The word itself bears weight, signifies pain, like an amputation, or a cancer diagnosis that pierces you with the fear of mortality and leaves you looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. A trauma, I suppose, although I haven’t even been able to admit this until now.

*

Recently, my husband and I were gathered with a group of friends, drinking wine and playing a game where teams vote on the person mostly likely to fit with the scenario on a given card. Who has the worst sugar addiction, for instance, or who among us is the most judgmental person — truths revealed and discussed among friends, and usually lots of laughter.

Someone in the group pulled a card that asked us to identify who among us had the best heartbreak story. I must have flinched a little, because I could see one friend signal to another to choose another card. Though I pretended not to, I noticed her subtle hand gesture, the shake of her head, her slight glance in my direction.

These were good friends, mind you, and although I’m not in the habit of hiding things from my friends, some of them still don’t know that my father disowned me, and that even after five years I still feel the hard pounding of blood in my stomach — the kind of desperate, queasy pulse that comes before getting sick — when this fact is brought to light.  Most of my acquaintances don’t know that I live with this pain and believe myself to be responsible for its residence in my body, like a chain smoker who refused to heed the cautions on the cigarette pack.

*

“What did you expect?” my brother once asked, implying that this was a self-induced wound, a self-severing — a stupid, childish act, like jumping out of a moving bus. And maybe I even agree. But the truth is a little more complicated than that.

What did you do? you’re likely wondering. Maybe you’re already allowing your imagination to fill in the blanks. What kind of a person gets disowned by her father? It almost doesn’t matter, because the wrong I committed must have been so terrible, so egregious that expulsion was the only answer. That being banished from the family was justified, that I must have deserved my figurative death.

How else could this have been done?

*

It has been almost five years since my father disowned me. I have friends who are cancer survivors, and for them, the five year mark is a milestone — a cause for celebration, an indicator of improved chances, the increased likelihood of a bright future despite the trauma the body has endured.

The five year mark of estrangement carries no such optimism. It is a widening gap, a chasm whose chances of repair have grown too dim to even imagine. It’s a death without a death, a thunderous shout into a canyon with an eerie, unnatural silence instead of the echo you expect.

*

During that first year, I dreamt about my father. I saw him in strangers on the street — the silvery glint of the back of his head, the tall, hunched bulk of his frame. I imagined him sitting in the car ahead of me at traffic intersections, watching me in his rearview mirror, looking to see if I was still too emotional, too righteous, too affected by my youth.

Months later, while attending a writing workshop at Bread Loaf, I suffered a sudden case of vertigo while eating lunch with my group because Scott Russell Sanders, my workshop leader, has hands that look like his.

During that same writing retreat, another writer and I were chatting with Rick Bass at the final barbecue dinner, asking him how his summer was going. His college-aged daughter had an internship in Montana, and was living with him for the summer.

“I get up early to make her breakfast,” Rick said, swatting a mosquito from his head, “and then putter around all day until she comes home so I can make her dinner and have a beer with her on the porch.” That’s so sweet, we gushed, making your daughter breakfast, and then I said, Awww, Rick, I wish you were my dad.

Later though, alone in my room, I thought about all the weekend mornings my father labored over the stove, making waffles in the waffle iron, turning and turning it over until they were just-right golden-brown, then gently releasing the sections onto my plate, the waffles crisp and steaming with care. The tears came quickly, and I had to take a midnight shower in the bathroom down the hall so my sobbing didn’t wake anyone up.

*

This is what I did: I wrote and published essays that revealed unflattering moments in my childhood home. My father felt accused. I attempted to apologize; he did not accept.

To be fair, I hadn’t fully warned him about the content of my work. My attempts at conversation about our past had not been well-received. And instead of insisting on an honest exchange, I put my work into the world with the belief that my father wouldn’t read it. I was wrong.

*

To be fair, I hadn’t made anything up.

*

“What did you expect?” my brother asked.

I had hoped that my father could see I was in pain. I had hoped that he would have tried to meet me where I was. I had hoped that he could forgive my need to revisit our past just as I had worked to forgive the hurt that I’d endured.  I had hoped that we would figure out a language between us. I had hoped that my father’s capacity to love me was large enough to accommodate mistakes, even big ones such as this.

But what did I expect?  This, which is to say exactly what has happened. I expected it because I think a part of me has always lived in fear that my father would cast me away for something. —Which is why I had to write.

*

It has been almost five years since my father disowned me. I still see glimpses of him in strangers, still catch him in the corner of my eye. I see him most clearly when my youngest daughter struggles with the same difficulty with emotions.

I feel sharp pangs when my brother’s wife posts holiday pictures of him on Facebook, laughing with their kids. But the hurt is tempered by the glimmers of him I see in the everyday things: the rustle of sails at a marina dock, the splash of sunlight across a lake, the sound of walking through autumn leaves, the horn of a distant train.

*

I have come to wonder if my estrangement is less about punishment than it is about protection. Protection for him, protection from me.

The truth is, I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I was simply trying to have a conversation that I didn’t know how to have. I wanted to know why my childhood continued to press on me as a mother and a wife. I wanted to make sense of the things that had happened in our home. I wanted to understand us. Like Rebecca Solnit says in The Faraway Nearby: “Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”

But the conversation that should have happened can never happen now. This death without a death — it was inevitable, I suppose, because things said and left unsaid can both kill a person. It would’ve killed me to continue keeping them in. But it has killed me to let them out.

The post Five Year Mark appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

“Fine, thanks,” I usually say, even when it isn’t. But I am a terrible liar, and lately I haven’t even been able to muster enough energy to say those words.

It’s not that I haven’t written — I still journal some, and I free-write when I’m leading my writing support groups for WomenSafe. I’ve written a few blog posts this year, and put a lot of heart into composing the eulogy for my uncle’s memorial service. But this is the first year in a while that I haven’t written or published anything real, like an essay or a poem. I haven’t been doing what writers are supposed to do — which is to say writing stories and submitting work — and when this problem is revealed by an acquaintance with good intentions, I start to feel a little down.

A lot down, that is.

The truth is, my writing is not doing well. It has been worrying about my girls, volunteering for too many things, going to the grocery store and back. It’s been spending too much time on the internet, scowling at the headlines, feeling rage at the president. It has been elusive, unreliable, and unwilling to show, even when I’m disciplined and create the time and space.

My writing just doesn’t come around anymore and I don’t know why.

