'Tis the Season to be Jolly?

If you see me at a party this holiday season and kindly ask how I am doing, pardon me if I remove my jolly holiday mask and respond candidly.  

“Not great,” was my answer, over jalapeño poppers, at a friend’s recent Christmas gathering. The world as we know it is crumbling down. Already, it was slipping in that direction – half the population apparently thought so – but living in our bubbles we didn’t notice. Now we’re waking up, having to face the truth of this Trump upset and watch the parade of right-wing billionaires marching behind their leader, straight into the halls of power, determined to undo whatever good Obama managed to eke out during his two exalted terms.

The news reports are disturbing and getting scarier by the day. Almost afraid to look, I squint through  ‘got-hope’ glasses and tell myself:  he will be reasonable, he’s in over his head, maybe it won’t be so bad. I’m white-privileged and can still enjoy a bountiful celebratory Mexican spread complete with high-end mezcal imported (under NAFTA) from Oaxaca. At least the stock market is going up (I’m not sure exactly why) and I won’t be sent across the border (though maybe I’d like to be). 

But it’s not good enough to be a good loser. And that’s the #silverlining. When it’s just another middle-of-the-road Dem in there looking a lot like a Republican, cozying up to the banks and oil interests, I can remain an arm-chair liberal. For the first time in my lifetime, I matter, I’m needed. The situation is so extreme, there’s almost freedom in it, permission to act out, to take my role as a citizen seriously.

This time around I have no choice. Change begins with me. Okay, I may not change the #RedStaters. I’m not ready yet for that challenge. First, I’ve got to look at my Self.   

Where AM I?  And where are you on the Change Curve NOW?  

I find this model (based on the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross) helpful in my work with leaders confronting change in their organizations. So how does it apply to a large-scale societal shift? It still comes down to ME.

First there’s Denial.  Many of us are still there. In Denial we avoid news and the ugly truth. Pick your news story du jour: the gratuitous Carrier deal, grandstanding over 700 jobs, a drop in the bucket compared to Obama’s unsung 14 million;  Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp of alligators” when all he’s doing is introducing a variant species; the Exxon-Mobil snakehead; his refusal to divest from his business interests; the seedy Russian connection; and, one of my favorites, our new President charging the American People $1M a day in rent so he can spend his weekends in comfort of his beloved Trump Tower!

Oh, let’s not forget the benign pizza joint in upper NW DC that was raided by a gun-toting nutter, driven by # falsenews that the restaurant owners, along with Hillary, were involved in a child sex ring. Disgusting. Even more disgusting, people believed it!

Okay, the expletives are an indicator I’m moving out of Denial, allowing reality to sink in, and getting enraged. Good for me! That’s Resistance, the next stage on the change curve, an excellent place to hang out (for a while). 

In Resistance, I face the truth and face my fears, taking the news in, perhaps in bite-sized morsels, hopefully from trusted sources. Though, frankly, I’ve got a gripe with the entire #mediamachine, the way the collective of outlets handed Trump the victory on a silver platter in exchange for ratings. So I have to be careful how I digest what I read and see and hear. I engage with friends, try not to hide my dismay, talk, listen, yell, post, and get real clear: this IS happening. 

If I don’t, I can slide back into Denial. And that subtle version, where I downplay the impacts, is most dangerous.

Bear with me as I draw a connection that I hope won’t sound disrespectful or exaggerated. Over Thanksgiving, I read Night, Elie Wiesel’s prized memoir about coming of age in the Nazi death camps. The thematic thread he weaves throughout the story begins right up-front, when no one will listen to the ominous warnings of Moishe the Beadle.  

By page 10, “German soldiers – with their steel helmets and their death’s-head emblem – were already in our town, the Fascists were already in power, the verdict was already out – and the Jews of Sighet were still smiling.”

Then, a third of the way through, “Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.”

Of course we all know where this horrific story goes. Once the boy arrives in Auschwitz with his father, he has no choice but to open his eyes. “I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible then men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real. A nightmare perhaps…”

Yes, a nightmare and a mind-boggling reality.

Which is why we must deftly move along the Change Curve, out of Denial and into Resistance, where we hit rock-bottom, and, only then, can we move forward into Exploration.

We don’t have time to stay stuck, nor can we skip stages. The latter is a trap I fell into myself, eager to shift to Exploration mode at a brainstorming dinner with colleagues recently. We had come together with flipcharts and markers to discuss how to put our facilitation and change skills to good use given this new political reality. And we walked away with a can-do game plan.

But later that night my subconscious awakened me to the truth. I dreamed I was part of the resistance movement and we were being hunted down by an army of guys wielding machine guns. The hotel in PG county where we were meeting turned into a bloodbath. I hid behind a white upholstered chair in the lobby as bullets reverberated, glass shattered, and blood splattered the walls. I awoke in a panic asking myself:  Was a hero or a coward? Will I stand up or hide out?

