Growing up, my family told me stuff about how it doesn’t matter what a person looks like on the outside, it’s what’s inside that counts. I was praised, or criticized, based on my actions not my appearance. Somewhere along the line I realized that those are the same sorts of things nice people say to unattractive girls to make them feel better. The lesson I took from this was that I was an unattractive girl, but my family loved me anyway. More than anything else, I have been the victim of my own storytelling.

the victim of my own storytelling

I tried to be pretty. Well, I tried to be thin, because I believed that if I was thin enough, then I would be pretty. I stopped eating around the time I was twelve. I would go two or three days at a time without eating anything and then I would break down and eat everything I could get my hands on. Every bite of food that passed my lips was a failure. I was too fat to eat, I didn’t deserve to eat. I didn’t even feel hungry most of the time. What I did feel was constant fatigue, headaches and mood swings. The thing is, for thirteen years I ate less than anybody I knew, and I kept gaining weight.

Then I became a mom. I ate vigorously through pregnancy. I didn’t get fatter, just healthier. Then the baby stopped sleeping and I understood why cops are stereotyped as living on donuts and coffee. When a person is that exhausted, quick carbs and caffeine are the next best thing to sleep. I punished my body, but not so much out of vanity as from being too overwhelmed to see any other option. As the children got older and I reacquainted myself with sleep I began to think about how to integrate that healthy thing I’d experienced during pregnancy into the rest of my life.

Having a daughter is a brutal mirror. It drove me crazy watching my husband tell my daughter she wasn’t full, she could finish what was on her plate. He wasn’t in the girl’s stomach, how did he know? It drove me crazy watching my mother-in-law (a woman who maintained a fabulous figure for much of her adult life) tell my daughter she wasn’t hungry anymore, that was enough food for now. She wasn’t in the girl’s stomach, how did she know? It also made me face what a short drive it was to crazy when even my young children knew that mommy doesn’t eat. I had to change what I was if I was going to have any healthy impact on who she became.

Around the same time I was wrestling with all of this, I discovered facebook. I tend not to look at pictures of myself, because I never like what I see. On facebook I found old friends and they found old photos and I found a certain joy in sharing these memories. I also couldn’t help but see that I was never as fat as I thought I was. I also have friends who look at current pictures and call this tired old thing pretty. My friends aren’t idiots and they aren’t blind, and it wouldn’t be very nice for me to call them liars. But it’s not easy to let go of decades of telling myself that I am not the pretty one.

How much easier it is, when crushing on a boy, to tell myself that he’s out of my league. He couldn’t really want me. I don’t have to risk disappointment if I banish all hope. I have kept my heart carefully guarded behind the roles of funny sidekick, pudgy nurturer and “just one of the guys.” I am not the leading lady type. I am something comfortable, familiar, safe. I learned to play to my strengths, as I perceived them. I held on tightly to anything that told me I was too fat or too plain, and quickly discarded any evidence to the contrary.

Now I have roller derby. I eat all the time. The thing is, all this eating is not making me fat. Some of that is because I try to eat things that nourish rather than merely placate my body. Some of that is that skating burns a lot of fuel. Recently, I tried to wash this dark spot from my face that turned out to be a shadow in an unfamiliar hollow beneath my cheekbone. I have one on each side, a little hollow that proves there is a cheekbone above it. Who knew? I have discernible collar bones again too. Wow.

Then there is the travesty that is my midsection. It has the same iridescent pallor as the belly of a dead fish, but with the added insult of great long stretch marks running its full length. It’s also loose, like postpartum loose, so much more skin than I am filling. It’s really not an attractive feature, even fully clothed, there is just something wrong with this gut. I was strutting out of my daughter’s school this morning (I always have a little swagger the morning after derby practice) and I noticed my reflection in a window. More to the point, I noticed the shape of my strange marsupial pouch of extra belly in the window. It kinda made me laugh, the way it didn’t go with my carefree sashay.

