Jacob have I loved...

For most of my life I have related to Esau. Beloved by my parents, the firstborn, but all the blessings seemed heaped on my younger sibling. It was the trickiest part of Sunday School for me. I always felt bad for the wrong guy. Jacob was the hero of that story but I never got over thinking that Esau got gypped. I still think it is horribly unfair that Pharoah's heart was hardened instead of allowing him to relent and grant the Jews their freedom. He lost his son to the Angel of Death in the next plague of Egypt. Why? Another topic, another day.

Most of our youthful acquaintance will tell you that I'm the smart one but my sister is more fun, and prettier. And so funny! Strangely enough, no one seemed to realize that we were both insulted by the observation that things worked out so equitably what with me being gifted with intellect and my sister with beauty. And just for the record, she's every bit as smart as me, however smart that might be.

We share many of the same gifts and weaknesses. We're both stubborn to the point of self-harm. We both have a sense of compassion that is great enough to cause us considerable discomfort. We feel sorry for convicted criminals who totally had it coming. Neither one of us would change the outcome but we do feel bad for the jerk who swindled all those people or fled the scene instead of calling an ambulance. We would both hock an organ or a car title to pay for a dog who needed surgery. Maybe not even our own dog.

These days, my sister is going through a rough patch. Long story short, she is reaping consequences far, far beyond what she has ever sown. She does not deserve the $#i% that is raining down on her right now. But she is not taking it lying down, curling up and quitting, giving up. She is tough as nails.

In our casual acquaintance, she probably still seems like Jacob. In her world, she probably feels like Esau. But here's the cool thing about Esau. Jacob and their mother conspired against him to steal his birthright. His mother and his twin. But Esau had the strength and confidence to greet his brother with delight after all the years and all that had passed between them because they were still brothers, first and foremost.

The things I have that my sister wants, I share with her. The things that she has that I want, she shares with me. It is likely that neither one of us will ever have what the other does, but it doesn't matter so much. Because if one of us has it, we both do.

I'm proud of her. I'm proud to share the same blood with someone as amazing as she is. I'm proud when other people admire her and I can say, "That's my sister."

Some days, both of us are Esau. But I think really both of us are Jacob. We both inherited the strength of our forefathers and one sister a piece. We are blessed.

Anniversary: High Points of a Marriage

Be wary. This will be long since said marriage has many high points.

9 years ago today the flower girl rolled backwards down the stairs while my beloved and I exchanged our wedding vows.

Anniversary 1: We celebrated in our Lilliputian Atlanta shoebox of an apartment. He fixed filet with cognac and mustard sauce and we ate year old, thawed wedding cake that was surprisingly delicious. My sister called us from Alabama in tears because her dog had suffered a critical spinal injury that ended up putting her in debt for quite some time. That boy I married was not one bit perturbed at having his delicious and romantic dinner interrupted by the crisis since he gets that our dogs enjoy a status damn near our actual genetic progeny, at least in my family.

After Year One I don't remember any specific anniversary, just that we always say "Happy Anniversary" to each other. I can't tell you how grateful I am for this. Neither one of us feels the pressure to make EVERY ONE just as special as our wedding day. We aren't always observant of birthdays or Mother's or Father's Day, either. I had the good fortune (or wisdom) to marry a man who thinks like I do. It's the sentiment and the occasional big gesture that count. You can't pull off the big gestures with regularity. But there have been a couple of knockouts during our relationship and the momentum wave carries you a long way.

First Christmas (dating, not married): Now Dear Hubby wrangled a series of three hardbacks by a man named Ferrol Sams (Run With the Horsemen, The Whisper of the River, and When All the World Was Young) for me. Autographed to me, complete with references to each book in the autograph, by the author. It were truly a fortuitous series of events that led to this coups but Damn! It was perfect. The books are universally loved by my family and left my sister's much wealthier lawyer boyfriend baffled at how nobody, including my sister, was impressed with his gift to her of half carat diamond earrings. That was the year she came up with the following axiom:

"You can spend a lot of money on a gift or a lot of thought. If you don't spend a lot of thought, you'd better spend a lot of money."

Eventually, she fired the lawyer boyfriend with lots of money and I married the student boyfriend without any. She was on to something with that observation.

After we'd been married a couple of years, That Boy and I took an amazing trip to Chicago for me to run the marathon there. Great food. One of the best trips I have ever taken. My mom went with us and since everybody loves my mom, including That Boy, it didn't cramp our style at all. In fact, it was even more fun.

He bought tickets to the Alabama vs. Tennessee game for my birthday that same year. Home game for my cherished Crimson Tide. The outcome was mixed. It was two weeks after the trip to Chicago and you know what they say about distance running and fertility. Well, I took a chance that weekend. The football game had four overtimes with the forces of evil finally taking the edge to give Tennessee the win.