Feeling my fear, fearing my ambivalence, is part of the process. As one of my mentors used to say, “All resistance is information.”  Ironically, I have to get past my own internal Resistance to become part of the bigger Resistance that will propel me forward.

In my next post I’ll talk more about the way forward – and the What NOW? Drinks and Dialogue event my colleagues and I are organizing to help ourselves get past Denial and into the streets!

Stay tuned, comrades…

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.” ― Elie Wiesel

Mala Mujer ~ Bad Woman

With the help of some important little messengers of late, I’m beginning to see that Mexico did not treat me very well.  

“As a single and childless woman, you’re an oddity. They don’t know what to do with you,” said Elizabeth, a new friend and client who’d lived and worked in Mexico for eight years. She regaled me with stories of her alienation, even working with the good guys in reproductive health, even in Mexico City, despite her fluency in Spanish. "Until I got married and had kids. Then, miraculously, I got some respect."

How could I know that the very untethered state that allowed me to wander off for two years to be of service would doom me?

I was a mala mujer down to the core. I lived alone in my apartment on Diaz and I bought wine at the Bodega Aurerra (Mexican Walmart) and I used tampons, which you could only get in boxes of 10, available only from behind the pharmacy counter, on the upper shelf, out of harm’s way, where a sales associate had to retrieve them for you. God knows what manner of shameful behavior was going on behind my closed apartment door.

According to Octavio Paz, the ambassador, poet, and Nobel Prize winner for his renowned book of essays, The Labyrinth of Solitude, “the mala mujer – the ‘bad woman’ – is almost always accompanied by the idea of aggressive activity. She is not passive like the ‘self-denying mother,’ the ‘waiting sweetheart,’ the hermetic idol: she comes and goes, she looks for me and then leaves them. Her extreme mobility…renders her invulnerable. Activity and immodesty unite to petrify her soul.” (Labyrinth)

Wow! I read his piece on Mexican Masks over and over, intrigued, mind-boggled, referring back frequently to my highlights and margin notes that bloodied the pages. But I could not, at the time, see how I how was fighting the unspoken label to curry favor with my counterparts and, in doing so, was losing me. I was too close to it. And if I had seen and acknowledged the kind of discrimination thwarting me at every turn, I would have had to surrender, take a Peace Corps ET (Early Termination), and head back across the border where I belonged.

Perhaps this was why, despite my ambivalence about being home those first weeks and months of my Returned PCV status, a cauldron of profound elation, at moments, was bubbling inside me.

 I remember the first night I ventured up to Mount Pleasant Street for a glass of wine at the local watering hole. Glass of wine. Even the words filled me with a sense of other-worldly appreciation as I stepped in the door as was met with a rush of body warmth and din of merriment. I sat tall in my stool, like a big girl, as the bartender came right over and laid a coaster before me.  I was mesmerized by the lengthy, laminated list of possibilities, Pinot, Merlot, Riojo. 

I couldn’t possibly decide; so Will the bartender recommended the Rhone and gave me a taste before filling my glass to the rim.  It was a late winter in Washington, and every time the door opened, a waft of frigid air swept in and gave me a shiver of exhilaration down to my frozen toes. After two and a half years in a desert, I felt profound thanks for the bone-chilling cold. 

As I sipped my ruby wine, taking in bombardment of English chatter, a waiter suddenly appeared a flatiron pan held high over his head. He lowered it and lit a Bic lighter to it and the pan exploded into flames. The entire establishment erupted in applause; cheese flambé was cause for celebration in Mount Pleasant, USA. My eyes must have been popping out of my head as the waiter set the bubbling halloumi on the bar because the couple next to me smiled and offered me a bite. 

At El Fenix, my local watering hole in Rioverde, other than Rita’s brightness and the merry mariachi music whining over the sound system, a solemnity pervaded, a sense that those of us there, sipping our cervezas and michaladas (only beer-based drinks served), were hiding our sins from the rest of the world, behind the smoke colored glass. We were the scorned ones. And I would not have been welcomed if it hadn’t been for the fact that the owner and bartender was a woman and fast becoming my best friend. 

Now talk about a mala mujer. Rita was not only single and childless, but a cantina owner on top of it, serving up the diablo’s brew, and Dios only knew what else. But she didn’t care what they thought. She’d lived through the death of her father at age 12 and abandonment of her mother at 15. Left to raise her four younger sisters, she crossed the border, worked as a domestic, and sent the money back home. Even then the neighbors in her community cursed the Garcia girls:  You’ll all grow up to be bunch of putas. They did not. They learned how to survive the small town fires. Pueblo pequeno, infierno grande.

Once I found Rita, and she found me, we did not let go. I became her protection – because “Nobody gonna touch me when I have the gringa by my side.” And she became mine, because nobody would or could explain the inner workings of the pueblito and make me feel better for feeling so useless as Rita. Suddenly I felt not so alone.