*

I’ve been running a lot instead. So far this year, I’ve run somewhere around 675 miles. Most of those miles were in preparation for an Ultra Ragnar relay race with five amazing friends, but deep down I know that what I’m really doing is running away from my problem.

Sure, I run because it’s social and meditative and healthy and all that shit, but in reality, I run because it’s easier and less painful than sitting at my desk. I run because I can count the miles and track my progress and feel like I’ve done something positive with my day, which is more than I could say if I spent it trying to write some words. For the first time in my life, writing is really hard for me.

*

My daughter, M, has a learning disability — a complex assortment of attention, executive functioning, and processing speed issues that make it more difficult for her to access her education. The most significant impact of her condition concerns her ability to write.

I recognize this irony. Teachers are often surprised when they discover that I’m a writer — children of writers shouldn’t struggle so much to put words on a page. It’s like some perverse version of the cobbler’s children having no shoes: the writer’s daughter has no sentences.

It’s difficult to articulate without sounding melodramatic the grief you feel when your child does not possess the particular skills that you yourself have taken for granted. And I’m not talking about an unlucky strike to the ego, like being an athlete with a clumsy kid — I’m talking about the skills you need to make it possible for you to function in the world. I’m talking about the ability to communicate thoughts and ideas, the ability to express what you know and how you feel, to show the world glimpses of the treasure within your mind.

*

It’s in there, that treasure. I know it.

*

When M is overwhelmed by a writing task, she gets stuck. She can sit at the kitchen island for hours, unable to produce a sentence. She fidgets with her pencil and eraser, her squishy toy, her hair. She picks at her finger nails and releases long, deep sighs.

I routinely check in to see if I can help. I ask questions and offer suggestions, but she stiffens and covers the page. So I leave her for a little while longer to give her some thinking space. When it’s been long enough, too long, I try to coax her from the kitchen, give her permission to take a break. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” I say. “Your teacher will understand.”

Usually, though, I have to physically pull her from the kitchen island, release her grip from the counter, unravel her skinny legs from the kitchen stool. She can’t begin, but doesn’t want to end. There’s something in her that wants to come out; she just can’t seem to figure out how to put it on the page.

*

I know exactly how she feels.

*

It’s not that I haven’t written — I write emails and memos to the school, advocate for accommodations in the classroom, negotiate adjustments to the homework. I write thank you notes to the teachers, fundraising letters for the school. I write only what my anxiety will allow me to write — which is to say nothing real about what it feels like to be a mother to a child with learning challenges. Or how my body possesses muscle memory of the worry that I feel — it’s deep and familiar, a worn path that I stumbled onto as a child and have trekked again and again and again, carving a deep ribbon into earth and delivering me to that place I can never quite escape: You Are Responsible for This, and Now You Must Take Care of Everything.

*

The other day, my mother told me she’d found some old letters I had written her during my freshman year of college. She was going through her belongings in preparation for an upcoming move.

“I ended up re-reading some of them, and I got pretty emotional,” she said. “I’d forgotten how hard it was for you.”

How so? I wondered aloud. I hadn’t remembered feeling homesick — What I recalled was wanting nothing more than to escape and move far away from the dysfunction under our roof.

“You wanted to be there for me,” she said. “I think that was hard.”

All at once my memory of the guilt rushed in — the guilt of leaving my mother behind in an unhappy marriage, of leaving my younger brother in the wake of her depression, of feeling like I’d abandoned them in an emotionally vacant home. I had finally reached the escape hatch with my whole life ahead of me. My mother didn’t have that luxury, and had resigned herself to despair. My brother, nearly six years younger, didn’t have a choice.

“What did you do with them?” I asked my mother. I secretly hoped that she had packaged the letters and mailed them to me, like she had done with so many other artifacts from that period of my life. I wanted them as evidence of all the emotional work that I had done.

“Oh, I threw them out,” she said, without missing a beat.

*

It breaks my heart when M is paralyzed at the kitchen counter. I can’t leave her there like that, I think. I need to help her get out of the woods.

I try to coax her out, try and try again to coax her out, and then, like a marshmallow in a campfire, my soft compassion contorts into ugly, blackened anger. Anger for all the reasons that parents feel frustrations with their kids: Eat your food. Go to sleep. Do your homework. But this frustration feels different because there is something beyond her control that keeps getting in her way — a matter that goes beyond the boundaries of discipline, requiring skills above and beyond the normal expectations of parenthood.

But also, the muscle memory. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought: I can’t leave her there like that. This isn’t the first time I have felt that what I’m expecting of myself exceeds my capabilities and makes me feel in over my head. I can’t leave her there like that. I can’t leave her there like that.

*

That might have something to do with it.  My writer’s block, that is.

*

I’ve tried all kinds of ways to avoid doing this work. I tried moving far away, and when that didn’t help, I wrote and published a few scenes from that childhood path and then suffered the consequences. I’ve tried writing about other things. I’ve tried literally running away.

But M is my little zen master, forcing me to circle back and look again. Meditate, so I can be here for the present moment. Even if it takes me all day. Even if it takes me all night.

*

I twirl my hair around in my hand, winding it tightly around my index finger. A long, deep sigh. Release and then do it again. I have to promise myself that I will keep showing up.

But it’s okay to take a break, I tell myself, getting up from the kitchen stool. Your teacher will understand.

The post On Writer’s Block: Notes from the Kitchen Island appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Before the conference, I had been thinking that I should write another blog entry — my last having been an enraged criticism of our violent gun culture in the wake of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. I had been thinking that I should write another entry because it had been a while, and because I didn’t want my students to google my work and find ‘school shooting’ to be the last topic that I had written about.

I didn’t want the heaviness of that topic to cast a shadow over our time together.

But I didn’t get to it in time, and on May 18th, while we sat in the dewey grass journaling our thoughts before gathering into the yellow buildings to review each others’ manuscripts, a 17-year-old student of Santa Fe High School in Texas walked into the art room of his school with two loaded weapons and gunned his classmates down, killing 10 and injuring 10 more.

Two months is a long time between blog posts.

Two months is not a long time between mass school shootings.

 *

This past Monday was Memorial Day and because of what happened in Santa Fe, the flag was being flown at half-mast. Just like the last mass shooting, and the mass shooting before that.

As I looked at all the American flags the local Rotary Club had placed around town to honor our fallen soldiers, I thought of a statistic that has been circulating around the Internet: So far, 2018 has been deadlier for American school children than it has been for American soldiers engaged in military combat.

