new life

These are my plants. Or most of them anyway. I crammed them onto a shelf one morning a few weeks ago in an effort to give them all a little extra dose of sunlight. My geranium, which has been steadily hanging on since April, was beginning to look a little droopy and I was worried she might have caught a cold in our ice box of a bathroom. Twenty minutes or so on the radiator would do a world of good, I figured, and so I took her down from her perch above the bathroom mirror and snuggled her against the paperwhite bottles.

These plants are the only living things in this world that depend on me for their daily well-being. Our apartment's too tiny for even the smallest goldfish and I'm fairly certain that my husband's diet would actually improve if tomorrow I suddenly vanished. But these plants, they need me. The paperwhites, I'll admit, only barely. They aren't cut out for long-term relationships. They grow up fast and bloom with fanfare, but they're gone before they've hardly begun. Last week there was a casualty when one collided with the aformentioned radiator. I came down our ladder-stairs in the morning to find the singed remains of a particularly beautiful specimen. Perhaps an extra adjustment the night before would have been more prudent, but I had gone to bed without checking in and in the night the poor bulb was jettisoned from its bottle. I picked at the pieces of leaf that had burned onto the radiator, and completed a quick burial, sans ceremony.

Two weeks ago my big sister became the mother of an actual human being. There were warning signs, of course: the months of pregnancy, the addition of a wooden cradle to her apartment, the ever-expanding belly. But all of that was hardly preparation for the sudden arrival of a pink and squirmy and incredibly alive little person. Poof, a human being with a tiny beating heart and two tiny expanding lungs and all of those many fingers and toes out in the wide world alongside us. I won't pretend to understand what it must be like to be a mother, but I can say that this wilty geranium, feisty paperwhite-owning aunt is awestruck, already.

The Other War On Women

Birth control. Binders. Bodies. Babies. As last fall’s presidential election came to a head, the phrase “war on women” became commonplace, part of the traditional vitriolic mud-slinging that both sides used against the other. As a woman, and one who places a high value on the freedoms of women, I of course followed the back-and-forth debates with interest, nausea, or amsuement, depending on what I was hearing.

But during that same period, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about a different “war on women”—the war of woman against woman, the war that we wage on each other, no men required.

At the beginning of my pregnancy last summer, I was talking to a pair of newlywed friends about my quest for the best pregnancy books.

“I don’t want to read anything that is going to make me panic about what could be wrong with my baby, or feel guilty about the pregnancy and parenting choices I make,” I told them.

The husband wrinkled his brow in confusion. “What do you mean, feel guilty?” he asked. “Why would parenting books make you feel guilty?”

I had to laugh at his response. It hadn’t taken me long after seeing that positive pregnancy test to come to understand just how incredibly saturated with guilt the world of pregnancy and parenting really is. Pregnancy books, websites, and forums are filled with dramatic stories about the harm you could potentially do to your unborn baby through seemingly innocuous things including (but not limited to!) nutrition, exercise (or lack thereof), medication, and even hot baths. Champions of epidurals or unmedicated childbirth regularly spar over the various merits of their preferred method, often making it seem like your child’s entire future life could hinge on whether or not you had a medicated labor and delivery.

And things only get more heated when you get into the world of parenting, with all its various methodologies and ideologies and conflicting advice. Breast or bottle? Crib or co-sleeping? Baby swing or babywearing?

Parenting isn’t the only arena in which women seem to spend an awful lot of time attacking each other, of course—it’s just the one I’ve been immersed in the most as I’ve prepared to welcome this new little one into the world. I’ve also seen women go to bat over things as big as career choices and hiring help, and things as insignificant as dyeing their hair or wearing makeup.

And let’s not even get started on the pressure we put on each other when it comes to what a woman should look like.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m as guilty as anyone else. I have on far too many occasions found myself judging another woman’s lifestyle choices, or fashion, or hair, or parenting, or career path. I’ve cringed on seeing wardrobe choices I don’t agree with and raised my eyebrows at life paths that seem less-than-ideal according to my worldview.

But still, I can’t help thinking:

What would the world be like if we women didn’t spend quite so much time and energy waging war on each other?

My resolution for this year is to give myself more grace—to stop holding myself to impossible standards, to have a little compassion for the times when I inevitably fall short (and then do so again, and again, and again). I’m vowing in 2013 to be a little kinder and gentler on myself, accept my own weaknesses and allow myself a little more love.

And all of this, this thinking about new year’s resolutions and about the war among women, has me thinking also: What if we all could do this, just a little, for each other? What if we could allow each other just a little more grace, a little more love, a little more acceptance? What if we could let go of our own lifestyles and convictions just long enough to recognize that, regardless of whether we feed our children by breast or bottle, we are all worthy of love?

It might just be a powerful change, indeed.

Do you ever find yourself at war with other women?

Like Water

By Judith NewtonHer book, Tasting Home, is available for pre-order on Amazon.

“How do you peel a walnut?” my daughter asked as she looked, not too happily, at the mound of nuts on the kitchen table.  We’d spent three days in the kitchen laboring over the twelve dishes we’d planned for a large buffet, and chiles en nogada, or chiles in walnut sauce, were the final stage of our cooking marathon.  That very evening some forty faculty and students from all over campus would be arriving to celebrate our new multicultural graduate program, and if any dish could instill a sense of community it would be chiles en nogada.

Making simple recipes like tacos de crema, macaroni with serrano chiles, and refried beans had been easy and even pleasurable, but the chiles in walnut sauce were posing a challenge. I’d combined Frida Kahlo’s recipe with one I’d taken from the Internet, and the latter called on us to peel the walnuts before pulverizing them for the sauce. “Mom,” said Hannah, rubbing at one of the walnuts, “this brown stuff isn’t coming off.” “This is a window into the lives of generations of women,” I said, ineffectually scrubbing another walnut with my fingers. “Can you imagine how much time they spent working in kitchens?” “I love cooking with you like this,” Hannah had said when we first began. “I love it too,” I’d said. Our years of cooking together and of struggling through difficult recipes had created a strong sense of solidarity.

We decided not to peel the walnuts, since Frida’s recipe didn’t call for it, but we did roast the two dozen poblano chiles and then pulled off their skins. Then we chopped a picadillo out of shredded meat, fruits, nuts and cinnamon, and, cradling the chiles in our hands, began to stuff them with the sweet and savory mix. We were treating those chiles as if they’d just been born, but, despite our labor, they were developing some ugly splits. We decided not to flour them, coat them in egg mix, and then fry them in hot oil as Frida’s recipe required.

“It’s too risky,” I said, entertaining grim visions of the chiles bursting their sides and spilling their colorful innards into a smoky pool of oil. Did Frida fry her own chiles, I wondered. Then came the sauce---easy, sweet, and cool. Four cups of (unpeeled) walnuts pureed with cream cheese, Mexican crema, cinnamon, and a fragrant half cup of sherry. Finally, seeds from six pomegranates and sprigs of parsley to go on top.  Red, white, and green---the colors of the Mexican flag.

I had been thinking about a Mexican novel for the entire three days, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. I’d been imagining Hannah and me as Tita and Chenca, two characters who spend much of their lives in the kitchen. A takeoff on nineteenth-century Mexican romance, Like Water is a novel about love and also a novel about politics, the latter being represented by the Mexican Revolution and the ongoing struggle of Tita and her sister Gertrude against patriarchal culture.

Each chapter of the novel is organized around a recipe, and the process involved in making the chapter’s dish---the grinding, the toasting, the chopping, the boiling, the frying, the cracking of eggs–is so thoroughly woven throughout the pages that cooking, an often invisible form of labor, becomes as central to the story as romance and revolution. Cooking, indeed, becomes an emblem of the domestic work that makes romance and revolution possible. It is the force that keeps women and men alive not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and politically as well.

Cooking is like that, always there, and if it is as it should be, it not only nourishes our bodies but gives us the comfort of feeling loved, cared for, and secure. Eating what is cooked and served in a caring way evokes one of our first experiences of feeling at home in the world, the experience of being fed by another being. That is one reason that cooking and eating with others can heal the adult self, one reason that it can so easily make us feel connected to another person, a family, a culture, a political community.

Like Tita and Chenca, Hannah and I were laboring in the service of politics and love. The new graduate program was meant to be revolutionary---cross racial, multi-cultural, and oriented toward political activism not just inside, but outside the classroom as well. And I had done enough organizing by then to know how cooking for others, not just from duty, but with generosity and lightness of heart, can develop and sustain those ties of feeling that are, at bottom, what make political community possible.

In Like Water for Chocolate, food is given magical force.  Quail in Rose Petal Sauce invites Tita and Pedro to enter each other’s bodies both spiritually and sensuously as they sit at the dining table. It prompts Gertrude to run away with a revolutionary, sitting behind him, naked on his horse. The Chiles in Walnut Sauce provoke the guests at Tita and Pedro’s wedding to make passionate love. Magical realism like this suggests the power of emotion, of the unconscious, and of cooking as emotion work in the day-to-day activities of our lives.

Like life, the novel is full of mothers, those who nourish and those who do not. The bad mother, Elena, controls Tita, insists that Tita serve her until she dies, and forbids Tita to marry Pedro, the man she loves. Cruel, repressing, she is the mother who denies. Even after death, she reappears, forbidding Tita to be happy. Like a force of nature, she returns again and again, suggesting the lasting influence of how we are mothered.

But Tita finds good mothers to take Elena’s place---Chenca, the cook who tends to Tita in the kitchen, and Dr. John and his Indian mother, Morning Light, who feed Tita healing foods after Elena brutally entombs her daughter in the Dove Cot. Tita herself becomes a nurturing mother to Esperanza, her sister’s daughter. Like Tita I, too, had found alternative mothers---in Dick, my gay ex-husband, in my women friends, in colleagues I had come to love. But most of all I had found mothering in being motherly---to Hannah and to my political community. Cooking for, and eating with, others had all but eclipsed those days in my mother’s house---the shame, the lost identity, the spilled water on the floor. Like Chenca, I wanted to pass on, to Hannah and to others, the recipes, the utopian practices, the ways of being and of labor that make history more than a tale of struggle; that make it also a love story, a story of caring for others.

* * *

CHILES EN NOGADA (Adapted with permission of Marilyn Tausend from adaptation by StarChefs.com from Cocina de la Familia: More Than 200 Authentic Recipes from Mexican-American Home Kitchens by Marilyn Tausend with Miguel Ravago. Fireside, Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1999.)

