It could as easily be step 17 1/2 as step one. Step into now. Step backward. Step over the dog shit in the yard (we have no dog, haven’t had a dog since our schnauzer died in 2004).

Step, set, test, stress.

No, no stress here, not today.

Today, I am 51. I’ve been dreading today for months and months, that step over the line from 50 to being in my 50s. Last year on my birthday, I took myself away on a lovely vacation with my wonderful daughter to visit one of my favorite people in one of my favorite cities. It was 08/08/08. Very cool.

Today, the numbers are all tilted and odd, except for those eights. I love the eights, round and balanced. I like being an August “baby.” I like that we were always on vacation on my birthday when I was a kid. I like that I started school young and then got younger because I skipped a grade (sometimes, I was two years younger than my classmates).

I am not like a Leo. I am quiet and pretend that I don’t like to be the center of attention.

On my birthday, about my birthday, I’m passive-aggressive. I don’t want to make a fuss, but when no one remembers (because I hide the date), I find that I want someone to make a small fuss.

Today, I’m driving my daughter and her dad to their hotel in Columbus where they’ll stay overnight. Tomorrow, they leave early for Florida, their annual vacation. I don’t mind “losing” my kid on my birthday. They’ll take me to dinner, maybe to a bookstore where I’ll make them buy me some novels I don’t need.

Or maybe not.

I’ll drive home, feed my cat, crawl into bed with a book, sleep tomorrow until I wake up.

While they’re gone, I’m going to write. I’m going to transcribe my notes from the San Francisco poetry workshop that feels so far away and unreal now (I’ve completely lost the magic). I’ll send the second half of my novel to the friends who are interested in reading it. I’ll let myself drift to a new project, maybe write some poems.

All this in a week? Well, maybe not, but I can start, take a step, maybe three, maybe 17.

I don’t really mind being in my 50s. We’re beautiful, us matronly sorts. We’re funny and real and warm and extremely kind. So we’re a gift.

*

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

If I don’t write about the weekend workshop every second I find using every medium possible, I’m afraid I’ll lose it. I took copious notes, though, not just on everything everyone said during the workshop sessions, but on my own responses to everything, everything.

I make a dreadful noise here, no explanation of what I’m going on about. Worse, I end a sentence with a preposition.

Here’s what this is about: I had the chance to attend a very intimate workshop with the lovely dancer/poet Diane Frank this past weekend in San Francisco. (author of such books as Entering the Word Temple and the the Pulitzer finalist novel Blackberries in the Dream House)

There. That should be enough to make this a little more connected to … what? Reality?

this is probably just part one of 70 million parts.

a few things I loved:

* I loved every single poet in the room at every moment they were in the room (and beyond) plus the Diane’s cellist partner Erik (who graciously allowed 11 strange women and one man (a friend of his/theirs and a harpist) to invade his house and drink his tea).

* my friend/poet/traveling companion who doesn’t hate me even after I snapped at her yesterday early morning a couple of times on our way back home.

* the goosebumps that rose on my arm when I heard exquisite “drafts” of the poets’ poems.

* the goosebumps that rose on my arms when another poet read my own poem back to me and I heard something … well. I heard another woman inside the poem who was familiar to me, but unfamiliar, and the goosebumps rose because I realized who I was hearing, and I … well, I guess I can’t quite articulate that part yet (maybe I need even more than 12 hours of sleep). and the goosebumps also rose because they fucking liked the poem, and I had had no clue that it was any good at all.

(pardon my cussing. that’s part of who I continue to be and I choose not to stop right now because I just don’t wanna. pfft!)

* I loved the fact that our hotel sucked so much but was, at least, clean and safe.

* Muir Woods.

* walking.

* walking.

* the beach

* the glimpses of the ocean that I got between fits of fog.

* the fog (I was the only person who loved the fog)

* the chill air.

* the heat during the San Francisco Symphony’s free performance.

* the San Francisco Symphony.

* the crazy little man who did an impromptu “performance” just before the real performance (he really was mentally off, but darling)

* the fact that I didn’t get heat stroke.

* my body.

* the different voices I heard all weekend from the other poets to the bass violin (dude! you with the white hair, ponytail and sunglasses. If you’re not already taken, I want to marry you even though I claim I’m never doing that again) to the trolley cars’ wheels on tracks to the shuttle drivers’ accents to the shriek of the espresso machine in the coffee shop next door to our ratty hotel…… (oh. here is a poem possibility, huh?).

* Diane’s car.

I’ll stop for now. I need to drink more coffee, get dressed (yes, I am still in my pajamas, the clean pair I had saved for last night), shift clothes from washer to dryer, etc., etc., life things, etc.

