Ruby Sparks Inspires: Words, Music, Love

Today, my husband celebrates his 53rd birthday. In addition to a handsome box of his favorite cigars, I gave him a gift of words to music, inspired by a film I saw recently.

Ruby Sparks is 21st Century Pygmalion; a young writer's obsession with a character he sculpts from his soul, the conception of his true love. Ruby is Allan's Venus, blooming not from a seashell in the ocean, but from the pages of his DeLuxe typewriter.  Early in the film, Allan describes her to the psychologist who is trying to help him break through writer's block. He notes the roots of Ruby's origins and wanders through a string of observations about her character--her charms, her idiosyncracies, the honor of her affection. This piece of gentle monologue is captured and set to music on the soundtrack in a song that bears the same title as the film. I have not been able to let go of it just yet, and wondered, in the way that I like to set my own life to music, what words would I use to describe my love, were I the Pygmalion whose conceived love leaps from imagination to life. And so, having shared that piece of words and music with my husband, told him how I would describe him, and as I did, violin from Ruby Sparks continued to rise and fall in the background. This is what I said:

You're tall, and walk with the tall-man gait-- a confident stride of men who seem to accomplish much, yet not all tall men have done what you have. You can't open your mail. Nor can you tolerate the calamity of child's play, stuff which rolls off my own back. But you feel things, notice things. You note the changing of light in a room.

I don't remember what else I said before he reached his hand across the table to mine, only what I felt as I tried to rein in the rest of the words.

Happy Birthday, Husband. Know that I see you. I love you.

Top Ten Signs of Blogworthiness

I know I've written a good blog when I reread it hours after the last set of proofs and tinkers, and I find myself laughing again. And one good blog triggers another. I have begun to feel very chicken-and-egg about blogging--does the event trigger the blog or does the blogging make the event noteworthy? Nevertheless, here are some of the signs I have learned that show me when an event is blogworthy or when a blog is going to entertain:

1. When my husband does something and says about it later: It seemed like a good idea at the time. I wonder if he'll be saying that about the motorcycle he bought a year ago that he will finally be bringing home from storage this summer. Frankly, I see myself with a hard cast up to the hip after my first-ever motorcycle ride saying the same thing. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

2. Anything my son does involving what a girlfriend of mine calls "Shit-iroshima". You can draw a conclusion about what this might mean based on the fact that we now call Friday night's 3 AM vomiting session "Puke-asaki". I have yet to write about it, but then I have written before about the mass eruption that is children's barfing. Do we really need to go there again? Yes. Yes, we do.

3. When an event is a metaphor for something else, the event is now blogworthy. For example, the day my dog died, the dog I once shared with my ex-husband. Enough said.

4. When a lesson is learned. For example, why I should never shop with my children. And this week I learned another new lesson: I should have ignored my son when he asked me if using the middle finger was bad. I said yes, and today he willfully and knowingly shot his sister the bird. He's not even five. I have so much to learn.

5. When I eat something so incredible I immediately transcend time and space, my five senses become electrified, and I swear I'm having a foodgasm. I wish I had taken the time to describe every breakfast I ate at Cafe Pasqual's in Santa Fe, New Mexico this year. I love food. I think food is amazing. It's multi-sensory, sexual, comforting, basic, extreme, and a mastery of chemical reaction both in creation and consumption--all at once.

6. When I experience something that I know will directly relate to a reader, a common topic, and put a twist on it you didn't see coming. Or maybe, I put something out there that I never could have said at the kitchen table growing up, like my friend Jay's line in this post: http://cafecatiche.blogspot.com/2010/12/facebook-vs-blogger.html. It's a super short post. You'll know the line when you see it.

7. And when I experience something inspiring or life-changing. The posts about New Mexico are particularly examples of that.

8. Anytime I have to explain sex to my daughter. Remember this one? http://cafecatiche.blogspot.com/2010/05/joy-of-sex-education.html And just recently, we had a whole separate discussion when someone let my daughter watch an inappropriate film. And I quote: "Mom, I thought the guy's thingie went into the girl's thingie like this." She made a gesture. I said yes, that that was true. "Ok, but I just saw this movie where this girl was in love with two guys and one of them got her from behind." You can imagine the phone calls I had to place after THAT.