This is not one of those deceptive falsehoods concocted to enrage the political left. It is an accurate statement that has been analyzed and verified, although PolitiFact included a hair-splitting footnote which read, “It is important to know, however, the likelihood of being killed in a combat zone is still vastly higher than it is in school.”

A detail which, in fact, underscores the absurdity of this conversation.

*

My generation was born during the tail-end of the Vietnam War, so ours is not defined by that conflict. But our parents’ generation was.  My husband had an uncle who saw combat in Vietnam and never spoke of it when he returned. I had an acquaintance in college whose father was a Vietnam veteran. He suffered from PTSD and was physically abusive to his family as a result. She told me she once woke to her father ripping her out of bed and holding her against the wall by her neck. He had dissociated from reality. She told me what really fucked him up was witnessing the involvement of children in combat. The blurring of innocence and evil.

Of course, hers is an extreme example, but my point is that ripple effects occur.

*

Is surviving a mass school shooting considered an exposure to extreme violence?  I mean, it does involve death and carnage on a military scale.

What if the supposed “good guy with a gun” kills the “bad guy with a gun” and instead of 10 dead it’s only 5? Is that less violent? Less likely to inflict a surviving student with PTSD?

Or am I splitting hairs?

*

I have tried and failed to write about this thing so many times. I lose sleep over the threat of violence in our schools. I worry about what lockdown drills have done to the imaginations of our youth, how school shootings have defined their generation. I dread the urgent news alert like the parents of a prior generation dreaded the arrival of a draft card. Somebody’s going to die. It may or may not be your child.

*

I recently pulled out my copy of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to see if his timbered words could inspire me to string some sentences together. O’Brien writes about the Vietnam experience with haunting precision, his detached narrative voice guiding us through the violence of war, but juxtaposed against the humanity of combat soldiers who find themselves in inhumane conditions. The book begins:

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rugsack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.”

I want to write about the kids in this way — by which I mean I want to write lovingly about young adults and teachers who have somehow, unwittingly, turned into foot soldiers at their own schools.

“The things they carried were largely determined by necessity,” O’Brien writes. “Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water.”

I attempt to mimic O’Brien’s rhythm, filling in the blanks with the belongings of our own child-soldiers: The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were backpacks, text books, tabbed notebooks, ballpoint pens, no. 2 pencils, college-ruled notebook paper, iPhones and other electronic devices, phone chargers, gym shorts, chewing gum, candy, makeup, tampons, ibuprofen, money, and Hydroflask water bottles.

“Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he’d stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavendar, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April… Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books.”

Kyle M. carried a tennis racket and the lines to his favorite movies. Angelique R. carried the love of her youth ministry and a fluorescent head of hair. Ms. Tisdale carried the oppressive worry about her husband, who was terminally ill. Kimberly V. carried a shyish grin. Sabika S. carried novels. She dreamed of becoming a diplomat to her native Pakistan, until a classmate shot her dead on a Friday morning in their school. Chris S. carried a football, and was especially fond of anything that made the wind blow through his hair: parasailing, jet skiing, ziplining through the trees. Jared S. carried his birthday wishes. Shana S., who had just turned 16, carried the nervous excitement of her forthcoming time behind the wheel. Christian G. carried the lyrics of Toby Keith songs in his head. Ms. Perkins carried the affection of her students. 

Dimitrious P., who was angry, carried a loaded .38 caliber handgun and a sawed off shotgun he had taken from his father. Later, after he’d been detained, police found explosive devices on the school campus, including a Molotov cocktail. Paige C. carried the expectation that this would eventually happen in her school.

*

At the final student reading on the last morning of the young writers’ conference, a young man read a poem he had written about being involved in the theater and protesting gun violence at his school. One of his teachers, a conservative, had mocked kids like him — this teacher had uttered words like libtard and Goddamn snowflakes, and had said to the quiet student who was now reading his poem, “You look like you could be a shooter.”

No one spoke out in protest, the young man said. Not one word.

Photo Credit: Newsok.com (The Oklahoman)

The post The Things They Carried appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

My mother sprang from the bed, hysterical, and somehow managed to scare the intruders away in a fit of panicked rage. When they finally got their bearings, my mother and father found that their phone line had been cut and several of their belongings were lined up on the floor of the living room —the TV, the stereo, and whatever else they had of value— staged by the front door, waiting to be hauled off. In the kitchen, evidence that one of them had helped himself to something from the fridge.

I don’t know if my father owned a gun then, or if perhaps that incident was what motivated him to look into purchasing a weapon — it certainly seems like the sort of reaction he would have had, given the fact that when I was in my twenties and living in Albuquerque, he advised me to carry a gun with me when I hiked alone in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. Though I did not grow up around guns, both of my parents had guns registered in their names, and I can recall in the very blurriest of early memories accompanying my parents to an indoor shooting range. It’s likely that it was just a hobby — just another activity my father unsuccessfully attempted to get my mother to enjoy, like hiking or boating, but in my mind the shooting range and the intruders always seemed to go together.

I remember complaining about and tugging at the too-big earmuffs over my ears, and taking them off in a fit of discomfort at precisely the same moment that my father or some other adjacent person fired his weapon at the  target silhouette. The succession of shots echoed in my unprotected ears and startled me so badly that I immediately began to cry. I remember touching the flesh behind my ears, thinking I’d just been shot in the head.

*

The first and last time I shot a gun was in college with my then boyfriend and future husband’s rifle — we were camping with friends on the edge of the Erie Canal, on his grandfather’s land in rural upstate New York. We’d cast some fishing lines into the water, put our case of beer into a mesh bag we had tied to the root of a fallen tree and dropped it into the canal to keep them cool. We wandered around the dense second-growth forest of his grandparents’ property, and pulled out all the camping chairs and rotten tables his family kept stored in an old abandoned school bus that had been dumped at the site — things his father and uncles used whenever they came down for hunting or fishing or cutting firewood.

I remember whooping with pride when I shot the empty beer can we had staged on a stump, the perfect aluminum void of where the bullet had entered the can, and the jagged, explosive opening of its exit through the other side. I kept that beer can as an artifact for a while, but it ultimately failed to survive a series of successive moves. Now what stays with me is the memory of shooting a gun next to a faded yellow bus.

*

The flag is being flown half-mast again, and yesterday, because of what happened in Parkland, Florida, I received a somber letter from my daughter’s school in the mail. It included information on lockdown drills and a fact sheet on How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Shootings.