It’s a strange thing for me, confronted with some glaring flaw in myself, to just laugh it off. “Whatever, belly, I don’t care today.” I know that underneath that gut I was engaging my abs. I have the heart of an athlete and the quadriceps of a superhero. I know that every week I skate a little bit better than the week before. I know that I can skip and dance and jump with this body here. I don’t really care what dress size I’m squishing it into. Do you have any idea how amazing it feels to breathe all the way to the bottom of my lungs? Today I didn’t look at my reflection and see that unfortunate looking, unworthy, girl. Yeah, I saw the shape of that belly, but it was just an artifact from the way I lived before, another scar that shows what I’ve survived. I know the way the muscles move beneath that shrinking layer of fat, and not-so-shrinking layer of skin. I feel like a fitness model underneath it all. For the first time in my life I realized, I do feel pretty on the inside.

I get a lot of spam comments. I’ve set up filters, which are currently preventing me from commenting on my own blog. It’s a decidedly imperfect system. If a comment doesn’t set off any red flags for the plugin, then I get to personally green light it, or give it the axe. Sometimes spam is hard to recognize, I mean, a stranger could, maybe, be saying that. Then I have to look at other info, like whether their username reads like bad ad copy or not. Sometimes it’s a tough call based on an only slightly suspicious link. Sometimes the unwelcome comment is hilariously inappropriate, and I get a good chuckle as I click the comment away to what I hope is some interwebby form of perdition.

I am forever finding poetry, even in spam. Recently, I received the line, “you are my inhalation!” I’m assuming this was some sort of translator software mishap, and that they meant to say, “you are my inspiration!” Only in this case “they” wasn’t so much a person as a spambot, some hack programmed to throw that bait out to countless blogs. Nobody was saying that to me, though I kinda wish they were.

Inspire and inhale aren’t used the same at all, but they are partners in the same dance. Part of making word choices as a writer is knowing etymology, alternate meanings and more precise connotations. Every now and then I find one word that can say what I mean on three different levels without any contrivance necessary. I love those moments. Don’t get me wrong, I misspeak, a lot. Sometimes I mean one thing and clumsily, artlessly, say another, but my verbal stumbling isn’t the point. Let’s get back to inspire-

ORIGIN Middle English enspire, from Old French inspirer , from Latin inspirare ‘breathe or blow into,’ from in- ‘into’ + spirare ‘breathe.’ The word was originally used of a divine or supernatural being, in the sense ‘impart a truth or idea to someone.’

So inhalation is what I breathe in and inspiration is what is breathed into me. If namaste is the divine in me bowing to the divine in you and inspiration is the divine breathed into me, then maybe, if you are my inhalation that is me accepting the gift of your divinity. Maybe when I prefer someone’s company to food or drink or rest I am sustaining myself on this breath. If rescue breathing allows first responders to breathe life into the dying, maybe this is how the resuscitation of the spirit works. Maybe the friends we choose are the ones who know the rhythm of compressions and breaths our own soul needs. When I look into someone else’s eyes and something there stirs me so deeply that I have to catch my breath, maybe it is not my own breath I catch.

Maybe I shouldn’t do routine website maintenance on sleepless nights. Better rested I might have been able to write a proper poem from the seed. Better rested I might have just hit delete and been done with it. Instead, gripped by the romantic vulnerability of my insomnia, I find myself stuck on the singular concept. I want to breathe you in. You are my inhalation.

my head is full of weeds

For Me

I’m sure it must be tender
I know it would be sweet
It could touch me very deeply
and sweep me off my feet
His love is many things,
but that’s another story
Because I know the thing it isn’t
that his love is not for me

I wouldn’t want to let him go

if he wished to hold me tightly
I would hug him every morning
and have him kiss me nightly
Old enough to know better
fool enough to want it sorely
Still I know I’ll never have it
that his love is not for me

I’ll have my own beautiful sunsets,
rainy days and starry nights
I’m going to have adventures
and transatlantic flights,
nearly anything I want to have
nearly all I want to be
and just a little bit of sadness
that his love is not for me

My first byline was in the Jan-Feb., 1990 issue of L.A. Youth. I’d been struggling for a few months to find my way as a teen journalist. I’m useless at writing reviews. It doesn’t matter what the movie, book or album, I will find something I like about it and I will focus on that positive. This is great for whoever I’m reviewing, but a distinct disservice to readers trying to decide how to spend their limited entertainment budget. I’m not any better at hard journalism, ’cause that kind of journalism is really hard. It hurt my brain just helping other people with their fact checking. Everything had to be true, not just the kind of true you feel in your bones, but the kind of true you could prove in court. It was kinda fun getting direct quotes from people, but only when I remembered to write them down exactly. Nope. I’m not cut out to be a journalist.