9. When the small moments are really big moments. I went to a children's talent show at my daughter's school this weekend. Those awkward displays of burgeoning (or failing) talent were beautiful. I have never seen so many brave young people. I watched one little girl sing "Yesterday" by the Beatles. She fought her nerves the entire time--stopping to fight tears, dropping words, and still managing to finish. I haven't even seen that many grown ups present themselves so vulnerably and courageously.

10. Love. Joy. Any moment that makes those things blossom in my heart and any moment that marks loss or transition relating to those things. My blog posts have run the gamut from self-indulgent to self-deprecating, but what I want to share the most is love. Like I said to someone this week, life is hard, but I would rather live celebrating its good moments. I hope that comes through on this blog. My life mission is to connect with others, make their living a better experience than it might have been otherwise. I hope that all the joys and trials of life that I have chosen to so neatly pen here in this blog are an element of that desire to love, share love, and be loved.

Happy reading! And as ever, thanks for coming back here again and again.

Love, Acceptance, and Joy: Cocoon, Catharsis, and Butterfly

Saturday on Facebook, I posted a sublime little message which read, "Love, acceptance, and joy: I need nothing because I have everything. This weekend marks my best birthday yet. Cocoon, catharsis, butterfly."


There is a lot to be said for recognizing satisfaction. I often complain that I don't have a real social life (Going out with friends? What's that?) and that my current job pays terribly and will not allow for greater professional growth. This weekend, I learned none of that matters as much as the ability to connect with family.


Celebrating my oldest step-daughter's college graduation, 18 of us flanked a set of tables at a seafood restaurant near the water in a town associated with happy memories for many of us. Included in our group were my husband and his two girls, my children, my in-laws, and my husband's former wife, her gentleman companion, and her parents. Watching all of this work together, I was moved to complete gratitude and joy. This is what other families strive to achieve: the occasional blissful merging of family post-divorce for the celebration of life that continues despite those familial break ups. And better yet, we were all genuinely pleased to see each other.


This moment was a mammoth blessing of grace for a second reason, which is that I realized my children really do have what I previously thought they were missing. I grew up surrounded by a clan of cousins on my father's side who were like brothers and sisters. We saw each other most Sundays and every holiday. Good news? We told family members first. Having a birthday? Share it with cousins, aunts, and uncles whose candles sport the same cake as yours. I have worried that my children would be permanently and negatively affected by the last several nomadic years and divorce. As it turns out, family has simply multiplied for them. 


While I like to think I am a happy person, I am often very conflicted about work and motherhood and the merging of those two things. Having been forced to confront painful things about myself and the people I love (or once loved), the last few years have been quite a challenge. But here I feel an emergence from the cocoon I built to process all these things, and as part of the renewal process, something else was being created this past weekend: a warm, loving link to the woman that was once married to my husband.


I cannot begin to express how accepted I felt among this clan of people who are still largely new to my life. I am eternally grateful to my step-daughter's mother for the gift of her children. This birthday, my 39th, I celebrate love.

Tide Rising When Love Is

There is a wonderful website, onekindwordproject.org, that I visited after seeing a notice about it in a local cafe. Intrigued by the idea of writing about love, the website's mission, I penned prose about my greatest romance (with a certain tall and handsome husband who washes dishes in the next room as I write) and was absolutely shocked when my work was accepted and posted. You can find my words by searching the site for the date on which it was posted April 29, 2011 or by searching for the title of my work "Tide Rising When Love Is" or by visiting the anthology submissions page here: http://www.onekindwordproject.org/category/anthology-submissions//. I am still, at least for a while, on the top of the page. Some readers, thanks to Facebook, found me there already. I encourage you to visit this website and peruse its pages.

And of course, you can read it here:

He said, tell me about love. And love is what I said, smiling with the jut of chin and shoulder before tumbling with him into the sacred oblivion of white bedclothes and down pillows. The encircling draw of his arms and the rhythmic rise of his chest above mine, the pushing and pulling in a river of warm, blissfully I swam and I sank. Yes, I breathed as I listened to his body, love simply is.