I read the School Emergency Information Guide for Parents and Guardians, and lingered for a while on the part about Parent Responsibilities During a School Emergency and Reunification After a School Emergency — how we must resist our instinct to call the school or come and rescue our children if an intruder has penetrated the building. We should not rush in, it says. We should stay close to our phones and email, monitor radio and TV reports for updates and instructions.

So much restraint. Such ingrained restraint that this is really all we do even after it happens again and again and again.

*

I can recall tornado drills as a kid. We’d line up against the halls of our school, crouched down in child’s pose with our hands clasped behind our necks. We did this because we lived in the Midwest, and tornados were a fact of life, a threat beyond our control.

Now, a generation later, my children are doing drills to practice protecting themselves against a mass shooter. They do this because we live in America, and mass shootings are a fact of life, a threat beyond our control.

*

The NRA White House says: “When we declare our schools gun free zones it just puts our students in far more danger.” We need to “harden” schools as a deterrent, arm more teachers with guns.

Trump NRA vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre says, “[W]e must immediately harden our schools every day. Every day young children are being dropped off at schools that are virtually wide-open soft targets for any one bent on mass murder.”

Soft targets? If we looked at the world the way the NRA would like us to look at the world, every place with people and the absence of guns might be renamed a soft target. As in, the kids ride the soft target to their soft target, and after they’re dismissed from their soft target, they walk over to the soft target for a snack and then go to the soft target to get a book for their research project. If we looked at the world the way the NRA would like us to look at the world, our fear would compel us to harden and arm all the places our children go: the school, the downtown deli, the library, the grocery store, the mall.

*

Not that I don’t understand the impulse to protect. What happened to my parents has been knitted into my bones, so I find myself sympathetic to those who wish to use a gun in their home’s defense. And the meat on my husband’s childhood kitchen table was a result of a rifle in my father-in-law’s hand, so I understand the role that guns can have in keeping a family suitably fed.

For me, the cognitive dissonance around guns happens with shooting for sport — when one’s demand for military-grade weaponry to shoot for recreation makes it easy for another to access such firearms for less benign pursuits. And I bristle at the refusal of some to acknowledge the role that easy access has in this country’s epidemic of mass shootings and gun violence. Why is my children’s right to a gun-free school environment less important than another’s right to get an erection from the experience of blowing up prairie dogs with a semi-automatic rifle?

*

Last week, I commented on a thread about guns on a friend’s Facebook page. He is a self-proclaimed gun nut, a thoughtful, conservative guy whom I like and respect, but with whom I often disagree. He posted a message recently, in which he stated that he had several AR-15 lower receivers, and then proposed to smash them with a sledgehammer for $250 a piece, payment via Google wallet. (They had apparently been purchased in anticipation of a ban after the massacre at Sandy Hook. An investment, I suppose. Like blood diamonds. Oops, now I’m letting my bias show.)

I considered the offer briefly, but thought better of having my money potentially used toward the purchase of some other semi-automatic weapon. What I want right now is policy change, as in no more civilian access to military-grade automatic and semi-automatic rifles. I gave my money to Everytown for Gun Safety instead.

The failure of left-leaning acquaintances like myself to take him up on his offer bothered my friend, or maybe it delighted him — I couldn’t really tell. “My offer just makes hypocrites of all who advocate fewer guns but are unwilling to pay for it as a societal good,” he posted. “Gun owners value guns enough to pay for them. Liberals who want fewer guns don’t want to pay symmetrically to have fewer guns.”

To be fair, this person is a good person, a law-abiding gun owner who is supportive of some gun reform. Registration and background checks, perhaps, but probably not banning anything outright. To folks like him, it’s an economic argument, driven by one’s willingness-to-pay. How much am I willing to pay to compensate him for his property? How much will I pay to destroy this firearm so it will never be sold to some disgruntled person who has more ready access to guns and gun accessories than to affordable mental health care? How much am I willing to pay to prevent this device from getting into the wrong hands and sending bullets through adolescent flesh at more than 3,000 feet per second?

But what about ability-to-pay? Should one’s right to live without the oppressive fear of gun violence be dependent on their personal ability to pay for the removal of that threat? Doesn’t that sound a little like… extortion?

And what if you’re on a limited income, like a teacher’s salary?

*

Besides, haven’t we already paid enough?

 *

My friend who is a teacher tells me that during active shooter drills, she must quickly lock the classroom door and gather all the children down onto the floor and behind the desks into a tight corner of the room, and then she must take attendance and slip it into the hallway under the door to show the principal that she’s accounted for all her kids. Then, while they sit there in silence pretending to be hiding from a mass murderer, someone outside rattles the door to make sure that it’s actually locked and she sits with her students holding her breath, heart pounding, wondering about the kid who is stranded in the bathroom while the door shakes and shakes and shakes.

*

The students say, We are scared. We are the children, you are the adults. Do something to protect our lives. Please keep guns out of our schools.

Trump says, I don’t think I’ll be going up against them. I really think the NRA wants to do what’s right.

The NRA says, Schools must be the most hardened target in this country and evil must be confronted immediately with all necessary force to protect our kids.

The students say, Please keep guns out of our schools.

The NRA says, No. And to all the journalists and politicians and celebrities who dare stand up to us: Your time is running out. The clock starts now.

*

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14 year-old daughter was murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, called on politicians to acknowledge the threatening tone of the NRA’s recent video campaigns. “They put a target on all of your backs,” he said during his March 7th testimony on Capitol Hill. “The NRA, a lobby that finances campaigns, that forces legislation, put out a video that basically says, ‘Your time is running out.’

“And here is Dana Loesch in the video, talking to legislators who don’t support her, members of the media who she calls out by name, members of the acting community and professional sports figures — telling everybody that if they don’t get behind the NRA, their time is running out. And she had an hourglass, and at the end of her talking she turns it over and she says, ‘Your time’s up.’”

Guttenberg is quaking with emotion at this point. “If this was put out by a terrorist organization, we would be raising the terror threat level in this country.”

Terrorism: noun. the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

*

What will it take to stop mass shootings? Please. We all know what it will take, but we just can’t seem to summon political will. The half-mast flags aren’t working. Thoughts and prayers aren’t working, either. And what of the letters and phone calls to politicians, the parent testimony, and the press conferences with traumatized teens wiping their tears away as they plead for sensible gun control? The NRA will flex its arsenal and remind us of our soft target status until we fall back into line.

