writing

before you have a baby

~ GennaClaire ~ 10 Comments

I’m not a parent. And I have no plans of ever becoming one. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the concept.

And I have one question for those considering bringing another living, breathing, tiny human into this world: Will you love it?

You could have a boy. Or you could have a girl. He could be short. She could be tall. Attractive or homely. Smart or slow. Quick-tempered or easy-going. You could have a child who’s mentally handicapped. Who suffers from anxiety. Or multiple personalities. You could have a child who is blind. Or deaf. Your child could be gifted. A prodigy. A genius. You could have a boy who likes boys. A girl who likes girls. A boy who wants to be a girl. You could have a child born with no clear gender at all. You could have a child born with extra toes. Or one eye. Or no hair. Or terrible, incurable diseases. You could have a great athlete. A talented artist. A beauty queen. Your child could be perfect in your eyes.

Or they could be anything but.

And you have to think for a moment before creating that new person: Will you love it?

Now I don’t mean: Will you raise it. Teach the child right from wrong. Impart your beliefs, your prejudices, your religion. Rearing up an immaculate version of yourself who thinks the way you do, makes the same choices you do, never disappoints you. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about what happens when your freckled-face 13-year-old tells you he’s known he was gay since before he knew he was supposed to be straight. I’m talking about what happens when your all-star quarterback wants to go into theater. Or your Bible-school daughter wants to pursue Islam or Buddhism or atheism.

What do you do then? Will you love them?

Will you say Go on; explore the depths of your own soul. Find what makes you feel most honest, most joyful, most true. 

Or do you call them a disgrace and declare they are no longer welcome under your roof. Do you blame them for making these “choices.” Choices like seeds planted in their souls. Choices that have been growing in them and with them and because of them. Choices that are tucked into the farthest corners of their being. Choices they have no choice in.

Will you love them?

There are no qualifiers for being a parent. But maybe there should be just this one: Unconditional love.

If you are not capable of it, I ask that you think hard before having a baby.

Because we all deserve to be loved.

No matter who we are.

 

the artist’s prayer

~ GennaClaire ~ Leave a comment
"Muse of Creativity," a painting, poem, and prayer by my mom
“Muse of Creativity,”
a painting, poem, and prayer by my mom

–Muse of Creativity–

Come to this table filled

with brushes, paints and

water, a candle, a purple iris,

and most importantly,

Mother Mary. Come and

assist me in using my talents

to make beauty, to offer love,

to spread joy. Alone I cannot

create. With you, I am

emblazoned on the artistic path.

Never alone. Never afraid.

Always Brave. Thank you

for guiding me.

-KDS

gamophobia

~ GennaClaire ~ 30 Comments

We dodge the questions like two school kids playing tag, chirping “We’ll do it when we’re ready.”

“We’re saving up.”

“We’re not in a rush.”

But really, we’re just plain scared.

We see what happens when there’s nothing left to run from.

be patient with the process

~ GennaClaire ~ 11 Comments

I can say without a doubt in my mind that December 21, 2013, the day between my mom’s death and her funeral, was one of the hardest of my life.

My sister and I zombied through Pulaski, Tennessee, with red eyes and runny noses doing all the things that immediate family members do when someone dies. We ordered flower arrangements. We visited the funeral home. We reviewed the drafted obituary. We picked out songs for the memorial service. We worked on a eulogy.

But the most difficult thing we did that day was visit her home. It wast difficult because Mom’s adorable house, situated at the bottom of a hill on West Jefferson Street, was perfect. It was a sanctuary. A reflection of the essence of her. Except the essence of her was gone.

Mom had remarried that spring and my sister and I went to her house that day in hopes of getting some of her things that held sentimental value and comfort and memories for us. To me, the most important of those things were her paintings.

Mom started painting about 10 years ago–mostly of angels or Madonnas. I loved her whimsical, vibrant style. 

redtennisshoes

When we arrived to her sunroom-converted art studio, we found a handful paintings stacked in the corner. I flipped through and recognized a few from her Etsy shop. But there was a particular one I loved that was missing.

I asked her husband–Tom–if he knew anywhere else that painting might be, and he suggested the small storage shed on the side of the house.

And that’s where we found it.

Not just the painting I was hoping for but dozens of them. Stacks and stacks of her work–most of which I’d never seen before.

We brought them all in the house and began revealing one after the other, lining them along the walls so we could take them in. So we could bask in them.

paintings

They were magical. They were beautiful. They were her.

In addition to painting, Mom was a writer. And many of her paintings included words. Sometimes names of the Madonna or angel she was painting–Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Other times just uplifting messages, whatever she felt inspired to say.