So can you see I’m only just beginning to understand all this? To survive my time in Mexico I had to stuff the fears down and put on my Mexican mask and carry-on. My ingrained American optimism, in the face of challenges, also served, or it suckered me. 

A year and a half after I left Rioverde my friend Rita risked life and limb to cross over the border again. It took her three months and close to 10,000 dollars, money saved up for El Fenix and her sister’s house-cleaning business in Dallas going into the hands of the narcos, not just dealing in drugs anymore, but much more lucratively, in people.  On her journey she was jailed twice, and the final time held in a motel room with 12 other migrants for weeks until the coyotes decided it was her turn, until her sister was so desperate that she would agree to a doubling of the fee upon drop-off or never see her sister again.

That’s how bad Rioverde was for single women.

As my writing partner, Julie Gabrieli, put it on a recent check-in call, “We’re good at talking about the lipstick, but what about the pig? There’s only so much you can do if you are forced into a system that is fundamentally broken.” 

What IS ‘The Story of Sustainability from South of the Border,’ really?  I’ve been getting closer to the truth, moving away from my initial yearning to make it a story with a happy ending and, thus, justify my 2 years and 3 months’ investment in PCMX at the peak of my career. 

But underneath it all I’m still blaming myself. I was the demanding exijente gringa, pushing for change when they weren’t ready, not honoring the cultural norms, fighting the paternalism ineffectively, and even deeper, bringing my history and baggage of issues with the ‘father’ inappropriately into my Mexico service. "Life is a fight and I am alone."

I don’t want to put lipstick on a pig, and I don’t want to be a whiner. I want to share the truth of the experience:  the good, bad and beautiful. I want to discuss the darkness of the culture and the experience and also the light.  Because there was light.

I stuck it out and met Angelica and the Zama Mamas and we did something together that was pretty extraordinary.  I don’t know if it was sustainable.  I have not been in touch with them.  I’ve been too afraid to find out.  I stuck it out and met Rita and made a friend for life. And I cannot say I wasn’t at least an indirect influence on her decision to cross the border and make a more sustainable and happy life for herself with her sister on this side of the border. I stuck it out and met Professor Fernando Nino and had the opportunity to teach his engineering students about sustainability and innovation and open their eyes to what’s possible.   

But mostly I stuck it out. Now coming on four years since the completion of my service, I may be just be getting glimpses of what it all meant.

The Heart of Memoir

I had the good fortune, last week, to attend a book talk by my memoir hero, Mary Karr. Her first memoir, The Liars’ Club, opened my eyes, back in the 90s, to what’s possible with the form, joy and pain in the unvarnished truth, through the eyes of a child.

I began to devour memoirs back then (Nabokov, McCourt, Welty, Woolf and Wolfe), developing a quiet aspiration to tell my own story someday.

The other night, at Busboy & Poets, amidst a packed house, I devoured the author’s nuggets of wisdom on the craft, a few of them harder than others to swallow, washing them down with sips of mojito.

Mary Karr & Busboys & Poets

First and foremost, she told us, find your voice as a memoirist, the most interesting version of yourself. And yes, she clarified, it’s made-up.

I haven’t found that voice for Mexico yet, though I have heard it in fragments here and there.
Write (even the people you hate) with as much love as you can, said Karr.

For me that means the corrupt mayor, Don Bruno, the paternalistic Peace Corps bosses, the machismo engineers, the gossipy, dismissive Consejo. The whole cast of characters with love?

She also said: From the second you choose one event over another you’re shaping the past’s meaning. It’s a hell of a lot of responsibility.

She went on to say that sometimes you have to write a ton to get past the pages that don’t belong, like I did the first 100 pages of my Mexico book. But that’s nothing. Karr told us she had to lop-off 1200 pages of her memoir, Lit, before it set right. The DELete key is my most important tool.
 
During the Q&A, I forced myself to raise my hand. I stood-up and posed a question into the microphone. I had a million, but the one that won out was about my challenges writing and completing the story of my Peace Corps Service. ‘I got back in 2013,’ I told her. ‘Do I need more distance from the events?’ Here was my chance for some answers. (I mentioned, incidentally, that I had my Kickstarter backers – like an agent collective – waiting for the finished product.)

‘Oh, that’s tough,’ she acknowledged, and graciously thanked me for my service. Then she answered my question with a question:

‘Is there some way in which you were meant to change through the experience and didn’t OR some way you changed and aren’t ready to claim? Explore that.’

‘Yeah, do I have to?’ I grumbled under my breath, feeling my face turn red hot, and sat back down like a kid who’d gotten the answer (or in this case the question) wrong.

Okay, I admit, there’s stickiness there, like dried soda pop on the kitchen floor, and I keep stepping in it. I’m the President of SeeChange, for godsakes. I should have known better, done better, if not in changing Mexico, at least in changing my self.

What pops to mind is an infamous line of my mother’s, worn in to grooves of my record so it keeps repeating: ‘I have great things in mind for my daughter and I don’t want you fucking them up.’ Back then the you was a man. Now it’s universal, anyone (including me) that might get in my way.