I think the aggressive gun culture in America right now echoes the racial terrorism this country endured during the Jim Crow-South — by which I mean obedience from the masses due to the threat of a punitive act. Back then, it took the gesture of a grieving mother —whose 14 year-old son Emmett was pulverized and shot and dumped into a river for allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955 Mississippi— back then it took her insistence on an open casket to force the nation to confront its own brutality.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of people being horrified by the sight of my son,” she said. “But on the other hand, I felt that the alternative was even worse. After all, we had averted our eyes for far too long, turning away from the ugly reality facing us as a nation. Let the world see what I’ve seen.”

I try to imagine that courage, the courage it took for a mother to pull the curtain on the violence that was inflicted on her son.

Do you have the courage, America? Do you have the courage to witness, truly witness what a semiautomatic rifle does to a classroom of high school kids, to the flesh of an innocent child? Do you have the stomach to truly acknowledge the depth of their exit wounds?  Because America, I’m afraid this is what it’s going to take for you to stand up to the NRA. It’s gonna take the face of Emmett Till.

Photo credits:

School bus — Groundspeak, Inc. www.waymarking.com

Emmett Till — www.emmetttillsocialjustice.blogspot.com

The post Notes from a Soft Target appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Holiday grief is hard on the heart, and in the past month-and-a-half, I have occupied a space cluttered with conflicting emotions: joy and gratitude for a life well-lived, sadness for the soul I miss, guilt for the time I squandered. And then there is the anger — anger at myself for how infrequently I reached out to him when I lived so far away, anger at anyone who expected anything from me while I was embedded in my grief, and anger at our political atmosphere and the way it eclipses all other things.

Chuck was born with cerebral palsy in 1941, back before there were services available for the disabled offering anything more than custodial care. My grandparents, hoping to fill a void in the educational system that was supposed to prepare their son for the future, used a $3,000 G.I. loan to found a school in my uncle’s honor, and opened their doors to other families with children who were afflicted as he was. It was, and remains for me one of the most unselfish acts of love that I have ever seen.

*

If you didn’t know him well, you might think that Chuck’s handicap was the most important thing about him. He spoke with struggled speech that required considerable patience to understand. He was wheelchair-bound, though when he was younger, he could walk short distances with the aid of crutches. In fact, when I was a little girl, Chuck could dress and feed himself and get himself to work, where he would mow the lawns and collect the trash and manage the soda machines at the Matheny School. There was a time when Chuck could do most of the things that the rest of us do, only slower and with much more effort. Everything was exponentially harder for him, and yet he did it all without complaint.

When Chuck visited my family in Ohio, I learned that I could gauge the character of an acquaintance by how they responded to my uncle. I became protective of him in public, staring hard at others whose gaze lingered a little too long when we were seated at a restaurant, or at people who changed their seats to move away from him when we attended a community concert. I shot daggers at them with my eyes while Chuck just continued living proudly, continued singing with his quiet dignity.

I didn’t know it then, but in those moments while I stewed in my anger over other people’s actions, my Uncle Chuck was teaching me something about love.

*

In the days following Chuck’s death, as my family and I sorted through his belongings, I came across some old letters that my grandparents had written to him in those very first years of the Matheny School, when Chuck was just a boy. In them, my grandparents expressed their tender affection for him, their gratitude for his sweet, agreeable demeanor, and laid out their ambitions to open a school in his honor. They called it their “Tribute to Chuckie.”

I learned from those letters just how hard it was for them in the beginning — and then my mother told me how my grandfather had once used his car as collateral to borrow the money he needed for payroll. These were difficult times, the end of World War II, in fact, when food rationing was still in place. And yet my grandparents persisted, boldly asking their community to invest in the education of children who had previously been hidden away.

I’m sure they heard ‘No’ a lot.

NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo

I think about how that must have felt — living in what was supposedly the greatest and most morally righteous country in the world, and having to ask for private money again and again so that their son could receive an education.

In 1948, on the two-year anniversary of the opening of Matheny School, my grandmother wrote these words to my Uncle Chuck, who was seven years old at the time:

“Please don’t become intolerant when I try to explain why we may fail. You see, dear, there are some people who don’t understand little kids like you and [the other students]. Perhaps they had little boys & girls who could run and play, and had no physical handicap — they don’t know how much courage it takes to fight your battles. They cannot know, dear, that within that handicapped body, lies a mind so keen, so alert, so willing to contribute — and equally important, a courage and a determination to conquer no matter what the barrier.

“Do not be intolerant, Chuck. Accept this as something which you will always have to face — be tolerant of these people because they do not know. It is hard for them to realize that you and [the other students], just given the inherent chance, will help in a productive and practical manner to formulate our world of tomorrow.”

Be tolerant of these people because they do not know. In that letter, my grandmother was teaching my uncle something about love.

*

In all the times I’ve had to advocate —whether for environmental conservation, or protective regulations, or for accommodations for my own child to access her education— I have struggled with anger.  It ignites in me upon my first whiff of indifference to the things that I hold dear. It roils under the sense that someone else places money or convenience or political popularity above right and wrong, or the health and security of my environment, my body, or my child — and it flares at things like vulgar tweets and internet trolls and unreturned calls and passive-aggressive emails because, my God are you not human? Where is your compassion and decency?

I often use my anger to protect what I love.  But then, perhaps I’ve been doing it all wrong.

*

Advocacy can take you to dark places when you don’t come up for air. When you walk around with your muscles flexed, always poised for your defensive stance, the fatigue will eventually set in. You may begin to question the humanity of the people on the other side of the table, regardless of where that table is: in Washington, in your community, or even your own home. It’s exhausting to maintain this suspicion of one another, this belief that everything is a win-or-lose game. You may pride yourself on your vigilance, on the power of your love to keep fighting, fighting, fighting. But the truth is, it’s exhausting to be at war.

*

After the end of the war, my grandparents opened the doors of the Matheny School with a $3,000 G.I. Loan and three students, including my Uncle Chuck. In just one year, the school grew to 34 children with a staff of 21 — which means that somewhere in between all the No’s came an occasional Yes.

How did they get there?

I can tell you one thing for sure — they didn’t get there with anger. They didn’t get there with shame.

Be tolerant of these people because they do not know, she said.  Be patient and be kind. Or in other words, lead with love. I think this is what my grandmother meant. I know this is how my Uncle Chuck lived. If there’s one true thing I can take away from his life, it’s how far love can carry a person, how far love can take a family, and how wealthy a community becomes when its currency is love.