Shortly after that trip, I fixed rack of lamb and bought a weensy bottle of champagne for us to tell him we were expecting for the first time. He was thrilled, I was terrified.

One two year old boy and some crazy medical complications later, I miscarried twins. We were disappointed but okay.

A couple of months later I bought a nice Pinot and fixed rack of lamb again, but I had to kick his mother out of the house after dinner to achieve the same state of expectancy the second time. That one stuck.

Shortly after the night I had to kick my mother-in-law out, my now husband turned 40. He celebrated his birthday surrounded by friends and family at the most ridiculously deluxe lakehouse to grace the southeastern US. It had an elevator. In addition to the heated pool (late November birthday), hot tub, fire pit, full size keg refrigerator, pool table, pinball machine, piano, and two kitchens, everyone had their own bathroom. A couple of people bought plane tickets to attend.

Each guest received their own copy of the cookbook to which they had all contributed recipes, stories, and photos. (My husband is a bang-up cook.) There were commemorative cooking aprons, as well. The keg refrigerator housed an actual keg and many, including the birthday boy, awoke on Saturday with substantial hangovers from any of a number of liquors including single malt scotch that populated the full bar. We had Italian one night and friggin' awesome barbeque the next, although I was too nauseated to enjoy either since I was pregnant with baby number two at the time. It was a surprise party and that boy I married had no idea until I got him there on Friday night under false pretense. The entire shindig represented a nearly a year of planning and the ultimate pinnacle of my creative forces.

Tonight we had dinner with our five year old boy and two year old little girl who both agree their dad is the fun one. Mom is kind of scary. We had chicken and dumplings. True to form, the Princess wore more than she ate. But That Boy I Married picked up a bottle of champagne on the way home so the chicken and dumplings seemed a little less Middle America boring than usual. And he also stopped at Target and bought me the softest blanket ever. EVER. I'm always cold.

I'm a lucky, lucky woman.

Insomnia

I've concluded that staying up all night long (literally...not sleeping at all before the first restless wails of a child herald daybreak and hungry children) to write is VASTLY preferable to staying up all night long with restless, undirected energy that is borne of dissatisfaction with the pace of my book but no clear direction how to fix it. It's fixable. I know it is. I just can't back away from it enough to see the solution.

I'm closing in. Little insights strike while I'm driving, in the shower, vacuuming, whatever. Some of them break my heart because they involve taking a hatchet to a chapter I just loved when I wrote it and still love to read. But in the big picture, it has to go. If 3000 words can be pared down to 300, then it was too many damn words.

But hey, I'll always have my hard drive, right? Me and my many-worded lovers can meet for private trysts anytime. If I'm ever famous, I'll have a ton of bonus material to post on the website. Boo-yah!

Moved...and starting Kindergarten

Mama Bear reared her ugly, roaring head today.

Hatchling #1 started Kindergarten yesterday in our fair new city. School started here back in August...way back, like the beginning...so he is breaking in to an already established playground hierarchy.

Background info:

Said progeny is descended from bellicose vikings on my side and germans on his father's-pretty much the same thing. He is very tall. Being a tall five year old, he is also skinny, though not painfully so. His birthday is late June so he barely qualifies for the age cutoff for kindergarten, making him one of the youngest in his class, but he's already reading so it seemed counterproductive to hold him back a year for age equality.

He's a little athlete with a well-developed sense of justice. He's also the youngest member of the youngest class on the school playground.

He came home today with a vicious scratch on the back of one hand. Turns out, a bigger kid grabbed him and was holding his hands (a smaller scratch bedecorates the other) and Bambino wasn't having it so he pulled his hands back to himself. Good for him. He did EXACTLY the right thing. He stood up for himself without hitting back or being a weinie tattletale.

We had a little chat about bullies. You don't have to put up with anyone putting their hands on you if you don't want them to. If they do, you tell them forcefully to stop. You have permission to defend yourself. If you need help, get a teacher but try to resolve it yourself first.

Little man tells me these kids are bigger and step on the littler ones. On their heads, arms, whatever they can stomp. My guy feels guilty for not interfering when they pick on someone else. Wow. I remember that feeling. What a conundrum as a mother. So that boy I married and I had a talk about how to handle this. We concluded the following, in descending level of importance:

1. Our child's physical safety is priority number one.
2. We want to instill (or reinforce, in his case) his right to stick up for himself.
3. We also want him to speak up for others if the situation warrants.

Now. How do we reconcile 2&3 with 1? That boy I married wants me to talk with Little Man's teacher. I don't want to be that mom...not yet. I don't want to mark my child as the kid with the overprotective mother, especially if he can fight his own battles or learn to. He obviously has some sense of self preservation or he would have intervened when others got picked on. I need to help him find the line that when crossed means he needs to go for help.