My Girl comes back to me today! (oh, breath!)

Golly. What a fucking amazing time I had!

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

Daughter is now at her dad’s until next Tuesday, July 21, when I return from the poetry workshop I’m attending this weekend.

The profound, impossible silence (except for a neighbor’s lawn mower) worries me. Can I focus around that silence?

I have had what I can only think of as a “gentle epiphany” this past week. This “epiphany” has changed my attitude toward myself, my work, my relationships, my role in my small world. But I am the same person with the same bad habits and the same way of rolling out of bed too late in the morning after sleeping badly at night, the same bad habit of starting my morning in the afternoon when my girl is gone, of feeling sorry for myself because I have to let her go to her father’s.

I have to get over myself.

I have a shitload of things to do between now and Friday morning when I drive my friend and myself to the airport for our flight to San Francisco.

God. I can’t wait.

But I’m also excited about the work I’ll do this week on my novel and on poems I will bring to share (eep! I hate workshopping my poems. Dear God, please help me to be brave and open, brave and open, brave and open.), work to do on my dreadfully messy house, maybe even on my yard.

My Girl’s dad has volunteered to attend tomorrow night’s band boosters meeting at the high school, and I will let him happily since I am so, so busy.

I just wish my busy led to some kind of income.

It’s funny how just typing through my loneliness when my Girl is newly gone helps alleviate that loneliness.

All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

I love my daughter. I love teenagers. One of my gifts is the ability (and willingness) to see the person inside the age or despite the age or through, around, because of the age. Girls are easier for me because I have a daughter. The boys are a little skittish around me until they figure out that, really, I have no ulterior motive when I choose to talk to them. I’m simply interested in them the way I’m interested in people in general (unless I’m feeling ugly and reclusive or shy and reclusive or pissy and reclusive).

That said, they are driving me mad, mad, I say.

I’d say I can’t wait for Aug. 24 when school starts again, but they all begin high school in the fall, and that’s scarier than allowing gaggles of teenagers to hang out in my house together.

Yesterday, I took, three 14-year-old girls to the July Fourth festivities down by the river. One went home with a bellyache, poor thing. One of my daughter’s friends, a 17-year-old boy (homeschooled, darling but nerdy, excessively brilliant, can’t wait to leave home, adores my daughter but pretends he thinks of her as a little kid), joined us. We laid out our blankets on the grass across from the bandstand where Sour Jane was playing some surprisingly decent rock and roll.

I grimaced through the offensive prayer blessing the event (really, I was offended), sat with the kids and laughed at them when they covered their faces as I tried to take their pictures, laughed at my daughter who kept glaring at me as I photographed strangers walking by.

*

Interrupted by a mad dash to the movie theater to catch my daughter’s friend’s “secret” boyfriend before he went into the movie to see if he could simply come back to my house to hang out (yes, in my daughter’s room, but she doesn’t have a door on her bedroom, which is actually the former “attic,” and I can hear everything that goes on up there, even quiet things like lips meeting lips, so, yeah, there would have been NO inappropriate P.D.A. in my house. Hey, if I don’t have anyone to kiss, why should I let 14 year olds kiss in my house?).

I didn’t realize that my daughter’s evil friend was a “secret” to her boyfriend’s parents. Hell, I guess I thought because I knew, and because the evil friend and her secret boyfriend went to the eighth-grade semi-formal together in May, that his parents had figured it out.

What do I know?

When we got to the movie theater at the mall, I let the girls out of the car so that they could go talk to my daughter’s evil friend’s “secret” boyfriend.

The girls did NOT expect to see my daughter’s evil friend’s “secret” boyfriend’s mother there with him. He refused to acknowledge their presence, though his mom said hello to the girls.

They came out of the mall completely stymied about how to get the boy to talk to them so they could ask him to ask his mother if he could come over to my house (I offered to go in to talk to the boy’s mother, but they turned me down).

It turns out that my daughter’s friend’s “secret” boyfriend had lied to his mother and told her he was seeing a movie with a male friend when all along, he was planning to see the movie with my daughter’s friend, his secret girlfriend.

For some reason, his mother decided to wait with him at the theater until his male friend showed up. Instead, my daughter and her evil friend showed up to see if we could drive him back to my house.

Really. I feel like an idiot.

(The reason we drove all the way to the theater was because the secret boyfriend doesn’t have a cell phone.)

When the secret boyfriend’s mother realized that he had lied and was never planning to see the movie with a male friend but had been planning all along to see the movie with my daughter’s evil friend, she said to my daughter (since the evil friend made my daughter go talk to him and his mom, instead, because the evil friend is afraid of her secret boyfriend’s mother) “Secret Boyfriend can’t talk to you. He has to go home. Right. Now.”

