A Map

Starting in high school- or maybe middle school- I started keeping notebooks. At first they were just diaries... journals of a teenage girl and her emotional instability. It's hard not to laugh when I read those now. But my senior year I started keeping a notebook. My Grandmother had given it to me to write stories in, but I am a perfectionist at heart and I knew that anything I wrote would have to be edited and torn apart. The idea of using such a permanent book for such transitory writing was unthinkable, so it became my first notebook.
I don't think I intended for it to be what it was. It was mostly supposed to be a journal, full of more blathering. But I started to write occasional poetry, make lists of my favorite words, snippets of conversations and essays and pictures- drawn (though not well) or cut out of magazines. I reread that one a lot. It marked a change in me- the beginning of a maturity that was still a long way off, but is there nontheless, in ink.
When I was in graduate school David Novak suggested that we use the cheap, black and white composition notebooks that you can get almost anywhere, to side-step the perfectionism in us all. SO I did. It was usually bigger than the other notebooks I had used, so that was nice. Sometimes I'd copy recipes, poetry, goals, thoughts, notes that are sometimes undecipherable to me now. But the evidence of who I'd been and what I wanted are all there in ink.

I stopped keeping a notebook a while back. Maybe it was when I had Jonah. There was so much stuff to carry that one more thing was just too much, sometimes. I didn't even keep one in my bedside table anymore, though.

This morning Josh took Jonah to the More Tractors Store, so I was checking my email and blogs that I occasionally read when I have a chance and I stumbled on this blog post about Vision Maps and setting Goals. I suddenly realized that I had been doing that with my notebooks. I wasn't just documenting myself, but I was also reminding myself what I wanted and who I wanted to be. I don't do that anymore.

I've felt lonely over tha last year or two in ways that I can't quite pinpoint. I have friends, family, I'm not isolated. But I haven't been acquainted with myself in a long while. I pulled a bunch of pages out of an old composition notebook this morning. They were notes from teaching- things I won't need again. I'm thinking I might need to put some ink on some paper.

The Crazy Amalgamation

Someone asked me the other day if I was "done blogging." I started thinking about it and I realized that the answer was almost certainly a no... but, as in many other things right now, finding the time to really organize whatever thoughts I'm having is far more difficult than I imagined.

Than I realized that thinking of writing in that was was really just not fair to me. Who says this blog has to be any sort of organized? Really... I mean, check my favorite posts list on the left.
So here goes nothin'.

The Crazy Amalgamation

* I am slightly depressed lately because it is November again. No, I do not have seasonal depression- I have NaNoWriMo depression. For those of you who don't know, it is national Novel Writing Month, and yet again, I simply ignore it because I am too afraid to make the time to try. I tried several years ago and didn't get past the third day. Pathetic.
I know that it takes and enormous amount of self-discipline to write an entire novel- most certainly in one month- but to be unable to even make an honest attempt is really just depressing. Perhaps the disappointment comes largely because I am now 30 years old (as of September 26th... when I wasn't blogging) and I still lack that kind of self-discipline.

*My house is a wreck. Can I stop throwing up now? Oh yes, I'm pregnant again and due about May23rd. I'm not sure how this is supposed to work with two. Isn't it smart to outnumber them???

*I got a second job... I'll be teaching at OCU in the spring. Only one class. School ends at the beginning of May. I'll have #2 at the end. Am I prepared for this? Probably not, but I am looking forward to some more adult conversation.

*Josh put up a fence around our property this summer. This might turn out to bite us since the leaves eventually just blem away last year. Not so much this year.

*It is much too close to Christmas and I have not yet started my Christmas shopping. This is making me nervous and a bit anxious. Money is obviously getting tighter, so I'm having to be more creative. So, seriously, what do you want, cause I need to get on it!

