Firsts

I've been branching out. 

I know I have been trying to write more here, but along with that, I've been working on a book of poetry and (quite unexpectedly) started work on a what might be a small business. Nope, this is not a heavy post with a lot to consider and a lot of metaphor to unpack. This is, instead, a post about hair accessories. 

Yeah. Could I be more of a suburban housewife? I craft. 

This is a summer of trying new things, that's for sure. We signed up for the Breezy Willow Farm CSA, and I've tried more new recipes in the past two months than I had in the past year. G and I kicked off the summer by trekking up to Syracuse, NY, to be in the wedding (the first besides our own) of his awesome brother and equally awesome wife. I got to wear my first bridesmaid dress, G, his first really spiffy suit with a deep purple pocket square. Another first of this summer belongs to my sister - she's getting braces next week, and this week had a fair amount of teeth taken out in preparation. 

Other firsts - we are going to be in our friends' wedding in December, and we've been spending more time with them. As such, we went up to the Celtic Fling and Highland Games in Pennsylvania and saw caber tossing, Irish dancing, and (shopper that I am) lots of crafts. 

Meandering in an out of craft booths is one of my favorite things to do at a fair. At the Fling, we had stopped to wait for friends outside of one such booth, and (obviously) my eyes quickly caught on gorgeous jewelry, pins, and hair clips. It was terribly hot, my hair was sticking to the side of my face, and after the millionth time of tucking it behind my ears I was primed for purchase - anything to deal with my hair. Anything. 

Anything turned out to be a deep red flower - five layers of petals with a few feathers and an iridescent purple center, set on an alligator clip. The proprietress, I then noticed, had six or seven lengths of fabric hung from the canvas roof of the shop, each with hair clips within a color group. Greens, blues, reds - little riots of silk and scrap and plume; I think she had about 100 of them hanging, each for ten dollars. 

Ten dollars seemed like a more than fair price for a flower the size of my fist and a solution to my problems. I even had cash - it was meant to be. But I ended up buying something else along with that one clip: I bought an idea. 

I can do this. 

I think it's safe to say that I feel a little silly about having a eureka! moment over a hair clip. It really isn't rocket science. But I had some glimmer of inspiration, which is, after all, the essential spark of what it takes to create. So I chased the glimmer - I went, within the week, to the crafts store, and in three days I had made 75 clips. I started by thinking about what I would want, what would please me, but after having made so many (bobby pins, larger alligator clips, French barrettes, and pieces with peacock feathers and French netting which are begging to be worn at the renaissance festival) I thought, hot damn, I could sell these. 

More firsts these summer? Having the conviction, the confidence, to get space at two craft shows in the fall. Having the nerve to invite people over for afternoon tea and wine tastings in August to take a look at my work and (perhaps) purchase a few items. Believing in myself, even if my current eureka! moments have more to do with hand crafts than great novels. Considering things like kickstarter and etsy and a PayPal merchant account. 

Doing, instead of thinking about doing. 

Today, I'm going to go over all of my items, make a few tweaks, improve on some of my earlier designs. I've never been much good at editing (well, I just didn't ever want to) so that's a first, too. Tonight we are getting more fruit and veggies from the farm, and I will have to quickly figure out what to cook - and actually follow through on it. 

I'm branching out. 

Pictures: 

Here are three of my first creations. I think I've made well over 100 at this point:

 

Here's a giant wall of about half my product (all of these are the large size with alligator clips):

8,259

What am I trying to do with my life?

I just checked the overview of this blog - the dashboard where I see page views, comments, etc. I haven't looked in quite some time; the last time I really noticed it was when I hit 5,000 views. Today, I'm at over 8,000. My post on bipolar disorder, Shame, has been seen 452 times, due in no small part to Columbia's late friend and Big Deal, Dennis Lane. 

My post yesterday hit 104. Bipolar disorder, bisexuality, and posts about my community life in Columbia seem to be the biggest draws. 

Again, what am I doing with my life? What am I doing here? What do I stand for?

