Act Two

It was a snowy day; pre-Thanksgiving record precipitation. Early in the season when one quickly moves from ‘this is beautiful and a reason to cook and clean and hand wash all the silverware’ to 8 hours later ‘I can’t take this anymore, if I don’t get out of this house now I might actually die in here, clean cutlery and all.’ I was in that state when my friend text me to grab dinner. I was following snowplows to the front steps of my local brewpub before my response reached her.

My friend and I have toasted to seeing each other, health, and snowplows. I take a sip. I look down my hand on the roundest part of the glass. We are at a natural segue in the flow of our conversation. Or, maybe we aren’t but I say anyway, “I’m lost.”

I go on to explain that I have been trying this writing thing, talking about art and art installations, helping friends with business plans, going to yoga, meditating, taking long walks with my dog in the mountains, binging on Oprah, listening to and reading books, seeing my therapist, connecting with friends, chairing the board of a non-profit, and when people ask me “what are you doing,” I feel like I have to make shit up. Nothing is sticking. I pretend that the writing is really more than it is. I emphasize the three conversations I have had about my art installation idea. They are really, really important. And, then I think, do I have what it takes?

My soliloquy continues. I am also unsure how honest to be. No need to go into the finer machinations of life and death, I decide. We are at a brewpub, for god’s sake. It just seems out of context.

“You are in Act Two”, my friend says to me. I sit back, look her in the eyes, “I am.” I love that we have a common vernacular, my friend and I. Act Two is the M-I-D-D-L-E. Brene Brown says “Act 2 is where the main character tries to solve the problem by every easy way possible . . . It’s the darkness.”

Yep, that is exactly where I am. Someone turned the light off when I was mid-stride and I hadn’t yet memorized the furniture layout of the room. I try to walk forward, a straight line and run into the corner of the armoire in all its bulk. I fall back dazed from the impact with a welt smack in the middle of my forehead. I am disoriented and less brave to go straight ahead anymore.

I turn to the left. Haven’t I already been here before? Haven’t I tried this? Painting, writing, creating. . . haven’t I already done that in my 20s? And, then there was that time in my 30s when I quit my j.o.b. to paint. That time I really meant it. I entered a juried art show. Two of my paintings were accepted. I bought a new blouse for the opening. My partner and I arrived early; we knew the gallery owner and curator of the show. They were still hanging the pieces. We walked in and I looked around the expansive rooms. I left my companion, looking, scanning the walls. I spied my pieces far across the room near the bathrooms, they are small and tucked in the corner, hidden.

I walked back to the person I arrived with. Let’s go get a bite to eat, I whispered, barely able to speak. We walked out the door, he turned to me smiling and I burst into tears, sobbing. I needed validation. I needed my paintings to be at the front of the space, not tucked into a cranny like an afterthought. My partner quickly surmised that we would be driving home, not going to dinner and then reentering the gallery when there were too many people I would know, too many people for me to face.

“If you want to be an artist, you are going to have to get used to rejection,” he said to me later that night. I get that conceptually. I read Stephen King’s On Writing, listen to LL Cool J on Oprah’s Masterclass, each talks about how much rejection they had before success. It feels so personal though. I learned pretty early on to create a shield. With art, there is no resume that doesn’t make it to the second round, or the interview that got off on the wrong foot, or the “decided to move a different direction” conversation. They aren’t rejecting my art; they are rejecting me. The next morning I wake up, turn my computer on, and start applying to open positions.

That was 15 years ago. The buffer, the shield has been reinforced. My identity as a non-artist is fortified. A few weeks before the mammoth snowfall and my confessions, I drove to my hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska from Boulder. My mom was turning another year older.

Our conversations meander when we are together. Words and phrases start to slip out once we take care of the formality of catching up after time apart. “I was the easiest of all the kids.” I state assuredly and nonchalantly, knowing it is true without any confirmation or facts to back up my assertion. “Ha,” my mom, who never is that bold, laughs both forced and reflexively, “you were a challenge.” Ummm, I think to myself, why have we never had this conversation before. “Really?” I ask not wanting an answer because it will change the narrative I have had running in my head for the past 50 years. I decide not to press this any further. I have had enough for one day, so I change the subject to Scott Frost and the Huskers chance for a bowl bid.