Marilyn Tausend kindly informs me that the secret to peeling the walnuts is to use fresh walnuts, right from the tree if possible. Meat: 2 lb beef brisket or 1 lb beef and 1 lb pork 1 small white onion cut into quarters 2 cloves garlic 1 T sea salt Picadillo: 4 T. safflower or canola oil 1/3 c. chopped white onion ½ tsp cinnamon ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper 1/8 tsp ground cloves 3 heaping T. raisins 2 T chopped walnuts 2 T. candied pineapple 1 fresh pear, peeled and chopped 1 apple, peeled and chopped 3 large, ripe tomatoes, roasted, peeled and chopped Kosher salt to taste Chiles: 6 fresh poblano chiles, roasted, peeled, and seeded with stem intact Walnut Sauce: 1 c. fresh walnuts 6 oz cream cheese (not fat free) at room temperature 1 ½ c Mexican Crema ½ tsp sea salt 1 T sugar 1/8 tsp cinnamon ¼ c. dry sherry Garnish: 1 T. chopped flat-leaf parsley ½ c. pomegranate seeds 1.      Cut meat into large chunks; remove excess fat. Place meat in large Dutch oven with onion, garlic and salt. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil.  Skim off foam if it collects on the surface. Lower heat and simmer for 45 minutes until the meat is just tender. 2.      Remove from heat and allow meat to cool in the broth. Then remove meat and finely shred it. 3.       Warm the oil in a heavy skillet and sauté the onion and garlic over medium heat until pale gold.  Stir in shredded meat and cook for 5 minutes. Add cinnamon, pepper, cloves.  Stir in raisins, 2 T walnuts, and candied pineapple.  Add chopped pear and apple and mix well. Add tomatoes and salt to taste.  Continue cooking over medium high heat until most of the moisture has evaporated.  Stir now and then.  Let cool, cover, and set aside.  The picadillo may be made one day ahead. 4.      Slit the chilies down the side just long enough to remove seeds and veins, keeping the stem end intact. Drain chilies on absorbent paper until completely dry. Set aside. Chiles may be made a day in advance 5.      At least 3 hours in advance, place 1 c walnuts in small pan of boiling water.  Remove from heat and let sit for 5 minutes. Drain the nuts and, when cool, rub off as much of the dark skin as possible.  Chop into small pieces. 6.      Place nuts, cream cheese, crema, and salt in a blender and puree thoroughly.  Stir in the sugar, cinnamon and sherry.  Chill for several hours. 7.      Preheat oven to 350 F.  When ready to serve reheat the meat filling and stuff the chilies. Place chilies, covered in warm oven.  After they are heated, place chilies on serving platter, cover with chilled walnut sauce and sprinkle with parsley and pomegranate seeds.

Republished with permission from Tasting Home

XXII. Rhône

The city of Lyon is known for its guignols, wooden hand puppets that, these days, are used frequently for political satire. I’ve seen a few of the faux-news television shows in my room back in Chambéry. Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected French president at the time, has just married model-turned-singer Carla Bruni, and their guignol doppelgangers make frequent appearances. I am tagging along on this day trip with two girls I met by happenstance in the supermarket. Annabel and Lucy are college juniors and are in Chambéry for their semester abroad. They seem so much older than me, even though the difference in our ages is only three years. They seem so much more fun, so much better at being happy where they are.

As we wander the tiny, packed streets of the Lyon old town, I pass guignol after guignol. Someone would probably like one as a present, I think, but I don’t buy anything. We keep walking for a while, look around a cathedral, eat crêpes, and then take the train to Chambéry. Annabel and Lucy go happily to their student dorm, getting ready to go out for the night, and I go back to my quiet apartment on the hill.

As I sit on the edge of my bed, I compare Annabel and Lucy’s experience of Chambéry to mine. They are so much more in the present than I am, constantly light and focusing only on the moment they’re in. Not only have I been looking forward to going home essentially since my arrival, but I came here in the first place because of the past---I chose this part of the country because my ancestors are from this Alpine region, my great-great-grandparents who made their way across the Atlantic from Switzerland more than a century ago.

And if I expected to find ghosts here, or at least something innately familiar, I was wrong.

Are You My Mother?

Dear Sibyl, Recently my grandmother got ill, and my mom went across the country to care for her.  I know this is the right thing for my mom to do, but I'm feeling abandoned and upset.  My mom recently retired and was so excited about all the ways she could spend time with her grandkids (my children) and help us out.  I know this sounds incredibly selfish, but my mom also has 5 siblings that live near my grandmother, and I'm just dumbfounded that she dropped us.  Any words of wisdom?

Distraught Daughter

Dear DD,

We never know when our mothers will leave us.  For some it is early, from a death or an emotional detachment.  For others, it is much later, unfortunately often at the time we feel we need them most.  Either way, it is always painful, and always a reason to mourn and find a way to move on.

So many of the problems in relationships, particularly with family, stem from expectations.  You expected that your mom would be there for you, to help you raise her grandchildren.  This was not an unreasonable expectation, since she has been helping you thus far, but now that you are having to shift your way of thinking about her role, it's leaving you feeling abandoned.

Your mother has her own life.  She's an adult, and she can do anything she wants with her retirement---she's earned it.  So, I'm wondering, how did she tell you that she was leaving town, and letting go of her commitments to you?  If she left without notice, and without you getting a chance to tell her how much you'll miss her, and how sad it is that your kids will lose their close relationship with her, then what you need to do is tell her how you're feeling, and that she could have handled the communication of the change differently.

The other piece that stands out to me from your letter is that you feel that her siblings could be stepping up to the plate and helping your grandmother so your mother could stay with you.  Well, that's an awkward situation to be in.  I'm not sure you want to take on your entire family system, and get involved in their complicated maneuvering of this caregiving issue.  So, you'll have to adjust your expectations for them as well as your mom.

Here's the tricky part.  You need to change what role you are giving your mother in your life (and your kids' lives), without losing the emotional connection to her.  This means you can't just totally detach and say, "Well, I guess she doesn't care about me or her grandchildren!"  You prevent this by being honest about your feelings (stop judging them as selfish and let yourself have them), with yourself and with her, and by accepting what offers she can give at this time.  That way, you're keeping the door open for a closer connection with your mom when she has the space and energy for it again.

You might find this change in roles means you are able to support your mom a bit, too.  I bet it is hard taking care of your grandmother, and perhaps you will get closer to her in this time by offering your ear to her, to listen to her struggles.  In order to do that, you'll have to forgive her for bailing on you.  It won't be easy, but if what you ultimately desire is more closeness with your mother, you'll find it a beautifully strange process.

Love, Sibyl

Lessons from a creative summit...

  Dearest Clara,

Every once in awhile, I like to get outside of my own box. It seems strange that as a management consultant that I would bother to spend time with photographers or writers or other creatives.  But while I enjoy what I do for a living, my true passions are outside of that.  I indulge them by spending time with others who can and do choose them for a living.  I admire that group of people so much---and sometimes there's nothing like getting out of your usual cadence to really gain perspective.  This weekend I attended a conference with hundreds of other people much more creative than I.  Sometimes I certainly wish that passions could be more for me, but at least for the immediate future, events like these will be as close as I can get.

Here are a few thoughts from some of the most creative people I have met, who also happen to be some of the best advisors for life as it turns out:

• "The only risk is not taking any risk": A reminder from one of the most risk-taking designers out in our time that if you don't have the courage to put your ideas and thoughts and frameworks out there to push the boundaries and make something happen, then ultimately the biggest thing at stake is that nothing at all will happen.  And life is about making things happen.  You get to choose the path that will be best for you, but have the courage to choose something.  Don't live your life by default.
• "You might as well spend time learning how to hustle since that is what you'll be doing from here until eternity":  I think some might look at this statement and find it demotivating.  After all, there's something about looking at a life of hustle that is akin to looking at a treadmill with no end of the road in sight.  But I see this differently.  Ultimately, life is about hard work, and that never really goes away.  If you learn to do the work---be thorough, pace yourself, know how to prioritize, know when to say no, know how to go after opportunities, know that no return comes without investment---then the work doesn't seem so daunting.  Learn how to do the work right.
• "You  might be judging me but that's not any of my business---you do what you like and I'll do the same": You'll find soon enough that the world is full of judgement---I'm always ashamed when I find myself on the giving end. I know from being on the receiving end, that often that judgement stings.  I found this young artist's perspective so touching when she openly acknowledged her awareness of people's judgement and her gracious, character building way of disregarding it---she regards judgement as the problem of the person giving it, not the person receiving it.  Have faith in who you are as a person---don't be defined by the judgement of others.
• "It's better to be disliked for who you are, than to be liked for someone people only think you are": It is so easy to get caught up in who we think we should be based on what others think we should be.  You'll know when you're doing it because you don't quite feel yourself, because you always have this nagging feeling of being left behind, and because you only feel that you're moving ahead when others give you permission to. . . look for those signs.  You won't want to admit them but trying to be someone else will eventually wear you out and wear you down---it's better to be known for who you really are, even if it comes at the cost of admitting who you are not.
• "I stopped comparing myself to others when I realized I was comparing my insides to other people's outsides": It's tempting to compare.  And if we're insecure, it can even be addictive.  But when we do, we know our full gifts and limitations but we don't necessarily see the full picture with others.  We don't know what's going on behind the scenes and we only see part of the picture (which incidentally is what we want to see).  It can only make you feel bad about yourself since a comparison is, in that sense, ultimately unfair.
• "Your success is built on incremental growth, and sometimes, every once in a while, magic might happen": I thought this was a tremendous insight and can be applied to nearly any project.  With information coming at us quicker and quicker, we might see the success of others and think it came to them overnight.  Every once  in a while that might be the case, but I assure you that it is extremely rare.  Most people have been working at their dreams and talents for years if not a lifetime, and for most people, success comes in small increments at a time.  Every so often, we're gifted a bit of magic - perhaps a collaboration, or flattering press, or some other injection that gives us some accelerated growth.  But that wouldn't happen without our foundational increments to support us.  When it seems like your due will never come, just keep working---the more solid your foundation, the longer your success will ultimately hold.

I know your successes will be many in this world, and I, for one, can't wait to see you achieve them.

All my love,

Mom

The Birthday Tradition

A few years ago, I invented something called The Birthday Tradition.  Despite my opinions on my birthday (namely, that it is the best holiday of the year; that I am allowed to be giddy for a week or so before and depressed for a week or so after; that “It’s my birthday!” is a respectable response to any question and/or comment directed at me in the time period listed above), I did not actually institute the Tradition on my birthday, but on my boyfriend, Zack’s.  I’d already moved to New York by then, and he was still living in San Francisco, finishing up a building project at his job before joining me.  I came back to San Francisco for the holidays and for his birthday.  Feeling mushy (booze, old friends and too many gingerbread men, aka crack, will do that to me), I began espousing my love for Zack. “He’s one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met,” I said, “but he also can talk about anything and everything, for hours, even if he’s just humoring me.  He looks super sexy when he’s rock climbing and has successfully taught me how to build IKEA furniture.  Kinda.”