That didn’t stop L.A. Youth from giving me a voice. In December of 1989 I turned in a little rant I’d written, more of a journal entry than an article. They ran it. That alone was kind of amazing to me. A real byline, in a publication any random member of the public could read. Still, I knew these people. They seemed to like me. Why not? I tried to be helpful carrying folding chairs about the senior center where we’d meet, and loading stacks of the paper in and out of our founder’s station wagon. I was of use in whatever way I could be. Maybe they were just being nice. It’s just that after the issue was out I got letters from total strangers. Only a few, but still, people who didn’t know me had read my writing and been touched by it. In that issue, not only did I discover that I had a voice, I discovered that using it could be of service. It wasn’t just selfish, whiny, somebody-read-what-I-made. It was connection, it was, “me too,” it was, “you are not alone.” It was powerful. I was powerful. There are very few things that make a fifteen year old girl feel powerful. L.A. Youth is one of them.

They are facing a critical financial crisis. If you can, please donate now.

I still have a laminated copy of my first article hanging on my office wall. It reminds me that I have a voice and that my voice matters. This is where it all began-

In Search of a Cause
by Crystal Torres

I am 15, and the year is 1990. Still the songs that play in my life are the songs of the 60′s. The music of the Woodstock generation. These songs were written when my mother was young, but I am the one dancing to them now. These songs preach about ending the war. I don’t know war. There’s one in Panama right now, but nobody cares about that one. The U.S. will win. To a lot of people that’s all that matters. The teach us, the children, peace, but then they laugh at war.

I want to stop the fighting, but I haven’t the slightest idea how to. I am of a generation that idolizes the 60′s. I, like a large number of my friends, looked on to the 90′s as our 60′s. The hippie skirts, peace symbols and ankhs. A fashion statement and a state of mind. We’d bitch and moan about the environment until someone fixed it, then we’d sell out, settle down and reminisce about the good old days. I don’t like to see myself as such a “wanna-be” but I hand no passion and no cause, only an unmotivated restlessness ad a groovy state of mind.

Then the night last December when they interrupted my perfect world sitcom to tell me the U.S. was at war with Panama. I had a cause, and for the first time in my three-and-a-half year mock hippiedom I had no idea what to do. The 90′s are supposed to be everything the 60′s were, without the war.

The hardest part wasn’t finding out that my country hadn’t outgrown wars, it was wanting to scream words of peace and knowing nobody cared enough to hear them. And now I am sitting typing feverishly, a Buffalo Springfield CD blaring in the background, yearning for the passion that my generation was denied. I want something to scream about and I want to hear a million voices screaming the same thing. I want today to mean so much that I won’t care about tomorrow. I k[n]ow that won’t happen, though; I don’t have a today. In the sixth grade my friends and I were planning ever detail of junior high, dedicated to picking high school classes, and now that I’m in tenth grade I’m studying for my SATs and I know most of the colleges I want to apply to. This is neither a joke nor an exaggeration. This is a genuine waste of a perfectly good youth. Youth that could be dedicated to the passion of today.

I could be making love and picking flowers. I could wake up tomorrow and hitchhike across the country singing songs that have no words (like the M.A.S.H. them[e] “Suicide is Painless”), but I won’t. I’ll get up, take a long hot shower and do things that I don’t really want to, but that I know are good for my future. And I’ll pretend not to care that I’m letting a perfectly good childhood go to waste without an ounce of passion.

Peace, love and tie-dye; what my teen years were all about.