Then I think of my wise and concerned friend, J, who tried coaching me through a rough patch in my service when the local board of sustainability to which I was assigned turned on me and the Peace Corps threatened to throw me out. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ J posed over Skype at about my six-month mark in Mexico, ‘that this experience could be doing you more harm than good?’

No, no, no, he didn’t get it. My friend was in development, yes, but a policy wonk, a diplomat, jet-setting around the world to negotiate treaties and wine and dine with the powers that be. On the ground work was a different ball game. He just didn’t get it.

But in the end, had he been right? I had (hidden) aspirations to change the world, at least a small corner of it. I had stuck it out, two years and three months. But what had I accomplished? Returning home to DC, I was back in the same old place, maybe I’d even gone a few giant steps backwards.

I don’t want to tell that tale, a story of disillusionment. But it’s there. Ways I hoped to change and didn’t. Ways I changed and don’t want to see. Can I face them? Can I handle the truth with tenderness? Can I see beyond the parternalismo and machismo and corruption, and my own getting in the way, to recognize that I did do some good, maybe even some ‘great things’?

F. Scott Fitzgerald says the definition of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing truths simultaneously. When I’m there, I’ll be ready to write. Or perhaps I write to get there.

Mary Karr's new book is called The Art of Memoir and can be found on Amazon or her website http://www.marykarr.com/books.php.

Writing Through the Doldrums

‘Mom and N, is that you?’ My voice awakens me from a dream, the image of them plain as day.

The elevator door has opened – a man gets on and his back is too me – but I could see Mom with the baby in her arms. She looked so happy. They both glanced over at me smiling, then the door shut and the elevator arrow dinged for down. They were going out to play in the park.

‘But I missed them and miss them,’ I think, coming out of my sleepy stupor, rubbing tears from my eyes.

I saw a close-up of my nephew on Facebook the other day, his first day of kindergarten. ‘Where has the time gone,’ my sister-in-law wrote, and I could hear her dry, Texas lament in the post on the screen. N wore a striped polo buttoned up to the top. He had a big boy haircut, a little punk, no more blond bowl, shaven close on the side and a shelf of mousy brown bangs combed long to the side. A sly cat ate the mouse grin hid a hint of trepidation. His faced had slimmed and his eyes had become decidedly his mother’s since I last saw him, Scandinavian wide-set and slightly slanty. Exotic-looking.

It’s been two years, a third of that kid’s life, since I’d last seen him, at my mother’s funeral, when the weight of the sibling shame and blame and rivalry was too much for the worn connections to bear. My mother was the hub in a hub-spoke relationship and once she was gone we were nothing but a warped and useless wheel.

So on that hot August day in Peoria two summers ago I lost all of them. The elevator door closed and went down without me.

In the Doldrums today, I’m breaking ‘Ordinance 175389-J: It shall be unlawful, illegal and unethical to think, think of thinking, surmise, presume, reason, meditate or speculate while in the Doldrums.’ It would carry a heavy sentence, off to the dungeon for Milo, of Phantom Tollbooth fame, if he didn’t stop at once.

But I bend around the rule and write.

I have a tummy ache that reminds me of being back in Mexico. A water main broke on the block and the last trickle drained out at dawn. Now every time I pull the handle in the kitchen I’m reminded how dependent I am.

I awoke way to early this morning for my own good and fell into writing about Mom’s cancer. ‘Change it up, let the Muse lead you by the hand,’ though sometimes she takes me down some pretty dark paths.
This ain’t no Dictionopolis. (That’s Milo’s first stop on his journey out of the Doldrums where he and his dog Tock learn to play with their words.)

When Martin, my handyman, arrives around noon carrying his massive tool box, ready to install my new ceiling fan, I am just arriving at my aunt’s house in Peoria. There I find my mother a shadow of herself, honestly like part of her had already left the body and was hovering above us.

                                                         ~~~

I dropped my bags at the threshold and dropped to my knees before her, grasping around her legs to keep her on this earth. When I rested my head in her lap, she stroked my hair and said: ‘I’m glad you’re here, Annie.’

Is that the moment I started to call her Mama?

No, not yet.

The doctors had said three to six months which we collectively took to mean six months, still not much, but we wanted all we can get. Though the moment I’d entered the room and saw her sitting, back to me in the easy chair, her once broad shoulders narrowed and frail, a halo of lamplight illuminating silvery strands of hair, I knew it could only be weeks.

My aunt didn’t seem to notice a thing. Then again, she’d been along with Mom on the chemo ride from the beginning and maybe she couldn’t see the decline in the gradual day-to-day.

‘Doesn’t she look good?’ Aunt M called down the spiral staircase that led from the open kitchen and living space down to the guest suite of her converted coach house. ‘She took a shower and got all cleaned up for you.’

‘Yes, she does.’ I got up from the ground, having resisted letting tears fall onto the knees of Mom’s drawstring pants. ‘Hair looks nice, Mom.’