I'm not counting my page views or blogging success as a measure of my writing skill, my perspectives, or my worth. It's a tool - I can see what interests people, and maybe, through that, what further topics I might explore. I'm also blogging over at Buster and Ellie, so I've gone into detail there about married life, growing up, and living in Columbia. A few of my words are out there - and rather than counting page views, I'd like to have some sense that what I'm doing resonates with people, or that what I say has a place in the world. 

I'd like to know that my writing has meaning. That my life has meaning. 

I'm not asking for affirmation or praise in this post. I have support from friends and family, and if you've ever commented on this blog you know I am absolutely terrible at following up on comments or engaging in dialogue, even when the subject matter is very important to me. I love the comments, most certainly, but I am shy and awkward even on the internet. In some ways, I don't want to be the story - I want what I write to be what matters. 

You see, I'm muddling along in life, trying to make sense of it in between loads of laundry and toilet scrubbings and iPad scribblings. I'm doing my best - and it's true that sometimes I don't feel like my best is good enough. Maybe that's what it means to be a writer; I only know that I have often felt inadequate: in my acting, musicality, academics, and interpersonal skills. 

I've often said that writing is an exercise in failure, and that's certainly true. But I think there's something more, too - writing is an exercise in discovering the self, the good parts and the bad. I find flaws in my writing and flaws in the way I execute my daily tasks. I also find a lot of good in me - the simple joys of writing and the delicious sound of words, the way I love my husband, my slow but hopefully unstoppable progress in loving myself. 

It sounds a bit like fortune cookie wisdom, or like a self-help book with meaningless buzzwords. I don't know. A discovery of the self sounds tacky - but I think it has merit. 

Again, I'm not totally sure what I'm doing with my life. I'm a housewife (while trying to reclaim that word in a positive way), and I'm a writer. I love being a big sister, and I am trying to be a good daughter. I am terrible with plants. I like French roast coffee, made in my French press, served in a giant mug from the Renaissance Festival. I like going to the gym - sometimes. I play the piano passably, but not very well.

I write blog posts about the Big Things, like sexuality, mental illness, racism, religion, feminism. 

I write blog posts which are nothing more than a close examination of the contents of my belly button. 

All of that is me. All of that, and little life lessons like keeping my mouth closed when I scrub the toilet (a lesson, I'm sad to say, hard-won). I am, as they say, a work in progress. I think we all are. 

That may be what I'm doing with my life - just becoming. Becoming something better, perhaps, while still being a person with flaws and doubts and insecurities. 

I was talking to my therapist about some of my family relationships, and I said that I can be overwhelmed by guilt - not being a good daughter, granddaughter, or not being supportive enough to people who need a shoulder to cry on. She said, quite firmly, Stop, and No. Guilt is a habit, she told me. Being overwhelmed is a habit. And all habits can be broken. 

Writing is a habit, too, and it's a good habit. Like my organic French roast, it's a good part of me, one worth celebrating and enjoying. That's part of why I'm writing today - I was daunted by the prospect of figuring out what to say after yesterday's post, but I knew that had to write, even if what I wrote wasn't terribly profound. 

I don't think there's any one of us who hasn't considered, at least for a moment, the question of "What am I doing with my life?" I'm sure it's common for people my age, set adrift in a vast ocean of what the hell, college is over, who am I? I think it's also common for everyone to have brief glimpses of being on the brink of not knowing something so seemingly necessary - career, relationships, health, identity. So I suppose I'm saying that I am not alone in my muddling, my questioning, my "discovery of the self."

Recently, a very close friend came over for dinner and drinks. We sat on the porch with our beer and cider and we read each other our poetry. I absolutely rejoiced in hers - she accomplished a great feat, finishing a challenging poem she had been writing for years. The way she read it, the words and the images and her intense lips, thrilled something in me - it was an invitation for me to be a part of her life, and for me to take more interest in my own. I read her the beginning of what I think will be my first book of poetry and I was suddenly, fiercely proud - and imperfect, and still in progress, and me. 

I guess I could say that I'm a writer. That's an identity, right?

