I'm sitting here during Maia's naptime at our dining room table, looking out at our very suburban backyard and its carpet of light brown fallen leaves. Near my right elbow is a book I just started reading yesterday, Parenting from the Inside Out by Siegel and Hartzell. I also have a big mug of coffee, still warm from this morning's brewing thanks to the travel mug that I got last year at REI. Maia and I went to her toddler playgroup this morning, and we're going to do some trick-or-treating downtown on Main Street in Ann Arbor this afternoon despite the rain.
I'm thirty-three years old, and I've been settling-in to some patterns of life over these last few years in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back sort of way. The image that comes to mind is of a dog making a "nest" out of a blanket or rug--circling around, turning, adjusting, pawing at the floor, tweaking things this way and that. And the next day? The whole pattern happens, all over again. This is what the last few years of life have felt like in many ways as I hesitantly force myself to change old patterns and habits that no longer feel comfortable.
This post, therefore, is a bit of a song in praise of being weird. :) (There's a poetic term for a "song in praise of ____" that I don't recall, from back in my English Lit. days--oh well.) I've had a few experiences recently when I've felt like a bit of an outsider in conversations, and I'm settling into that fact and settling into my weirdness--it's all by choice, after all. Being an outsider was a daily source of stress and sometimes despair for me back in teenagehood, and I began to accept my weirdness in college (a time during which I attended zero frat parties and once read Ulysses out loud--with friends--for over 24 hours straight), but it wasn't comfortable yet.
Now, some of my weird habits and ways of being feel like a soft, old sweatshirt. They are the comfy trappings of who I am right now, and I'm starting to love them. Some are deep and profound (too much so for this particular blog), and others are much more superficial. For example:
- We don't have cable, and don't watch any live TV except for The Office, sometimes.
- I see no need to have a bigger car, ever.
- I've never shopped at Wal-Mart.
- I treasure the fact that I have dear friends who do things like send me e-mails about the public option's inclusion in the Senate health care bill (you know who you are!). :)
- I'm totally down with secular homeschooling, even though it's not a path I'm likely to follow with Maia.
- I nursed Maia for two years. Oh, the looks I get sometimes when that comes up . . .
- I love going to the gym. I really do. This is one facet of my current selfhood that I'm still trying to resist in a strange way--my old habits still conspire to make going to the gym a pain in the butt, even though I really do love it underneath.
- I'm a politics geek; www.politico.com is one of my most-visited bookmarks.
- I treasure my 21 hours of labor, and would do every second of it over again tomorrow in a heartbeat (even the 19 without the epidural) if I could get a good night of sleep tonight first.
- I've taught Maia the words uterus, placenta, vagina, and penis (because she asked--not randomly!) and she uses them relatively accurately. (I wonder if this particular bullet point will get me on some "banned websites" list?)
There are many, many things about my daily habits and ways of life that fit perfectly into a thoroughly suburban American way of being, and I know that . . . and that's another aspect of my weirdness. The incongruity of it. Each day, each month, each year is a adjustment process, a re-examining of my core values and how I want to push my continued development as an individual. There's no place of arrival, no final moment when I sigh and say "I'm finally here--this is the person I've been trying to become." For me, this is one of the core facets of "the meaning of life," as it were. Life for me is about consistent, incremental adjustment and reflection. It's about change, and it's about being highly skeptical of the pressure to strive for some destination after which I'll say "I'm done now." To me, there is no such thing, and I love that.
When I was a teenager, I remember believing that I could get away from this feeling of being an outsider by striving to find something outside of myself, a place "out there" where I would belong. If I could find the right college to attend, the right major, the right job, the right partner, the right city, then I wouldn't be an outsider any more. I remember the stress of that, the discomfort and occasional despair . . .
The only place I belong is here, inside my own skin, sitting at this table. I'm enough, I'm complete in my weirdness and my incongruities . . . I'm complete at this moment, but the next moment will likely feel different, and I'll adjust, and there will be a new "complete" in a different way.
6 comments:
"Encomium," perhaps?
This post is lovely - the final paragraph brings me particular pleasure. Each new, different moment being a new, different kind of complete in its own way; change being the only constant, both within and without the self... Love it.
But dear sis, who says you're "weird"? None of the 10 things you've listed here, for example, strike me as the least bit "weird"! "Weird" by whose standards?
Echoing your sentiment, I say, "hooray for being REAL." For being who we are, and even - especially! - allowing this construct "who I am" to be dynamic, fluid, flexible from moment to moment.
Identity is really just a bundle of thoughts and rules, anyway (such as "I am weird/unconventional/nonconformist; I do things differently than everyone else," etc.), and ultimately end up limiting us; the tighter we hold on to these thought-bundles, the more we risk losing contact with the moment, whatever it may contain.
And it contains EVERYTHING! It contains all there is.
Love you. Thanks for providing an unexpected opportunity for reflection on a Friday afternoon...