Another day, my heart sandwiched between the pleadings of small children, the dancing of the hungry dog, and the peeling of paint from the walls, my love wasn’t is, but instead had a whole constrained definition. Confined between their needs and his work and my shortcomings, love was an obligation. And then the day passed, and a night, and another day. And that night, love just was again. Love was sighs, the creak of bedsprings, and the sudden pooling of too-warm covers between the bottoms of our feet and the end of the bed. The house slept, our secret adoration in a sweet tide of us rising and filling it. Love just was. And the morning came, with it enough sustenance to counter his woes, discussions of expenses, and diatribes about former lives.

Blink

pour me a drink

and let’s forget about all of this but love, please

the rolling, returning flight of love

In love we are the only ones despite the thousands upon millions of Helens, Juliettes, and Cleopatras, only we have much better endings. Our grandparents, hands clasped in old age or death, were once even us. Oh, but for that millisecond of time in which we are love, loving, and loved.

Shh, let me hush the bleating child. The paint still will flake. I see in your eyes, my sweet, the cotton of warm sheets, the beating of your heart, and the spin of your sea.

Be Good to Each Other

A few years ago, when I thought my world was coming to an end, my then-husband wondered aloud why he did not treat me as nicely as my father treated my mother. What I realized later was this: to treat someone that beautifully requires an interior quality so profound and pure that all one’s actions become a reflection of that goodness. This is not to say that change isn’t possible, that effort cannot improve a relationship, or even that difficult people can’t have a solid marriage, but really, this kind of lovely treatment of one another is a rare gift, and my parents are particularly blessed with it.


When I walked down the aisle the first time, my father whispered in my ear as he guided my arm to my soon-to-be husband’s. He said, “Be good to each other.” Such simple directions—the most uncomplicated marriage advice I have ever heard. Unfortunately, my first husband was unable to embrace those plain words and the marriage ended. Recently, my father and I paused at a café for java and had a long talk about the end of that relationship, and I commented about what I had observed between him and my mother that week. This Christmas, as I watched my parents speak gently with one another, my father cupped my mom’s face in his hand, and they bowed their heads toward one another, and murmured affectionate words. I held my breath as time stopped. It was a beautiful moment, the likes of which I witnessed often through my childhood, but that I never fully experienced until I courted my new husband: tenderness in its most innocent and sweetest light.

As we dawdled over coffee, my dad and I eventually grew to a deeper discussion of our own present marriages, my father and mother’s being their first and only. He elaborated on what he had learned as a young man in his early married years, and we laughed about how his errors paralleled some of the comedic ones my husband and I now experience as newlyweds at our age. Despite newness and trial though, we do triumph.

“I looked across the room at the Christmas party,” I said, “and saw my husband smiling at me. And he was proud—not ‘my wife is a trophy’ kind of proud, but proud to be married to me.” Suddenly, and even with my own spouse miles away, I could smell his cologne and feel the warmth of his body. I could almost hear him breathing the way he does when he bends his own forehead to touch mine in a wordless exchange of love. I paused in reverie. My father and I sat near the window of a Starbucks, the steam long having abandoned the cups in our hands, our thoughts drifting.

I thought about the goodness of my husband. When he speaks, he speaks gently. His voice still stops my heart and slows me down—it is the sound of love. This is not to say that we don’t have moments where we have overstepped boundaries in some way (Do NOT remove the carpet from his office! Do NOT!), but the overwhelming sensation I have for him is ultimately adoration. This Christmas, one and a half years after the start of our marriage, we drove our children from their father’s home to my in-laws far away. The kids were quiet, sleepy, and warm in their blankets against the dampness and chill of the fog outside. We cruised down the highway, picking out familiar landmarks silhouetted against the grey mist that curtained the countryside. I was overwhelmed by a familiar feeling—security, love for family despite obstacle or stress, and faith despite the unknown future. I told my husband later how much I enjoyed being part of his family—both the nuclear one we create and the extended one we share. We are good to each other.

Magic and Light

When my younger step-daughter confided a recent difficulty, my husband and I listened, gave counsel and insight, and offered a series of compliments designed to make her laugh. Finally, when she disclosed that a certain level of self-doubt persisted, I told her that she has a kind of magic and light. There are so few people out there like this young woman. Woe to the creature that fails to recognize her value.