“Well,” our friend Matt jumped in.  “If we’re doing that, I wanna say why I think Zack is awesome.”

“Me too,” said our friend Colette.  “You guys can’t get all the credit when he ends up crying.”

And the Birthday Tradition was born.

We do it every birthday, and every person is required to say their bit, even a friend’s new girlfriend or boyfriend who met the birthday person moments before.   There’s a lot to love about people, whether you’ve just met them or ate their crayons in kindergarten.  That’s the point of the Birthday Tradition:  we so often think the things we love about people, little or big, but rarely actually say them. Sometimes it’s nice, surrounded by loved ones, to be reminded of why the love is there.  It makes it that much more concrete, and that much harder to break.

We’ve done the Tradition for every birthday I’ve attended for the past three years.  I’ve said I loved a person’s brilliant sock collection, their offbeat sense of humor, their impeccable sense of self, their cooking and their party planning and their unfailing kindness and their loyalty and their karaoke skills.  Which is why I was so devastated when Zack told me, as his first birthday in London was rapidly approaching, that he thought we should skip the Tradition this year.

“But why?” I said, extending the final syllable, clutching my hands to my cheeks and sliding to the floor writhing as if a hot ball of fire were about to burst from my belly button.

“Most of the people coming out are friends from grad school,” he said.  “It’s kind of like asking your colleagues at work to say something.  I think it’ll be more awkward than fun.  Also, the British aren’t really mushy like that.”  (This is true: I’ve witnessed one marriage proposal in England.  It took place in a pub, and the matter of fact question was followed by fish and chips)

Begrudgingly, I accepted Zack’s wishes.  That night, though, as we readied ourselves to go out to the pub in which we would ring in his birthday, I was struck by regret.  Zack, of all people, needed the Birthday Tradition.  I brought in our roommate, and together the three of us, with our two cats as witnesses, did a mini Tradition.  It was the smallest the Tradition had ever been, but it was lovely.  Then we went to the pub and got drunk.

As the next day, Zack’s actual birthday, drew to a close, we ate cake at our flat, and watched as snowflakes the size of my nose slowly blanketed the world around our windows.

“It was a good birthday, right?” I said, snuggled up to Zack on the couch.

“It was,” he said.  We’d just talked to his parents in California, and his voice, like them, was far away.  A birthday is a time filled with love, but it’s often that kind of love that makes you miss the people you love the most.  I snuggled in closer, and squeezed him hard.

And then the email came.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ZACK, said the subject line, and in the email a single line of message, the word “Love” followed by the names of all of the New York friends we’d left behind.  He clicked open the attached Powerpoint and found, on the first page, the words, “Happy birthday, Zack!  We are so bummed that we can’t celebrate with you this year so the Birthday Tradition has gone digital.  We miss and love you, The Gang.”  Next to it was a not so flattering picture of Zack asleep with a pizza box on his belly.

Every page was made by one of our friends, and every page featured a heart felt message and several embarrassing photos, many taken years ago, reminders of how long the friendships had endured.  Our friend who is currently in Thailand even submitted his response, and a lump formed in my throat as Zack clicked through page after page of messages of love.  Zack, whom I’ve seen cry less times than I can count on one three fingered hand, blinked back shiny tears.

It is not the birthday of the Birthday Tradition, but nonetheless, I would like to say why I love it.  I love it because the more positives in the world, the better.  I love it because it makes me feel grateful for my friends, and reminds me that they are the buoys that so often keep me afloat.  I love it because it’s easy, and simple, and kind.  I love it because I love to see people blushing, and I love it because it’s fun to watch the newbies squirm.  Mostly, though, I love it because it could show, even from an ocean away, that the love was still there, steadfast and strong.

The Vanishing Man

Dear Sibyl, This summer, one of my best friends from childhood contacted me.  Actually, he was the first person I ever Loved.  As a teen, I hid my feelings from him for five years.  Finally, I told him how I felt in a letter, and said that if he didn't feel the same we shouldn’t continue to be friends.  I didn't hear from him again until this summer---fifteen years later.

When I heard from him, I was both excited and wary.  It was great to have him back!  At the same time, he was newly divorced after being separated for a year and clearly looking for something.  He said that he had a crush on me all those many years ago too, and that he had thought about me many times.  He started to talk about wanting to come visit.  I live over 600 miles away.  His tone became more and more romantic, and it was around this time I decided to do a reality check.

I didn't say I wasn't interested.  On the contrary, I was very interested, but I said that if he was going to keep talking romance, I needed to see him.  I told him that I really want children and a family, and that if he wanted to get together I would need him to be open to exploring that possibility with me if things went well.  

He responded that he cared about me, but that his relationships usually happen more 'organically'.  I said I understood and was sincerely grateful for his honesty.  We both said we were still very much interested in maintaining the friendship.

I didn't hear from him after our conversation for four months.

On Christmas, he reached out.  Although my feelings were mixed, I was mostly happy to finally be hearing from him again.

He dated someone briefly in the intervening time but is once again alone.  A few months ago, he was checked out by a doctor and learned he is sterile.  He bought a house in order to move toward a place where he can have a wife and children.  He knew he was sterile when he bought it, but he hopes to have a family through non-traditional means.  He was not in a good place on Christmas, because he had just spent the whole day around family with lots of little children.  He was feeling lonely and sad.  I doubted when I hung up the phone that I would ever hear from him again.

Since then, he has apologized several times for being a bad friend to me, and the two of us have been communicating almost every day, texting or emailing.  It has felt good to have him back in my life.

My love life has been complicated recently, and I let him know that the first time we talked.  For the first time ever, I’ve had a Friend with Benefits.  My FwB is great, but I always knew he was moving away. In fact, FwB just left this morning.  

The longer my old crush and I talk the more I realize I have major unresolved feelings for him.  In fact, I have been unable to climax since our initial Christmas conversation.  The one time I successfully came, it was because I was concentrating really hard on pretending I was with Old Flame instead of with my lovely FwB.  This has never been a problem for me in the past.  

Mostly, boundaries with Old Flame have stayed platonic this time around, but last night, on the eve of my FwB's departure, I texted that I was considering spending the next six months in celibacy.  Old Flame texted back ('jokingly") that I should visit him so he could “knock the bottom out for me instead”.  We flirted with each other and with the idea of me visiting.

I know this situation is emotionally precarious.  I really do want a family and a partnership, but after years of searching, I’m also feeling exhausted.  I want to have fun.  I want to have sex, hence the FwB.  I want romance to just happen for me the way it seems to be happening for ALL of my friends without having to work to meet that someone special.  

Even more powerful than these needs for sex and fun is the feeling that this man still has lessons to teach me.  Maybe he's just going to teach me more about heartbreak, but there's only one way to know for certain.  I want to find out.

I want to visit.  I want have sex with him, but I don't know if the flirting is genuine.  If it's not, I definitely need to ask him to stop.  At the same time, I'm tired of being the boundary police, the one who has to bring up all the serious stuff.  I’m also dreading bringing it up since the last two times I brought it up he completely disappeared.  If it happens again, do I keep letting him back into my life?  Our relationship has meant so much to me over the years, I don’t want to cut him out.  How do I even start this conversation?  Again?

Sincerely, Deja Vu

Dear Deja Vu,

Sweet baby jesus, you have a LOT going on here, girl.

The first thing I need to point out here is that you have not seen this person in fifteen years.  Fifteen years.  I know he seems quite attractive and interesting over text, email, and the phone, but things can be very different in person: is he comfortable in his own skin?  Does he tip waitstaff well?  Is he a road rage driver?  Can he dance?  These are things you'll never know on g-chat, and could be deal breakers.

The thing is, I am getting the sense from your letter that nothing would be a deal breaker for you.  You want to correct this past hurt that you’ve held onto for all these years, and you’ll jump at any chance to do so.  It was not too much that when you expressed your desire for kids, he disappeared, or that he came back saying that he's sterile, then vanished again.  So far, this "relationship" is completely on his terms, and you are hanging on his every whim, like. . . well, like a teen with their first love.

It's like you took a snapshot of him at that time, over a decade ago, and you're in love with a photograph, not the real guy.  You're dying to get back that hormone fueled fusion the two of you shared, which, even then, was rooted in you pursuing and him distancing.

I understand your strong desire for a relationship -- the part of your letter that was about your longing for love, fun, and sex was the most relatable piece.  However, I have to be the un-fun boundaries holder that you no longer wish to be.

Reality is, none of your friends' loves are as easy as they seem from the outside.  Love is always messy, fraught with doubt, and everyone eventually has to do massive amounts of work to come to a good place with the other person.

To sum up, dear Deja Vu, Step One is to meet this guy.  Go ahead, have sex with him, get all your curiosity and teenage dreams fulfilled.  However, if there is even a glimmer of the pursuer-distancer pattern between you in person that you've established across the miles these past few months, run, Lola, run.  You don't want to spend your life offering him things just so he can turn them down.

I know you want a relationship with a long-term partner.  However, don’t settle for Old Flame if it turns out he’s really just looking for a flash in the pan.

Love,

Sibyl

More or Less Like Family, Part IV

By Molly Bradley Read Parts I, II, and III

That evening found my siblings and me in the family room before dinner. I could smell it; I was hungrier than I’d been in a long time. I’d walked further than I had in days---it wasn’t much but it felt good. Earning things felt good, in any small way I could earn them.

Mamadou stepped inside. Instead of watching TV on his feet awhile and then sitting down, as he usually did, he addressed me immediately.

“Molly.”

I looked up. So did several of my siblings. Then I looked around: Binta wasn’t there. Neither was Hangout Girl. Khady, however, looked nervous again.

“Can I show you some things now?” he asked.

I glanced at Khady. She looked quickly down to the mat beneath her, picking bits of stuffing out of a hole in its casing.

“I think we’re going to eat soon,” I told him.

“It’s not ready yet,” he said. “I saw them. The rice has only started to cook. I will not take long,” he added.

“Alright.” I stood. I didn’t look to see who was looking at me, or not, as I followed Mamadou out of the room.

His room was right next door. There was a mat on the ground, a few trunks of his belongings, and three or four folding chairs. He must have had company relatively often.

He gestured toward one of the chairs, and took a seat himself on the trunk beside it. From beneath his mattress, within an arm’s reach, he pulled a ratty folder full of papers. He opened it and began to show me what was inside. Documents, forms: a visa application; passport-sized photos; an old school report. The picture of him photocopied on the report looked much like him now.

“I went back to school later,” he said. “I went when I was little, but then I had my siblings, and they needed school. So I went back after, to finish high school.”