She smiled back weakly, unconvinced. ‘M blew it out for me, what’s left of it.’

I muted the damn TV, another ISIS ambush on a town called Mosul, and took in my surroundings. The slight scent of cigarette smoke in the air, a habit all the sisters but Mare had been able to kick. This aunt, a retired art deal, had an impeccable eye. Every inch of the place was perfectly appointed, a combination of antiques and moderns, books and tiny lamps and Persian throw rugs on the wood floors – tiny succulent plants and pots of herbs perched on the sills, classical music wafting down from the living room stereo – Bloody Mary’s being concocted on the circular marble bar above us with stalks of celery and generous wedges of lime on rim.

I loved coming to Peoria, even though it was a ‘podunk town’ according to Mom. It wasn’t our family home and it wasn’t Washington, but Peoria had become a hub over the years of visits, especially since Mom had invested in a little house around the corner from her sister in the historic Moss Avenue district.

‘Or you could have a Bloody Maria, you know, with tequila,’ my aunt’s voice called out over the Bach.
Aunt M, with her socialite gene, knew how to make even the dying days festive.

‘What about you, Ro? A Clamato on the rocks.’

Mom nodded, her eyelids resting shut, and I called up for her.

‘Annie,’ Mom whispered, gray-blue eyes fixed on me. ‘It’s the only thing my body seems to tolerate these days. Craves the lycopene for some strange reason.’

Mom was talking about her body as though it were already separate from her.

                                                         ~~~

The workers are still working, the break is serious, the hole is deep, I’m out of the Doldrums.

Change it Up

Beneath the thick canopy of late summer foliage I could hear my panting breath, feel my shoes smacking the pavement, my limbs heavy and stiff as tree trunks. ‘Never have been a morning person,’ I thought, wishing I could stop dead in my tracks and walk. The park was virtually empty. I seemed the only crazy soul out in the mid-August heat in Washington.

But the pain didn’t stop my mind from thinking, planning, ruminating, running in circles way faster than my legs could go. ‘Could I really just stop writing Mexico?’

‘Just 21 days,’ said my yoga/journalist friend Marilyn over lunch the day before. She’d planted a seed – or maybe it was a bomb. She knew I’d been toiling over my direction. I drew an image in my notebook, me at the trail head with several paths emanating outward and I was stuck there, frozen in indecision. Which story to focus on, which way to go?

‘Change things up,’ she suggested. ‘Whatever you’re doing now, drop it and do something else.’
The Mexico book had been weighing on me. ‘I’ve made promises to my backers. But I can't find my rhythm.’

‘Twenty-one days won’t kill you, the world won’t end. But it’s long enough to see where your energy is.’

At the ranger station, my half-way point, I doubled over to catch some breath. My energy was low. ‘Usually not this tired at two miles,’ my comparing mind hissed. I compared myself to myself most harshly.

Resting my hands on my slimy knees, I watched the sweat cascade to the ground.

'Change it up.' I had listened and broken my routine, hitting the trail in the morning rather than my more usual and comfortable evening hour. That was the trouble.

Suddenly a cardinal darted across my vision and into the brush. I could feel myself smile at the dazzling flash of red amidst all that green. Suddenly the creek, which had been running alongside me since the start, was audible, rushing raucously across the rocks, the thrilling sound of movement, even if relatively sluggish this late in the season.

Suddenly I was in my body, feeling the rise and fall of my back with my breath. I stood up, wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and got a notion. ‘I’m going in,’ I heard myself say. Fifteen years running this same 4-mile Rock Creek course several days a week, and I’d never, ever stopped to cool my feet. Always going someplace, on my way. An object at rest tends to stay at rest. Can't have that.

I started my legs back up, plodding across the bridge and u-turning onto the left bank toward home. ‘Don’t be silly,’ the saner me puffed, ascending the hill, pebbles crunching beneath my feet. ‘Just keep going, get home, things to do.’ That was Leo the lion, my rising sign, powerful but oftentimes a stick in the mud. My Pisces, the fish, by contrast, was more fluid, spontaneous, even playful.

As I coasted down, hopping horse dung, my steps lighter now across the bridle path, I found myself eyeing the creek for an access point: not too sunny or muddy a spot and watch-out for the poison ivy. The Fish was calling the shots now, drawing me toward the water. As I inched down the sandy back I could hear Leo (or was it my Mom) warning me: don’t you get those shoes wet.

I found a foothold on some protruding roots and, bending over, maintaining my balance, untied and slipped off my sweaty shoes and socks, one then the other, and perched them on a dry fallen limb. Stepping in I could feel the cool of the water around my calves, the soft slime of the river bed on my soles. A tiny gasp of ahhh seeped out of me as I stood inside the creek feeling its currents pushing against my skin. It was a whole new perspective, down low, watching the water flow south toward its destination, over and around boulders, logs, anything in its way.