And she is magic and light. She is some kind of combination of Holly Golightly, Tinkerbell, and Amelia Earheart. She describes her future and I am certain that she will do as she dreams. This girl, that recently plummeted fearlessly from an airplane and routinely climbs mountains, puts young men to complete shame and still maintains girlish charm. She has honored me with her love this summer. She could not possibly know how moved I am when I even think remotely about her trust. Perhaps, until she is a mother herself, she could never know. But this daughter claims not to want that role. Magic and light—she will find other ways to share it.

She charms street people into making bracelets for her. She smiles in complete paragraphs. She makes books and odd art charms as gifts. She has completely tamed and socialized our rabbit to the point that he is now a litter-box-trained house bunny. She still stands and walks as the trained ballerina she once was. When she pins her hair and curls into place, she becomes a 1930’s paper doll. She is thrifty and conscious. She is the kind of girl most men find elusive, but she really does not want to be. When young men disappoint her, her faith in love persists. She is admirable. I expect one day she will receive some kind of prize for aiding a third world country. I will be the old woman at the supermarket bragging to strangers that I know this girl.

To be so blessed! I have had a joyful summer with two step-daughters, the elder of whom has returned to college already. Perhaps someday I will illustrate her own unique loveliness in a blog here (and I believe I have touched upon it once or twice already). Truly I am thrilled to have welcomed into my life both young ladies who have somehow unknowingly managed to lift and inspire me. I can no longer imagine my life without them in it and feel as though I have fallen in love with both of them nearly the way I initially had fallen in love with their adoring and noble father, a man who sometimes seem strikingly innocent despite his age and maturity.

Perhaps magic and light is simply love in its purest state. Joyfully, there is plenty of it here.

Love and Mothers

I had meant to post this on Mother's Day, but I was traveling. In fact, my mother was with me, having just helped to support me through something awful. This blog is for her.

One night, my husband and I lay beside each other in conjugal bliss with a book of Rumi’s poetry between us. We were discussing love and how to describe it. We each had been thinking about the bonds of love between parent and child in addition to that holy bond between spouses. How does one truly articulate love? Difficult to define and express, efforts have been made for love to be explained, questioned, pondered, answered, and spoken through the written and verbal word, through acts of physical intimacy, demonstrated in gestures of sacrifice and service, painted, photographed, sculpted, and even shouted from the couch on Oprah. But really, in the quiet moments at this writer’s desk, what is love and how can I really tell someone exactly how and how much I love? I cannot pour it into a glass and measure it. I cannot buy it. I cannot put it in a box, gift it, and say: Here is this love. All of it.


Lately, I have thought in particular about my mother. I want her to know how I feel about her. It is impossible to capture precisely, this love. Simply said, it is too big, too profound. In a recent and beautiful letter, my mom described the loss of several friends and her gratitude to still be alive and well and sharing her life with us: her daughters, my dad, her friends. I was moved to tears both reading her lovely words and penning more back to her. My love for her runs as intensely as romantic impulse, deeply as protective instinct, and joyfully as the wagging tail of a happy dog. I so love her. Does she know how? I think she does, in her own way of words and gestures, because we are both mothers.

My mother made sure my childhood would be as free from pain as possible. Having been unprotected from certain hardships, she sacrificed aspects of her adulthood to guarantee my own secure entry into the grown up realm. For the painful end of my first marriage, she sometimes blames herself for the reasons parents do—if only she had said, if only she had showed me, if only she had prevented this from happening. She considers my children her own and thinks about them constantly. She sets quiet examples of incredible work and success. I think she is the first woman in both my maternal and paternal families to earn a master’s degree, and to do what she does for a living. She made it possible for me to get my own degrees by setting that example. When my babies were born, she was there. She bundled them and stayed up all night with those precious newborns so my then-husband and I could sleep. When holidays came, she sacrificed her own time so we would not have far to travel with children. She came to us.