A few days later, the trip is coming to a close and I will be packing up in the morning, hitting the road and munching on popcorn during my 6 hour drive west to the mountains. It is just my mom and I at dinner. The two other “easier” siblings are back at their respective homes and families. By this point in our time together my mom and I move through our multitude of our many roles, slipping from mother/daughter to friend to confidant to daughter/mother, seamlessly. We talk about everything from the mundane, like how long will she be able to live on 20 acres in the country by herself, to the sacred, how will the Huskers do this year, to the profane, can you go a little deeper into the statement that I was the most challenging child who ever graced this earth?

She laughs, “you do have your dad’s dry sense of humor.” Quit stalling, I think. I am sure she is holding out on me and doesn’t want to talk about the time she almost gave me over to protective services because I was that challenging. Instead, I smile and dig in. I can out wait her, I calculate. She might be wiser, but I have youthful stamina. “So,” I say slowly tempering the urgency with the realization that I have gone this long living a lie, what is another minute or two? “I am curious about how I was challenging?” I let the question hang in the air. Keep it open-ended and non-threatening. It feels like I am manipulating her. And, I might be, but it is moments like this when the ends justify any means necessary.

“You were a perfectionist.” She is softening me up I think. I feel so far from perfectionist at this moment. I feel as though I have just vomited my life plans, if I ever really had them, on the sidewalk, and am wiping my mouth looking around to see if anyone noticed. “Tell me more,” I ask in a way that is not defensive. I am genuinely interested in hearing her side of the story. “There was one time when you had homework and you didn’t think you had it 100% right, I could not calm you down.” Here we are 40 years later and she remembers that moment. I let that sink in.

This is starting to get interesting. I do remember the time when I was in 1st grade and my easy-going, life-loving older sisters had homework and I didn’t. I was jealous, and probably, angry. Maybe I made my mom pay for the sins of my teacher. Because it was a Catholic grade school and my teacher was a nun, I can only image how angry God was at Sister Luella for her oversight. My mom was collateral damage.

My mom continues. “You were so efficient that you did not sleep under the covers because you didn’t want to mess up your bed or spend time making it in the morning.” She was younger than I am today when all these silly shenanigans were playing out. I look at her. Really look at her.

I have been piecing together my childhood for some time now. When I found my 3rd grade report card a few years back that showed A+ in math and demotions for inability to pay attention, I was suspicious. When I shared this startling news with my close friends, they just smiled and nodded.

My now near perfect oldest sister, by comparison–because why wouldn’t I, was the delight of the class. Pluses in all the socially acceptable characteristics that assure she will be a strong contributor to the betterment of the world. “What a great student and person.” The teacher takes extra care and extends her comments beyond the allotted box, “We wish every child was as wonderful and attentive as she is.” I look at my report card searching for a moment of redemption. “We wish Deanne luck next year.”

“Mom, you sandbagged me.” She looks startled at my assertion and a little confused at my climbing reference. “Thankfully, you saw something in me that no one else did. You bet on my potential.” It took me a long time to come to this place of grace. But she’s on a roll now, so I let her continue, “you were stronger than all the boys in 7th grade, you could bench press more than they could. You came home one day so upset because they made fun of you.” This makes sense to me. Twelve years of competitive swimming by the time I entered Junior High, 2-a-days for the past three years, I was an anomaly. I was a proud, strong, bold, competitive, and confident girl. . . until I wasn’t. We are getting to the part of the story that has confounded me, and her, for the past forty years.

She looks down at her plate of picked-at fried chicken. We both know what is coming next. We have never been able to talk about it together, to each other, at the same time, in an actually conversation. I take a deep breath, hold it for a second too long, and wait for her to take the lead. “I found the laxatives, I didn’t know what to do. I was scared. Maybe I shouldn’t have called you out of class and confronted you in the lobby of your high school. I don’t know. There was no script for bulimia in the early 80’s.”

I listen. This is a first for me. Listening, instead of defending the moat, the castle, every last blade of grass, and still calling in back up cavalry. I put myself in her shoes. For the past nine months, I have listened to every single On Being podcast, read Pema Chodron, meditated, studied Buddhism, and stood on my head; all for this moment. I pause. I am no longer angry. I feel compassion for her, for me, for the teenage me, and for the young mother that she was. “I can, and can’t, imagine how hard it was for you. You must have been so terrified.” I mean these words. I feel them in my core.