We looked through teachers’ comments. He read them to me, slowly. The handwriting was almost illegible. Either he knew his teachers’ writing very well, or he’d read and reread these hundreds of times. I’m sure he could have told them to me off the top of his head. Mamadou is a very good student and wants very much to learn. Mr. Bah is slowly learning the language, but he has a lot of patience for the work. Mamadou is a good student who deserves not to be so timid in the classroom.

At the back of the folder was a slim notebook, like French cahiers brouillon: soft-cover booklets with exceptionally thin paper and faded grid markings. Every page was filled with Mamadou’s handwriting. His letters were round and small, but the stems reached high and low, tangling with the lines above and below.

“These are songs that I wrote,” he told me. “I know I can’t – I know I must work and do this---” he gestured out the window, vaguely toward the onion fields---“but I would really like to sing. I think singers are the most good people.”

He began to read me his songs. They were all titled in a self-explanatory fashion: “The Hussling Life,” “I Love You Baby,” “It Is For My Family.” After the titles, though, the lyrics startled me: they were frank, and they were true. I couldn’t help but smile a little every time he used “hustling”---on the page, “hussling”---to refer to work.

He paused before reading “It Is For My Family.”

“I have not seen them in many years,” he said. “It’s for them that I’m here. Yes I want to go to Europe, England, America, but more important is that they are there.” I caught the slip of Wolof into English. The way to say that you’re fine, or that your family is well, is maangi fi rekk, or nungi fi rekk: I am here only, or they are here only. That they are in existence in the world is, perhaps, enough.

I read along as he read aloud. The lyrics weren’t spaced traditionally with short four-line verses: all the sentences ran together, every line full. He didn’t heed the margin, either. The page was brimming with ink.

He wrote the song to his father, his mother, his sister, his brother. There was nothing really singular about what he wrote---nothing about the song was specific to him at all. All the song really said, very plainly, was that he missed them.

“I really like that one,” I said.

He was silent. We both looked at the words on the page.

Mamadou shuffled things around again and returned to the front of the folder, to some photographs we’d skipped initially. He flipped through them, and introduced me to the people in each.

“I want to give you one,” he said. “You pick one picture.”

“I couldn’t take that from you,” I said. There were none of him alone, and I didn’t want to deprive him of seeing his own friends or family.

“I want to give one to you,” he insisted. “I want you to think of me.”

He let me flip through the pictures again, slowly. I paused at one of him and some friends. He and three men occupied most of the photograph, one of them crouching in front of the others standing, in a field of green. Definitely onion fields. I’d never seen anything so lush.

“These are my friends where I worked somewhere else,” he said. Mamadou was definitely the coolest of the crew, standing shirtless in the sun, shades on his face, pointing one hand toward the camera in a gotcha gesture or like a thumb-and-forefinger gun. In the other hand he held up a leaf from the fields where he worked, where the four of them stood. The crouching man, though---“my best friend in that place”---had the best smile.

I made my choice. He was about to put everything away when I asked, “Could you write that song---the one about family---on the back of this picture?”

He paused. “Give you this song?”

“No, not the book---I mean can you copy it, write it again, on this photo?”

He thought a minute, then nodded. I watched those small round letters appear by his hand on the sleek back of the picture. He murmured the words as he went, correcting mistakes from the first copy, making new ones on this second.

“Thank you,” I said when he was done. “This is really---” I was going to say nice of you, generous of you, thoughtful of you---something equally inane. I’m almost glad Binta’s entrance cut me off.

She stood still in the doorway for a second before she said, “Mama. On mange.” We’re eating.

When I returned to the family room, everyone was indeed already eating. I held my spoon and reached reluctantly, guiltily. I probably didn’t deserve dinner, for having disobeyed orders. I was ready to pay my dues---but then, as usual, my siblings collectively noticed I was being timid and all began insisting, “Mange, Mama! Mange!”

 ***

I said goodbye to as many siblings as I could the following morning. All the students had to leave their families, wherever they were living, and meet in the town square at eleven. When the time came I couldn’t find a lot of the little ones. Some were at school, I was told; others were off somewhere playing with friends.

Khady clung to my waist and kissed it. She said she couldn’t promise to text me because she didn’t have her own cell phone, but maybe Binta would let her use hers. Over Khady’s head I looked at Binta, who shrugged. Khady released me and at first I didn’t make a move. But Binta came and wrapped me in a tight hug.

“Be good,” she told me. “Be careful.” She squeezed my shoulders, then let me go with a smile. I hadn’t seen that soft a smile on her before.

Hangout Girl had been hanging behind Binta. Now she came and held my arms at my sides to give me a clumsy bise, one kiss on either cheek, the way the French do. She snickered as she and Binta turned and went back inside the family room.

I said goodbye to my parents and held their hands while I thanked them. Before I left the place I looked toward Mamadou’s room, and I thought of asking where he was. But I knew, and we’d had enough of a goodbye. I had his name, address, and photograph. And his song.

He wasn’t there, but leaving my family felt more like leaving him. I wished I were going for his sake---were going to Saint Louis to find things to send back to him. Not necessarily money, but postcards, pictures, books. Music, certainly. Maybe a world map.

Khady helped me carry my bags to the town square. It was in part a parting, and in part a homecoming. I was relieved to see the friends I’d come to know so well in Dakar, to speak English, to joke around without explanation. We were all exhausted and ready to go.

Khady got quiet around all of the reunion noise. I reached for her hand and squeezed it.

“Don’t take out the braids,” she said.

“I’m going to have to, later,” I said. “But I won’t ever be as pretty again as I am now.”

She smiled. First it was tender, and then it was just smug. Another student’s host sister was watching our exchange. Khady stuck her tongue out at the scrawny girl and squeezed my hand back.

On the bus to Saint Louis we were chattering like children with new words. A few other students had seen the onion fields.

“They didn’t let me do anything,” said my friend Arielle. “The men just laughed when I asked if I could help.”

I thought of Mamadou and his perfect willingness to let me be a part of his work, a part of things. I could see sweating Mamadou, buckets in hand, sprinting (as well as he could) across my father’s field. I thought of him hustling his way up the coast of Africa, edging slowly, stoically and slowly edging up and out of his continent for mine, either of them.

“They wanted to let me. They tried,” I said, “but I don’t think I did much.”

Reclamation

How do we reclaim spaces and moments that we used to exist in and define ourselves by? Loss takes with it pieces of our daily lives---pieces that sustained us and brought joy to our lives---whether we lost a home, a community, a relationship, or a person. I’ve experienced moments of mild unease or anxiety in returning to places that used to be “home,” or meeting up with people who used to feel like “home,” re-doing activities I used to do in relationships that felt like “home.” However, there is power in reclaiming these as my own; there is power in actively creating my own home. During this chilly winter season, I have been reminded of how reclamation is a powerful part of my own healing process.

Nearly seven years ago, on a typical sunny day in Colorado, my father was killed in an avalanche. He was skiing inbounds at a resort, following the rules. Without much conscious thought, I put my love of skiing (and winter outdoorsy-ness in general) in a metaphorical closet, nervous to tempt fate and to unsettle my own emotional healing.

My most recent story of reclamation happened this past weekend, among friends, high spirits, and blistery icy slopes in Maine. Leading up to the trip, I approached downhill skiing as something “I used to love” or that “I can still do moderately well.” Since my father’s death, it ceased to be a defining factor in my life. I had skied a few times in the years between that day and this past weekend, the most significant being a visit to the run he died on. The blue and white sign at the top of the run now reads “David’s run.” But, that experience, was more a sense of visiting---visiting the place he died, visiting his world---it wasn’t mine.

In Maine, I chased guy friends, who will always ski faster than me but are willing to pause to let me catch up, down the icy slopes. In some moments I felt transferred back into childhood, peacefully enjoying my skis gliding over powdery snow. In other moments I struggled, silently cursing the ice and shrubs sticking out of the snow. A sense of bliss followed the entire experience, aided by the surprise of still knowing how to ski and the forging of new friendships---where we share values related to being outside. Values that represent “home” for me. I am not sure what exact transformation took place or on which ski run, but skiing felt comfortable and peaceful. I can welcome the world of skiing and the community it encompasses back into my life.

Central to the outdoorsy world I grew up in, my family spent holidays at a YMCA camp tucked away in the Rocky Mountains. The camp is set between downhill ski resorts and hundreds of miles of cross country skiing. It is a gorgeous winter heaven. The year after my father died, we retreated to one of these cabins for a painful and lonely Christmas. We passed the holiday estranged from each other, engulfed in our individual grief. The camp felt haunted by childhood memories and impossible images of the future without my father.

It was six years before we plotted our return this past December. Together, we visited a sign the camp constructed in memory of my father. This year, the same space felt peaceful and healing. I felt my family take a collective deep breath and embrace this space, which was once ours and now is ours again. Reclaimed.

Curled up by the wood fire, I smiled as my mom and sister took out old card games, which contained records of highest and lowest scores throughout the history of our family playing the game. They lightheartedly reminisced about my dad’s competitiveness and my grandmother’s love of dominos with joyful memories of past holidays. As the pain withdrew from the memories over the years, we stepped back into our relationships with each other and again became a family that visits the places where it grew together over and over again to make new memories.

For all the tables we danced on

These words sound better to the tune of this.

"we've lived in bars and danced on the tables hotels trains and ships that sail we sim with sharks and fly with aeroplanes in the air"

- Cat Power, Lived in Bars

"It is always important to dance."

This phrase recurs in my friend Jonathon's book, as a life philosophy that merits reiteration.

I had never thought of dancing as something that invites the adjective "important" until I moved to Guatemala, where Jonathon and my friendship was born. My Guatemala was steeped in importance and imperatives, in trauma and injustice. It was an outsized kind of importance, the kind that shows you the limits of your knowledge and highlights the boundaries of what you can do to understand mass atrocities and serve their survivors. At no point did I feel qualified for the tasks required of me in Guatemala; and even if in some universe, I were qualified to perform the tasks themselves, no part of me was prepared for the emotional weight, vicarious trauma, and ceaseless heartbreak.

It seems curious, then, that Guatemala was where we danced. We danced with vigor and with no shame, with no reservation and with gusto---every single time, with gusto. We danced on beaches and atop volcanoes, in living rooms and on coffee tables. Perhaps that was the place that inspired Jonathon to posit that "it is always important to dance."

In my homeland Greece, dance is barely a contact sport. Fingers may graze each other, but for the rest of it, you are on your own. You are fully responsible for wiggling your own shoulders, moving your own knees, swaying your hips, without the help of hips glued onto your own. Much of what I love about dancing in Latin America calls back to my original conception of dancing. While salsa and merengue inspire more affection than my native Syrtaki, they evoke jubilation and look like hugs in motion. It is perhaps these preconceived notions of mine about dancing that made "grinding" an enigma when I arrived at an American college campus at the age of 17. My idea of dancing involved synchronized skipping around, jubilant bopping, wiggling and nodding along and smiling, endless smiling---and maybe doing all that atop a table or two, yelling Opa! for good measure.