On my recent visit home, my parents showed me baby pictures that had survived Katrina. Because of so much lost, these photos were a particular jewel. I only had one image of myself as a baby—until now. The best image in this newfound collection, the most touching, was my mother sleeping beside me. I was less than six months old. Curled toward her, my forehead pressed to her breast, she cupped my body in the bend of her own. Light from the window poured in—clean, pale, ethereal, soft. The stillness in the photo, the very peace of the shared nap could be felt nearly 37 years later. It is the most beautiful picture of my mother I have ever seen. The preciousness of that photo spoke volumes of love, past and present. It is just a glimpse though, of the sacrifice made, the words spoken, the tenderness exchanged.

There is no love like mother-love. It is a cycle repeated timelessly, endlessly within one relationship, and passed down to other generations. I can only truly honor her love by living well, loving my own children, and when the time comes to care for her in old age, accepting the responsibility with grace and gratitude.

Love to you always, Mom. Love.

Love Wins

Love wins, as does truth and goodness and all the other virtues that shed light on what can be an ordinary and troubled world.

The No No List and the Dish on Love

Once upon a time, I listened to my husband encouraging one of his daughters. He was dispensing relationship advice to her. Her dilemma wasn’t should she break up with a certain young man, as she initially seemed to ask, but how. All I can say after picking up odds and ends of this conversation are that cute feet cannot sustain a relationship. (Don’t ask.) Her keenest recognition of her own circumstance was this: That love shit doesn’t last. It wears off.


I love teenagers. I am intrigued by their points of view, the urgency in which they feel they must romantically love someone, and the infinite trouble they suffer as a result. No matter how progressive we think we are in the 21st century, these liaisons are the training ground for marriage, and there is so much I wish I could tell both my husband’s daughters about this. Out of respect for them and their birth parents, I draw the line at interfering unless directly asked for advice.

Last year I was dining at the home of a good friend. Around the table were ladies ranging in age from teenage to maybe fifty-something. One of the young women asked what warning flags she should recognize in her current relationship. This question in itself suggested imminent disaster. We entertained ourselves immeasurably with this conversation and accrued a list that began with obvious deal-breakers, such as someone else’s lipstick in his truck. Between bouts of laughter and the pouring of wine, the most notable points made included considerations that are easy to overlook. As a young person I would have disregarded these completely. In fact, I know I did.

1. Have you met his friends? What kind of people are they? Does he ever hide his friends from you?

2. Take a good, long look at his father. You’ll end up marrying that. And there is hardly ever an exception to this rule.

3. In particular, how does he talk to his mother and father? Those are our first authority figures. How he speaks to them, he will speak to you (if not now, then someday). And there is never, never, never an exception to this.

I think women tend to make excuses. We want “the love shit” to last, and often enable misbehavior. I have made this mistake before. I won’t make it again. We tend to think that conduct is a temporal flux of sorts. We tell ourselves that what we are seeing will stop when he grows up, changes, settles down, finds a job, the ex goes away… whatever. We make a lot of excuses about how he treats others (or ourselves) saying that he was under stress or the treatment was deserved in some way. We might assume certain of their responsibilities to avoid conflict or embarrassment. Lo and behold, a cycle is born.

What you see is what you get. And if you see others suffer at the hands of your mate while you seem to skate fairly peacefully at a distance, be wary. This peace is short-lived. My step-daughter is right—the aura of your love does wear off, and you may find yourself, as I once did, trying to understand how you became the person who accepts being told you are “less”.

The human brain does not fully mature until the age of 25. I have often pondered this and thought marriage should be discouraged prior to this point, but who am I to say? My husband’s daughter recently described someone as being the cookies to her milk. The sweetness of this statement should not overwhelm the profoundness of the realization. This young lady already sees love, knows it, feels it, gets it. And I get it, too. After all, her father is indeed a heaping plate of warm cookies to my milk. He brings to my life sweetness, innocence, goodness, and comfort.

This kid’s going to be all right. She is tougher than I ever was and I cannot see her accepting sarcasm or disrespect from anyone. She has other demons, though, that she has yet to discover about herself. I look forward to a conversation with her years from now when she has a handful of wriggling toddler, a mortgage, and she has just coached her future spouse through a job loss or death of a parent. I want to know what she really finds underneath what wears away, and how she feels about the love of her life seeing her in her own moments of vulnerability. I hope the cookies and milk will still be there.