Now she is in her own world. This conversation has played out a hundred times in her mind, I just happen to be here this time. “You were, are, strong and strong-willed. You are the one who said, ‘I have an eating disorder and I am going to deal with it.’ At nineteen you checked yourself into the in-patient program.” I let this soak in. This has not been my narrative. What she saw as strength and determination, I labeled as failure and weakness. What she sees as a blip in the arc of a full life has been a weight fastened to both my feet that keeps me tethered to the past.

She is finished. She has said all she is going to for now. The urge to consume more is strong in me. I want to figure it all out. I want to see the pattern in order to end it. I want to be released from the tension, anxiety, the years of self-doubt and self-hatred with an epiphany. I want her to exonerate me. ‘You got me into this mess, now you get me out.’

Instead I thank her and we raise our glasses to her strengthen, wisdom, and beauty. She laughs a little and says, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

* * *

“They did the best they could’ is an oft repeated phrase after someone recounts their personal atrocities from a childhood laid out like a minefield. It usually feels like a weak attempt at forgiveness; more often though it lands as a cop-out, letting those who were entrusted with out soul, bodies, minds, and spirits off the hook for not being more of what we needed.

I have toyed with the idea in the past that we, let me make this personal, that I chose my parents. I chose a father who was larger than life when he was in the company of others and a wall of disregard when it came to me. A mother who lost her mother at age six in the middle of the depression, with two younger brothers to raise. Even as I write this, I think about how my sisters would pick different attributes to highlight. Perhaps, it isn’t so much that parents are chosen, but that we find those obstacles in people around us to help us grow to our highest and best potential. That is, if we are not defeated first.

I am sad that I have to leave the next morning. I know that someday she will not be here to grab dinner and have a conversation. Someday there will not be another birthday to celebrate. Someday I will have to make up both the storyline and fill in the details.

I gather pebbles along the expansive seashore that lay ahead. Tiny bits of information add to my collection. It is a beautiful, if not eclectic, swirl of colors, shapes, textures; occasionally a piece of glass or plastic makes its way into the collection. Do I keep them because they represent an effort to bend down and examine? They were a mistake, but they are now part of the whole. I decide to keep the glass. Discarding the plastic leaves a temporary void that quickly is filled in.

Am I making a sandcastle or can the parts and particles merely exist without striving toward a greater form? Is a life lived enough? This is my Act 2.

* * *

The next morning is, after the snowfall, glorious and cold. The task of shoveling heavy, wet snow takes my mind of the tape on repeat. I start to sweat and catalogue my gratitude’s from the day before. A strong body is always at the top of the list. When my mind wasn’t cooperating, as a young girl with undiagnosed dyslexia, I found refuge in swimming, running, hitting baseballs, playing flag football. There, I had confidence. There, if I wasn’t the team captain, I was the reason everyone wanted to win the coin toss for first pick. There, I wasn’t discarded and told “good luck next year.”

I didn’t know about the women’s movement, Gloria Steinem, N.O.W., bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Ms. Magazine, or Soujourner Truth. Being the only girl on the field was not an act of defiance; it was desperation. It was the one place where I knew I fit in with myself. This has been my refuge: the dirt county road of my hometown that systematically tracks mile increments; the expansive trail, winding through the trees, over creeks, and around rocks; hours in the yoga studio; climbing mountain faces outracing storms and lightning strikes. Pushing my mental limit through the physical is the largest, most polished pebble in my collection.

Act 2 wears many outfits. It is such a commonplace experience, that oft times goes unlabeled, so we try to dress it up to feel like we have ground underneath us, a form to push off against. Pema and the Buddhists might define Act 2 as the bardo. The intermediary state between getting hit by the proverbial bus and kicking it in heaven with God or coming back for a do over. A lot goes on in the space between. Life here on this planet is dress rehearsal.

Dying, letting go of all that is known, disintegrating, groundlessness, practice for the inevitable last breath that is our collective commonality. The trick is to be okay with this. Maybe even welcome it. As we face our eventual demise, we have a choice. Do we want to be panicked and scared or ease into the vast unknown like a child plunging into a snow bank to make angels. The implications reverberate.