My bad habits, as my therapist would call them, are still there, waiting to be broken. One of them is delaying my writing because of insecurities. Another is waiting for Facebook comments to come in after I've written a particularly challenging post. Yet another is considering this future book of poetry, "Conversations with my Father in the Garden," and putting it off because of my daughter-guilt and little Alice fear. They're all a part of the other habit, the good one, which in an uncontrollable urge to write. 

I feel like this post has gone on for far too long, and it probably has, because the only thing that's really on my mind today is a simple, deceptively effortless statement of truth, which is that I'm a writer and I have to keep writing. 5,000 views, 8,000; Facebook comments, family praise; being a voice in Columbia, being a drop in the ocean - it's just an easy thing to realize, after all, that this is who I am, this is what I am doing with my life, and that what I stand for is telling my story and inviting others to tell theirs, too. 

First, I will put the laundry away. And then - I will write. 

My Mirror

I was nine years old when I caught myself on the edge of admitting something - something I had probably always known - as I looked into a gilded mirror in an antique shop and thought, horrified, "I like girls." 

I pushed it away. 

My grandmother and great-aunt had taken me on a trip to French Canada. Among whale watching and fancy dinners I aged, and I was terrified; I wondered when I should start shaving my legs, and when I could flirt with boys, and when I should be honest with myself about the less than platonic relationship between my girlish heroes, Xena and Gabrielle. I was confident of certain things: I didn't doubt my body yet, and I hadn't begun to question the emotional effects of being a child of divorce, and my mother hadn't remarried and brought my sister into the world. I was an only child, mature for my age. I ran down the long hallway of my father and stepmother's apartment and kicked the air, releasing a battle cry, and my stepmom praised my confidence. I was glad. 

On that trip to Canada, though, I found myself shy and halting - enjoying myself, absolutely, but I was somehow aware that things were about to change. This was the summer before my father took up his post at my school and church, the summer before my mother joined the choir and met my stepfather, the time before I looked at boys and girls and felt an aching in my chest which burned with a white flame. I think of that summer now as the moment before fruit bursts with ripeness - a steaming August before the fall, the last peach over-sweet but too tempting to refuse. 

Grandmere, my aunt, and I took a moment to poke around an antique shop. The owner spoke French and it was beautiful in its clean symmetry and haunting softness; I wished I could understand it and come back to Baltimore and my Grandpere and delight him. As Grandmere and Betty scanned the back of blue and white dishes in the practiced way of finding treasures, a hundred years old or more, in the corners of my eye I saw a mirror as tall as I was, and I was frozen in that moment of self-awareness and fear. 

I knew it, suddenly. I was different. 

How can I explain what that meant to me, how I felt? The idea of being gay was nothing new to me - after all, I was an episcopalian, a church musician's daughter, and most of the adults I knew were gay. It wasn't a shocking concept, and frankly until I was eighteen and at college I assumed that most people were attracted to their own sex. There were no moral qualms in me; the God I worshipped was a loving God, a force for passion and compassion and truth - and for enduring acceptance. I had no social training in rejecting others. I loved everyone, and I hoped they loved each other, too. 

So why was I scared? 

I stayed scared for a long time. Even as I slowly came out as bisexual in high school, I was scared. At eighteen I was thrilled with joy and with dread as I attempted to have a girlfriend, and my fear totally messed that up - I couldn't give enough of myself. She was beautiful, kind; she played the cello, excellently; she wanted to help me love her. 

I did. And I couldn't. And I regret that almost every day. 

This isn't some grand announcement, here. I am very happily married to my husband, my best friend, the man with whom I fit perfectly like pieces of a puzzle. We work together, and anatomy has nothing to do with it. I couldn't have found a better person to spend my life with - and yes, a better man. 

I think about how lucky I am to have my love recognized by society and by the government, and how, if I had been more brave, more confident, I wouldn't have had the same luck. It's a terrible thing to be told how to love, how not to love - to be told to change yourself, to pray your very being away. To think that God is not that compassionate God, and that he hates you. 

How many young women and men have had the same moment as I had - the moment of seeing oneself honestly - and endured the fear which comes with knowing they are different? 

How can we work to take that fear away and replace it with love?