I am not generally inclined to like vampires as romantic figures. Monsters are monsters and I’d rather not flirt with them. It’s just that sometimes I feel a bit like a monster myself. There’s a little trap door in my mind, and I don’t know what trips it, but every now and then it opens. All my past transgressions come tumbling down and weigh heavy on my heart. I am well intentioned, always so well intentioned. It’s just that anyone old enough to have loved and lost carries a few demons with them. I never mean to hurt people, but I know I have, I fear I will. So when I find myself inclined to open up, I also find myself inclined to shut myself off. A lot of my poetry comes from that place. I’m picking up old hurts and putting them back in the attic, hoping I’ll forget them. Maybe these poems are my label making, so I remember what is in each box.

Let Me In

My heart is a vampire
it destroys and devours
Your wounds sing like sirens
in these darkest of hours
I will consume you
convert your faith into sin
I know you’re bleeding inside
So please, let me in

I’ll court you with pleasure
and leave you with grief
Your vulnerability grips me
and it gives no relief
I’m hungry and aching
you’re netting me in
You know you can have me
but first, let me in

A friend and I working faire (photo by L. Scott, 1988)

I was in seventh grade, a year older than my daughter is now, when I started, “working,” faire. “Work,” being rather euphemistic as it was largely just playing dress up with a theme and food tickets were the closest I got to being paid. The next year I was fortunate to have friends from school not just visiting me, I had them working along side me. It occurred to me that my daughter has friends who would probably enjoy the madness too. I am not as brave as my uncle was. I can’t imagine taking responsibility for someone else’s child like that, not at faire.

I talked parents into it easily enough then. It’s educational. Parents are suckers for words like, “educational.” At the time the faire was owned and run by the non-profit Living History Center. I used to tell parents all the neat stuff I’d learned during workshops about English history. I told them about Henry VIII and the forming of the Church of England, the changes in national religion as his older children each took their turns as monarch and how the religious instability of the time led to things like the puritans, who led to our own country’s pilgrims, et cetera. See, I could even turn it patriotic, in a single run-on sentence. I did not tell parents about related things like the Adamites. I spoke instead, of my detailed knowledge of the sinking of the Spanish Armada, and the guild system in 16th century Europe. These things sound very impressive coming from a junior high kid. None of those things are why my friends wanted to work faire with me.

The bigger lessons tended to sneak up on a person. I learned that playing is not something you have to outgrow and that in improv a quick answer is often better than a right answer. I learned that I can fail an audition and still survive, and even be brave enough to pass the next year. You don’t have to know where you’re going to commit to it completely and often commitment is worth a whole lot more than control. I learned that I really like singing along, even when I’m not very good at it and especially when I’m encouraged to participate fully. Faire is very much about participating fully. The fine line between being a spaz and being an entertainer is focus. I am not very good at focus, but I learned to be better. I learned that audiences are easily entertained by watching people in costume do ordinary things like sleep and eat.

I learned that having an uncle who answers to, “Fang,” no matter how permissive, can come in handy, but it is not a limitless protection. I learned that landsknecht women I’ve never met before will rescue me from drunken strangers, even if I started the trouble I was in. I learned that the gap between my teeth is perfect for spitting through. I learned that Maudie Mumblecrust’s homemade facial can be eaten entirely by another group, if left in the wrong cooler, and that that is far more legendary than the bit for which it was intended. I learned that beautiful women are just as insecure as plain, sometimes more so. I learned that sometimes the best shows are backstage and/or after hours. I learned that an entire faire can turn itself inside out looking for a little girl named Tabitha and that when it turns out to be more of a misunderstanding than a missing child the collective sigh of relief can turn to laughter very quickly, and for years to come. I learned that laughter really is the best medicine. I learned that flirting, for its own sake, is not just a delight but a primal need, imbedded in every one of us, from nine-month-old babies to ninety-year-old retirees. I learned that wool cloaks are best when shared and that the most fascinating conversations happened at Mullah’s at night. I learned how much there was to be learned by just shutting up and listening to the amazing people around me. I learned that I can dream the best daydreams beneath a burlap sky.