*I've been reading the Inkheart series. I've yet to read the last one. So far I'm enjoying them, though the second book is sort of slow int he middle. If anyone has the third one, please let me know so i can mooch it off of you for a few days. I've also started Audrey Nefenegger's new book Her fearful Symmetry, but found I didn't have time to finish it, so had to return it. I'd like to finish it soon, but I think that might be wishful thinking for the time being. Anybody else read a good book lately?

*I'm looking at a pink sunset right now.

The Girl on Pg. 194

I was looking at a friend's blog and she had posted a link to Glamour Magazine. I was kind of shocked because she isn't really a "Glamour" kind of girl. Then I looked at the link. I also managed to find an article about that photo on CNN.com The article mentioned that magazines didn't want normal looking women because they believed that the women who read the magazine wanted to look at a fantasy, not a normal woman.

Huh?

Try to stay with me on this. I swear it's related.

I've been really listening to fairy tales lately trying to figure out how they related to my life, and the lives of the women I know. I had a post recently of an experiment that is probably the first of many experiments with fairy tales and regular modern women. It's a project I'm working on... we'll see how it works out.

The thing is, I'm doing this project because fairy tales seem somewhat unrelatable to me in many ways, but after reading "Spinning Straw into Gold" I want to be able to relate to them better. I feel like women need to be able to relate to them better, and I want to facilitate that. We need to understand the rich truths that our grandmothers wove into story. We don't just want to fall into fantasy, we want to to know that the fantasy is (as the CNN article says) achievable. With Fairy Tales, the fantasy isn't just achieveable, it is also an explanation of the places we must travel to find our way in this life.

So, hopefully coming soon... Cinderella.

Singing and Telling

I'm currently in the throes of VBS. Beginning Sunday night we will be performing a 20 minute play every night on the life of Moses. I'm really enjoying the opportunity to act again- even though my lines are small and my role is largely supportive. The only thing is that I had a solo to sing on the first night. Had.

See, the song was "Tomorrow" from Annie. They had changed the words and I was supposed to sing for about three minutes tops. Did I mention that the main character in Annie is a young girl? And that I sing alto? It wasn't working very well even though we tried a few different things to lower the range and keep me where I needed to be. It was pretty much a train wreck. The only thing is that Moses has a huge costume change during the song so we couldn't just cut it.

So tonight I talked to our director and Larry suggested that we try something different. Instead of me singing- what if I used my fabulous education to (get this) tell the story. He asked me to go home and work on a short bit of storytelling that we could work with. So that's what I did tonight. I came home at 10:30 and looked up Exodus 2. I wish I had more information about Moses' life while he was gone from Egypt, but I think what I've got will work. I'll let you know how it goes.

Sleeping Beauty

She lay stretched out, completely relaxed on the bed. Her golden hair spread out on the pillow around her face. She has slept for what seems forever. This is certainly not a normal night of sleep, or a normal nap. She slid into this sleep like a leaf drifting down From a tall tree to float on the surface of something deceptively deep and swift.
How long she should sleep is unknown. She waits for the clear, handsome face to peer down at her, to beckon her to wakefulness and the life she was certainly meant for. Years passed in which she was unknowingly shielded from the difficulty of the life that came as her birth right. Until that day when she crossed the protected boundaries of her childhood and stepped into the harsh reality of her adulthood.

And now she sleeps. Just for now. For, soon enough, a handsome face will peer down at her and reach over with his hand placed just under her jaw and say, "Tickle Tickle Tickle!" She she will wake to her prince- her little prince.

Once upon a time...

One thing I would like to start doing is posting a new story each week. I can't guarantee it will happen (as a matter of fact I can almost guarantee it won't happen this week due to VBS practice) but I can say that it should become a recurring type of post. To be honest, I'm not sure where to start, so I thought I might get some ideas from anyone who is reading this blog...

So to get things rolling... What fairy tale is your favorite and why?

The Black Bride and the White Bride

In fairy tales there is a naturally recurring theme of a false bride taking the place of the true bride. The false bride is often referred to as the Black Bride and the true bride is referred to as the White Bride.