This is clearly a subject very close to my heart. My wonderful, sort-of ex-girlfriend told me that she loved me when I spoke about civil rights for all of us, and I carry that praise and acceptance with me as I find myself in a world with so little justice, so little compassion, so much fear. I carried her beauty with me when I cried as DOMA was partially overturned; I held that memory in my aching chest as I blasted "Same Love" from my porch after I read the news and saw pictures of couples kissing and weeping. 

I don't want to be afraid anymore. I don't want anyone to be afraid. 

I don't have a hell of a lot of solutions to this problem. I suppose I had to start within myself, quelling my doubts and terror and being honest - and it wasn't, it isn't, easy. After that I started to represent the kind of person I hoped to see in others - coming out, engaging in dialogue and shared experiences, giving comfort and support to friends and family. But after that, what's next? What can we do to create a space for everyone to be loved? 

That's something I pray for, and I hope my childhood God listens with his infinite compassion. 

I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to stop praying, stop loving, stop reading the news; I'm not going to stop being honest with myself and others; I'm not going to end this long struggle for equality by hiding or fearing or being complacent in my marriage to a man. I don't know how to fix the world, I really have no idea, but maybe if I keep fixing myself through integrity and passionate purpose I can contribute to the kind of society I wish to live in. 

I can think of my ex-girlfriend with gratitude, rather than shame. I can remember what it felt like to be the confident little girl who loved everybody, and herself. I can go back to that moment in the mirror, whisper across time, shout in gladness and in pride at my differences and worth and validity. 

I can love my husband, without guilt and with joy. 

I can stop being scared. 

Visible

There is a part of me which hates Facebook. 

I was in that generation of kids for whom Facebook was an epic right of passage - I waited, breathless, for my university email address to arrive so that I could join my fellow high school seniors in getting that coveted, no-parents-allowed, (fairly obvious) status symbol which was a picture and a few words of me. I remember filling out the small sample of boxes about my favorite movies, books, music, thinking that somehow putting those personal identifiers online would say more about me than any actual human interaction with actual human beings. 

I got to write whatever I wanted, so I proudly declared my faith (Anglican), my politics (very liberal) and my "interested in" (quite defiantly, men and women). I listed all the French literature I had ever thumbed through, from Rimbaud to Baudelaire, and I enumerated the jazz performers who made my heart sing and the love of whom, I thought, made me sophisticated. I created a little world for myself online: one picture of Louise Brooks, a few quotes from Anais Nin, and a mostly unseen reference to my bisexuality. 

It was due to Facebook that I met my husband. I joined the JHU Rocky Horror group, quickly agreed to be in the cast, and met the love of my life at a Thursday night rehearsal for what was to be my social scene for the next four years. Without Facebook - I will admit - I most likely would not be married to G. 

So thanks, Facebook, for that bit. 

The part of me which hates Facebook is the part which is terribly afraid that social interaction (in real life, as they say) will forever be changed by the myth that talking online is the same thing as speaking to a friend in person. 

The Internet was once known as the "information highway," and while that sounds a bit silly now, I feel as if the goal of exchanging information should be that for which we, as Internet users, strive. I fear, however, that social media can sometimes do the opposite - we don't always share information. Mostly, we choose to share the banal, like pictures of our food or a recounting of bar excursions or other trivial details of self-importance. Places like Facebook help us focus on ourselves, because everything we do is placed on a grander stage of both the ephemeral and the eternal. Our lives are catalogued quickly and effortlessly, mundane events and casual thoughts listed alongside births and deaths and marriages, and with a refresh of the feed those events are gone - but as my husband would remind me, what you put on the Internet is there forever. 

What does that mean for human interaction? Is everything we do important? Is it brief and meaningless? Do we know, anymore, how to ask questions about others, or how to be polite, or how to care? Can we go out to dinner without telling the world? 

How do we proceed in a world where what we are is in bits of data - the personal sound bite - rather than in a good meal, a good conversation, and questions which can't be answered by a quick search and a concurrent stretch of uncomfortable silence? 

What if we know more about our friends through a status update than through the art of conversation? 

