. All life choices have an up as well as a downside and nothing can ever be said to be permanent.

The TGIF


I don’t really experience TGIF since “retiring” from teaching. Friday is a day like Saturday or the fifth of July. My work is writing and despite not paying at all well, I answer to no one but me.* Weekends are vacations that allow me more  physical time with Rob, but we are in touch throughout his workday and he comes home for lunch, when we don’t meet for lunch in town, so I can’t say I am deprived of his company by the work week the way some couples are.

This week has been disorganized. We are out of the tent trailer and all crammed into the master bedroom as that is stripped and most of the new sub-floor is down. The lack of curtains has been a bit of an issue. Being a month away from Summer Solstice means that the days are lengthening. Dusk falls at just a bit before eleven at night and the sun is up again in all its brilliance by 5:30 in the morning. Even so, Baby has not woken with it as was her wont. She is so like her father, needing pitch darkness in order to fall asleep and stay asleep. I never had room darkening shades before Will. I enjoyed being waked by the sun. Not so my vampiric late husband and our child of darkness.

Rob is up with the dawn and I need to start doing that too. I have decided to change up the writing schedule and work on fiction for an hour in the early morning and consider anything else that comes my way through the day gravy. Life just has a way of derailing writing and until there is a nanny or housekeeper or personal assistant at least to help out, I have decided that I will simply go with the flow. Writing will be done in the morning. Getting up early never hurt me when I was teaching and it won’t hurt me now.

A quick update on Nephew1. Do you remember the story I told about his mother last June during our visit to Iowa? She arrived at the house one day in a tizzy because LawnMowerMan had apparently had a stroke which turned out on further examination by a real doctor to be sciatica. Nephew1 is his mother’s son.

Yes, he does have a serious medical condition. His asthma is not to be taken lightly and he and his father were doing just that. This led the first doctor who saw him to read him the riot act and outline the very dire consequences of not following one’s asthma protocol. Death is a very real outcome for severe asthmatics as is lung damage. Nephew1 only heard about 20% of what he was told beyond the “you could die” and the fact that at fifteen he deems himself too old to allow his grandmother – the responsible adult – to accompany him in to see the doctor – led to the misunderstanding and worry on the part of me, my mom and DNOS.

Nephew is still unwell but he is now getting the attention he needs and is taking his asthma seriously.

However, a new situation cropped up unexpectedly yesterday afternoon. I called my mother and found her prepping for a lower GI. In case you have never had one, it’s similar to prep for a colonoscopy but is a series of x-rays. Why? Well, I was perplexed. She’d had a colonoscopy shortly after Dad died and was given the standard “see you in five or six years”. She was not told that a deformity was discovered that impeded a full scoping and she would need follow-up in 6 months.

Yes, she was a bit disturbed and planned on having words with her doctor today. I would have had more than words. I don’t trust doctors anymore. I went through hell trying to convince doctors that Will was physically rather than mentally ill. I had similar problems with my own health about 8 months after Will died when everyone was content to write off my stomach issues as “grief” rather than the non-functioning gall bladder that it was.

Mom was calm. She said she’d call today though I will probably not wait and call her first, but I feel too far away again.

The weather has finally taken a summery turn. I got my zombie story mailed off last weekend and am nearly done with the companion story. There is probably a full novel in there but not now. I joined Authonomy last night. It’s a place to post novels in progress and get feedback from other writers, editors and even agents. I will let you know when I have a draft of Night Dogs and my memoir up. Give me a month or so. I am also thinking about applying for sessional work in the college of education at the U of Alberta. Anthony Trollope’s advice to writers was to always a have a day job. He work for the post office his whole life despite being a successful writer, so he must have a reason for such advice, eh?

The pen name? Christie from Christopher, which is a family name. My great-grandfather, Crazy Christie, is the beginning of the chain that has included, among others, one of his sons, a couple grandsons (it was Dad’s middle name) and a few great-grandsons. And then Cox, because it is my name. The one I started out with a long time ago when I first decided I was a writer but didn’t realize how much of a writer I really was.

Christie Cox. That’s my fiction pen name. I’ll get a link up to my writer’s site soon.

Enjoy the last weekend of May. I plan to.

*And that is not always a good thing but it’s a post for another day.