I ran my fingers along the surface of the water, tiny salamanders darting around my toes, and rinsed my legs of the grit. A lone monarch butterfly fluttered by searching for a place to light.

Then an image of a phrase appeared across my screen of my quieted mind: ‘We had to unhitch our trailer from his.’

I climbed up the bank, repeating the phase. ‘…unhitch our trailer from Dad’s…if I could only convince Mom.’

Ever since my mother died two summers ago, images like this from my past had been popping up, especially when I ran. Moving my body set my mind free, though sometimes there are things you don’t want to see.

’21 days, it’s not gonna kill you.’

Back on the bank I found a log to perch upon. I brushed my feet of the icky dirt and leaves, pulled my socks on, one then the other, then my shoes. Tugging at the laces, I make a perfect loop around my thumb and for a brief moment there I was a kid again, what it was like when you felt a sense of quiet satisfaction over the smallest thing. A soft breeze wafted through the trees. The cicadas’ song crescendoed and diminuendoed beneath the canopy.

Hopping off the log, gazing down and my feet, I could feel the solid ground beneath me. It was time to take-off again, the muse was urging me. She’d been tugging on my skirt, tapping me on the shoulder, begging me to pay attention to her for the longest time. Now with this seed in my pocket, I felt the urgency too.

Descending out of the woods, feet slipping on the loose rock, I was eager to arrive, to sit on the front stoop, sweat dripping onto my legal pad, and let the truth come pouring out.

                                                                       ~~~

After the night in the family room on Friars, for the first time in my life standing up to Dad, it was a strange and unjust domino effect that led the cops back to me, and I was the guilty one. I was the one paying for the sins of the father. And it was just the beginning.

But I'd been surprised at how small my father seemed when I squared shoulders to face him, my fists clenched, ready to fight. ‘Fight me, not her,’ I yelled, standing taller than my shrimpy five feet. ‘I was the one who broke the door, I’m the guilty one,’ I set the record straight. And I watched him lean away from me.

It was just like that bully dog Cesar who constantly chased me down Wilmette, once up a tree, then jumped for my dangling legs and bit into my calf.

‘Son of a bitch.’ Blood was dripping down my leg and my sweaty hold was slipping, and eventually I had no choice but to drop to the ground and face him.

‘Cesar go home,’ I screamed and the voice came from a place deep inside me. It was ferocious. The little mutt backed down, simpering as he crossed Wilmette with his tail between his legs.

Our father had terrorized us for long enough. My mom lie whimpering on the floor of the family room. And for the first time, and for just a fleeting moment, I saw him for who he was: a weak man who could not, would never change. And in that moment I knew I was done with him.

We had to unhook our trailer from his and be free to go down our own road. He was only weighing the family down, holding us back from our lives, whatever they were going to be. I could see that so clearly. Why didn’t my mom?

Mexican Mask

I realized on the cushion this morning (a habit I’ve pledged to re-begin for the entire month of August): I’m not fixing anything on this spiritual path. I’m just uncovering who I really am. I could feel my shoulders relax and my monkey mind calm at the thought.

I’ve been hiding her, as if ashamed, afraid of her power. She tugs on my skirt. It’s the me who, in first grade, could have 'run this entire school,' so said my teacher Miss Casula. It’s the me who stood up to my bully father. And after seeing him back down, a sheep in wolf's clothing, nothing was the same.

‘Remember?’ the little girl says, looking up at me.

That girl’s got things to do, places to go, works to create, truths to proclaim.

Though the messages of the past ring-out like it was just yesterday: Don’t upset your father, don’t overshadow your sister, take care of your little brother, don’t ask too much of me. 

That’s Mom’s voice:  subtle, demure, just like her, never showy or direct. She probably had no idea she was sending such messages: a scowl of admonishment when I demanded she look at my art collage, a pat of approval when I sat still in front of the nightly news, a song of praise when I cleared the dinner table. I would do anything to please my Mom. She is in me now.
But if, over time and years of therapy and re-parenting, I had rebuilt some of my youthful power, it got knocked back out of me in Mexico, immersed, submerged as I was in a culture of paternalism and machismo.

I had to plead with the mayor: ‘Deja me trabajar,’ let me work! I was becoming one with the people in their struggle against the powers that be. After the news came from the Peace Corps bosses that I would be transferred to the capital or sent back home, I had to scramble. I would not, could not go. I needed the support of the townspeople. Surely they’d prefer I stay and try to do some good in their pueblo. Surely they would make the case for me.

‘Si, seguro,’ yes, of course, Anna, assured the Mayor's right hand man. I had prepared the sustainability training for the city functionarios, a task to make myself useful, justify my existence. This would be my chance to show my value. I had my PowerPoints translated, my exercises defined and my script ready, and I’d gotten myself mentally psyched-up to face my audience across the language divide. But again and again, the training had been postponed.

I was beginning to learn: Yes is not really a yes, guerrita, little white woman.