Those are the concerns which leave me baffled by Facebook - by our current use of the Internet entire. I hate that. I hate feeling like I'm more valuable online than I am in real life. 

But there is, of course, the other part of me, which sees something emerging and terribly good about social media. 

I will return to the opening of this post, which addressed my "coming out," of sorts, through Facebook. Frankly, I don't think it was a huge surprise to anyone who knew me that I was attracted to both men and women. I'm obviously very open about that now, and to me it is truly no big deal. But back then, at eighteen, it was a big honking deal, and there was a fair bit of doubt which went into putting that information anywhere, even if only other eighteen year olds could see it. I was invisible to adults, yes - but somehow, with a check mark in the appropriate box, I was more visible to myself. 

That level of visibility is what I love, really love, about Facebook. 

I recently read an article written by Stephen Fry about his journey with bipolar disorder. It was posted by my grandfather on - you guessed it - Facebook, and I don't know if I've ever been more grateful for the share button. After I reposted the link, two friends reposted it, and this afternoon, my mother mentioned the piece and we were able to talk about Fry's use of Shakespeare and of his mental illness. 

It was a real, human interaction. 

It was also another moment of visibility for me. Sure, eight years ago, I announced my bisexuality - but today, through a quick reposting and a resulting conversation, I announced, addressed, had no shame in my bipolar disorder. I made myself visible, and not only that, I helped Stephen Fry's visibility, and I was able to share in that with my grandfather and with friends and with their friends, too. Isn't that the sharing of information, the goal, the purpose of the Internet? 

Maybe the fact that our lives are an open book online means that we can be more honest, both with ourselves and with the world. Maybe sharing information isn't just about facts and figures but about the human condition - sexuality, social justice, mental illness, compassion, debate, anger, joy, grief, delight. Maybe we share pictures of our food because they convey something about us, something which is both ephemeral and eternal. 

When I got Facebook, I put a bit of myself out there, and sure, there was a fair amount of ego involved, but there was also an element of - this is me. It was a stepping stone, a passage which took me from being single and heterosexual and unmedicated to being married and bisexual and openly bipolar (and dealing with it). I mean, here I am, on a public blog, talking about how I can be married to a man and attracted to women and emotionally stable and mentally ill and all of it, now, is no big deal. 

I am not invisible. The very root of me is exposed. 

I still miss the days when going out to dinner was more important than telling people I was going out to dinner. I worry that our enjoyment of life is inextricably bound by how we present our lives online, and by how many people "like" it, and by how good our food looks through the lenses of our cell phones. I am so torn between the concept of sharing and that of over-sharing. I don't want my self worth to revolve around my online presence. 

But I can understand that, perhaps, seeing myself through the lens of social media means that I am forced to "like" myself. I have begun to appreciate the many ways in which my Facebook family shares parts of themselves - statuses, articles, music or video - and that I can share those parts, too. I've been awfully hard on social media in the past, but as I have been writing I've thought about what life would be like without Facebook, and I wonder - 

Would I have ever known about Stephen Fry's mental illness? Would I have known about my high school classmate - now living in Europe - giving birth to a beautiful baby boy? Would I have been able to see my ex-girlfriend's awesome band succeed? Would I know what was happening in Asheville, or San Fran, or Washington, or even Baltimore? Would I know exotic dancers, actors, lawyers, poets, housewives, feminists, activists, priests? 

Would they know me? 

It's flitting, it's permanent, and none of it, none of us, are invisible. 

As much as I hate dinners interrupted by Facebook, I love my life with it - an open book, a source of pride, and something worth writing about. 

Even if it is in a status update. 

On the Evening of Making an Offer

Dear Lord,

I am fairly certain that you know all of my thoughts - probably before I think them. It should come as no surprise to you, then, that on this evening of making an offer on our first house, I've got one particular poem stuck in my head.

I was sitting on the porch, as you know, praying - praying for peace. I asked for the kind of peace which would allow my husband and I to handle either a rejection or an acceptance of our offer. And, what do you know (hopefully, a lot), but a flitting line of poetry began to twine itself in the folds of my brain,

"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow..."