For tonight, I told him he did the right thing. I told him that when someone else gets picked on he should stand up for them if he thinks he can. And I told him that when I was little, and his dad, too, sometimes we didn't say anything either. Because we had the sense to be scared.

I hope that as he gets older he will find the strength to help someone weaker and the creativity to do it even if he feels outmanned. I did, somehow. I was the bully target for over three long, miserable years and I still never suffered the torture of someone weaker than me. It is a violation, an abomination. I'd rather be hated than live with knowing I should have spoken up, even when I was twelve.

In the meantime I hope my child's mother will refrain from the instinct to find the little $#8#s who are doing this and tell them in hushed tones, below the hearing of rational adults, that they might be bigger than my kid but I am bigger than them. Their mamas might not care if they act this way but I do. I can find them. I can make them sorry if they don't stop.

Did you take your medication?

Be forewarned. This post is destined to trend whiny.

We just moved to a new city. Or rather we are approaching the end of a move to a new city. I loved where we lived before but am delighted to live less than twenty minutes from a grocery store and in a city large enough to boast actual bookstores. (Well, our last little burg did have one bookstore. Sonshine. Inspirational reading. I never went since I own a Bible already and prefer to go straight to the source if I am seeking spiritual guidance. Self-help in any form, even non-religious but especially theologically based, is an anathema. Don't argue with me about this...you have no chance of changing my mind.)

Moving is hard work. I've done it plenty of times before and you would absolutely not believe the sheer quanitity of crap I can lift, carry, and haul. If I were a superhero my identity would be Antgirl: the woman who can carry up to 100 times her own body weight if it means one less trip from the car!

This time is different. I can't lift as much. And I punk out half-way through to my goal for the day. I just have to stop and lay down for a while. My legs swell up and the skin feels like sausage casings until I raise my feet long enough to let the swelling go down. I used to get more done than anybody but my mother and this time around I feel like everyone else is carrying my weight. That boy I married has done his share and about 75% of mine. I harbor the secret fear that he is looking at me askance because he thinks I've grown lazy. But then he asks:

"Have you found a nephrologist here yet? Are you taking your medication?"

If you have ever had a chronic medical condition or taken long term meds then you will understand there is no phrase more annoying than "are you taking your medication?" It is rife with implied criticism. The possible interpretations are limitless:

You aren't taking proper care of yourself.(Admittedly, I can do better in this arena.)

If you were taking better care of yourself you would be as good as everybody else.

And my personal favorite: You just aren't what you used to be. And the difference is notable.

I am not on the verge of kidney failure. I am nowhere near as sick as life insurance companies think I am. Or as I will likely be at some point in the future. My blood pressure and lipid panels are good but my body can't seem to keep enough iron to carry sufficient oxygen for my robust energy requirements. I lose enough protein through my kidneys that I could eat steak every day and still not break even.

It drives me NUTS. Right now. Not even thinking about what this means for my future. I hate the feeling that my body needs me to put some chemical into it to slow down the ambiguous progression of a ridiculously obscure illness that has no cure and that one of my children may have inherited. Oh, and did I mention that it also causes deafness? Seems convenient, if constant chatter frays your nerves. The noise, however, is not yet diminished. I just don't understand what you're saying half the time. If there is background noise and I can't see your lips moving as a crutch then odds are good I am getting a garbled version of whatever you're asking me.

Don't even think about talking to me if you are standing with your back to me or walking in front of me. I speak English, Spanish, and Redneck fluently and can't understand any of them reliably if you don't speak directly to me under ideal conditions. In bad conditions you sound just like Charlie Brown's teacher. Delightful.

Ah. My cankles have reduced in diameter to discernible ankles again. Time to get back to work.

In Defense of Literary Stepchildren

OR: Why does everybody hate adverbs and passive voice so damn much?

These are two hard and fast rules in "good writing." Adverbs and passive voice are lazy, sloppy, unprofessional, and will ruin your work even though they are grammatically correct.

Okay, who came up with this arbitrary prejudice? I can guess where the antagonism towards adverbs started and it probably is rooted in lazy writing. Observe:

"I want you now, my darling," Fabio whispered breathlessly.
"We can't! O my lover, the evil Stephan will kill you," Victoria murmured fearfully.
"I will defend you. You are mine," he said fiercely.
"Oh, yes. I am yours, lover. Take me now!" she said recklessly.