I had to be relentless, come back again and again, careful not to show any sign of weakness. Though simply forcing myself to wait in a chair outside the mayor’s office, and being passed over three or four times while continuing to smile and make small-talk with the with Julio the gate-keeper and the sweet senoritas as they stamped papers, endless mayoral sayos, stamps of approval, was not a winning strategy. It took me down notches, undoing all the assertive work I’d done. But sometimes I just didn’t have the energy to beat down the door. That’s just when I lost face, backing down from standing up for solar cookers in Puente Bajo where they couldn’t afford cooking gas, or the health clinic in Magdalenas or the trash pickup in Canada Grande. How did I know what was most important to run this municipio, really?

That was my Mexican Mask, doubtful, docile and sweet, though without the lipstick.

So much energy was required, so much confidence and assertiveness, to pull-off the simpatico mask  and just be myself. I was grappling with my power (or lack thereof) every single day. How much could I display, as a female, without offending someone, violating the customs, overstepping the bounds and being seen as the mala mujer? Containing and second-guessing myself sapped even more energy.

I would arrive at the Presidencia with adrenaline fight coursing through my veins and a commitment to myself to be heard. But as I sat in the waiting area, minutes and hours ticking away, amid the crisis (same word in Spanish) del dia, I could feel my aspirations deflating like a balloon. The door would open and a waft of AC would seep out, as the men with slicked hair and carnitas bellies spilling over shiny silver belt buckles marched in, butting ahead of me unapologetically. The door would shut tight behind them, leaving me with the camposinos and our collective sigh of ni modo. So it goes. I would convince myself that’s where I belonged, with the people, the oppressed versus the oppressors. Though I was getting nothing done out there.

If I were lucky, Julio the gate-keeper would apologize. ‘Lo siento, Anna, un dia loco, como siempre,’ a crazy day like always.

‘No problema,’ I would respond, like a liar, a sheep in wolf's clothing, standing over his boss’s calendar book spayed open on the table, hoping for a few minutitos of time.

‘Mejor in la manana, temprano,’ better in the early morning, he would say, encouragingly. But I knew it would be the same drill all over again. I would get out of bed early for nothing. That’s when I’d slink out, beaten like a piñata, wade through the sea of camposinos crowded in the hallway with their worn solicitudes for the roof laminas and food dispensas. Down the stairs I’d go, past the mural of Rioverde in its orange grove heyday, slipping past the guards, out the heavy doors, into the blazing morning sun, and wander the plaza for a while wondering what to do with my time and the adrenaline energy pulsing through my veins with no place to go.

But today was different. I didn’t care. It was best, I was learning, not to care what anybody thought. Not to care about busting the norms, fitting it, becoming a 5 on the god-damned Peace Corps integration scale.

I didn't want to be like a Mexican who, according to Octavio Paz, "shuts himself away to protect himself; his face is a mask and so is his smile. In his harsh solitude, which is both barbed and courteous, everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation.”

I would not be resigned. I had to have the mayor’s commitment to the EcoFeria. And I was going to get it. Yes, they had signed the solicitude, in a dog and pony show stunt at Parque Revolution, snapping photos for the press. But now they had to make good on the promise.

‘Necesito ver Ruben,’ I said to Julio, unsure if the literal translation was correct. But I didn’t care about that either. I need to see Ruben, that simple. I stood over Julio’s desk and I was not going to budge.

He glanced up with a pained look on his face, his unibrow furrowed. And I repeated myself, placing the signed solicitude on top of the agenda book open on his desk. ‘Necesito ver Ruben hoy,’ today.
Suddenly the door to the inner sanctum opened and Ruben was standing there, like the Wizard of Oz coming out from behind the curtain. ‘Venga, Anna,’ he said, inviting me in, nodding at Julio. The senoritas looked up from their stamping, red lipsticked mouths agape.

The door shut behind me. This time I was inside, the AC splitter humming, ready to do business.

Mexican Mask

I realized on the cushion this morning (a habit I’ve pledged to re-begin for the entire month of August): I’m not fixing anything on this spiritual path. I’m just uncovering who I really am. I could feel my shoulders relax and my monkey mind calm at the thought.

I’ve been hiding her, as if ashamed, afraid of her power. She tugs on my skirt. It’s the me who, in first grade, could have 'run this entire school,' so said my teacher Miss Casula. It’s the me who stood up to my bully father. And after seeing him back down, a sheep in wolf's clothing, nothing was the same.

‘Remember?’ the little girl says, looking up at me.

That girl’s got things to do, places to go, works to create, truths to proclaim.

Though the messages of the past ring-out like it was just yesterday: Don’t upset your father, don’t overshadow your sister, take care of your little brother, don’t ask too much of me. 

That’s Mom’s voice:  subtle, demure, just like her, never showy or direct. She probably had no idea she was sending such messages: a scowl of admonishment when I demanded she look at my art collage, a pat of approval when I sat still in front of the nightly news, a song of praise when I cleared the dinner table. I would do anything to please my Mom. She is in me now.
But if, over time and years of therapy and re-parenting, I had rebuilt some of my youthful power, it got knocked back out of me in Mexico, immersed, submerged as I was in a culture of paternalism and machismo.

