Heather S. Ingemar's Blog, page 16

My medieval life

It occurred to me today that some of you might be scratching your heads over my post for the “Known World’s Got Talent” competition and all my recent ramblings on bardic music, Artisan rank, and sewing projects. I hope to remedy that.

Per bend azure and sable, a bull rampant argent maintaining a lute, all within an orle or.
Devices are unique to the member. Only I may display this device, or use it to mark my belongings.

See, my husband and I are part of a neat organization called the SCA, or the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is dedicated to the study of life and culture in the medieval and renaissance period (roughly 500 A.D. to 1610). At first glance we look like just a rag-tag bunch of blokes who dress in funny clothes and run around smacking each other with sticks, but I promise there’s more to it than that. The SCA covers a lot of area, there are divisions for fighting (“heavy combat” and rapier), archery, cooking, arts & sciences, equestrian… The list goes on and on. If there is an area of medieval/renaissance life you are interested in — say, medieval fishing practices — you can study that, and share what you learn with other like-minded folks.

Members are encouraged to develop a historical persona and unique heraldic device, and period-appropriate garb is a must. Along the way you have opportunities to achieve special ranks. Some are awarded by your local Barons and Baronesses, others are awarded by Their Majesties, the King and Queen. Members are strongly encouraged to follow the practices for showing deference and reverence to higher-ranking members (such as curtseying to the Throne, addressing your Baron and Baroness as “Your Excellencies,” etc.). As you may have already guessed, all the regions of the world that play are referred to as “The Known World,” and are divvied up into Kingdoms, then Baronies, and then possibly Cantons, Shires, and Colleges. Every year these territories host events which you can attend for a nominal fee. Most events are weekend camping events (period tent not necessarily required), with fighting, classes, feasting, bardic entertainment, court, and camaraderie. In short, everything is organized and ran approximately according to what it would have been in medieval times.

My persona (Lady Emma Godwif) is that of an English sail-maker’s wife (merchant/middle class) in the late Tudor period, specifically during the last years of Bloody Mary’s reign, and into the time of Queen Elizabeth I. I am related to James and Matthew Baker, the famous English shipwrights, (“Godwif” or “goodwife” is a nickname) and met my husband, a well-to-do sail maker, James Elwic, during business negotiations between our families. We are Protestant, and only managed to avoid trouble during the Marian Persecutions due to James’ insistence that we make like Catholics and observe all traditions as such. Needless to say, we were quite overjoyed and relieved when Queen Elizabeth I took the throne.

My ranks are that of a Lady and Artisan; the title of Lady (an Award of Arms) was granted to me by our reigning King and Queen for being good at and invested in our game, and the rank of Artisan was awarded by my Baroness after I passed a series of tests. In return, I have pledged my fealty to her, to uphold her honor and represent our barony wherever I go, and I get a belt medallion to wear and a beaded favor that resides on my SCA guitar. (My husband is a Lord and a Gallant, we essentially have the same rank, although the rank of Gallant is a fighting rank for rapier. He gets a fancy scarf in our barony’s colors to wear when he is on the fighting field.)

Most people I’ve met since being involved in the SCA are amazing and very personable, I find that during the “event season” (here in the Kingdom of An Tir that’s typically April through October) I count the days and weeks until the next event on my calendar. The people we play with are like a second family, and everyone pitches in to make events fun.

If your interest is piqued, I highly recommend locating your chapter and seeing what it’s all about.

Tagged: artisan, Elizabethan, life, medieval, persona, Renaissance, sca, Tudor, Wastekeep

The truth about “okay”

My default setting these days is “I’m okay.”

“How are you?”

“I’m… okay.”

Here’s the deal: “Okay” is not a cop-out, or a way to lock you out of my inner workings. “Okay” is not flippant, it is not a thoughtless answer. My pause is not one of dread, the hesitation is not a mad scramble for a word to neatly tie up inner turmoil into something socially acceptable.

Tomorrow it is three months. I should have a three-month old cooing and giggling at me. I should be surviving on little sleep organized around a flurry of feedings and diaper changes. My son should be our constant companion to our daily lives. I should be a mother.

But I’m not. My failure rings clear and it hurts.

And yet, I am “okay.” I am healthy. I am whole. I have a wonderful husband, amazing friends, and music to soothe the ache. I know my loss won’t always hurt like this. I may not ever understand why my husband and I weren’t allowed to be parents to such a beautiful little boy, but I’m okay. I’m stronger that I knew. Losing our son so soon after his birth was, by far, the biggest disappointment of our lives, but it does not define me.