Yes God, it's me, Alice - the girl who dreams in greens and rain and the smell of stone and in the language of Ben Bulben. You know me; when I don't know what to say, what to think, I speak in Yeats.

Back to the praying bit. So here I was, Lord, praying in Yeats, and I thought of what it might mean to have a permanent home. I'm sure you remember what I was like as a teenager - a bit of a mess, I'm afraid, but with a terribly romantic idea of purchasing a one way plane ticket, a motor bike, and glibly riding up and down the coasts of Ireland for the rest of my life. Ireland was the closest place to home I had ever felt, and in my dramatic teenaged way I wanted to stay there forever.

It was home - and perhaps I was melodramatic, too rash in falling in love with a far away fairy tale land, but it was, it really was, home.

Now, you know how the story goes, God. You know what my life was like when I forsook my childhood dream and met the love of my life at university. You know he is and always will be a pretty great guy, and that I endeavor, every day, to be worthy of him. You know that, in meeting my husband, I found a home more permanent, more enduring, and (thankfully) a bit less dramatic than my dream of Ireland.

So why the Yeats? Well, God, I think you know. But let me work this out for a moment.

When I think about that poem, I think of a man who had that image of home in his heart. He longs for it, absolutely - he writes that when being in the city, outside of nature and that little island in Sligo, he feels his home calling. And his writing encapsulates the scene of Innisfree; he holds it in a bubble of never-changing by putting it into words. Through poetry, he creates two isles: the physical, and the conceptual. Both are real, both have merit, both are home.

I know, Lord, you're probably sitting up there on a cloud wondering how you ever created a girl who could talk so much. Sometimes, I wonder that too. The act of praying can be quite the marathon event in the Alice household.

Peace and home, that's what I'm trying to figure out. That's why I'm praying. I've got a lot of homes, in a way - a Mom and Dad's house, a Stepmom's house, a Dad and partner's house, a Grandmere's house, a G and Alice's house. And I have had a lot of peace, too - not only recently with G, but also with my Grandpere, when he drove through Baltimore, painfully slow, just to watch the world go by; with my cockatiel, Rembrandt, when he sang his warbles to my shiny silver braces; with my grandparents, S&J, who made me rethink just about everything, from theatre to happiness to life, fully lived.

Peace and home - now that I think about it, you're doing a pretty good job, God. Keep it up. So what am I praying about (I hear You ask Yourself as You have way bigger fish to fry)?

There may just be a little part of me, the little Yeats-speaking part, which holds a home in her heart, trapped in time, beautiful but untouchable.

You know, God, when people are upset - how they say things or beg things of you which don't make much sense? Asking for things that could never happen, regaining the light of lives lost, finding a set of car keys that we should know darn well where we put them? Well, as you know, when I'm really upset and lonely I think, "I want to go home."

Home.

I've worn myself out asking for it, and I bet I've worn you out by not finding it. And tonight - a night I would have ordinarily ended by asking for that home - I started this long, misbegotten prayer, and I prayed for peace, instead.

I could almost see you smile. (You don't have to look so smug, though.)

In praying for peace, I saw my home, and it was me.

It was a ridiculous a-ha moment, to be sure. Yeats's words settled into me a bit more deeply - he was his home, too, because he lived it and wrote about it and loved it. Yeah, the longing is still there - but there is a permanence, something almost tangible, in committing that love to paper. Maybe I'm trying to do that now. Maybe that's what I've been trying to do for quite some time.

Sometimes I want to shake my fist at you, Lord, and make some particularly nasty comments about your mother (sorry, Mary). It all seems too hard, just too, too difficult, when you throw all this stuff in my way like death and money and morality and all the other bits and bobs of being human. It can really suck, God, and sometimes you seem like a jerk. And, don't get me wrong - we are not on the best terms forever. But today you gave me a little something.

If I'm not talking to the air. Which would be embarrassing.