The post On Advocacy and Love appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

This year’s theme is Writing about Health: Activism, Advocacy, and Storytelling, and will include workshops, craft sessions, and readings with a focus on health and healthcare. The featured Keynote Speaker will be acclaimed Korean-American writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter, who has written on a variety of health topics, including advocacy for her son and others on the autism spectrum. Her new novel on the future of medicine is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

The conference will also include additional workshops and craft presentations by writers Nina Angela McKissock, Gillian Pidcock, Fran Quigley, Vince Mondillo, and myself. I will be leading a workshop titled, “Cellular Composition: Writing Water, Environment, and Self” — My workshop description follows:

Cellular Composition: Writing Water, Environment, and Self

 

Water is the most abundant molecule in our cells, accounting for roughly 70% of total cell mass. And given the permeability of our cell membranes, what’s in our water often ends up in our cells — making water pollution issues a matter of personal and public health. But while writing about the science behind these fluid boundaries is essential, it isn’t always effective in exerting positive change in environmental health policy. As Rachel Carson revealed with the public response to Silent Spring, people are more often moved by stories that engage their memories and emotions.

 

In the literary world, we often talk about “writing from the bones,” or “writing what we know on a cellular level.” This personal narrative —stories grounded in memory and emotion— will be the focus of our time together. In this workshop, we will examine the work of writers and scholars such as Sandra Steingraber, Rebecca Altman, Kristen Iversen, and others to learn how they have woven both science AND the self into their environmental health literature. We will study their methods and then embark on our own cellular compositions, using targeted writing exercises to generate strands of personal history to weave into our own environmental health stories.

The post 2018 Moravian College Writers’ Conference appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

My grandparents founded the Matheny school for my uncle, who was born with cerebral palsy in 1941.  He had come into a world that was ill-equipped to accommodate children with special needs. So my grandfather obtained a GI loan to open a school for my uncle and other similarly afflicted kids. My mother grew up immersed in a therapeutic environment designed to bring my uncle and his peers to their fullest potential.

You cannot help but learn empathy when you grow up in a place like Matheny.  These are people who are profoundly affected by their disabilities, people for whom God-given intellectual and creative gifts are often eclipsed by the bodies they’ve received — people deserving of care and respect.  Certainly more care and respect than was given to the gentleman mocked by a certain person during his Presidential campaign.

I had to drive by the Trump International Golf Resort in Bedminster on my way to the Matheny event. I may or may not have flipped the bird as I sped by.

*

I’m working on a new project now — a story about someone in my family whom I have never met.

My mother was adopted, after have been born to an unwed girl in the early 1950s, when America was great. A girl who hid her pregnancy from her family so well that when she went into labor on a Saturday in late September, her mother telephoned the doctor for a house call to see why her daughter was having such a bellyache.

My mother entered the world prematurely — perhaps due to the girl’s corseting, or stress. Or both. The doctor delivered my mother and rushed her to the hospital, where she remained in an incubator for another month before the Matheny family took her home. The girl, who labored and writhed and cried out in pain as her body expelled her sin and the trees outside her window released their autumn leaves — the girl was left behind. She never saw my mother. The girl’s name was Ginger; she had once been a counselor at a Matheny summer camp.

*

I was a freshman in college when my mother began the search for her birth parents. She hired a private investigator, who helped her with the process of tracking down her roots. I have the artifacts of their work in my office — thick notebooks containing photographs and correspondence, certificates of birth, marriage and death.

I am working on that story now, but suffice it to say that the plot of Ginger’s story resembles gravity. Like a branch dropped from a tree into a river coursing by, dragged under bridges by the cold current and thrown against the jagged edges of rock until finally stopping dead in a silt-choked place.

The narrative we told ourselves once we learned the painful details of Ginger’s life focused on the blessings of adoption — thank God you were raised by someone else — and of course we were right to be grateful for my mother’s adoptive family. But we said this as if her birth mother had been the Titanic, as if the ensuing alcoholism and suspected abusive marriage and mental health issues were inevitable, and had nothing to do with the shunning or the trauma she endured.

We said this as if she’d been bad, like a bruised fruit instead of a person. Like she wasn’t the kind of person who had enough character to work with the disabled.

*

This project deviates from my usual environmental work, I know. But aside from the fact that this story is part of my own, I am interested in the circumstances surrounding my mother’s birth because I think Ginger’s story is emblematic of a larger thing.

What I mean to say is that I think the way society treats its women is connected to its propensity for violence,

… which is connected to oppression,

… which is connected to exploitation,

…which is connected to destruction.

There’s parallel refrain in the study of women and earth in our culture. A parallel refrain of consumption and control.

*

Look at how women and the environment were treated, for example, back when America was great. Or better yet, look at the current policy agenda of the Trump administration.

 *

During my weekend trip to New Jersey, I visited some of the places where Ginger had lived. I started with the house where my mother was born. It sits on a curved county road in an affluent part of the state, near a one-lane bridge that crosses the Lamington River. A place with historic farmlands and equestrian stables — not all that far from the Trump golf resort.

After I stopped to record my impressions of the place, I returned to my car and drove on, quickly passing a house owned by someone as offended by Trump as myself. Their yard was filled with protest signs: Hate Has No Home Here, Stand with the ACLU, Resist the Madness, Clinics Not Alleys.

Hours later, into upstate New York, I drove through the trailer park where Ginger had eventually settled after she left her husband. Then onto Newburgh, where she died all alone. Here, the storefronts of buildings were covered with plywood and corrugated metal, and the curbs of the streets were littered with trash.  Sidewalks were occupied by drifting, listless people — stereotypical urban decay, stereotypical human decline.

I hadn’t expected my heart to pound the way it did, hadn’t expected to hear my own heightened breath. But there I was in the car, anxious to turn around and head for home. I know my own privilege amplified my reaction to the final place where my biological grandmother lived. Or maybe it was the thought that she had likely been one of those aimless people smoking a cigarette in an alcove of an abandoned store.

All I know is that I fought hot, angry tears when I saw that car right in front of me a few miles down the road, as I made my way back to the highway — that red Chevy sedan with a Trump bumper sticker and another one that read: Stop Planned Parenthood Now.

*

The saddest part of the story is that she died all alone, that nobody came to claim her after she took her final breath.

 *

Last year in Indiana, then-Governor and Vice President-Elect Mike Pence signed a law requiring health care facilities to notify female patients who miscarry and undergo abortions in their care, that arrangements must be made for proper cremation or burial of “their baby.” Lawmakers in Ohio, South Carolina, and Mississippi have recently considered similar measures; those in Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas have already succeeded in codifying such policies into statute. Which means that, in many places, there is more concern for the dignity of fetal tissue than for someone like the invisible woman from which my mother and I came.