Small Acts of Compassion

This week, I contracted the nasty stomach flu. Several hours and retchings later, I lay semi-comatose and feverish on my bed, but recovered enough to let the children see I was not dead. The youngest child, our Tiny Man, crawled up beside me, took a damp rag from the bedside, and proceeded to sponge me with it. He said he wanted to clean my eyes, my ears, check my hair, my skin. He wiped gently and murmured the entire time that I was getting better and that I was okay. He sat with me for around ten minutes, giggling and pressing his cool feet against my burning skin. He kissed my forehead, my lips, and my chest, patted me with his little cool hands.


Oh, to be loved by a child. Makes everything better.

Marriage

Why do we marry, asks Elizabeth Gilbert in her recently released memoir, Committed. She explores marriage as a means of protection and survival or as an expression of class and rank in certain cultures. She discusses romantic love and the absence of it in certain marriages. And she documents her own path to re-marriage, a journey fueled by a complication in her husband’s status as a foreign visitor to the United States. She comes to terms with rituals and the need for formality, the permanence of a publicly made and witnessed promise. She rises to the final conclusion that I could have told her simply and from the start: we marry because it feels good to be loved and we want that love recognized. Yes, we can reap the benefits one receives as a married couple in society. And of course, if one has children, the bonds of marriage become the walls of the house in which those children are raised. But the best answer to this question of why do we choose a life partner has to be what I learned from Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Adam says, finally and after much frustration with the creature called Eve, that life is better outside the garden of paradise with her, than inside the beautiful garden without her.


I heard Twain’s above line at a theater production, a series of vignettes about love. Selected readings from Diaries bonded together each scene with comedic and finally the dramatic reality that love can end when life does. Sitting in the darkened theater, my husband’s profile lit with the jewel-toned lights cast from the stage, I was caught in a moment of tearfulness. Our marriage, still new and flecked with moments of hardship, is the relationship I choose because life with him is far better than living without him.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s own sentiments on love are quoted below as a direct reflection of why I married again despite the challenges of merging two families and any of the general troubles that might plague a marriage:

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.

Interestingly enough, Mrs. Browning married her love despite her controlling father’s objections. Wikipedia mentions that she lived happily ever after, if there is such a thing, especially considering her troubled health. She penned those beautiful words approximately 200 years ago when marriage meant assuming certain domestic roles from which women have found limiting both then and now. I find her choice thrilling and hopeful.

Barks in Translation

The family dog prances up and down while we pour her food into the bowl each day. She scoots immediately to her dinner dishes, sniffs to make sure her meal is there, looks at us, and calmly walks away. The kibble still rests untouched in the bowl. Why? Why does she do this?


There are some things I cannot understand about the dog, such as why she insists on pooping under the piano at night, or why she pulls paper out of the garbage cans during the day. I have asked her why, but she does not give a reason.

She is our dog, one of our pack, so there are some things that I can translate having spent much time with her the last couple of years. If I come home and she is waiting, she will howl something that sounds much like this: Where have you been? Why were you gone so long? And why did you leave me? And then she will lie down suddenly grudgeless and content, her behind touching the chair of my desk. She can roll her eyes, just like my daughter can, in an expression that reads, “Can you please take the small boy off me?” She has learned to tattle on him, too. She barks at him and then runs to look at me with those large, perfectly blue eyes and says, “Hey, did you see that?” She’ll even sit in on the resulting discipline of my son and smile gently about it. My favorite thing she says is the clear and enthusiastic ROWF in the middle of the day when she says it’s time to play outside. Yes, this ROWF is why we have a dog. We love her and the way she talks to us.

These days, she is an old dog. She heaves her stiff legs and bulky body up the stairs at night and will glance back at whoever is chaperoning her ascent as if to say, “Dude. Why did you put the bed up here?” In her age, she has gained wisdom, and will lie close to us when we need comfort. She cannot tell us how to solve our problems nor can she bring medicine, but she knows her warmth and fuzziness somehow make it all better.

I love this dog, understanding or not. She was my husband’s before she was ours, and I love her for that, too. Considering our often hectic schedules, she is a constant presence, and a soothing one. I cannot imagine life in this house without her. My husband, knowing that we will be lucky to have even another year with this dog, is moved to silence when he strokes her, conveying through the pressure of his moving hand, all his love for her, something that is perfectly understood.