But anyway, God, I'm trying to bring this prayer to a humble finish. G and I made an offer on a house tonight, and it is scary. We don't know if it will be accepted. We don't know if the house inspection would show a lot of needed repairs and fixes. We don't even really know which would be preferable - acceptance or refusal. But what I'm asking for, here, is just a few more moments of peace, in which I can look into myself and see home -

Grandmere, Grandpere; Mom, Richard; Todette, Rembrandt; Dad, Jenn; G, me.

Baltimore, Columbia, Sligo, Cork.

An apartment, a house.

The permanence of Innisfree.

Thanks for listening, God. You'll probably hear from me tomorrow.

Amen.

Inspire HoCoHouseHon

My brilliant mother has undertaken an important task - namely, writing a blog post each morning.

I have to admit, I'm kind of in awe of her.

My mom is and always has been a creative person, drawn to crafting and home decorating, music and poetry, introspective journaling and brain mapping. She is a writer - so much so that one of my standard (but not too dull, I hope) gifts for her has been a pretty notebook and fancy pens. I always thought of her as having something interesting to say, either about her state of mind or about the world she inhabits. I'm grateful to her for teaching me the importance of being honest through writing and through art.

If you read my blog, you probably read my mother's, too, "Village Green/Town Squared." Through it, she has significantly developed her writing skills, while at the same time struggling with and raising questions about our community. Knowing my mother to be a mostly shy person, I am so proud to see her create her voice - not just as a blogger, but as someone to notice, someone to respect, someone to laugh with and cry with. When I think about what it means to live in Columbia, I think about my mom: cool, compelling, open, with a sense of integrity in the life we live here.

Mom went through a particularly nasty election a few months ago in her village of Oakland Mills. To me, Mom would have been a great voice for change in a town which should be growing and adapting to the challenges of modern life. Unfortunately, being a voice for change in Columbia is (sometimes) like banging your head against a wall; there are too many entrenched ideas, too many people hoping that Columbia will stay frozen in the honey amber tree-sap of cultural and structural immobility. Oakland Mills has its fair share of those citizens - people so afraid of change that they don't see, for example, that cutting down a few (a lot of them, dead) trees in Symphony Woods could be the beginning of something wonderful, a Columbia-that-will-be, rather than a Columbia-that-was.

In response to that unpleasant election process, and compelled by the issues of living in Columbia, my mom started writing a blog post each morning. Seeing my mom pull strength out of defeat has inspired me and, in some ways, made me reconsider my role as a blogger in HoCo.

My mom showed me how to heal.

For so long, I have put my writing aside. Though I didn't want it to, the fact that I will not be attending graduate school this fall made a dent in my pride - and in my confidence. My mother might have felt rejected by her home village; I felt incredibly stupid that I had tried to get into a program to which I apparently was unsuited. Writing, then, got harder and harder as I imagined the disapproval of JHU - somehow I saw the impassive faces of fiction professors every time I took up a pen or the iPad. As I was moping away, though, my mother turned a disappointment into something more; what was, at first, bitter, became a catalyst for a new and constant creativity.

Pretty cool. And now, it's my turn.

I'm going to try to write here more often. What I type might not be that interesting every day - frankly, a little less seriousness and a little more informality might do me good. I'm also writing at Buster and Ellie, a site for and by people in their 20s. I'm going to submit stories and poems to contests and see where that leads me.

I've been sticking my head in the sand for too long, and it's depressing and a big waste of time.

So today is a new day - as is every day - and here I am, writing. If I feel a little foolish sometimes, or if the only topic I can think to write about is picking out paint colors or cooking Swiss chard, I'm going to keep on keeping on with a big, "so what?" to the universe.

Finally, if you haven't checked out "Village Green/Town Squared," I suggest you do - the writer is a pretty awesome lady who might just inspire you the way she inspires me.

Winning

A while ago, I wrote a post entitled, "Winning the Lottery," about rape culture in the US and its psychological impact. Today, I'd like to put a new - and rather literal, I'm afraid - spin on those words.

Anyone who knows me might say that I've already won the lottery of life. I married a wonderful man, someone who makes me laugh and holds me when I'm down and eats everything I cook, even when it's mostly vegetables. I live in a safe, beautiful home, and though we rent instead of own it has truly become our space - our art, our furniture, our ever growing collection of glassware. It's an apartment where we have grown up together, figuring out marriage and finances and fun.