Rediscovering that obscure genre of dancing in Guatemala felt like a homecoming---a realization that when the workday came to an end, others would wish to join me for a round of salsa or a wiggle on top of a table. Others felt, like Jonathon did, that "it is always important to dance." The Guatemalan table-dancing marked me in ways that became impossible to forget, delivering another imperative: to continue dancing, with gusto, everywhere.

And so there was the summer of 2012, on a Halkidiki beach in Greece, with some of my best friends, sweat dripping down our faces, sand on our feet. There were hoarse voices and tsipouro and broken glass and stomping around and knowing every word. There is a beauty to dancing in your own language.

There was the first Los Fletcheros concert, put on by the illustrious band of my beloved graduate school. This, too, came with ample stomping and hugging---so much hugging. Every dancing experience comes with its own soundtrack. If there were a soundtrack to my Los Fletcheros this year, it would be that of nostalgia: The Killers, Mumford & Sons, MGMT. It would be the soundtrack of youth.

This past weekend, Los Fletcheros performed on my graduate school's annual ski trip, a tradition imbued with wine, flurries, and more kissing than a library typically inspires. Graduate school dancing reminds me of all I have loved about Greece, Guatemala, and everywhere in between: it is affectionate, but not intrusive; jubilant, but (ehm, usually) not sloppy. It is undeniably alive. This is what has motivated me and Taryn---jokingly, I hope---to want to open a club called The Graduate Student.

True to our graduate student selves, Katherine and I danced on a windowsill. Friends kissed in the background. Yet other friends nearly spilled drinks on the band. Thirteen of us left our cards at the bar. Who-knows-how-many actually collected them the next morning. We went home with the wrong jackets, each other's scarves, or no jackets and scarves at all.

We all need hugs in motion, sweaty faces, hoarse voices. All hearts need to move, and be moved. And, courtesy of Los Fletcheros, I am starting my life this week with an extra dose of whimsy. This column is called Eternally Nostalgic and, in some senses, I feel that this reflection is doing its namesake an injustice. Can you be nostalgic about an experience that you just had---an experience which you are, in effect, still having?  Los Fletcheros inspire a different, sweeter sort of nostalgia: a nostalgia for the moments in which you felt truly alive. An ode to whimsy, if you will.

More or Less Like Family, Part III

By Molly Bradley Read parts I and II

“Mama! Mama? Mamaaaa!”

Already Khady’s wake-up call felt routine. She’d done the same the first morning, calling urgently through my door. I’d thought something was wrong until I saw it was just that she wanted me awake. If she wasn’t sleeping there was no reason her tubaab should be. With my braids, now, I was pretty much just another Khady.

I rose and stuffed my grimy contacts in as fast as I could and came out to assuage my anxious alarm. We had breakfast, and only got a half hour or so of the morning soaps before my father came in. He stood and watched with us for five minutes or so, impassive to a disconcerting degree. There were more physical shenanigans happening on a show this morning, ones I could understand. There was dancing and falling and laughing and more dancing.

Finally I looked to Khady. “Are we going?” I asked her, glancing at Dad.

She looked up from where she sat by his ankles, tugged his pant leg, and said something swift in Wolof. He bowed his head and muttered something in reply.

“Yes, he’s waiting for you,” Khady said.

“I’ve been ready,” I said in my defense. As soon as I stood he led the way out of the room and out of our sandy yard.

We took a path out of town that I’d never noticed before---not that I’d spent a lot of time outside the house. Still sand, sand, sand---then suddenly sand with growth on either side of the road. Somehow growing out of the sand. First just dry, unhappy grass, and then shrubs, bushes, trees. Growing.

Somehow we managed a little conversation while we walked. We’d never really spoken before, only nodded our hellos in passing. He was rarely around the house.

He spoke slowly enough, and I had just enough Wolof, to answer some basic questions: Was I alright? Did I need anything? Was Khady being good? Was I hungry? Had I brought water? (No---I should have, but I was, for no reason, playing stoic. Maybe I thought I needed to challenge myself some way or another, if I wasn’t doing anything else.)

The road seemed endless. Finally at one point we cut through the bushes to the right, up a gentle rise to an area sparsely studded with trees and, as it turned out, other homes. I wasn’t sure if these belonged to Mouit. Were the people who lived here part of the community? Did they commute, so to speak, to town to get things they needed? Or did they just survive out here on their own?

I wished I had more words to ask my father.

Despite the nothing substantial that we said, the walk was companionable. My father greeted the few people we saw as we passed. He seemed to know everyone.

Finally we came through a more densely wooded area into. . . green. Bright green. Rows upon rows and fields upon fields and hills upon hills of green. I had no idea this was out here, in the middle of this sandy, desert-like land. I had no idea how it could exist out here at all. Even when I’d gone with my sisters to gather wood the previous day, the “woods” had turned out to be very, very short shrubs with sturdy branches. Nothing like this. It was idyllic enough that I almost didn’t believe it: almost too green, too perfect. Endless bursts of green all in neat rows. The Jolly Green Giant was growing children in the ground, and all you could see were the tops of their curly green heads of hair.

We walked awhile through the fields. My father greeted every man working there---there was at least one person tilling every field. I trailed behind, so lulled by the color I almost forgot why we were there.

Finally we found Mamadou. I’d spotted him before we got there. He was wearing only a pair of loose linen pants and a hefty bandana on his head, to soak up the sweat. It was beyond hot.

Mamadou raised a hand in greeting and I raised mine back. My father gestured for me to sit on the ground at the edge of the field. He walked slowly toward Mamadou, keeping between the rows of onions, placing one foot carefully before the other, watching them as he walked.

He and Mamadou talked for a long time. There was a good deal of gesturing back and forth between the two halves of the field. Once my father left, Mamadou told me why.

“He thinks I am not taking good care of this side as that side,” he said. He sat beside me and got out the bowl he’d brought his lunch in. “You see that side is more green. This side, not so green.” He was working on this side today.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“You can take the weeds.”

I scrambled to my feet. There were weeds everywhere. I started by bending over each row, but quickly I got down on my knees and got efficient about it, crawling down the rows. Mamadou laughed.

“You really want to do a lot,” he said.

“I just want to help.” I was hardly doing anything. There were so many weeds. And there was Mamadou, doing the real work (that he explained to me as he did a first round): pumping the water up from the well, filling two buckets, running with them back to the row he was working on, and dousing the soil. The running kept things quick and efficient, because he had to cover the whole field four times, really drowning the onions at each pass. The running was also necessary because one of the buckets had a leak. The more water he lost, the less there was to cover the onions, and if it didn’t do the trick he’d have to do the same patch twice in a row. If he had to do that every time, that would make eight times watering the field in its entirety.

He kept at it and barely paused. It was hot, and the prickles on the weeds started to sting my fingers, but all I had to do was glance at him to feel embarrassed and start tugging again, reinvigorated.

The water started to sound really good coming up from that well. I wished I were working on the same row as Mamadou, at the same time, so I might catch some drops from the leaky bucket on my hands or feet or head. The four remaining water bottles on the floor of my bedroom back in the village kept materializing before my eyes.

Finally he finished his round on the less-green half.

“We go back now,” he said. “You can’t be in the sun for so long.”

My indignation was smothered by relief before it had really even arisen.

 ***

At the house that afternoon, Binta found me helping Khady wash clothes. Really Khady was washing them. I was trying to imitate her motions: soggy cloth grasped in both fists, enveloping the knuckles, and the knuckles of one hand scrubbed vigorously over those of the other. When she did it somehow the cloth, or probably her hands and the water, made a sharp and satisfying squelching sound like a brazen bird.

I couldn’t do it. Khady laughed at first but then became impatient.

“Just let me,” she said finally, and I resigned myself to brushing the suds around the rim of the plastic tub of water.

Binta sauntered over with a lilt in her step that could fit only her.

“Viens,” she said. Come.

I ought to have curbed it long before, but my immediate reaction to commands like this was to ask, “Why?”

Whether she took it as the curiosity it was or the insolence I didn’t intend, Binta didn’t let on.

“Viens boire attaaya.” Come drink attaaya.

Attaaya was a strong, sweet black tea boiled so many times over it almost caramelized. It smelled like it, anyway; the little cobalt blue or easy green teapot on the stove would start to shiver, and warm amber bubbles would begin to peek over the surface. Then whoever was tending it would come turn the fire off, take the teapot by its hot handle with a rag, and pour some into the stubby fluted glasses on the tea tray. The method was then to pour the steaming liquid back and forth from glass to glass, keeping one firm on the tray and lifting the other as high as possible, sending the liquid down in a perfect graceful arc. The height gave the surface of the tea a thick foam of those caramel-colored bubbles that tasted as good and sweet as it looked.

I’d never tried the technique myself. I wanted to learn but knew the first time would be a catastrophe of hot liquid streaming across the floor. This rural village with its limited stock of tea would not be the place to learn.

Binta led me to the bedroom she’d moved into with a sibling, or maybe Hangout Girl, or maybe a sibling and Hangout Girl. I was still pretty sure Hangout Girl didn’t belong to this family and did, in fact, have a home of her own, but I believed this on blind faith. She hadn’t missed a family gathering here yet, be it mealtime or TV time or watching-the-tubaab-struggle-to-cut-the-fins-off-the-fish time.

In the room were my oldest brother, the baby Mama, and, naturally, Hangout Girl. The room wasn’t tiny, but small enough that once I was inside, Binta could take me by the shoulders and sit me down on the bed in only a few steps. She sat down beside me, plucked the baby up from where she was rolling on the bedspread, and put her in my lap.

Hangout Girl was sitting in a chair next to my brother. She started snickering. “Mama mak ak Mama bundaw.” Big Mama and Little Mama. She pointed first to the baby and then to me as she said it. Fair enough. The other Mama was here first.

My brother was brewing the attaaya on a makeshift portable stovetop, something like a Bunsen burner. He took the teapot off the flame. The tray with the glasses was on the ground. He lifted the teapot to the level of his eyes and began to pour. Once the head of the stream made it safely into a glass he lifted it high above his head, meeting my eye and grinning as he did so. Sort of showing off, sort of showing me.

“I’m sorry, I never learned your name,” I said in French.

“Malik.” He finished pouring from the teapot and began to pour the liquid back and forth between the glasses. I smiled. Two brothers named Malik. This Malik was older, but he asked the same questions my Malik at home had asked me when I’d first arrived in Dakar, when I’d first become part of the family.