Many dialogue tags and adverbs to describe the dialogue. BORING. And trite. They should be saying and doing things that cue the reader into the mood. But really, there are only eight parts of speech. Do we have to engage in the wholesale slaughter of one of them just because lazy writers use it as a crutch? That's bad writing. It shouldn't be contending for publication anyway. Meanwhile, a decent story with better writing is getting axed by an agent or editor whose anti-adverb policy is Pavlovian. Once you've trained your eye to look for them they are all that you see.

To adverb or not to adverb? It's basically (uh-oh! adverb!)Faulkner vs. Hemingway. And dammit, I like Faulkner better. But clearly (oops...another adverb!) there is a place for both.

Then there are passive voice and being verbs. Essentially, the subject of the sentence is acted upon or just IS something instead of performing an action. Most of the time a sentence can be restructured to better effect by eliminating passive voice. I get that. For example:

I was hit in the skull with the baseball.
The baseball careened into my skull with bone-crushing force.

OR:

The house was delapidated, with paint peeling like willow bark and a porch that sagged with years and the burdens of the family within.

Paint peeled like willow bark from the delapidated structure and the front porch, exhausted with age, sagged in its center.

But why can't it be okay to just state a condition every now and then? Like:

I was defeated.

It's short, sweet, and to the point. If you want more oomph, sub "beaten like a red-headed stepchild" or whatever. Sprinkle in an adverb like "utterly" as long as you're breaking all the rules. But if the narrator got theyself beat, a brilliant descriptive sentence that pops off the page doesn't feel the mood.

I'm paying a lot of attention to passive voice these days and some of my favorite books use a lot of it. I suspect this is because the authors are storytellers more than writers and spend less time worrying about passive voice than communicating the mood or state of the character. At any rate, the reading public is quite forgiving of passive voice regardless of what professionals think of it. It certainly appears with much more frequency in the classics. Probably because they were written before t.v. and movies and ADD convinced us all that everything has to be action or we will be bored by it.

Since I am not famous nor do I think I am the next Faulkner, I continue to scour my work with an eye toward eliminating adverbs and passive voice. I gotta tell you, though, sometimes it doesn't make any difference to the story. I wonder if the pendulum will ever swing back the other way? I miss adverbs. Passive voice doesn't bug me. And don't even get me started on the death of the backstory.

Why Is Church Funny?

Yesterday I went to church with my mom to hear Don Piper speak. He is the fellow who wrote "90 Minutes in Heaven." The short version of his story: killed when an 18 wheeler hit him head on in excess of 60 mph. Declared dead by four different sets of EMTs. Dead. Definitely dead. 90 minutes and lots of prayer later, he was singing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" and somebody was telling the police officer, "Hey, the dead guy in the red car is singing."

I'm not going to weigh in on the tale or the religious implications. I haven't reviewed x-rays or medical charts or verified eye witness accounts and don't feel particularly driven to do any of these things. Draw your own conclusions. Aside from the amazing personal account I left church with one other burning question.

Why is church funny?

Am I just by nature sacreligious? I don't think God is funny, although I'm pretty sure He has a sense of humor. But honestly, I cannot get through an entire church service of any type without stifling laughter at the most inappropriate times. Yesterday, for example, I almost lost it when the internalized narrator noted in a dry voice that the soloist bore a disconcerting resemblance to BTK. Perverse, I know.

If you could get inside my head at a funeral you might be diagnosed with grief induced hysteria. My own wedding witnessed shudders of silent laughter that began with me and spread to include my sister and the very dignified, dedicated pastor performing the ceremony. (The flower girl rolled backwards down the stairs with a series of thuds that sounded for all the world like a bowling ball. In my defense it was pretty funny.)

I think it is all the dignity at church that makes me laugh. People are just not dignified. I sit there in the pew and contemplate the nature of God, the failings of humanity, the remarkable notion of redemption, and wonder how many other people there are hungover or thinking about lunch. Stomachs growl, the guy next to me in the pew has killer garlic breath and sings with too much gusto, kids who are too old for the children's service squirm, we all sweat or shiver because one octogenarian power-hungry harpy of a church secretary controls the thermostat. No single place in the world brings to focus the foibles of humanity like church.

I have many friends who no longer attend church (or synagogue or whatever). They cite a host of reasons for their lapse but chief among them is that church is full of hypocrites. Naturally church is full of hypocrites. How can you have hypocrisy without standards that you value and fail? It's really the whole point of church, if you think about it. A place for all us hypocrites to get together and try (or pretend) to be better than we are.

It's the dichotomy, I suppose. The incongruous juxtaposition of the beauty of spirit and selflessness with the inescapable reality of corporeal form. That being said I really should go to church more. If nothing else, it's good for a laugh. And if the sermon takes too long I usually leave with a really good idea for a book.

Yesterday's service taught me one very important thing about myself. I do NOT want to get run over by an 18 wheeler in order to achieve publishing success. God does speak to us, even if we laugh too much during service.