I've got to agree with Jo:
'who says you're "weird"? None of the 10 things you've listed here, for example, strike me as the least bit "weird"! "Weird" by whose standards?'
Those 10 things you list aren't weird at all, they're just more this decade than last, more Ann Arbor than Cincinnati, more progressive than traditional. It sounds like you've found yourself, as have I, in a place in space and time where the details of your life add richness to the world around you instead of isolate you from it, and the things that are indeed nontraditional are more mainstream than they were for our parents - which is a real collective triumph.
I think that this beautiful post could actually be a statement representing our generation, particularly of those who are parents of young children. We are settling into our differences, which are, splendidly, not so different anymore.
I'm ruminating on my word choice now. I see so much where you both are coming from (Johanna, your "more ___ than ____" construction hit the nail on the head), and so perhaps "weird" isn't a word that fits.
But, then again, I have these moments--and I had a couple of them recently--where some of these things still do feel so very not mainstream. Maybe here's what I'm doing: perhaps I'm trying to reclaim the word "weird" in the same way that I've tried to reclaim "selfish"? (We've had conversations about that one, Jo.) I might be trying to change the connotation for myself and take it on regardless of whether it's technically accurate. I don't know . . .
I've lived much of my life seeing "weirdness" or "outsider" status as some sort of burden to be shed, and now I think I've realized that I don't see it that way anymore. I'm cool with it, whether it's mainstream or not, whether I'm in Ann Arbor or Cincinnati. :)
In any case, I treasure the fact that you both took the time to comment. It gives me the warm fuzzies. Thanks so much.
"Panegyric," I bet! That's gotta be the word you were looking for. ;)
I think we'd all do well to discuss things like this more often - which is probably why I appreciated the post. I'd wager a guess that most of us, if we're paying much attention, struggle with issues of identity and self-definition. We sort through the words that might be used to describe us, and we like some of them and we don't like others, and we try to earn them or shed them or reclaim them or subvert them... We sift and sort among the prototypical roles in which we're cast in our lives (daughter/sister/lover/friend/wife/mother/teacher/scholar/waitress/nonconformist/WHATEVER) and we try to put on the right costumes, and we try to speak from the right scripts, to play those roles as we imagine they're supposed to be played (or as other people tell us they're supposed to be played)...
Ultimately, though, it's all just words, whether resisted or reclaimed. How much of it really feels authentic, if we're honest with ourselves? How much of it really means anything?
Recently I've been wallowing in a bit of a "crisis," in the context of which I don't feel certain about "who I am" anymore. So much has changed about my life in the past year... makes my head spin.
But I think the "crisis" came to an end when I recognized that within this uncertainty about "who I am" is also the greatest clarity and freedom I've felt in a long time. I don't know "who I am," I don't know "who I am" supposed to be, or what to do to play that role "appropriately" - and this not-knowing is exactly where I need to be! Insider, outsider, academic, nonconformist, joiner, loner, midwestern girl, urbanite - I'm all of it and none of it. Ultimately none of it means anything to me, really. It's all smoke and mirrors.
The only thing that means anything is this moment... And this one... and this one... And what I do with it. And what I'm doing with it is reaching out to my sister through the interwebs and saying, YES! Weird or not-weird, Cincinnati or Ann Arbor (or New York), progressive or traditional, whatever. Who knows? Won't it all change anyway? In this moment, the uncertainty in me responds to the uncertainty in you, and we're finding one another there.
I've come to really like the feeling of leapfrogging from one role to another, jumping around, slipping a bit, regaining my footing . . . that's been quite an adventure. That's a major part of what my thirties have been--one big game of leapfrog.
And here's the thing for me: settling in on one word for one bit of time, perhaps shifting it a bit, making an adjustment there to keep my balance . . . that process feels deeply satisfying to me. It isn't particularly comfortable, and perhaps that's what a lot of this is about for me: I'm finding that I'm most at ease when things are shifting and moving and feeling a bit "jumpy." I have great skepticism for the status quo, for stagnation, and I tend towards boredom in a BIG way if things feel excessively stagnant.
Perhaps in a way you're not, Jo, I'm also comfortable with shouldering these various descriptors and signifiers, because I like messing around with them. I've worn the mantle of "educator" for six years now, but oh how that actual words has shifted in its meaning in my life. I love how the term "student" has changed for me between 1995 and 2009. It brings me great joy to think about all I've learned in that time.
I don't particularly object to the trappings of these words; they're like clothes on a body, perhaps? Superficial and artificial and not actually alive--"smoke and mirrors"--but the artifice what the world sees. It's how the world categorizes me. I am the movement and breath and life and warmth underneath the artifice, and I can change it at will, and there's some significant power in that.
(And yes, panegyric was the word! Panegyric FTW!)
Thanks for your lovely post. As Steve and I gird our loins to deal with the parents of Esme's 17 closest friends today, I will try to wear my outsider badge with honor. I am my authentic true self, and if the other parents aren't down with that, who cares, right?
Post a Comment