Busted!

Now evil friend’s secret boyfriend’s mother is going to think I’m a skanky mother who is too permissive and allows my daughter to have boyfriends at the young age of 14 even though the secret boyfriend isn’t my daughter’s boyfriend but is the evil friend’s boyfriend, and I had NO IDEA that the secret boyfriend had lied to his mother about where he was going to be and with whom (it was more the “with whom” than the “where”).

The girls orchestrated an intricate afternoon that involved balancing the “secret” boyfriend with one of my daughter’s male friends, Mustache Guy. Girl Boy Girl Boy (but no kissing since my daughter and Mustache Guy aren’t “dating” and you can call me delusional if you want to, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m sleep deprived and therefore extremely cranky).

We picked up Mustache Guy from his house and brought him back here even though “Secret Boyfriend” is probably grounded for the next 16 years for lying to his mother, so the balance is off. But this is the first time Mustache Guy has been able to get together with them. (family crisis has kept him at home – a dying relative), so my daughter and I did not want to cancel on him. My daughter’s evil friend dislikes Mustache Guy and didn’t want to be here with just him and my girl.

Mustache Guy did NOT lie to his mother. Thank God.

My daughter’s evil friend was pretty much frothing at the mouth the whole time I drove all three back to my house.

The three of them are up at the elementary school playground expending all that excess adolescent energy. Mustache Guy looked a little bit terrified, and my girl walked very quickly away from the house, a sure sign that she is pissed as hell.

My kid doesn’t lie to me, not about where she is or who she’s with (I know that should be “whom,” but it sounds funny, so if my bad grammar bothers you, you can just bite me). I know she leaves things out now and then. But she wants me to trust her so that I’ll let her do the things she wants to do (her dad, too). There’s no point in lying to us.

I don’t care if she has a boyfriend (she’s says she’s “off” dating right now). “Dating” for 13 and 14 year olds is more a matter of wandering the mall looking into store windows, maybe holding hands, or going to the movies, maybe sneaking in a quick kiss while no one is watching, than real dating dating.

I can’t stop my kid from liking boys, liking specific boys any more than the evil friend’s mother can stop her from like her “secret” boyfriend or the secret boyfriend’s mother can stop him from liking my daughter’s evil friend (and the other girl he apparently likes).

They’re going to like each other. They’re teenagers. They have blood and skin and eyes and hormones.

Ah.

The evil friend has returned from the elementary school playground and is now upstairs in my daughter’s room, probably hanging out online.

“The playground wasn’t fun?” I asked.

“No. It wasn’t,” she said.

My daughter is now probably happy to be alone with Mustache Guy. Who knows? Maybe they’re holding hands as they swing or something. I can’t stop them, and I’m not sure I’d want to.

*

(note: my girl and Mustache Guy are back. They don’t know what to do. The evil friend is making everyone miserable because her “secret” boyfriend couldn’t come, too. He’s in trouble because of her, this poor “secret” boy. Evil friend won’t take responsibility. Golly. Someday I’m going to sit her mama down (when she’s not too busy running their restaurant) and tell her all about her daughter’s maneuverings and manipulations.)

*

Um. Now my Girl and Mustache Guy are in my living room watching Fired Up, and evil friend is upstairs sulking.

Evil friend’s mother is out of town, I think. I don’t know if her father is around but working. I do know her aunt is in town, but is also probably working.

My kid and her boy buddy are at a loss. I think they’ve chosen well. Mustache Guy is really nice. I feel so bad that he’s stuck in this hell with my daughter’s evil friend. Well. Everything is temporary, right?

It’s time to put yourself on the shelf, so to speak (whatever “so to speak” means), and put the Work out there. You don’t matter. The Work matters. If you want to share the Work, you have to put it into the hands of people you trust to help you fix what’s wrong, accept that what’s right is right.

In other words, chica, let it go. Trust your friends to be kind but honest. Trust them to believe in you as writer, in the Work as valuable or at least somewhat entertaining.

Trust them to help you finish because you have to finish.

Get out of your own way. Admit you have an ego and then have a talk with your ego, calm her down, tell her these people are NOT your mother and they will not purposely hurt your feelings to get you used to being criticized when you share your creative work.

(that’s right. blame your fear on your dead mother. Always works for me!)

It will be fine. Even if your trusted friends hate this project you’ve been writing for WAY too long, it will be fine. It’s work that matters and the process of writing it has led to other work that matters more. It’s all practice. Sending it out there, letting it go, that’s practice, too. Process, practice, purpose.

Take a deep breath and decide that the Work is worth sharing, and you are worth the Work.

Love,
me