I won the lottery in having an amazing sister, fourteen years my junior, who brought light into a world where I had found so little. In some ways, my sister was the driving force of turning my life around - she taught me simple pleasures that only children know, bubbles in the bath, silly songs from preschool, loving and depending on family without hesitation. That black-haired, purple-eyed infant, once so alien to me, became one of my greatest joys. If that isn't winning the lottery, I don't know what is.

I was a winner, too, in getting treatment for my bipolar disorder. Though it is still a struggle sometimes, I have a support system in my family and my doctor - something not everyone is lucky enough to have. I live a mostly normal life, a life I choose to live through writing and housework and cooking and love. Good luck, most certainly, and hard work, is this business of being healthy.

So why do I buy lottery tickets? Why should I want anything other, anything more?

When I was young, Mom and I used to play the lottery game. We'd buy the tickets and then plan what we would do with the money - a house with a yard and a treehouse out back was a dream we held on to as my mother did her best to raise me and feed me, clothe me, house me. The lottery game was an outlet for the desires made difficult by our financial situation.

There's something in me which will never get over those parts of my childhood touched by having too many dreams and too little money.

I'm not trying to be negative about the way my mother raised me - not at all. She magnificently succeeded at taking care of a growing girl, providing me with a capacity for enjoyment wholly unsullied by our lack of wealth. She gave me a place in her faith, and though she was singing in the choir at church rather than sitting beside me in the pews, I always felt a sense of wonder as she shared her belief in a compassionate God. We spent summers going to concerts, having picnics, and we spent winters sledding, building snowmen, mixing ice and sugar to make snow candy and ice cream. Mostly, she provided me with love. Though money was tight, that love was another way in which I won the lottery.

My life was and is full of love - my stepmother was a blessing, my stepfather a stroke of luck too good to believe. I didn't go wanting when it came to affection - from all four of my parents, from my grandparents, from family friends.

Six dollars a week, now, go towards the lottery. What am I looking for that I don't already have?

Most people probably don't think about the lotto in these terms - I can see it being a whim, a hint of delight at the possibility (but without any expectations). I can also see the lottery as someone's last chance at finally having enough on which to get by. But for me, both of those impulses are inextricably caught up with those days when Mom and I planned our treehouse. It's a legacy of not quite having enough that I can't seem to shake.

My husband and I are embarking on that complicated voyage which is buying a house. The housing market in Columbia is a lot more intense than we anticipated - I think we expected the demand to be quite low, but Columbia, being in Howard County, benefiting from a top notch school system, positioned perfectly between Baltimore and DC, is a hot market where properties are sold as soon as they are listed. Finding a house which fits our budget and other criteria has been quite a challenge. We've just found something we like, which is exciting; even so, we are trying to be as financially smart and safe as possible. Without several factors going our way, this house could slip out of reach. Not a big deal, in some ways - as I said, we love where we are living now.

But I've got two tickets in my wallet, and sometimes I pray to that compassionate God - who could chide me, maybe, for my apparent materialism and greediness - that He might spin the numbers my way. I whisper all the things I would do, from fixing up my grandmother's house, to restoring the organ at church in my grandfather's name, to helping my stepmother with rent; I will do it all, I think, and keep only what is needful. I will follow Christ's teachings and give to not only my family but to those in need. Whatever you want, God, I will do.

When I was little, I hoped that someday money would be abolished, and that everyone would have what they needed without those dirty, crumpled bills. No bank accounts, no credit cards, just freedom from wealth and debt.

I'm realizing now that I've gone on and on about money, which is one of those things you are definitely not supposed to do. Forgive me - I tend to write here about all things impolite. My takeaway message is not about needing more money, or about worshipping at the altar of consumerism, or about a childhood lived well but without enough. This is what I mean to say -

I have so, so much. And I am grateful. Old habits might die hard - but new habits, mindfulness, peace in the present, are the stronger foundations of this life I share with my husband, my sister, my mom, my family, my God.

And if that's what it means to win the lottery, I'll take it.