And as my heart swelled looking at those paintings born from her hands–the hands that raised me, the hands that molded me into everything I am–it was as if they were speaking to me.

A butterfly blinking the words “Joy is everywhere.”

joy

A beautiful angel offering up “Transformation.”

transform

A pink and purple tree, saying simply “Love grows.”

love

A skull surrounded by roses soothing, “I honour what is lost & found.”

lostandfound

A wavy-haired woman suggesting that “Grace makes us whole.”

grace

It was like she had put those messages there for us. To ease our pain. To hold us as we cried. To echo in our heads as we mourned the loss of her.

The largest painting, nearly four times the size of the others, was of an anatomical heart, pierced with several spears and bursting with flames.

heart_far

And written in Mom’s familiar handwriting in the top corner were these words:

“In sorrow’s stillness, a tear comes that prisms light, a sigh comes forth

and something that was broken breathes.”

I don’t know what Mom was thinking when she painted those words. Or who she had in mind. Or what angel guided her hand. But those words were exactly what I needed to hear.

Now nearly eight months have gone by. I’m past the phase where I forget she’s gone and am constantly t-boned by that devastating realization. I’m past the phase where I cry all the time. I’m past the phase where I can’t sleep at night, where I can’t sit still, where I can’t let my mind wander.

Instead, I’m in the phase where I just miss her. And I wish she was still around. To be my goofy mom and my sweet friend. Some days I can’t think about anything except her. And she’s all I can ever seem to write about, no matter how long I spend trying to think of another topic. And I get scared when I can’t remember exactly how her voice sounds or what her different facial expressions look like or all her amusing catchphrases.

Some days I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface of my grief.

And on those days, I know if she was here, she’d remind me of the words I found on another one of her paintings last December.

bepatient

And of course, I know she’d be right.

the pros and cons of writer’s block

~ GennaClaire ~ 8 Comments

I don’t have writer’s block.

Because that’s when you can’t write.

Where your mind is a crevasse, a pit, a canyon–

Deep and vast and empty.

Vultures flying overhead,

scouring for bits of creative roadkill

left among the dust and heat.

Circling, swooping, diving

On a mindless, endless loop

Of absolutely nothing to say.

 

I don’t have writer’s block.

Because my mind is not a canyon.

But a chalkboard in a first-grade classroom

Filled corner to corner, top to bottom

with only two letters.

Or a typewriter with just two keys–

Two options, two choices.

I hunt and peck just like the vultures,

but there are only two letters for me to find.

Of the 21 consonants and 5 vowels in the English language–

the language I learned to speak by mimicking my mother as an infant,

the language I learned to write poetry in by copying my mother as a young girl–

Of all the letters she taught me,

Only two are within my reach.

Two alphabet neighbors,

Making one precious word:

M-O-M.

I’m an artist with only two colors.

I’m a musician with only two notes.

I’m a daughter with only one parent.

Because M-O-M is gone.

 

No, I don’t have writer’s block.

Because I cannot block out grief.

And I cannot block out angst.

Or flashbacks.

Or nightmares.

Or the swelling of my stomach when I miss her more

than having 24 more letters to work with–

Than having something else to say.

 

I don’t have writer’s block.

Because I can write.

I can write anger.

I can write devastation.

I can write longing.

I can write memory.

I can write her.

I just can’t seem to write anything else.

 

I don’t have writer’s block.

But there are some days

I wish that I did.

 

this is what death looks like

~ GennaClaire ~ 15 Comments

I watched a movie last week. It opened in a hospital with a mother on her deathbed.

Her young son standing by her side, holding back tears.

She looked over at him with tired eyes. And said sweet things like I love you, and you’ll be fine, and don’t you worry about me.

Before she drifted gently away.

But death doesn’t look like that.

All glitter and glamor and Hollywood.

And I didn’t know it until last year.

Before anyone dies in the movies, they get to say their final lines.

They get to finish their role.

They get to play their part.

But death doesn’t work like that.

Death comes in when you’re all alone in the hospital on Sunday night.

Because visiting hours are over. And your husband has gone back home.

When you think it’s just a bad cold, but really it’s pneumonia.

When they say you’re in ICU just as a precaution, but a third of hospitalized pneumonia patients don’t make it.

When the doctor comes into your room far later than he should for the day,

And you have to take notes with shaky hands because no one is there to take them for you.

“Respirator”

“Lung failure”

And your two daughters are scattered across the country.

Planning their Christmas visits to see you.