I am aware of the irony of my unwavering pro-choice position — my mother and I probably wouldn’t even exist if birth control had been widely available in the 1950s, or if accessible, legal abortion had been an option for Ginger back when America was great.

But I believe this woman’s life was wasted because she had wandered outside the lines. She endured what she endured because she didn’t have much choice. I believe that she was somebody, a real person who had once cared for others less fortunate than her. And I can’t help the expression of empathy that she has passed down in my DNA.

Photo Credit: Sal Pellingra/EyeEm/Getty Images

The post Empathy appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

After the race and celebration, we returned to the van, and there it was: a big, chubby penis on the van windshield, drawn over the driver’s side in purple chalk marker — with shots of cum dashed from the tip, like bullets in a video game.

My teammates and I, six strong women, had collectively run 203 miles in the Ragnar Relay Reach the Beach event — 203 miles through mountains and valleys, through heat and rain, through fog and pain. From the Bretton Woods ski area to the sands of Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Through nausea and self-doubt, we had run.

And yes, we wore our technicolored pigtail headbands so we could find each other in the crowds — because all of us are mothers and we think about these things — and we cheered loudly for one another at the exchanges because we were a team of six instead of twelve, and were therefore running twice as much as most of the people in the crowd. Including, I suspect, even you.

Were we too loud? Too proud? Too exuberant in our mutual support?

Or was it because we rolled our eyes at the testosterone-driven teams who tallied their number of “kills” — the people they had passed during the course of their legs (a somewhat infantile statistic, considering the staggered start and the number of runners on Ultra teams such as ours who were running twice as far)?

At one exchange, a man belonging to the van parked next to ours walked up after his run and announced, with his arms held high in a victorious reach: “Seventy-five kills, you guys! Wahooooooo!!”

(To which I uttered not so much to myself, but at least with my back turned toward him: “Really? You are making me so hard right now.”)

Yes, we all agreed. There’s some dick-swinging going on.

Here’s the thing:

We all passed people on our runs, every one of us on our team. Except that, instead of silently shaming the other hard-working souls who chipped away at the 203-mile pursuit a little slower than ourselves, we said, Looking good. You got this. You’re almost there!

That’s a difference between you and me — besides, of course, what we carry below the belt.

What does your penis even mean? Your micro-essay, your little piece of flash nonfiction?

Does it seek to elevate your team’s accomplishment by diminishing our own? Even you must be aware that your after-the-fact purple penis doesn’t have magical powers — doesn’t negate or un-do the fact that we still ran all the miles, just the six of us forty-something mothers with our party headbands on.

Are you worried that this fact somehow compromises the terms of your own team’s accomplishment? As in, maybe it wasn’t that amazing if these six women were able to finish it, too? Hey, I think any team of any number running 203 miles is amazing. So that would be your narrative, certainly not mine.

Or did you intend for your penis to be an act of violence, like a Swastika, or a gun? Was it your Trump card?

And what, exactly, did you mean when you scribbled the word, “SLOT” on the side window of the van, next to our decorated names and the checked boxes for all the miles we had run? Is this another slang for the opening between our legs? Like some kind of restrained, passive-aggressive way of calling us cunts?

Or did “SLOT” mean to kill? An in what manner did you mean?

Or were you instead suggesting that we were lesbians in this van — that being in close quarters without the company of a man somehow skewed our collective sexual preference toward vagina — and did you assume that, in between all the running and re-hydrating and nausea and muscle pain, we were hanging out in our rented van “playing the slots”?

Is it your belief that the fact of a woman is unfinished and incomplete without the imposition of a penis, like an uncrossed ’t’ or an un-dotted ‘i’?

Or is a van-full of strong feminist women who have also accomplished your goal simply some kind of a threat to your inflated idea of you? 

Maybe you did have something to fear. Maybe you were worried that we indeed had the power to turn the fact of a penis — penis as a noun, that thing on the windshield — into something lesser, something less required for the completion of a sentence. An adjective even, a modifier to a fact — as in, That insecure person just made a dick move. He must be one of those Trumpy, penis-kind of guys.

Then again, we really didn’t do anything but run a bunch of miles. The reduction of your penis? Yeah, you did that to yourself.

The post The Fact of a Penis appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

It took me a moment before I realized what she meant.

*

In our town, Labor Day is marked by the placement of American flags all around the town, a patriotic gesture provided by the local Rotary Club. It’s a nice nod to all the workers out there — the people who stock our grocery shelves, the workers who pave our streets, the teachers who guide our children, the doctors and nurses who tend to our health. All those working people who make the American engine run.

It’s been over a decade now since I left my career as an environmental scientist. It almost hurts to write that down. I remember feeling panicked when I hit the 5-year mark — like I had fallen from the train and would never find my way back in. You can infer from that how I’ve been feeling about it lately.

Sure, I’m a writer now, and sometimes I even earn a little money. But most of the work I do — writing, volunteering, caregiving — is work exchanged in the gift economy, which is not to say that it’s unimportant or unfulfilling work, but rather un-accounted, or at least un-celebrated.

So I’ve been missing my old career. I miss the science, the urgency. I miss the intellectual and political stimulation. I miss the people I used to serve.

Sometimes, when I’m away from my children and allow my mind to wander the pastures of what might-have-been, I question the decision I made years ago to leave my career and stay at home to raise them. I had tried my hand at being a working mother, but found it too burdensome in the context of my husband’s demanding cardiology career. The ultra-marathon days, the call. That mother-fucking pager. I didn’t want to hire it out, so instead I gave my employer notice.

When I told some of the people whose wells I’d been monitoring for the state that I was leaving my job, they asked, “Who will make sure our water is safe?”

I told them that someone else would fill that role. But I couldn’t tell them that because our regulations reflect our cultural value of profit over health, that even if someone is doing the work of monitoring their wells, things can (and sometimes do) slip through the cracks.

*

I miss my former work enough that I’ve been following the environmental stories of my newly adopted state. For the past year or so, I’ve been obsessing about perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in drinking water wells in the southwestern corner of Vermont, caused by the former activities of Teflon-related industry. I have written about this before.

I think a lot about the people impacted by this issue: the families now struggling in the face of an uncertain future, the parents laboring to cook their family meals with bottled water. These are exactly the kind of people I used to serve.