We ran through the topics and drank our tea. With four of us---not including Mama---we each only got two rounds of about half a glass, rather than three ample servings.

Different families do it differently, but typically attaaya is served three times a day, with three rounds each time. Guests tend to complicate the system and leave everyone with a little less tea.

I didn’t mind so much---but then, it was a bonus for me, an extra cultural treat in my day whenever I was offered attaaya. For them, it was the norm. They had to give up a little of their lives to give me this brand new one with all its experiences.

I’d gotten used to thinking of these temporary homes as home, and these fleeting people as family. There were so many of them there to take care of me there was nothing else to call them. What was I to them?

When they had no more questions for me we sat in silence. Companionably enough, but it still seemed strange. Then I realized why. I’d thought I was slipping into their world as it was, simply a new addition to what existed. Really they were simulating it for me.

Blowing in the Wind

Dear Sibyl, I was recently left by a guy that I thought was going to be a long-term boyfriend with a future.  We had only been together for five months but we had been chasing each other for half a year before then and I know he had been interested but thinking he had no chance for way more than that. When we finally got together, we were the dream couple to all our friends and the times we spent were most often in mutual genuine bliss.

Then one day, he invited friends over on a Friday at 1.30 am when I had said that I was tired from a long week. So I was a bit pissed off and went home. He broke up at 4 am with a text and confirmed that in a conversation the next day saying: 'We have nothing in common, he can't see his friends (far from true), I'm reactive--he's proactive, it won't work out so he'd rather end it and it's better for me as well.'

I was devastated. Most friends said it's just gonna be a few days. So I took it with dignity, kept my public appearance, including Facebook, happy and optimistic and left him alone for about 5 weeks. But believe me, I was devastated. I had no idea what was going on and friends told me he wasn't being himself either. So I had hope he'd come to his senses.

Then I saw him at a festival. Snorting mountains of cocaine. Everything became a bit clearer to me. Throughout the weekend I learned that he had re-started cocaine the night before he broke up, been doing loads of drugs since then and that he had lost his job. He did continue to want this breakup but deliberately stood next to me very often and started crying during songs. I have told him now that I don't want any contact for a few months. That included that I didn't want a 'Happy New Year' email either. I thanked him but told him again no-contact.

But now I don't know what I will do after that. I can't avoid him forever. Will he come to his senses? Would it be a good thing if he came to his senses? Should I try and stay friends? Should I avoid him in my life---tricky because we have zillions of mutual friends that I don't want to lose. I think that it's not a lack of love but a fear of failure and of commitment that he's suffering from. I know the cocaine phase is temporary. So is the unemployment. Part of me wants him back after that. Another part thinks that he can't be trusted ever again.

What do you think?

Yours,

Brokenhearted in the U.S.A.

Dearest Brokenhearted,

There are so many ways to cheat on one's partner.  You can disengage emotionally and start up an internet friendship with a long lost fling.  You can sleep with a member of their family, their best friend, or a random person you meet out dancing.  In your case, Brokenhearted, the cheating wasn't sexual at all.  His mistress was cocaine.

When I was a teenager, my best friend lost his mother to cancer, and I, to my great surprise, lost them both.  I adored his mother, and had fully believed that my fervent prayers to save her would turn her illness around, right up to the very end.  By the time she died, however, I was not surprised, having visited her several times in her final days.  But I was completely shocked how my friend reverted into himself, eschewing my friendship for people who never knew his mother, and would not bring up his pain.

I wouldn't take no for an answer.  I wrote him long letters, parked outside his house and waited for him to come home from school, and, when he did let me in, sat with him for hours in silence while we inexplicably watched tennis on his tiny television.  It was all he wanted to do.  Or so I thought---I slowly learned that all the times I couldn't find him, he was off with his new friends, consuming as many drugs as was humanly possible in the provincial area we lived in.

Since that experience, I've learned to look for the presence of mind-and-mood altering substances any time a person has suddenly disengaged in a primary relationship, especially when there is a precipitating loss of some kind.  For whatever reason, your boyfriend's unemployment was more than a temporary career setback---it was a huge loss to his sense of self.  Instead of being able to let you in to that pain, he turned to something to shut it off, in this case, cocaine.

The only bright side is that he broke it off with you the moment he chose drugs over connection with you, even if he wasn't truthful about what he was doing.  This is actually sort of admirable, because most people in the throes of an addiction just take down whoever is closest along with them.  You dodged a bullet, and when you realized the kind of dangerous behavior he was engaged in, you wisely instituted a no-contact policy.

The piece I have to gently warn you about, Brokenhearted, is your assertion that his cocaine use is a "phase".   Drug use is not like body piercing or thinking you're an evangelical Christian.  It's not a phase, it's an addiction, especially if it's been caused by depression because of his unemployment, caused him to do something so drastic as break off a healthy relationship, and if he is truly snorting "mountains" of it at festivals.

I know that in your pain of losing him, you wish he could come back to you, untouched by your time apart.  But he will not be the same person then, even if he does.  He has started down a long road that will take him a good while to return from, and in fact, he should be a different person, if he really digs in to the recovery process.

So, my suggestion to you is to only invite him back into your life if he is a) in some kind of recovery program, and/or therapy, b) willing to discuss why he sought out drugs instead of connection at that time in his life, and c) interested and able to hear from you how it hurt you to lose him in such a way, and what boundaries you need going forward.  Finally, he should agree to never break up with anyone ever again via text message.

In the meantime, tend to your own broken heart.  Think less about him and his choices, and mend your own wounds, sewing them up with the support of your friends, with new experiences that bring you joy, and comforting practices like staying in to intricately braid your hair and read your favorite book over again.

Your boyfriend made a sad mistake, choosing cocaine over you.  Don't follow him down the rabbit hole.  I have seen many people throw away their dignity for the lure of the seductive drug user.  There's something desperate in those hollowed-out eyes, and we are sure that if we can just harness that desperation, we can turn it into passion---for us, rather than the substances.  Instead of chasing that dragon, stay close to yourself, on your own side, in the realm of human, rather than chemical, connection.

Soberly,

Sibyl

It Always Was

I wasn’t the girl who grew up dreaming about her wedding.  I didn’t play pretend wedding and neither I nor my Barbie dressed up as a bride.  In college when a girlfriend was having boy drama, I was the one telling her she was enough on her own.  I didn’t look for love, I didn’t pine for it or dream about it. It was a non-question, as was marriage, I didn’t think about it except in the abstract. And then, exactly 10 years ago this week, this guy kissed me. And that was it. It just was. It was everything and nothing all at the same time; so perfectly ordinary that it was extraordinary.  From that moment, that one perfect moment, we were together. We just were.

Someone asked me once when I knew we were serious, when we had that conversation. I had to think about it then, and I thought on it again on this milestone. The truth is, there never was a conversation. I’m sure of it. Perhaps there was a word or two before we got engaged, but I don’t remember them.  There was certainly nothing prior to that and nothing that ever involved questions of ‘Should we do this’ or ‘What are we’ or ‘When will we’. It seems odd, most relationships have those status checks. I can’t explain it except to say we just were, from very early on.

That’s not to say our relationship was placid. It isn’t now and it never was. I’ll say we’re spirited conversationalists.  We’re not afraid to air our grievances and then move on. But in all those conversations and discussions, there was never a question of ‘what if we weren’t us’.

I’m don’t think I believe in soul-mates or fate, which is why it’s so hard for me to understand how someone so perfect for me, in ways I could never have guessed or anticipated, would be a part of my life. It would be easier I think to say it was fate.  Easier to say our relationship was destined to be.  Without that predetermination, the chance involved means we could have easily missed each other. I could have gone to a different party, he could have gone to a different school. We might never have met and then he might never have kissed me on that cold January morning.

But he did.

Ten years ago I didn’t know; I didn’t know what my life would be like today. I couldn’t have possibly imagined if I tried. Ten years ago I wasn’t thinking about marriage or the future.  I just knew it seemed right. I just knew, in the way you know the sky is above the ground. I just knew I was in the right place, with the right person. Just as I know it now.

I still don’t know what the future holds. I get dizzy thinking about what my life might look like ten years from now.  I don’t know where I’ll be or what I will experience in the next decade; I couldn’t dream it if I tried.

But I do know who I’ll be with.  I know who I’ll cuddle under the covers with, who I’ll wake up when I’ve had a bad dream.  I know who I’ll trade ‘you are’ comeback lines and lame jokes with. I know who I’ll debate over beers and cuddle with during movies.  I know who will get me ginger ale when I’m sick and chocolate when I’ve had a bad day. I know who I’ll talk with, argue with, laugh with, and dance in the living room with.

I know who will be holding my hand.  I know who will be kissing me.

Because it was never a question.  It always was.

Starting Over

By Rebecca D. Martin When we moved into our last house, the first piece of furniture we bought was a sofa, big, comfy, and at the top of our price range. We promised each other that, if we let ourselves buy it, we’d commit to filling it with friends. We would open our home. We would give the sofa back, in a way. Share it with others. My husband and I are introverts with big ideas and true intentions.

A year and a half later, we bought a used dining table, full of chipped-up charm. By then, our illusions had shrunk to a manageable reality, and we made no promises about numbers or chairs or dinner guests. The reality was that I had moved four times in five years. I was worn down by building new relationships in each new city. So for long, long stretches, both sofa and table held only the two---and then the three---of us, resting weary together after long weeks of working, mothering, and missing friends in other towns.

Did we fail? Did we fall clean over our good intentions of being hospitable? It probably depends on who you ask, but if you ask me, the question itself is the wrong one. Hospitality is, after all, about people. It isn’t about meeting a year-end friend quota. It isn’t about succeeding or failing. It’s about sharing life. And life can be downright messy, complex at the best of times, convoluted or worse at the most difficult. In this life, we put down roots where we can, but who knows which way they’ll grow? We intend to stretch out arms of wide welcome, but we end up reaching for help and support or comfort and calm, instead.

And now here we are again: another move, another home. The sofa settles comfortably into the new living room, and I pop out the dining table leaves to give them a good wipe-down. We think with hope about the people we will meet in this new city and what friends might fill these seats. Our intentions are true. But our expectations are open. We’ve learned that relationships will grow in their own way. Community will develop where it’s able, when it’s needed.

In the meantime, our job as a family is to put down roots and grow strong together. We sit down around the weathered dining table, join our tired grownup hands with soft, sweet, chubby ones, and offer thanks for what we have right at this moment. Just the three of us: it is a good place to start.