I learned that friendships are formed in the trenches, you love people different after you’ve been pressed to your limits together. I learned that a patient woman willing to let me make a mess of her spinning can be carried in my heart forever and felt in every bit of yarn I’ve spun ever since. I learned that a mud pit can be a stage and that there are few things as gleefully, terrifyingly, exhilarating as realizing that an audience, packed deeper than my eyes can see, is hanging on my every word and laughing exactly when I want them too. I learned that if a grown-up whom I love and respect is foolish enough to tell me that I am a responsible person I will push myself harder than I thought I could, just to keep from disappointing them, just from hoping to make them proud. I am thirty-eight and still hoping to make some of those grown-ups proud. I learned that you should probably know where you live before you go off on an adventure, just in case a different person is charged with taking you home. I learned that getting very lost, very late, and for a very long time can bring some of the most wonderful people into my life and heart for years to come. Sometimes it doesn’t matter where you’re going nearly as much as it matters who you are going with. I learned that some feelings are definitely worth traveling more than 500 miles, each way, just to be a part of. I learned that growing up in one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the whole wide world does not preclude the experience of growing up in a small town. I’ve learned that you learn a lot about people, and human nature, when thin tent walls do not keep secrets well and a strong community has a long memory.

I learned that it sucks to watch the person I’m infatuated with in their infatuation with someone else. I learned that there are some things I would rather not share with all my friends and that jealousy can make me a dangerously cruel and calculating creature. I learned that on occasion, getting what I want can be a quick lesson in how much better wanting can be than having. I learned that stepping away gracefully can seem like playing hard to get, and so it is that I am chased most when I have no desire to be caught. I learned that dress rehearsals are essential, especially if you are rather busty and there’s a chest shimmy in that night show’s choreography. I also learned that very creepy older men can remind you for years about how much they enjoyed your wardrobe malfunction. Reminding people of their uber-humiliating public experiences is not a good pick up line, ever.

I learned that age is just a number, and some of the best friends I’ve ever had have been no where near my own age. I’ve learned that age differences can still be real hurdles. I learned that swinging one’s hips rhythmically at ale jam is a great advantage for a seventeen-year-old trying to argue that eighteen is an unnecessarily arbitrary number. I learned that the only age I could imagine being would prove to be one of the most quickly fleeting moments of my life. I learned that sometimes something you meant to take lightly can begin to feel very serious. I learned that it is just as painful to want more than you are being offered as to know that you have less to offer than is being asked. I learned too slowly and painfully, what a tragedy it is to lie to yourself about either what you want or about what you are offering. I learned that hearts can break and mend and be that much the better for the experience. I learned that friendship is the best caulk in the cracks of a broken heart.

I’ve learned that you can come home again. I’ve learned that home is not in oak trees or lakes, it’s hellos and hugs and familiar eyes that seem to really see me without scanning through me or past me, to see if there’s someone better on the horizon. Home is not so much in where you are, as it is in who you are with, and who you are when you are with them. Resurrection moss can seem long dead until you add a little water, the same can be said of some washerwomen. Every sappy love song, the theme song to Cheers, and anything else I’m embarrassed to sing along to, is probably true of my feelings of someone at faire. It is possible to be a girl of twelve, a grown woman of thirty-eight and every age in between all at once when I am in the right company. I learned that it takes a village and this one was mine.

I learned that grown women can make new friends who feel like they’ve been there all along, or at least like the puzzle shape they fit in perfectly has been waiting patiently somewhere in my soul for all these years. I learned that the things we learn when playing are often the most important things a person can know. I learned not to take myself, or anything else, too seriously. I’ve learned that the demigods of my youth are only mortals after all and that most of them are that much more lovable in their human frailty. I’ve learned that relationships maintained in seasonal hugs and passing smiles can be some of the most valuable in my life. I’ve learned that the grown ups laugh not because the folly of youth is so strange, but because it is so familiar, and because we would rather laugh than cry as we empathize with a place we remember all too profoundly.

The washerwomen, the theatrical group I am most deeply a part of, have a tradition now of sharing online what we’ve learned over the weekend. It’s usually funny, short and sweet. I’m sure I can fit a weekend into that format. I’ve only scratched the surface of my twenty-five years working faire here, though. I can’t possibly tell you everything in one blog entry, but I’ve attempted to give you some of it. We are part of the show, and the show has become part of us. I am grateful to have the opportunity to bring my daughter with me on weekends to show her what her mother is like in her native habitat. As much as the girl enjoys having friends visit, I doubt I will ever bring any of them along with us though. Faire is, indeed, very educational.

