Reading, Writing, and Returning

My business trip to Toronto was encouraging and depressing at the same time. I learned a lot about the latest and greatest breakthroughs in psychiatry. I also learned how little we really know about the brain, its chemistry, and what really works for a multitude of disorders. It was a similar dichotomy on the personal level: I had a great room, enjoyed some nice food, and had 5 mornings that started, miraculously, with uninterrupted showers. But I missed my family and hardly saw Toronto.

Sitting in lectures for 9+ hours per day was pretty grueling, even when the speakers were super smart and compelling. In between, I needed to think of anything but psychiatry. I was able to use some breaks as small windows for reading and writing. That silver lining, which I anticipated, is still shining for me.

On one break I walked down the block to Chapters and bought 3 hardcover books, a big deal for me! As a rule I oppose hardcovers: more money for the same text, and much harder to manage in the bathtub. But these titles just screamed to be bought.

Live What You Love: Notes from an Unusual Life was an easy, colorful read that set the tone for the others. Bob and Melinda Blanchard certainly do have an unusual life. They live part time in Vermont, part time in Anguilla. The book might be categorized as self-help lite, because it does offer gentle suggestions between chapters. Mostly, however, it’s a quirky, non-chronological memoir. Before finding success with their island restaurant, Bob and Melinda started and ended a lot of businesses. They fretted over a sick child. They slept in a VW bus. They moved away, and moved back home. Their message, which I needed to hear, was to try new things without fearing failure.

The Lie that Tells a Truth is another form of encouragement, which I hope will get me over another fear. John Dufresne’s chapters on writing fiction are witty and worthwhile. The chapters end in exercises and the margins are chock full of quotes. I like this one by Patricia Hampl: Refuse to write your life and you have no life. To a nonwriter this must sound fanatic. But every writer gets this, I think. Writing has become like breathing to me (except that at this point in my life I must hold my breath and then hyperventilate when I can!).

Writer’s Idea Workshop: How to Make Your Good Ideas Great by Jack Heffron really stole the stage. I had a few moments to do some of the exercises, and suddenly had a really powerful idea! I scribbled some details and used lunch, the airport, and my flight home to flesh out two chapters for a new book. It is very much like being in love. On the one hand, I wanted to tell everyone about my revelation (and of course no one was around). On the other hand, I didn’t want to dilute it by sharing it. I am favoring this impulse and will not blab too much about it until the proposal is accepted. It’s a unique spin on writing and mothering, with some history thrown in, and I am so excited about it! (I may write to Mr. Heffron to inform him that his book has magical powers.)

I hope to spend Tuesday on a mini-writing retreat. Gavin will be in school, so I can turn my full attention back to my infant book. I’ll look forward to it all weekend. In the meantime, the joy of being back home is still new. I swear Gavin has matured since I left: suddenly he is a sophisticated wit. His language seems more subtle and smart. Tom noticed it too, so it is not just some weird perception from being away. I got home Wednesday night but insisted we leave the sign up on the front door: Welcome home, Mommy. We missed you. These were the best words I read all week.

The Ghost of Nursing

I am flying to Toronto in less than 12 hours, off to cover the American Psychiatric Association meeting for work. The trip has opened up an unexpected dilemma for me. I will get a lot of continuing education credits, which can help renew my certification as a Clinical Nurse Specialist in Mental Health Nursing. But I had forgotten that I have to acquire 1000 practice hours in my specialty between now and 2007.

After 11 years in medical-surgical, emergency, and psychiatric nursing, I left it all behind about 6 years ago. I saw dangerously short staffing, preferential treatment for the insured, and administrators who crunched numbers with not even a nod to compassion. There are ugly memories: patients dying in undignified ways, clinicians enrolling inappropriate patients in studies (for the money), uninsured psychotic patients being “held” on a stretcher in the cramped Emergency Room until they were just calm enough to leave. To conserve my strength, I chose my battles. But finally I just had to walk away.

I wrote about it of course. I can see how hurt and angry I was:

I am finally doing it. I am finally saying goodbye. I remember an innocent time when I thought my optimism, my cheerfulness, my willingness to help others would save the day. Now I see that it is a losing battle. My wellspring of caring is nearly dry, and I am saying goodbye before it is depleted. There have been too many years of fighting. Fighting for my patients when others didn’t care. Fighting to get them a room, a decent meal, a place to die. Fighting for some respect for the individual and for some semblance of health care coverage. Fighting for some sense of fairness, of ethics. Screaming for others to look at those who suffer. My heart lights up when I see another nurse who feels this way. I feel we are “brothers in arms.” But despite the fact that there are others like me, I am tired of caring. I am tired of feeling like the only one who cares. The system, the greed always wins in the end. I have fought the good fight, and now it’s someone else’s turn. I’m afraid there will be nothing left for my children, my husband, myself. I want to be greedy and selfish. Let someone else do the hurting, the worrying. I’m used up. I’m cold. I’m hungry. I’m shell-shocked. I’m old before my time. I hurt. You’re on your own.