I had to plead with the mayor: ‘Deja me trabajar,’ let me work! I was becoming one with the people in their struggle against the powers that be. After the news came from the Peace Corps bosses that I would be transferred to the capital or sent back home, I had to scramble. I would not, could not go. I needed the support of the townspeople. Surely they’d prefer I stay and try to do some good in their pueblo. Surely they would make the case for me.

‘Si, seguro,’ yes, of course, Anna, assured the Mayor's right hand man. I had prepared the sustainability training for the city functionarios, a task to make myself useful, justify my existence. This would be my chance to show my value. I had my PowerPoints translated, my exercises defined and my script ready, and I’d gotten myself mentally psyched-up to face my audience across the language divide. But again and again, the training had been postponed.

I was beginning to learn: Yes is not really a yes, guerrita, little white woman.

I had to be relentless, come back again and again, careful not to show any sign of weakness. Though simply forcing myself to wait in a chair outside the mayor’s office, and being passed over three or four times while continuing to smile and make small-talk with the with Julio the gate-keeper and the sweet senoritas as they stamped papers, endless mayoral sayos, stamps of approval, was not a winning strategy. It took me down notches, undoing all the assertive work I’d done. But sometimes I just didn’t have the energy to beat down the door. That’s just when I lost face, backing down from standing up for solar cookers in Puente Bajo where they couldn’t afford cooking gas, or the health clinic in Magdalenas or the trash pickup in Canada Grande. How did I know what was most important to run this municipio, really?

That was my Mexican Mask, doubtful, docile and sweet, though without the lipstick.

So much energy was required, so much confidence and assertiveness, to pull-off the simpatico mask off and just be myself. I was grappling with my power (or lack thereof) every single day. How much could I display, as a female, without offending someone, violating the customs, overstepping the bounds and being seen as the mala mujer? Containing and second-guessing myself sapped even more energy.

I would arrive at the Presidencia with adrenaline fight coursing through my veins and a commitment to myself to be heard. But as I sat in the waiting area, minutes and hours ticking away, amid the crisis (same word in Spanish) del dia, I could feel my aspirations deflating like a balloon. The door would open and a waft of AC would seep out, as the men with slicked hair and carnitas bellies spilling over shiny silver belt buckles marched in, butting ahead of me unapologetically. The door would shut tight behind them, leaving me with the camposinos and our collective sigh of ni modo. So it goes. I would convince myself that’s where I belonged, with the people, the oppressed versus the oppressors. Though I was getting nothing done out there.

If I were lucky, Julio the gate-keeper would apologize. ‘Lo siento, Anna, un dia loco, como siempre,’ a crazy day like always.

‘No problema,’ I would respond, like a liar, a sheep in wolf's clothing, standing over his boss’s calendar book spayed open on the table, hoping for a few minutitos of time.

‘Mejor in la manana, temprano,’ better in the early morning, he would say, encouragingly. But I knew it would be the same drill all over again. I would get out of bed early for nothing. That’s when I’d slink out, beaten like a piñata, wade through the sea of camposinos crowded in the hallway with their worn solicitudes for the roof laminas and food dispensas. Down the stairs I’d go, past the mural of Rioverde in its orange grove heyday, slipping past the guards, out the heavy doors, into the blazing morning sun, and wander the plaza for a while wondering what to do with my time and the adrenaline energy pulsing through my veins with no place to go.

But today was different. I didn’t care. It was best, I was learning, not to care what anybody thought. Not to care about busting the norms, fitting it, becoming a 5 on the god-damned Peace Corps integration scale.

I didn't want to be like a Mexican who, according to Octavio Paz, "shuts himself away to protect himself; his face is a mask and so is his smile. In his harsh solitude, which is both barbed and courteous, everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation.”

I would not be resigned. I had to have the mayor’s commitment to the EcoFeria. And I was going to get it. Yes, they had signed the solicitude, in a dog and pony show stunt at Parque Revolution, snapping photos for the press. But now they had to make good on the promise.

‘Necesito ver Ruben,’ I said to Julio, unsure if the literal translation was correct. But I didn’t care about that either. I need to see Ruben, that simple. I stood over Julio’s desk and I was not going to budge.

He glanced up with a pained look on his face, his unibrow furrowed. And I repeated myself, placing the signed solicitude on top of the agenda book open on his desk. ‘Necesito ver Ruben hoy,’ today.
Suddenly the door to the inner sanctum opened and Ruben was standing there, like the Wizard of Oz coming out from behind the curtain. ‘Venga, Anna,’ he said, inviting me in, nodding at Julio. The senoritas looked up from their stamping, red lipsticked mouths agape.

The door shut behind me. This time I was inside, the AC splitter humming, ready to do business.