Joan Gould talks about these two as two halves of the same woman. Often we see marriage as the fulfillment of a set of relationships: daughter, friend, lover, mother, sister... "With this ring, I become everything I am meant to be!" we should say.

However, the reality of the expectations of these relationships is often overwhelming- even oppressive- and enters the Black Bride. She is hideous. A shrew who is completely self-centered. The Prince wonders how he could have been so duped as to marry such a evil, foul woman, who is so obviously not the angel of the house he believed her to be...

What woman hasn't found herself transforming (some days when the kids are too clingy, or you find nails in your washer from your husband's pants) into that ugly, selfish witch? You want to love them and be everything for them, but part of you just wants to escape to the hammock and read, or find a quiet corner to paint, or just come home at the end of the day to find that your house is clean and quiet and no one is wanting anything from you. And yet, we also long for a home and family and people to give ourselves to. We long for someone to love us, and grow old with us. How could we not? No one wants to be alone, especially women, whose very DNA calls them to seek out the best genetic material available and procreate.

And how do we reconcile these two aspects of ourselves? Fairy tales seem to suggest two options. In The Black Bride and the White Bride the White Bride is revealed and the Black Bride killed. Do we really want to sacrifice our Selves to our children and husbands? If we did, there would be no Black Bride.

The other option lies in another story I've mentioned recently- the story of the Seal Wife. (I managed to find this copy of the story, but itis only briefly mentioned among other information about Selkies) In this story the wife is forced to abandon her true home, and after many years of marraige and bearing children, she finds her seal skin, and returns to her home. In some ways this story is slightly disturbing. What mother would abandon her children? And yet, she is not just a mother, but a beautiful creature who had been forced into servitude- although it wasn't exactly slavery since the story does say that she grew to love her husband. However, the story also makes it clear that her children were old enough not to be completely dependent on her, though that doesn't make it much less horrifying that she abandoned them.

Somewhere between these two extremes lies the key to a happy wife and mother. She does not put her Self to a gruesome death, but she also does not abandon her family to swim in the solitude of her own individual indulgence. The key is balance. Much like the rest of life, balance offers the opportunity to be both the dark and light aspects of Bridehood. How do you pin that down? Is there some method that we must all learn to execute in order to retain our essence without letting it drown us?

Perhaps that is the fairy tale I'm looking for.

Things that make me happy

1. The Torrential downpour we had this evening. Even though the weather has cooled to the mid-90's this week, it was so nice to have the rain cool us off even more!

2. Tick Spread. My husband is out running around the yard with the spreader right now to get rid of the little pests. It was getting bad. Jonah would point to the grass and say, "Ticks. Bite you!"

3. Cleaning out the vacuum bag. It always amazes me how much better my vacuum works when I've put in a new bag, or cleaned one out a little. It actually picks the rugs up and really sucks the Goldfish crumbs out of them.

4. My new bathing suit. The old one was (not so) affectionately referred to as the ugliest bathing suit on earth. Mostly because it looked like something you might see at the olympics. The new one makes me look like a girl. Yay.

5. Jonah knows his colors. We're still stumbling on white, and (on occasion) purple, but he had a quiz today at my mother's house, and (yes, I'm bragging) he's got them down.

6. The anonymous gift I received in the mail. After raving on my blog, facebook, and twitter about my new favorite book, someone bought it and had it mailed to me. No card.... Whoever you are- THANK YOU!

That's what's making me particularly happy today.

Chara

BlueBeard

I've been thinking a bit more about Bluebeard lately. I've been reading a book about it called "Secrets Beyond the Door" by Maria Tatar. I'm not very far in yet, but I found part of what she has said particularly interesting.