San Dimas is sticky in the summer. Not so oppressive a humidity as Hopewell, Virginia where my hair never dried in six weeks, where malarial mosquitos were more dangerous than soldiers in both the revolutionary and civil wars. Still, it leaves you wanting to shower, to wash the steam from your body, over and over again. Those summers, combined with my youth, made shorts seem like a good idea until the phone would ring and standing up from the faux leather couch where I babysat, there would be that dread-filled moment where I could feel the skin on the back of my thighs pull back like a rubber band. Snap! I was married one August, in San Dimas.

My family wasn’t any good at marriage. Maybe we give up too soon, maybe we stay around too long, maybe we only fall in love with the people who are completely wrong for us. I just know that I grew up in a family with no aptitude for marriage. I didn’t want what they had. I wanted what Jean and Harry had.

They were the parents of a friend of mine. She and I were bluebirds together and our mothers ran the PTA at our elementary school. I always wished I could be good the way she was, just like she wished she could be more like her older sister. Her family had an abundance of goodness. Maybe there were other parents who loved each other so well, and I wasn’t close enough to see it. Maybe her parents didn’t love as well as I thought, and I wasn’t close enough to see that. It’s just that, from my perspective, I had never seen any man love a woman as much as Harry loved Jean.

He was a likeable guy, with a goofy dad-like sense of humor, but I can’t say that I spent a lot of time with him. Like most dads, he just sort of passed through the world of women and children. I didn’t really witness him loving his wife. I saw it in the paintings. Harry was an artist, by trade and by passion. I remember their living room, the rocking chair and the rock collection and the paintings. When he painted his wife you could see her through his eyes. I could almost fall in love with Jean, through his gaze. He took her in so fully, and liked all he saw, enough to keep her. Wow. I wanted someone to look at me like that, so long, so lovingly.

My husband and I used to rent an apartment in San Dimas. We would open the windows at night, but the breeze was flattened, more like a warm, damp blanket. It was the kind of weather where you could flip the pillow all night long and never find a cool side, the kind of weather where you kick off the covers and sleep on top of the sheets. So that’s how my husband and I slept that night in August, uncovered and wearing little more than our wedding rings. When I woke up, that first morning as a married woman, I didn’t want to disturb him and I didn’t want to be apart. I grabbed some art supplies that we’d received in our wedding gifts and sat in the bedroom doorway.

This month I rearranged my office. I found a drawing a little crumpled at the corners after nearly fifteen years. It was a reminder that once upon a time I looked at somebody the way I’d always imagined Harry looking at Jean. I too, committed my love to paper. I don’t have Harry’s skill as a painter. Still, my rough pencil sketch conveys that emotion. I never get to show that picture to anyone though. The subject finds it embarrassing, even though his back was turned, even though the artist was clearly so much in love. I look at it now and remember how that newlywed summer felt. San Dimas is sticky in the summer.

Well, not quiet exactly, just multi-faceted.

When I was three years old my father was the growl of a motorcycle engine in the driveway, the rattling of my grandmother’s bay window. I only remember his arrival now, “big noisy.” There was no event significant enough to call goodbye between he and I. Though his absence was the norm I didn’t know that anything was missing. I had my mother, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles. My world was very small, but filled with people who loved me.

My mother and I moved out of the house on Emelita when I was four. I never saw Miguel again, and I don’t know if his motorcycle ever shook the bay window after that. I had a new stepfather and a new neighborhood. I made friends with the neighbors and played in the street with other kids. My world was getting bigger, and in those growing pains I found it to be less kind.

By the time I was ten, I was an angry child. The world had been a cruel disappointment to a child who had once had such faith in fairness. So by ten I had learned to hit back. I had learned to hit first, and hardest, and last. I had learned that you only owned as much as you could keep other people from stealing, and at times that was very little. The sanctuary of my home was a lie I could no longer respect. Not because it wasn’t safe, it was very safe, but it had led me to believe that the world was a safe place filled with good people. I could not forgive myself for having ever been gullible enough to believe that fairy tale.

