Driving Forward Into the Past, #365StrongStories 37

“Does it feel like a good sign or a bad sign that the dealership uses your old plant as a carpark?” I asked my husband this on our way to the Poughkeepsie Mazda place. This wasn’t a particularly triumphant trip. My husband had walked away from a totaled car last month (thank the gods!) and we were on our way to find a replacement. We weren’t excited about a new car payment and we all would have been happier spending our Saturday hiking in the woods.

But here we were on one of those commercial strips that make America mediocre doing what consumers do as Presidents’ Day draws near.

We did the car browsing dance, learning the steps as we went along. When my two year-old got tired, she and I went back to the mess of an SUV that is the family vehicle.

That’s when I got the text. “The red one in the distance. It’s parked right where my old office used to be.”

And so, we met Karma, the “soul red” sedan that's going to be a necessary addition to the family.

It felt destined and blessed and we were grateful for something more than reliable transportation.

My husband loved that job before the factory was shut down. We were looking for a sign that we were doing more than signing away five years of monthly installments. We needed this to be something more than a car.

You might say it was fate or you might say we were making up a story to make the whole deal more palatable. Either way, it worked in a way that no sales pitch ever could. What about you - what big move did you make based on “the universe said so”?

Where does telling a nice story really take you? #365StrongStories 36

Stories don’t generally emerge from self-discovery style writing prompts. At least not directly. But sometimes, a probing personal question exposes a persistent inner villain - a calculating, weakling narrative that somehow threatens to sink all your strong, heroic stories.

Today, I stumbled across of a collection of expert advice on the heroine’s journey curated by a beloved colleague, Saundra Goldman.

It includes this prompt rom Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones:

Women are allowed to be powerful. You’re not going to find your voice being nice. You’re not going to find who you are. This is your lifetime. You want to say to yourself, “I want to live out of a more genuine, real, connected place,” and keep looking. And it takes time. Ask yourself, “Is this really something you want to do or is it another thing that makes you crazy?”

Questions for writing and reflection: How has being nice held you back? What are you doing right now that doesn’t feel genuine or coming from a deep place?

Last night, glancing over the daily stories I’ve written and shared in 2016, I started to panic. Goddesses, birth, fairytales, motherhood, and occasional mentions of football and entrepreneurship… what sort of lunatic businesswoman thinks that random, personal collection is going to bring in paying clients?

Apparently, this one does.

Playing it cool and trying to write what’s popular hasn’t ever worked for me. My power isn’t ever going to be found by writing nice posts that speak to my conception of the mainstream because I’ll end up feeling like a fraud who gets left high and dry.

All I can do is explore my power and exert the strength of my inner storyteller each day. I can dive deep and listen to the voice that says “you have something the world needs to hear.”

After all, how can I ever believe in your stories and help you make them sparkle and shine if I don’t believe in my own?

Caught in the Mists of Story, #365StrongStories 35

“Mists of Avalon? Haven’t read it. My sister’s college roommate went insane when she read that book. Drew all the characters names and connections on the walls around her bed and never finished the semester.” I don’t remember who said this to me, but I have shelved the conversation with all the other memories of the book I credit with changing my life.

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s sweeping Arthurian epic with all its feminism and paganism and didactic wonder rewrote my relationship with religion. It the long process of questioning, abandoning, reconciling, and finally building my own mature relationship with the Catholicism of my childhood.

It was a big deal for me. But I didn’t flunk out of high school because I thought I was Morgaine.

And yet, I do get lost in stories. I know my addiction is stronger than most, but every person craves and creates stories. These days, it’s not just writers, but also psychological researchers, marketers, and neuroscientists who talk about how stories are at the core of our humanity.

Is it strange to rearrange one’s spiritual beliefs based on a book? It feels a little embarrassing to admit I’m so vulnerable to story.

Oh, wait, isn’t that exactly what all religions with a written tradition rely upon? Myths, legends, oral tradition captured on paper generations later that eventually become the backbone of an entire faith? I’m in good company (and some not so good company). It’s just part of being human.

Testing the Truth of Two Birth Stories, #365StrongStories 34

It went on for pages. Exacting descriptions took the reader minute-by-minute through the entire 28-hour process. Though the story was written over several weeks, the narrator would tell you she remembered every detail because she'd been exultantly present in every moment. The journal pages filled more than four years later were more like notes on a dream. The writer lingered on the result, not the road that got her there. When you finally do find out what really happened, entire hours are summed up with “I was lost in the torturous, incremental progression of it all.”

Though the stories were written by the same hand, it would be hard to say that the same woman gave birth in 2009 and in 2014.

After my first daughter’s birth, I considered myself a force of nature - triumphant and ecstatic at the power of the female form. When I survived the second, I was a deeply humbled creature who contentedly swore “never, ever again.”

In truth, the second birth was probably the safer one… transition was a long, brutal hell, but I pushed that baby out in the space of eleven banshee-screaming minutes. The first time around I flirted with “failure to progress” and I’m sure the story would have ended very differently if I wasn’t in the care of trusted homebirth midwives.

Both stories were rooted in my truth as I understood it, but none of it was necessarily true.

Birth is ascending to the stars and falling to your knees. It’s all hope and despair, euphoria and desperation, and the words on a page can only offer a distant view through a cloudy glass. For something so sacred, that is just as it ought to be.

Birth From Wrath to Realization, #365StrongStories 33

It had started at one in the morning. By midday, I was frustrated and angry and already tired. And then Husband looked into my eyes and said “this can’t be like the last time.”

Cue the rage of every birthing mammal in the history of the earth.

Yes, dear, let me make sure I keep the groaning, writhing, and screaming to a minimum. Yes, dear, this time I will clean up after myself as soon as that cord gets cut. Yes, dear, I’ll have her tucked into her own little bed in time for kickoff.

I hissed. I spat. I thundered off as only a woman in the midst of a very slow, so far uneventful labor could be.

It was Super Bowl Sunday, you see. To say that my husband is big fan is to say that natural childbirth is hard - understatements of the century. So, when I heard him tell me that he didn’t want this time to be like the last 28-hour ordeal, I was certain that he was more concerned with the big game than he was with my big belly.

How is it that the human race creates the relationships that make beautiful babies when we can't communicate in such crucial moments?

Time collapses on itself when all you want to do is meet the creature who has been sitting on your bladder for months. I’m not sure how long it took for me to accuse him “you care more about a bunch of stupid linebackers than me and our baby!”

But I still remember the pained disbelief in his eyes when he said “What are you talking about, babe? I don’t give a damn about the game. I know how tired we are and I don’t want us to have to do this at five A.M. again.”

In that moment I realized that pregnancy may be a long, lonely journey, but birth isn’t. Not when you ask the person you love to watch helplessly while you storm about in the boredom of early labor, struggle in the wilderness of transition, and turn yourself inside out in the final push. Not when you ask him to hold you up so the midwives can do their work of catching the person you created together.

Not when you expect him to hold the little one’s other hand while you hold the other and, together, you promise to teach this child to navigate the world.