And they have no idea what’s coming.

And neither do you.

That’s how death works.

So you scribble down jagged notes in your tiny book and put it in your purse to tell Tom the next morning when he returns to your side.

But you never get the chance.

You’re the one-third.

And all alone, you slip into a coma.

With no one to tell your final lines to. No one to hear your goodbyes.

In the movies, the hospital patients look like mannequins.

Sickness is painted on with makeup.

Medical equipment is just another prop.

There are flowers on the bedside.

There are flowers.

But that’s not what death looks like.

Death looks like me calling Southwest Airlines in a panic to try to move my Christmas trip five days earlier because my mom might die.

Death looks like packing a black turtleneck dress next to a reindeer sweater because I’m not sure what the next seven days have in store.

Death looks like crying at an airport bar on a Monday afternoon while my flight’s delayed for two hours.

There is no glitter, no glamor in death.

And when I get to the hospital I’m rushed down dingy corridors lit by humming fluorescent overheads. It smells like latex and bleach and sweat (that I realize only later is actually my own).

Family members are on their phones contacting more family members. Everyone looks up when I arrive, but no one smiles. That’s what death looks like.

Like a monstrous version of the woman I call mother.

Blown up with so much fluid. So swollen I’m scared to touch her. Scared she might burst.

Death looks like eyelids held shut by medical tape.

Big puffy blisters all over her turgid face.

Black and blue bruises covering arms and cheeks.

Tubes shoved up her nose.

Yellow fingernails.

Needles coming out of her skin.

And small splotches of blood on the blanket from everywhere she’s been stuck.

In the movies, even the dying have a good hair stylist.

But mom’s soft hair was matted up on top of her head in a sticky, messy sumo-wrestler style bun.

She was foreign to me…unfamiliar.

I had to squint and study to recognize my mother in this ballooned woman lying on that hospital bed.

She looked like death.

Death looks like an oxygen monitor that keeps dropping further and further away from 100.

Death looks like a plastic bag that won’t fill up with urine.

It means she’s too sick. It means her organs are broken.

It means she’s not getting better.

It means she’s not coming back to say goodbye.

Death looks like planning a funeral four days before Christmas.

And opening the presents she got for me on the floor of her living room. Underneath her pink and white tree. Without her there to watch. Or hug. Or thank.

Death looks like two sisters with no mother.

Without a second take.

Without a denouement.

Without glamor.

Without glitter.

Without goodbye.

This is what death looks like.

love means never having to say you’re sorry

~ GennaClaire ~ 12 Comments

The summer semester before my senior year in college I took a course called Sociology in Film. That’s where I was first introduced to Love Story, a 1970s romantic drama about two college co-eds falling in love. I don’t remember many specifics from the movie, but what I do remember is a line from the closing scene. The main character tells his estranged father: “Love…love means never having to say you’re sorry!”

And that line plagued me for years. Because to me, it didn’t make any sense.

I.

Growing up I was a momma’s girl. I bonded with my mom from a young age, considered her one of my best friends throughout my adolescence and even into my 20s.

But that relationship wasn’t without turmoil. Mom suffered from depression. And when it swept up over her—all sudden and ferocious and overpowering—she’d shut herself in her room for days at a time.

In a deeply personal letter she wrote my sister and me when we were teenagers, she apologized for all those dark moments.

And I need to say I’m sorry I couldn’t be all those things that babies and toddlers’ walking falling legs desire… I’m sorry I could only be me and half the time I had no clue who that “me” even was.

That was my mother. She was the first love of my life. And this was not our only “I’m sorry.”

II.

Then there was First David. He was the boy I fell irrevocably in love with in the way only a sixteen-year-old heart knows how to do. He was the boy who promised me the world and the stars and forever. He was the boy I let have every part of me. And then he got drunk and stole those same intimate parts away from other girls on the side.

For six years First David and I bobbed and wove inside our ring of relationship. We threw punches and jabs like prizefighters—always waiting for a bell that was never going to ring. Each round ended with no victor, but plenty of apologies.

That was the second love of my life. “I’m sorry” was sewn into its seams.

III.

Later I found Second David. A quick-tempered Oklahoma transplant with a spotted past, Second David was a challenge in the same way growing a garden on a patch of earth that gets too much direct sunlight is a challenge. He was defiant and obstinate and volatile, but I loved him just the same.

Five years later, we’re still together. And more impressively, still happy. That’s not to say it’s all roses and rainbows these days. We have plenty of hunker-down, fist-shaking, voice-trembling fights. But when they’re over, we look each other in the eye and say we’re sorry.