She quotes the movie, The Talented Mr. Ripley, (Josh and I watched this movie on our Honeymoon and I found it particularly disturbing at the time, since Mr. Ripley's talent seemed to be murdering close friends) in which Tom Ripley say's "Don't you put the past in a room, in a cellar and lock the door and just never go there? That's what I do. Then you meet someone special and all you want to do is toss them the key, say open up, step inside, but you can't because it's dark and there are demons and if anybody saw how ugly it was..."

It occurs to me that perhaps BlueBeard himself isn't the monster that the story makes him out to be, so much as he is the monster that we all are. Very few of us have murdered people the way Tom Ripley had, but we all harbor secrets of things we aren't proud of, or parts of ourselves that we instinctively know are not socially acceptable in some way. As in The Crane Maiden we might just be trying to protect the last private parts of ourselves from a spouse- to whom there are no longer any other private parts.

I find myself feeling sort of sorry for BlueBeard today. It seems he wanted to share all of himself with his wife, but the closest he could come was to trust her with the key to his secret.

Another option for your reading list

I've recently finished reading Joan Gould's "Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reaveal About the Transformations in a Woman's Life"

Just so you all know, I'd like my own copy. This is the kind of book that I will probably go back to over and over again, especially as I get older.

To be honest, I was somewhat dissatisfied with some of my classes at ETSU that had to do with the structure of fairy tales. We spent time talking about the Hero's Journey, but that left me wondering... what about the Heroine? Instead, I was left with Disney movies, trying to make sense of the Grimm's versions, and still not understanding why women in fairy tales seemed so passive and dependant. I always got really excited about stories like Molly Whuppie where the girl in the story took charge of her own future and kicked the ogre's behind. Do you hear me cheering??

Margaret Meyers (one of the other students at ETSU with me) told a story Norse (?) story about a Bride who was secretly switched with a witch, that has perplexed me since I first heard it. And then there is the equally perplexing story of "The Seal Wife," which is the Scottish folktale of a Seal-woman who is captured by a fisherman who makes her his wife by hiding her seal skin. Years later she finds it and immediately abandons her husband and children.

What do stories like this mean about women? If the Grimm Brothers were right and women were passing these along to one another, what were they trying to say about the life of a woman? What do these stories mean about who I am and who I am becoming?

Joan Gould did an excellent job of connecting the dots... and explaining that what may look like passivity and dependence is often very purposeful. What I have essentially come to realize, after processing this book for the last few days, is that the life journeys of men and women are completely different. A man's journey leads him away from home, to pursue a quest, and to come home the conquering hero... probably just to find himself another quest. Men are rarely looking mainly to transition, with the exception of Beauty and the Beast. What they are more often looking for is the opportunity to prove themselves the hero, and claim what they see as rightfully theirs. A woman's journey leads her through multiple transitions in life- she is always changing, like a perpetual caterpillar, always evolving, always spinning herself a new chrysalis... meaning that Sleeping Beauty's sleep was purposeful, Cinderella's stint in service was necessary. The Seal wife's flight from her family is a normal desire of many women (no wonder I never would have agreed with this idea after reading "The Awakening," I was in high school!), and many women feel that their identity is split like the White Bride and the Black Bride after they become wives and mothers.

The most interesting part of this book was the discussion about "BlueBeard." She largely pulls form a version called Fitcher's Bird, that was originally published in the Grimm's version. In this version there are three sister's who are forced to marry the murderous husband and the youngest revives her murdered sisters and orchestrates justice. I've always seen "Bluebeard" and "The Crane Maiden" as stories that were linked, but until now, it didn't dawn on me that the difference between the stories was the gender of the individual with the secret, and how that changes their reaction to being caught, and how and why they hide it in the first place.

This book is an epiphany. It's changing the way I look at my marraige and my husband, and myself. It's no wonder that I feel so fractured at times- every metamorphosis splits and doubles and murders aspects of the one being changed. It's also a comfort to know that this is a natural part of life- it means that we are all capable of change and expected to change.