Back in the late 19th Century, when manufacturing laborers were gathering strength to organize and fight for worker protections against unsafe working conditions —and back when the federal Labor Day holiday was first officially sanctioned— this area of Vermont was a hub of industrial activity. The Walloomsac and Hoosic Rivers provided ample hydropower to run dozens of factories and textile mills, several of which were known to have used child labor.

In 1910, photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine documented these practices in the factories of Bennington and Pownal, Vermont:

Now, over a century later, children of the same ages as those who worked in the mills are laboring to metabolize PFOA from their bodies. Mothers have unknowingly nourished their babies with the chemicals from their spouse’s or neighbor’s former employer.

*

Happy Labor Day, she said. As in, Happy Anniversary of the day you delivered this child safely into the world. Who will he or she become? What will he or she do for a living?

*

What little we do know about the health impacts of unregulated chemicals like PFOA we owe completely to the industrial workers of the past — men and women who have been acutely and chronically exposed to toxins over the duration of their careers. Occupational exposures provide the very foundation of our epidemiological knowledge of toxic substances in the marketplace, from coal miners to the Radium Girls to the more recent cases of DuPont workers injured from the manufacturing of Teflon.

Consider the story of Sue Bailey, a former DuPont worker at the Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia — who was repeatedly exposed to PFOA while pregnant and then delivered a baby boy with severe facial deformities.

Upon her return to work, Sue discovered a company memo in the women’s locker room, which cited a study that had been conducted by 3M (the company that supplied PFOA to DuPont for the manufacturing of its Teflon product), detailing the occurrence of eye deformities in the offspring of lab rats who were fed PFOA during gestation.

Sue confronted the Washington Works facility’s medical doctor and asked if her exposure to PFOA had caused her son’s condition. The doctor denied any causation, but within a year, the company prohibited any women of child-bearing age to work around PFOA, per the expert opinion of DuPont’s chief medical director.

Sue continued to work for DuPont until her son, Bucky, was five years old. He would undergo dozens of surgeries to address his medical problems, and Sue needed the income to cover the expense. She didn’t file a lawsuit against DuPont at the time, because she couldn’t find an attorney who was willing to take her case. Everyone was afraid to confront one of the region’s most important employers.

*

According to the United States Department of Labor, Labor Day “…is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

I interpret that concept broadly, the well-being of our country.

*

To this day, DuPont denies any connection between Sue Bailey’s prenatal PFOA exposure and her son’s facial abnormalities. And just like the United States Radium Company did with the Radium Girls, DuPont has spent decades and millions of dollars downplaying the toxicity of the key ingredient in its market centerpiece.

It should come as no surprise then, that Michael Dourson —founder of the consulting firm that DuPont hired to evaluate the toxicity of PFOA, and a DuPont-paid expert witness in the first of 3,500 lawsuits brought against the company for PFOA-related injury — has been nominated by Donald Trump to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety office.

Indeed the very same division charged with determining federal drinking water standards for PFOA and other emerging contaminants. The standards that are supposed to protect us and our children, the workers of the future generation.

*

 Happy Labor Day, she said. It took me a moment to realize what she meant.

*

Ready yourselves, fellow mothers. The work has just begun.

Photo & Art credits:

Cover Image: The New Yorker, cover by Art Spiegelman, May 11, 1998

Vermont Child Laborers: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress

Photo of Newborn Bucky Bailey: Bailey Family, from Delaware Online, “C8 Suspected in Birth Defects: One Woman’s Story”

Photo of Masked Bucky Bailey: Bailey Family, from Delaware Online, “C8 Suspected in Birth Defects: One Woman’s Story”

Photo of Bucky Bailey & News Article: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept/Investigative Fund

The post Labor Day appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I don’t know why I am like this, or how this came to be. I imagine there was a time when I felt confident, when I could simply be, rather than perform, relative to him, relative to her. But I’ve lost touch with when that was. Something happened — puberty perhaps? Childhood? Adulthood? Something made me painfully self-aware, so paralyzed by the perception of others that getting dressed, leaving the house, opening my mouth suddenly became a difficult chore.

As a young woman, I learned to wear fitted clothes, hide behind a large mass of curls, and sing the choral refrain, figuring that I was sharing the best of me, the pieces of me that people actually wanted to see: the positively focused, the aesthetically pleasing, the non-confrontational.

Except that wasn’t really the truth. And I believe in telling the truth.

It’s difficult for self-conscious people to commit themselves to something like writing creative nonfiction. Truth-telling is the core of the mission, and a fully examined self is almost always part of the game. It’s tempting to edit around the details, forget entire chapters to maintain one’s hiding place behind a thick curtain of hair.

Confession: I have a piece of writing that I’m currently hiding from. It is out there in the world, but I haven’t the courage to post it on my social media accounts. It’s an honest piece of me — not the environmental scientist-writer-mother me, but the stay-at-home-mother me who sometimes struggles with being a wife and mom because of how it was modeled for me.

This is considerably less comfortable to share than the identity for whom I have purchased professional business cards.

If the piece had been an environmental essay, as I’m otherwise accustomed to write, I would have gladly shared it far and wide, maybe even feeling a little righteous about doing the “good work” of environmental advocacy, of flexing my scientific muscles and applying knowledge obtained during the pursuit of my graduate degrees. I would have felt good when I received the editor’s e-mail that the piece was now live. I wouldn’t have woken up in the middle of the night, heart pounding in my chest.

But this is not such a piece. It is, simply, a glimpse of me with my hair pulled back and my flawed self showing. A glimpse of the things that used to keep me awake at night.

In graduate school, when I was working toward my MFA, a friend of mine who is also a creative nonfiction writer said, “I don’t think CNF writers get enough credit for the work that goes into their writing.” By which she meant the work before the work, the courage it takes to go there and wrestle that, the courage it takes to face the consequences of everything in between.

Last night I started reading Roxane Gay’s Hunger, and nearly a hundred pages had gone by before I could even put it down. The entire time, I thought: Holy shit, she’s brave. This is so fucking raw. But I could imagine people, people I know and love nodding along, feeling less alone in the world because of what she has decided to share.

I wish I had that confidence. I wish didn’t feel so compelled to hide from some of the writing that wants to come out.

But I do. I’m just so used to hiding my face.

It’s out there, though.  I was at least able to do that.

And maybe if  I

hold

my

breath,

I can squeeze my eyes shut and let you look here and see me.

Just this once.

The post On Hiding appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.