XX. Provence

Juliette’s apartment is covered in America---vintage tin Coke placards, the boxed set of all the seasons of Friends, posters of scenes of Central Park. She has small bowls full of Native American arrowheads she collected from a trip to the southwest of the United States a few years ago. There is even a print of the classic Uncle Sam illustration, with his stern eyes and accusing finger. I lean in closer to read the caption. I want you . . . to speak English.

Juliette’s love for all things Americana now includes me, and in the month that I know her before I board my plane back to Ohio she invites me to her house several times for baking cheesecakes and having dinners with her friends. She loves showing me off, telling her friends to pay attention as I switch from speaking English to her young daughter to using French slang with ease as I describe to them the plot of Gilmore Girls. I think she does it to prove that the America she loves is signified by someone like me, not the politicians and the obesity and the reality TV casts broadcast throughout France.

At this point, I’d do anything to make Juliette happy---after months of being an unwanted intruder in Agnès’ apartment, I feel welcome here. And I don’t mind being showcased like one of Juliette’s souvenirs. Sometimes I also need to be reminded of what the real America is like. If I can prove it to someone else, then maybe I’ll start to see it, too.

More or Less Like Family, Part II

By Molly Bradley Read Part I of this series here

For whatever reason, my sister Khady took a strong liking to me. She was thirteen, small and skinny, and startlingly sassy---around me, anyway, and with the little ones who paid no attention either way. Around her older siblings she barely opened her mouth. That was the far more startling shift.

In the family room after breakfast the first morning, she took a handful of my hair and lifted it from my face.

“Je vais te tresser,” she said. She wanted to braid my hair.

“Non. . .non, ça va,” I said, dismissive, smiling. Thanks, but no thanks. Already I’d seen a few other girls from my program pass by my house, flanked and flaunted by their sisters, newly tressées. Their hair was tight against their scalps in what can only be called cornrows. The skin underneath strained with white and red.

“Mais si,” she insisted. “Il faut augmenter ta beauté!” We had to “augment” my beauty.

I was fairly certain that method of augmentation didn’t really do the trick for white girls.

But I was plopped down on a low, unsteady stool that sunk into the sand beneath the shade of a tree. The sun was just past its peak, and it was still hot as ever.

The little girls gathered around my ankles and stared. Khady set herself up behind me on her own stool. She pulled out a comb and began to move my hair this way and that, parting pieces, pinching them together.

Binta came out to watch with another girl. I thought at first she was another sister of mine, but I realized later that this girl just hung out in their compound all day long. At one point while we were watching TV, the ever-hanging girl---Hangout Girl, I called her in my head, because I never quite caught her name---made a snide comment in response to something that happened onscreen. Without missing a beat, without even turning her head, Binta said in French, “Don’t you have a home or family?”

Hangout Girl was still smirking, but no one laughed and no one apologized. No one kicked her out, either. Either Binta and Hangout Girl were friends, or they’d just given up on getting rid of her.

Binta and Hangout Girl ambled over and away continually throughout my braiding. Khady pulled my hair in a confident way that bordered on callous---every now and then I made a soft sound to remind her that there was a person under all that hair---and talked to me, hummed to me, berated my hair for being so uncooperative. It felt peculiarly motherly. Odd, for this thirteen-year-old girl to seem so in control. Around me, anyway. Despite my age, I was the baby of the family now.

An hour and a half into the process, a new shadow fell over me. When Khady allowed me to lift my head and my eyes I saw it was Mamadou.

“Very nice,” he said.

I smirked. “Thanks. You’re next.”

“No, not me,” he said. He raised a hand and patted his too-short hair that was already winding into stubby dreads. “Beauty is for the women. They are making you like them.” He walked away, slowly. Everything was a just a little slower in the sand.

I felt content, accepted. This wasn’t so bad. My homestay family seemed to like me---and even if they didn’t, they were working on making me something they’d like. Khady was on it.

She pulled abruptly on my hair, forcing my head up a little. “What did he say?” she asked.

For a second I was puzzled before I remembered no one else spoke English.

“He said he liked it,” I told her. I lifted a hand to my head to feel the progress. The right side was almost done, and almost numb. Khady was pulling the braids tight. It occurred to me, with a tinge of dread, that she was probably modeling my braids after her own, which were microscopically thin and innumerable.

“Could you make them a little thicker?” I asked, but she’d already yanked my head back down by means of my hair.

“Quoi?”

“Plus épais?” I pleaded.

She let out a little hmph and said no more. From somewhere outside the curtain of my remaining loose hair I heard Binta snicker.

 ***

The English was jarring the first night. It was still jarring the second. Khady would turn and ask me something in Wolof; I’d reply in broken Wolof and amend my meaning in French; the TV blared a mix of both; then suddenly in my right ear I’d hear a question in a language only my brain used now. It felt forward. Too familiar. Oddly intimate.

Still, with Wolof flung at me like a test of character from everyone else I encountered, the English was wholly welcome.

The regular soap was on. I was still a little fuzzy on specifics, but there was one duncelike man who kept procuring the anger of two other men. They argued in an endless stream of Wolof until finally they all broke grins and sat down for ataaya together. This was how the women would then find them and berate them for doing nothing but drinking ataaya all day. They had no idea.

As for the very well-dressed women, they sat in their living room and extensive conversations would take place at too fast a pace for me to understand. I stuck to paying attention to the clothes: the elaborate boubous, outfits, in bright colors and patterns; the jewelry---heavy gold, or intricate silver filigree---that made me feel shameful and shabby. I pulled at the thin grey yoga pants enveloping my thighs. When I’d come out in them this morning Khady had told me they were si si beau---so so beautiful---so many times I really couldn’t tell whether or not she was being sarcastic. But she herself wore more Westernized clothes, spaghetti-straps and jeans and rhinestone-studded sweaters.

Mamadou murmured something about the scene onscreen.

“What?”

“They’re cruel,” Mamadou said. “You see? Africans, we Africans, we are always cruel to each other.”

I looked to the screen. The two men in the show had hidden something from the other man, sending him into an overblown frenzy. To his face they were cold and unyielding; when the fool went off in search of his possession, the men laughed and held each other’s shoulders and slapped their knees.

“We do that in America, too,” I said. “TV is crazy in America.” I thought of action movies, crime shows, movies about high school---hell, I thought of the Marx brothers. “We’re always tripping people, or lying to them, or stealing from them, or shooting them . . .”

“Alright, but we are like this really. Not just on television,” Mamadou said.

“What do you mean?”

“We are cruel,” he said again. “Africans are bad, bad men.”

He said it simply, like it didn’t need explanation. I’d never heard anyone talk about where they came from that way. Talk about themselves that way.

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. Immediately I wished I had phrased it differently---wished there were a better way to phrase it. I didn’t mean to challenge him, since he was African and I was not; I meant to emphasize the I: that in my experience, I hadn’t found that to be the case at all.

“Alright, alright, it is true,” he said. For a second I wondered who was arguing what, but then I realized he used his “alright”s as acknowledgment as well as dissent.

“Alright---you see,” he said, “an African man who is in the street---who is injured, maybe, or who does not have a home to be inside---no one will help that man. That is the best.”

I didn’t follow.

“Alright,” he says, “you see---in the best, at his best, another African man will leave him be. But usually another man will kick him, hurt him, or steal from him.”

“You really think everyone---every African---would do that?” I asked.

“I know this,” he said.

“But it’s the same in America,” I tried again. “No one looks at homeless people in the street. Everyone just walks by. And there are even some people who take advantage of them. Who hurt them.”

“Yes, alright, but American man, he will feel sorry,” Mamadou said. “He will say to himself, Oh, I wish I could help that man. Even if he cannot help that man he will feel sad. He will want to help. The African man, no. The African man only helps himself.”

This was bizarre. Not only had I never heard as much from anyone else---African or otherwise---I hadn’t seen evidence of it at all. Almost all I’d encountered was warmth, generosity, willingness to teach, et cetera, ad nauseum: all the stereotypes of West African hospitality that are stereotypical for a good reason. The worst anyone had done to me was laugh at my feeble attempts at communication in a language that was clumsy on my tongue.

Then again, I wasn’t African.

“How do you know,” I asked, again, “that any African would behave that way?”

“I know this,” he said.

We fell silent.

The men laughed. The dunce searched.

 ***

Before I went to bed that night, Mamadou asked how much longer I was staying in the village. I told him I had one more night before our group of students left for Saint Louis.

“That’s good,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. He nodded a little. I’d learned his nods meant he was making the sentence he’d say next.

People are unpredictable. It’s always gnawed at me, the way there is no way to ever get inside someone’s head. Mamadou wasn’t much more predictable than anyone else, but his nodding was one thing I could identify. It was a reassuring habit to be able to look for and interpret. It was small, but it was something. That, and there was the comfort of English. At the time, in that place, those seemed like two very concrete things to know about someone.

So after his nodding he said, “If you want I can take you to the fields tomorrow, before you go.”

I was eager to see the fields, to talk with him some more, and to participate in a helpful activity---but mostly I was eager to get out of the village. Aside from sawing fish into brow-raisingly sloppy pieces for meals, and failing to persuade any dirt out of the laundry I scrubbed with my sisters, I’d done very little but sit and watch soaps. (The one soap, really.) And I still didn’t understand the conversations in the living room. I felt like a child listening to adults talk about Things They’ll Understand When They’re Older.

He said he’d ask my host father to walk me there the following morning, when I was awake and ready. We said goodnight and I stepped out of the room.

“Mama!”

The older girls had followed me out: Khady, Binta, and the Hangout Girl. I turned and waited. Binta stood squarely before me. I thought maybe I was in trouble for something. Not that I had done much of anything to get in trouble for.

“Don’t talk to the Gambian,” Binta said.

There was no curve in her lips this time.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You’re not supposed to.”

I opened my mouth, paused. Asked again: “Why?”

Hangout Girl shifted her weight. Khady looked nervous. She was stiff except for her eyes moving between Binta and me.

“It’s not good,” Binta said. “It’s not good for you to talk to him.”

I had so many questions. Was it not good for me to talk to him as a tubaab? Was it just because I was new to the family? Was it because I was a woman? Was it because I was American---or, worse, considered somewhat French?

But I didn’t ask. I didn’t think she’d tell me. I didn’t think she knew. What I did think was that she’d been told to tell me not to talk to him. I thought this because, I saw suddenly, my host mother was standing just outside the family room, watching us. To my surprise, the look on her face resembled worry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But he’s nice.”

Khady and Hangout Girl shuffled their feet.

Finally Binta shrugged and broke eye contact. She murmured a goodnight, and the three shuffled off to their bedroom.