That was the third love of my life. And “I’m sorry” helps us keep it together.

This is why the line from Love Story haunted me for so long, why it didn’t make sense through the lens of my first three loves.

IV.

But then there’s also my fourth love, my Amy.

When I was in college, I got back together with First David after one of his many infidelity escapades. Knowing none of my friends would support my decision, I lied about it. I lied about where I was going and who I was seeing and what I was doing.

After a few weeks, the buried truth bubbled its way to the surface, leaving all my poor choices and deceit fully exposed. Some of my friends shunned me; some yelled at me; some stopped talking to me.

But not Amy.

Amy had been my closest companion since middle school. We met in sixth grade but didn’t really hit it off until seventh. By the end of eighth, we were inseparable. Our friendship survived high school—even with her as a popular cheerleader and me as a reclusive nerd—, dorming together our freshman year of college, and the many years of self-discovery that followed. We never had a single fight, an argument, or even a tough moment of differing opinions.

When I tried to apologize to her for lying about reuniting with First David, she cut me off before the words could even begin to come out of my mouth.

“You don’t have to say it,” she said with empathy and kindness. “I already know.”

<3.

Looking back on it now, I realize that never having to say “I’m sorry” isn’t about not screwing up. It isn’t about loving someone so much that you never hurt them, that you never let them down. It’s about understanding someone enough, trusting someone enough, loving someone enough, that those explanations are simply not needed.

Love is real. It’s flawed. There are mess-ups and break-ups and make-ups. Some loves need apologies. And that’s okay.

But the fourth love of my life was different.  The fourth love of my life was Amy. And thanks to her, the words from Love Story finally make sense.

 

This piece was crafted as part of YeahWrite.me‘s Summer Series Silver Lounge. Thank you to three incredible bloggers (Meg of Pigspittle, Ohio, Tienne of The Silver Leaf Journal, and Rowan of Textwall) who provided invaluable feedback and pushed this post–and this blogger–to a stronger place.

an open letter to the yeah write community

~ GennaClaire ~ 36 Comments

My mom was a writer. She was, in fact, the best writer I know. And I don’t say that because she passed away in December. I’ve always thought it and said it and believed it to be true.

That’s why it meant so much to me when she provided feedback on my writing. Despite having a public blog for the past 10 years, Mom was the only one who read anything I wrote. Or at least she’s the only one who cared enough to write back.

She sent many of her comments via email. And I saved them. Filed them away for safekeeping so I could read them again one day. So I could hear her encouraging words in my head.

Genna,

I was reading a little of your blog, and I think it is so amazing. And so YOU.

And you are one special woman on this earth. I’m glad the earth gets to share its circling with you.

I think you are a phenomenon!

Love,

Mom

Or in response to a specific piece I sent her:

Genna,

What you’ve written here is absolutely stunning–it moved me. YOU are such a gifted writer or words–a woman of exquisite depth that few at your age GET. I’m proud to be your mother–to watch your stars shine.

THANK YOU for sending me this part of you.

Mom

When Mom left, I wanted to write. I wanted to write out the grief. I wanted to write out the incomprehension. I wanted to write out the numbness. But for me, part of wanting to write is wanting someone…anyone to read.

And so I decided to give WordPress a try. I moved over my works from other blogs, started writeamuck.com, and wrote my little heart out. All while trying not to think about how much I wanted to send links to Mom–to hear her gush over it in the sweet way that mothers do.

I’d only been on WordPress for a little over a month when I noticed a small uptick in blog visitors.

I looked at the referral links; the new traffic was all coming from a single source: YeahWrite.me.

That’s when I discovered this community, the first community of writers—outside of just me and my mother—that I’ve ever been a part of.

Excited to find this gem, I set out to write my first post specifically for the Challenge Grid. Like never before, I searched for inspiration and a strong theme. And once again Mom was there to nudge me along; I wrote a post titled “the lost and the found” about losing her and how we remember.

That post was voted audience favorite that week on the grid and was later picked up by Freshly Pressed. I mention it not to brag but to say thank you. Because if I’d never found this community, I doubt I’d ever have written it.

Now I look forward to the grids every week. I’m pushed to improve. I’m encouraged to continue. And I’m inspired by reading what everyone else writes.

On the days that I long to send something to Mom, on the days that I wish she was still here to be my favorite writer and most dedicated reader, I’ll skim through the comments left for me by my Yeah Write friends. And read through new stuff by my favorite writers who blog and bloggers who write.

And it lifts my spirits. And it restores my confidence. And above all else, it makes me want to keep writing.