For years I lashed out, hurt, angry, hateful. I never backed down from a fight, I never surrendered. Then one day I was done. I was sitting in my room plotting revenge, a far too common pastime of my childhood, when it struck me; there was a beautiful day going on outside my room. I was always in trouble, always pushing away the good people who cared about me and the people who had earned my rage were oblivious to it, I was hurting everyone, but those who’d deserved it, with my anger. All at once I’d had enough.

I knew that who I’d been wasn’t working, but I didn’t know how to be someone else. I spent my teen years torn between the fighters and the fools. If I always expected the worst I could never be disappointed, but I could never really be happy either. If happiness was a lie I wasn’t sure I had any use for the truth. Sometimes it feels like a horrible betrayal of that badass little girl to go about being so happy-go-lucky. My inner ten-year-old would totally be making the gag-me face at some of the people-pleasing foolishness of my adult life. The feeling is mutual though. The give-until-it-hurts careprovider, I grew up to be, is fairly ashamed of the violent hurtful creature I used to be.

And then there’s derby. Yes, everything is about roller derby lately. It’s just that I’ve finally reached that unlikely truce between who I was at ten and who I was at twenty. We can knock the piss out of each other on the track and totally nurture each other afterwards. Even in a less violent, referee, role I’m still pushing my body in ways I haven’t since I was a prepubescent brawler. I love having my lungs ready to burst with air, I love showing off all the bumps and bruises after the fact, and I love having a derby family to care about.

It feels like the end of The Dark Crystal, where the Skeksis and Mystics are integrated at last. It feels like when I was very young and my life was still lived in moments, rather than in stories; when Miguel’s presence on my grandmother’s front porch felt as simple as a visit and not like the seed for decades of Daddy Issues. I can be kind, and I can be fierce, and I can trust. My world is as big, or as small, as I make it, and I’m filling it with the activities and people I love.

My Goals for 2012

Yeah, I know I’m about a month late. I’ve had the basic ideas down for a while, but I’ve been finding it simultaneously very difficult to articulate and very difficult not to. Which is to say this is the sort of thing that has nagged me to write it, but not given me much inspiration to write it well. I’m gonna write it anyway, ’cause that’s what I do.

First of all, this is the year I didn’t make any resolutions. Resolutions have turned out to be a strangely competitive sport of seeing how far we can push the art of lying to ourselves and still believe whatever candy-coated unicorn poop we’re shoveling. This time of year (well, a month ago, because obviously giving up procrastinating isn’t on my list) we pat each other, and ourselves, on the back for declaring the most noble and ambitious promises we can imagine. Yet, by the time of year this is actually being posted, many of us will have swept those tarnished fantasies behind a mystery bin in the garage. You know the garage that we were going to finally clean out and organize for our long envisioned home gym and/or workshop, or maybe just a parking space. Yeah. So to sum up, that’s what I’m not doing this year; I’m not excavating the garage, I’m not giving up procrastinating and I’m not making any resolutions. That sentence, right there, makes this one of my most honest Januarys, ever, by the way.

So what, do I think I’m perfect now? Nope. Have I finally given up on self-improvement? Nope again. I’ve just stopped believing that the night I stay up late, eating calorie dense finger foods and drinking champagne, magically gives way to the day that I change my entire life. I’m trading in my holiday declarations of change for the daily grind of goals. Goals are about as dull and colorless as dishwater, but they stick around long after the resolutions are gone.