Despite the obvious stress it caused me, I find myself wanting to rejoin nursing sometimes. While visiting someone in the hospital, I overhear the floor nurses chatting about a nasogastric tube or a new admission. I listen as an insider. I think, I was one of you. Sometimes I think, I am one of you.

Then I think again, about too many battles and not enough victories. I loved the patients but came to despise the system. How would I handle that stress now that I am a mom, now that I am a writer?

One thing that bothered me at first about writing was that I didn’t see it as a helping profession. And it’s not, not like nursing. But I have decided, having been helped by countless things I’ve read, that creative writing can be helpful in a much more philosophical way. Mostly I like that it can give people hope, or new ideas, or just a savored moment, reading descriptions that shine and create a new world right there on the page. But there’s a definite, lingering sadness in knowing I left my first calling behind.

I’ll be sitting in this conference with a lot of clinicians. I will feel like a pretender in that I no longer actually care for patients, just write about them for a living. It will be a good time to think about what to do.

It will be the longest period I have ever been away from Gavin, and I am missing him and Tom already.

But it’s not all heavy. There will a big, comfy hotel room and an endless supply of food. And, oh yes, maybe a few quiet moments to write, on the plane or before the first symposium in the morning. There is always that silver lining.

Writer in the Mist

I have a dream of being a columnist, to write some commentary on life every day, a little bit Erma Bombeck, a little bit Anna Quindlen, although hopefully mainly me. And my Saturday blog is my once weekly foray into the experiment.

Often though, on Saturdays, I wake up feeling blank. I go on an expedition in my own mind, picking up ideas and tossing them down again. Especially after a stressful week, it is as if someone had ironed all the interesting wrinkles out of the cloth of life. I am on autopilot, and obey a robotic inner voice: Must work, must cook, must eat, must parent, must sleep, must make a list so I can get it all done, must do it all over again. I feel very musty after a week like this, and need airing out. I need a good long walk outdoors, a break in routine.

I think some of my confined feeling this week is from lack of fresh air, a quite literal mustiness. It has been raining, hard, for days. Is it true that Seattle is perpetually rainy? How do people cope? I wonder if it is more of a misty rain. If so, then I could live there. I know I would find other writers, and I love a good walk in the mist (although I have a punishing combination of Art Garfunkel and Groucho Marx hair the rest of the day).

Before the big rain started, Wednesday I think, I parked my car in Chester, and set off in my business clothes with incongruous blue Keds. Chester is an artsy town with historical houses and plenty of small windows on nature, a perfect blend for me. I walked past the marsh on the right side of a curvy road, dragging my pinstriped cuffs through the soggy grass when a car approached. Then up East Liberty, a great old hill with houses dating from the 1700s. When my heart rate topped out I panted past an aged cemetery, complete with picturesque tumbled stone wall and craggy trees, past the town meeting house, and down Wig Hill Road.

I always start out struggling with the I wants when I walk certain parts of Chester, Essex, or Deep River. I see big, historical houses and whine internally, why don't I have one of those? I covet my neighbor's house, as they say in the Ten Commandments. I used to beat myself up about this, then I realized that the houses look so orderly, so easy, and have come to symbolize the fantasy of an easy life for me. I know that if I moved in my stress would not magically disappear - no doubt the current occupants also struggle with clutter, chaos, and covets of their own. I do still envy that their neighborhoods are so perfect for walking. But I comfort myself with slightly sour grapes: I would not get to see this variety of Connecticut neighborhoods if I lived in one of those perfect places. I would walk the same loop every day, and probably get bored.

It was the kind of a mist that threatened to be more, but I felt silly when I tried the umbrella. I heard nothing coming down on it. Umbrella retired, I climbed toward Prospect Street, which would loop me back towards town. Flying flashes of red (both robins and cardinals) were frequent on this particular walk. I decided rain was good for worming, just like it is for fishing. I imagined small open beaks waiting in unseen nests.

