Another Turn in the Wheel of Life

Years ago, I had my chart done by a wonderful astrologer named Tom Brady from Santa Fe. I’ve never met Tom in person, but have had several readings with him over the phone. He records these calls and sends me a CD so I can listen to them over nad over again. Each of Tom’s readings has contained pearls of wisdom and insight that I’ve chewed on for years.

In the first one he did for me, Tom told me that my whole chart reinforced, over and over again, the message that my life path was to “shine out into the world.” He said I would be an “agent of change” in the arena of communication. This is something I have done consistently throughout my life-as a radio producer, a talk show host, an inspirational speaker, an author, a blogger, a columnist, and now, as a writing teacher and group leader. Inspiring others toward healing, through my gifts with language, has been a thread I have followed my whole life.

Tom also told me that these cycles of shining out into the world would always be followed by periods of retreat and holing up. And this, too, has been true.

The five years I was on the road speaking and leading workshops on healing from sexual abuse, starting in 1988, when The Courage to Heal was published, were very public years. I was a guest on Oprah. I appeared on hundreds of radio shows, dozens of TV programs. I filled bookstores and auditoriums. I spoke in theaters with my name up on the marquis, standing alone on a stage with no props, just a water glass and a spot following me, speaking heart-to-heart to 900 people at a time. I had a taste of fame in my own little niche. It was a powerful, humbling and challenging to be constantly in the public eye. To some of my fans, I was God; to my detractors, the anti-Christ. Those first years after Courage was published was very much a roller coaster ride. And for me, it was especially hard to be up on a pedestal because I had “gracefully survived” trauma and lived to tell about it.

Chapter 1,The East Coast Mother-Son Odyssey

Blogging about your family can prove challenging, at least as your kids get older. When Eli and Lizzy were babies and toddlers, I had carte blanche; they were too young to voice an opinion or to object to the columns I wrote about my adventures parenting them in Growing Up In Santa Cruz. And when Eli was old enough to object (at the tender age of five) to the fact that strangers kept coming up to him in the park, talking to him as if they knew him, he was easily assuaged by being given a pseudonym, Justin, a name that he chose. Years later, he decided to stop being “Justin” and to go back to being “Eli.”

Later, when they were in elementary school, he and Lizzy would read my columns and edit them for accuracy. “Mom, that’s not what I said.” Or “But you forgot to write about the time you took my door off its hinges.” We wrote the columns as a team and in the process, I got to teach them about the narrative arc of a story, telescoping events, and the permissible use of literary license.

The Zero Hour on Health Care

I'm holed up in my room at the Land of Medicine Buddha. It's the long afternoon break between the morning session of the Memory to Memoir retreat and dinner time. There are a fabulous group of women here with me, ready and willing to dig deep for the truth in their writing. I'm moved by their stories, but vastly distracted. I spent much of the afternoon, not getting a massage, not hiking, not writing personal stories, but watching the C-SPAN coverage of the health insurance debate.

Tomorrow is the day. Tomorrow is the vote. And for me this vote isn't about someone else's health coverage. It's about mine.

The Accountant In My Heart

In my Wednesday writing group, I read Tony Hoagland’s poem, and then gave the writing prompt: “The Accountant in My Heart.” Here’s the poem and my response to that exercise: 

The Loneliest Job in the World  

by Tony Hoagland

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?

you are completely screwed, because

the next question is How Much?

and then it is hundreds of hours later,

and you are still hunched over

your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.

This is the loneliest job in the world:

to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,

and all around you, you can hear

the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,

pushing the turnstiles, putting

their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,

which constantly changes.

No one knows why.

"The Loneliest Job in the World" by Tony Hoagland, from Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. (c) Graywolf Press, 2010.

Here's what I wrote in response:

The accountant in my heart has a very thin face and slender beak nose. He wears exactly the kind of glasses you’d expect, narrow little black half-moons that slide down to the bottom of his nose, where they perch precariously, always askew. He wears white button down shirts stained with sweat in large streaming circles under his arms. His back is bent in a permanent curve since he spends all day and night hovering over a giant thick ledger with mildewed parchment pages. His face is creased with a permanent frown. His watchword is “Never Enough.”

The accountant in my heart has been weighing and measuring since the moment I was born. He was there when I was wrenched away from my twin sister, forced screaming into a world where Loss and my name, Laura, were twinned with the same first letter. What is the cost of a dead baby sister? That was his first actuarial task. What does it cost the survivor to live? What cost the bright lights, the cold hands, the first ragged breath, and all the breaths that follow? He has calculated exactly how many breaths are allotted to me; he knows the final tally, the time of my death, but he will not tell. But he never lets me forget that each breath costs me. I don’t know the price per inhale or the cost per exhale, but each breath I get, that she didn’t have, is running up my tally.