I’ve condensed my basic long-term goals, the ones I’m working on every day until I get there, into a simple phrase: Debt-free Derby Mama with a Degree. It’s pretty simple, and I don’t have to backtrack through my journal to remember what I wanted. Let me break it down into more complicated and verbose terms though. This is what that means to me-

Debt-free

As far as financial goals go, Debt-free is pretty self explanatory. The only reason anyone lives in my zip code is affordable housing, so I don’t mind my mortgage. It’s just that when I was a teenager, I used to like to swim upstream in the creek. When I’d get too tired to swim, I’d grab onto a big rock and rest a bit, then start swimming against the current as soon as I was able. This one time out by Honey Run Bridge, the very big rock I’d grabbed came loose and we rolled together. When we stopped tumbling I had a very large chunk of stone resting on my chest and a lovely view through a few feet of water. My credit card debt feels a lot like that moment. I tried to lean on the credit cards for support when I needed to pay vet bills, or car repair bills, or when we ate out way too much around the time of my son’s surgery. Now it’s like that relationship has flipped and I’m trying to breathe while pinned under water with a minor boulder on my chest. I’d like to fix that. So I’m making an active effort to spend less, and pay off more, until I am debt-free.

Derby

How does a new skater describe roller derby without sounding like an infatuated teeny bopper? I could tell you that I’ve never felt this way about a sport before, that we were meant for each other, that derby just gets me, but you wouldn’t understand. Unless, of course, you’re in love with derby too. Suffice to say, I love derby.

It is, however, a very demanding love affair. Derby requires commitment, strength, stamina and flexibility. My goal is to meet those requirements. This is not a sport for a middle-aged housewife who has let herself go. Well, I guess it is, since that’s who I was when we found each other. That’s just not who I am anymore. My lungs expanded even faster than my quadriceps, once I learned how to skate more than a few feet without planting my rump on the rink. I am already thrilled with the physical vitality I’ve forged in the heat of this sport and I’ve still got a long road to travel towards being the athlete my league deserves. The Roller Derby Workout Challenge 2012 is certainly going to push me further towards that goal, but this is just part of a long journey.

With my recent physical success I can see so clearly why every weight loss resolution I’ve ever made (and believe me I’ve made plenty) has failed. I kept promising myself a new lean body in the old fat life. I didn’t want to, or believed I couldn’t, change the sleep habits, eating habits, exercise habits, et cetera, that were making me fat. Instead I’d push myself for these intense, punishing, bursts of diet and exercise, often losing twenty to thirty pounds. By Easter I would find myself wallowing in failure and Jelly Bellies. Now I want to skate hard (which for me is still pretty bunny slope by comparison) and often. I want to make choices that make me able to skate harder. If I don’t workout between practices, if I don’t eat right, if I don’t sleep enough, it shows. Maybe not to anyone else, but I can feel the difference. Some nights my legs feel like I’m trying to run through cement and others I feel like I wouldn’t trade my skates for Hermes’ winged sandals airmailed special from Mt. Olympus. The more I live like the athlete I want to be, the more my body forms to that expectation. I will look like the life I lead, and that’s a great bonus now that I’m leading a more athletic life.

Mama

It’s who I am, who I’ve been, who I will be. I think my daughter and her father sometimes worry when I go off on my adventures that I’m rejecting my parental role. I’m just trying not to evaporate into it. I love pouring myself into my children, but I can’t do it if I’m a cracked and/or empty vessel. The other goals are how I refill, so I can have more and better things to give to my children, and phooey on anyone who thinks otherwise.

with a Degree

I also started college today, which means I should be reading a microeconomics textbook right now instead of blithering on in my blog. I’m a high school dropout and I’m prone to using that as an excuse to leave the interesting lives to the smart kids. My AA won’t really make me smarter, but it will make me more employable and it’ll take away one more excuse I have for telling myself “I can’t.”

Words in bold, just so my closing paragraph doesn’t blend into my last goal set

I won’t complete these goals this year, and I’ll surely have bigger goals someday after these finish lines are crossed. These are just the markers I have my eyes on for now, the what, the why, and the how of the better life I’m building. I’ll let ya’ll know how it works out.

I have reached a whole new level of geekery, I am writing roller derby poems. Yeah, what else is there to say about that?

Reinventing the Wheel

I am not reinventing the wheel
I am just skating in a circle
counterclockwise as counterculture
finding my own way
Hermes had wings on his sandals
because wheels were not a luxury afforded to the Gods
But in this woman’s sport we know the value
of dangerous curves
the round of our wheels
the round of our track
the round of our bodies
strengthened and toned
reforged in warmups and drills
I am not reinventing the wheel
I am just rediscovering myself