I looked to the family room. My host mother was already gone.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

By Sibyl Perhaps you read my column the other week about diving in to the creative life and were intrigued, but need an extra push of inspiration.  Or maybe you are already engaged in art-making pursuits of some kind, and could use some encouragement for your efforts.  Either way, read on for Sibyl’s picks for what to read offline to spark your creativity until you positively surge with it.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger For an entire decade, I read this book yearly, usually in a single sitting on a rainy evening, pacing around my apartment saying the words aloud to myself in a very low voice, or curled up in an ancient armchair with all the stuffing showing.

This book sees all your neuroses and lets you keep them.  The story and the characters wind their way around your fears about the selfishness of the creative life versus the selflessness of the religious life, and sews a protective cloak around them.  It reminds you that if nothing else, you need to do it for the Fat Lady.

Letters To a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke This slender missive was first given to me at the tender age of 19 by my favorite older cousin, who had just quit her life on one side of the country and travelled to the other on a wing and a prayer, following her creative whims.  It sometimes gets flack for being exclusionary (he makes the argument at one point that you are only an artist if you NEED to be, can do nothing else, which is obviously a bit dangerously black-and-white), but what I love about this book most is that it upholds difficulty.  Rilke asserts, again and again, that if you are finding adversity, you are doing it right.  He instructs the young art-maker to trust his sadnesses, seek out the important, serious struggles and try not to judge the outcomes.  Great advice for those days when you inevitably feel like if it’s too hard, you should just pack it in.

Wild Mind: Living The Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg Technically, this book is geared towards writers, and there are excellent writing prompts at the end of every chapter. However, there is tons of advice that is good for any artist seeking to find practical ways to loosen up and find the freedom to create.  Goldberg advocates for creating from instinct, and writes about all the ways we clog up our first impulses, with suggestions for how to remove those barriers to vibrant creation.  She also argues for committing to a specific arts practice rather than allowing yourself to get preoccupied with fifty different things.  Since I am a firm believer that commitment, even if you fail fully at it, always leads to depth, I love her application of this to the creative life.

The books that I have suggested in this column have one thing in common: they are all short.  The last thing you need is a huge engrossing tome that allows you to avoid creating.  Read, get inspired, then put the book down and make something! The more of yourself you put into it, the more uniquely powerful it will be.

Sometimes, visual imagery inspires like nothing else.  Therefore, here are three companion documentaries to go with this reading list:

Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time (2001) When I had a newborn, I watched endless documentaries about artists, yearning for the time when I would have a baby off my boob and be able to go back out into the world to create.  It was actually a lovely time of incubation and learning, and I discovered Rivers and Tides in that period.  I think I watched it over and over for an entire week, whenever my baby was feeding.

The pace of it is enchanting, as Goldsworthy is followed over a year of his work, which takes him all over the world creating ephemeral sculptures out of natural materials.  The most evocative piece for me was that the way Goldsworthy works makes him face failure on a daily basis.  This is something that is absolutely imperative for an artist: to become so familiar with failure that while it is devastating every time it happens, you learn to trust it, to use those mistakes for even greater works of artistry.

Who Does She Think She Is? (2008) Watching this documentary, which follows several female artists as they struggle to create in the midst of mothering, is an inspiring experience.  The personal stories are interspersed with astonishing facts about the lack of representation of women, and particularly mothers, in the art world.  Seeing these women have the courage to create when everyone said they were selfish, unrealistic, and irrelevant was incredibly empowering to me.  My favorite was a ridiculously talented sculptor who has FIVE children, and does her art-making during naps and after bedtime.  This documentary would really be interesting to anyone, not just mothers, because you'll find yourself saying, "If she can do it, with a baby on her hip, and one pulling on her leg, so can I!"

1991: The Year Punk Broke  (1992) In the summer of 1991 the seminal noise-rock band Sonic Youth invited filmmaker David Markey along on a two week summer festival tour of Europe, with their little-known opening band, Nirvana.  The result, a documentary that will rock your face off, was playing on repeat in my buddy Ben's basement for most of our teenage years.  To be fair, I have not re-watched this since about 1997, so I'm going on hormone-fueled memory here.

I'm a little afraid to re-visit it, actually, since doing so sent artist Andrew Kuo into such a tailspin that he was forced to ask, in graphic form, "Wait, did punk ruin my life?"  If it did, I don't want to know.  Maybe you weren't a baby punk in the 90's who swore she saw God when Sonic Youth's guitars sustained a single note of noise, creating a wall of discordant sounds around you for minutes at a time, but if you fancy my Sibyl columns I think that baby punk might live within you, without you even knowing it.  Watch this doc and let the manic expression and vibrant fury of these bands stir in you the desire to smash the world with your art.

Non-negotiables

We watched a couple of documentaries last weekend that are still tugging away at me as the week floats by. The first was Happy, and the second was Bill Cunningham New York. In the first, intimate portraits of happy people in surprising situations—from a rickshaw driver in India to an American woman who has recovered from a severe accident—were interspersed with researchers discussing what they had found to be the building blocks of happiness: novelty, close relationships, and acts of kindness.

In the second, shots of the revered street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham biking all over Manhattan with his camera contrasted with glimpses of his tiny apartment, where he sleeps on a board among file cabinets. For him, sleeping and eating seem to be afterthoughts. And the idea of a work/life balance? Well, he’d probably just laugh and say that work is life.

In a surprising moment, he responds to the invisible interviewer that, yes, of course, he goes to church on Sunday. It seemed that while everything else came second to his work behind the camera, church was a given. The otherwise opinionated and articulate subject paused for a long stretch and struggled to explain why.

More than anything else, these two films challenged my assumptions about non-negotiables. Each of us is constantly making tiny choices, arranging and rearranging priorities, which eventually add up to the more public aspects of our lives. Sometimes it’s impossible to really explain the whys and hows of our own lives and the lives of others. We can only grasp at threads among the complex bundle of will, experience, nature, and circumstances. I suppose all of this is obvious, but perhaps I needed a reminder.

Grief: Mapping Your Online Community

I learned the phrase “Community mapping” at age sixteen while volunteering in a small community in rural Paraguay. At the time, the notion of mapping the resources in a community seemed clear. Quickly drawn on a piece of paper---the community school, church, homes, the dirt roads connecting the dots, and the fields that spread in the spaces between houses. The stick-figure buildings my host family drew to mark the previously listed sites represented the physical locations of where community manifests. They leapt off the page as a visible sign of the strength and resources held within this community.  At sixteen, I transferred this model to my life in Colorado---my school, my home, my family’s cabin, and the places where I spent time with my friends.  My map made sense, I didn’t question my places of support and where my community came together. The intervening twelve years of moving and creating new communities---including online---threw a wrench in my map. It no longer fits on one page or within a single community. I access much of the pieces of different communities in online spaces, including gchats from friends who still inhabit past homes on other continents, Facebook messages from childhood friends, and following twitter feeds of friends-I-haven’t-actually-met, who share a common journey.

Grief and loss often throw the individual into an unknown emotional space, where the “community map” becomes increasingly important. It creates a sense of one’s resources and places of support; showing the individual the strength of their community(ies). For many, the communities of support blend between in-person, phone, and online communication.

Admittedly, the online space trends towards the more positive aspects of life, as Jenna Wortham notes in her article, Talking about Death Online, “This is more than trying to decide how carefully polished you want your online image to be. . . . It’s about the way social software is slyly engineered to get us to participate---we are encouraged to brag about our lives, and present ourselves as living our best lives each day and year.” Between updates about babies, engagements, jobs, and school---loss becomes just another post that slides by not really resonating.

Engaging with more difficult, heart-wrenching topics, such as grief and loss via social media opens the individual up to vulnerability. For many, loss creates moments of intense need to reach out to one’s community. The online platform is not necessarily designed for in depth sharing or support, as posts and tweets have character limits. The feeds stream by, not allowing the adequate time or ability to respond to a friend’s post. As Jena Wortham writes, “However, when it comes to talking about death and grief in a non-abstract way---that is, when dealing with the loss of a family member, a partner or close friend---it gets much, much trickier. It doesn’t have an appropriate reaction face, a photo that you can reblog, a hashtag.” I often wonder as I see friends hesitantly posting memories of their lost parent how our ability to comfort each other spills into this medium?  How much of our ability to empathize in person actively translates with each “like” we give to their posts?

As a firm believer in allowing each individual to chart their own path for grieving and healing, online spaces may become mechanisms for both. In my own process, I try to push the boundaries of what feels comfortable to share on Facebook, twitter, etc. I don’t shy away from posting pictures of my father, marking what would-have-been his sixtieth birthday, the sixth year since his death, or my travels to places he would have loved. However, the accompanying text is often positive, such as “missing your adventures” rather than engaging with the harder, empty feelings of loss. While I can’t express my “full self” in this online space, I trend towards sharing what I can with this online world. As my community is spread throughout many places, online becomes the place that I receive (and provide) support from so many communities at once. Online, I am reminded of the people beyond the Facebook photos who love and care about me---through likes, comments, and quick emails after they see the post.

Beyond our individual experiences with grief and healing---Facebook has become a community in itself, creating a way to memorialize those who have died. Two of my “current” Facebook friends are people who have passed away. Their profiles remain places where friends and family leave notes---sharing life updates, memories, or simply typing “I miss you.” In a world where visiting gravesites may not be practical, the online memorial space may bring us closer together.  In her blog post, Online Mourning and The Unexpected Refuge of Facebook, Cheri Lucas (another Equals Record writer) discusses her experience with a friend’s death;

“A few hours after receiving the news, I wrote something and shared it as a Facebook note. I posted scanned photos from college—precious moments of youth, debauchery, and experiences I had never shared publicly—from nearly 15 years ago: onto his profile, our friends’ profiles, and my timeline. I sat in front of my computer, clicking on photos people tagged of him: images that conjured memories, that stunned and confused me, that made me feel grateful for knowing him, that devastated me because I realized I didn’t know the man he had become.

Alone, I sobbed. Yet I sobbed with Facebook open—his life revealed and exposed in bits on my screen, his friends spilling tears on his profile. I sobbed at home, by myself, but also with everyone else. I had never given in to the community of Facebook until that moment. For the first time, its communal space had comforted me.”

The possibilities of online spaces to bring us together are endless, we can share memories of those who have died, sharing our own healing processes, and of course, share our joys. Yet, as Wortham also notes, we don’t yet know the outcomes of creating online communities that don’t support the whole breadth of human emotions. However, we should trend towards sharing our authentic selves, our whole journeys---and in return, we should support others who do just that---comment on posts people share about those they have lost, about their difficult moments---engaging with the full spectrum of emotions, will only make the blissful moments stronger.

Much of my community is online, thus my grieving and healing cannot be completely separate. However, as with all pieces of grieving, this is personal---and we will each have to carve out how we interact with our online spaces. Yet, striving to make these spaces open to deeper human interaction, will only bring us closer to each other, and as a community---closer to healing.