The best part of a long walk alone is how the world falls away. Let me clarify: the artifices of the world fall away. I forget to think about what I covet, about obligations, about schedules. There is just the mist on my face, the memories (many of camping) that cool air evokes, glimpses into other lives (human and otherwise), and the physical release of heading downhill again. The varied rhythm of my shoes on sandy pavement, on gravel, the soundless breaks when I walk over sod become a song to replace that awful, robotic voice of stress.

That day, when I went to work after my 45-minute walk, I felt refreshed and renewed. And just recalling my misty walk this morning gave me a bit of renewal - not quite the real thing, but a good start to yet another rainy day.

Natural Space

I haven’t used this space much for one of my great loves. But in the background, always, I am reading about it and thinking about it.

Right now I am reading Last Child in the Woods and Timothy, Notes from an Abject Reptile. Both fall into the general category of nature books, but in vastly different ways. Last Child is a nonfiction look at how today’s kids are further and further removed from nature. The “plot”, if you can call it that, for Timothy, sounds laughable, but brilliant Verlyn Klinkenborg pulls it off. It is about the painstakingly slow moving and infinitely observant life of a tortoise, from the tortoise’s perspective. It sounds like it might be a cutesy anthropomorphization (anything but that!), but it is the opposite: very lyrical and thought provoking. For Timothy, time is pretty much irrelevant and the present moment is all important. My life is enhanced by garden visits with this tortoise Zen master.

I had to buy Last Child, because it resonated with me from the minute I picked it up. It’s a nonpreachy, convincing argument for unstructured outdoor playtime. Organized play, like soccer, doesn’t count in this author’s view. The ideal outdoor experience is all about poking around with a stick, maybe jumping in a mud puddle, holding a worm, building a fort. Figuring out how the world works, and how it feels. My own childhood was like this, but the world has sped up and everyone seems cocooned. Too often Gavin is shepherded from car to day care to stores and back to car, to home and videos and PBS, in the footsteps of his similarly under-aired, autopiloted parents. He wants to be outside quite a bit, but I am ashamed to admit that I too often have thought it messy and inconvenient, and perhaps exaggerated the dangers (bees, ticks, and poison ivy, not to mention the child stalkers I imagine in our bushes).

The best times I’ve had with Gavin lately have been outside. In Woodstock, after we exhausted the stores and restaurants, we strolled to the local playground. Gavin was most interested in the things beyond the slide and swings: the hawk babies in the cemetery next door, the bees that hovered all about, the couple working their tiny plot of the cooperative garden. We also hiked the Overlook Trail high above town. The highlights for Gavin were rearranging clumps of leaves in a small stream and making “paint” with spit and a red rock. Then, last weekend, our neighbor Rich uncovered a huge black salamander with yellow spots under his woodpile. Gavin promptly named him EyeFace (for his bulging eyes), and we set up a little terrarium for him outside. Poor EyeFace kept darting below the rock we had set down, and wouldn’t eat the ants we offered. He set his pulsating reptilian jaw in defiance, and we had to set him free so he wouldn’t starve. But how excited Gavin was about him! We would be doing other things, and Gavin would tear off to the deck: I have to check on EyeFace. He showered EyeFace with affectionate words and kind questions, not to mention an excess of leaves, grass, and water. All week I have hoped to see EyeFace again, perhaps emerging from under the deck or trekking towards the thick moss by the stone wall.

It’s been a hard week. I have a close relative in the hospital, an event too fresh and personal to air here. And I realized, grabbing a quick outdoor meal in town after visiting hours, that nature is such a comfort to me. There is a fragrant tree in the area that smells like grapes (I must find out the name). All through my quiet, exhausted meal, nature called to me, I am here. It’s me again. It was a balmy night for May in Connecticut, maybe 70 degrees. Everyone was out, reveling in that unbeatable spring sensation of warm evening air on the skin again. These little revelations, these recognitions, are constant like my porch wren (see a few blogs back: Wrens, Woodstock, and the Universe), and often my preferred route to God. Or forget the route, just God.

My love for nature is inexorably tied in with memories of my father, who died when I was six. I don’t remember many of our conversations, but I specifically remember one about dew on the grass, and another about fog (he described it as clouds on the ground, and the idea still enchants me). I remember my father wading in the Atlantic to fish, and wanting to toboggan in subzero temperatures in Vermont. My mom said he dreamed of a second career as a forest ranger, an escape from his stressful attorney lifestyle. I have my own outdoor dream, too, but mine of course works in writing a book. I want to be the next Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard) or Henry David Thoreau, transmitting volumes of wisdom simply by witnessing the natural world.

Now that spring is here, my predawn blogs are often accompanied by birdsong. I love to hear it swell from solo to chorus. I never tire of the tune as I stare through my monitor, wondering what to write next.