Sometimes it is hard, so very, very hard to function, knowing that so many women in my community have recently become what I am not. And that I have to face them, every day at The Day Job, knowing that, outside of my hearing, they wonder what I did to not be able to bring my son home. Some days it is all I can do to hold back the tears.

Sometimes it isn’t hard at all. Sometimes I can leave the empty hole in my heart at the door and my smile feels ready and genuine.

“Okay” is my way of checking in with myself. “Okay” is reminding myself that I am hurt, yes, but I am also still standing.

“Okay” is where I am, right now, and I’ll be here for a while. I may never be any more than just “okay,” even on the days that are fantastic, even on the days that suck. Because life after losing a child you wanted so badly is like being in a fight. When you’ve been beat down like this, it’s easier to cover your head and stay down. All our natural impulses drive us to take what’s been dished out and pray there is no more forthcoming. But to stand up? To brush yourself off and put up your fists? To keep living? That takes fight. It takes a ‘fire in your belly’ and a certain, stupid pluck to get back up off the ground and say “I’m okay.” Mind over matter. It’s no small feat after something as tragic as losing your first and only child. But here I am. And I am up, I am standing. That’s a start. That’s “okay.”

So please don’t raise your eyebrows or look at me funny for my hesitation to the question. Please don’t quiz me on whether I’m “Just okay?” and then give me a disappointed look like you expected more of me, three months after. I am what I am, where I am, who I am. Take it or leave it.

I am “okay.” And that’s okay with me.

Tagged: coping, grief, loss, neonatal death, Pregnancy

Known World’s Got Talent

The SCA is currently running a contest among their members to showcase the variety of amazing talent within the Society.

Any time I get to dress up in garb and pretend I’m a minstrel is a good day, and so, without further ado, my Entry:

The song is the “Agincourt Carol,” written to commemorate Henry V’s victory over the French in Normandy in 1415. It is an amazing story, as the English were severely out-numbered: English forces numbered under 10,000 while French forces boasted around 50,000. Henry only claimed victory thanks to his longbowmen and their archery prowess.

The first half of the lyrics tell of Henry’s travel and how God was on his side. The second half is all Latin, roughly “thank you God! Thank you God! England receives your victory!” (I don’t read Latin, but I know enough to get me in trouble. If anyone has a better translation, please speak up.)

Voting is open, so please “like” it on YouTube and help me represent the awesome Barony of Wastekeep in the Known World!

Edit, 7:08p.m. — if you have already voted, I will have to ask you to vote again, as I just figured out how to upload it in high def.

Tagged: medieval, music, performance, sca

Fantastic Tumbleweed

Talk about a fantastic weekend!

The weather was beautiful over in the Tri-Cities for the music festival. Hot, but beautiful. I played extremely well during my set, and the crowd listening just kept getting bigger and bigger as people stopped, and then stayed for the duration. (Every musician’s dream.) I sold a bunch of CDs and had a blast talking with people. My dad surprised me by showing up (he lives far away and typically doesn’t make my concerts), so that totally made my day. Not to mention all my awesome SCA friends and other assorted family that attended out of the blue. (Thank you!!!)

On a professional level, the sound guys were amazing. It was truly a pleasure to play there.

You can also see some of my performance on my YouTube channel playlist.

If you haven’t guessed, it’s now Monday morning, I’m back at home, and I’m still buzzing along on a post-performance high.

Things I Have Learned for Next Time:

Check in on Friday night instead of the day of. Because the Festival staff have a booth where they sell your merchandise for you, and only having your stuff available on the day you perform, for the few hours you perform, is not enough for potential buyers.
Bigger movements! Because, yet again, I find myself too used to playing to small, intimate groups and not large ones, and my small facial inflections and gestures are disappearing in the distance.
Post-It notes are awesome. This was the first time I used a post-it with my set list pasted on the top of my guitar, and I liked it. No one else could see it but me, and it kept the clutter on the stage to a minimum.

All in all, a fantastic experience, and one I hope to have again next year.

Tagged: festival, music, performance, Three Rivers Folklife Society, Tumbleweed Music Festival

Back in the Game

This weekend marks my first major performance in… let’s just say a long time.

And I’m going to rock the house. You wanna join me?

Sunday, September 1st at Howard Amon Park in Richland WA. I will be playing a set from 12:30 to 1:45pm for the Tumbleweed Music Festival, and it’s going to be packed with my favorite originals! I will also have copies of my 2nd CD, “Let Me Go,” available afterward ($10 each) if you’d like to grab some music to take home with you.

And one more time for the calendar…

Sunday, September 1st, 12:30 to 1:45pm

Howard Amon Park, Richland WA

Look for the “River” stage and the brown-haired gal with the black guitar.

Tagged: guitar, music, performance, songwriting, Three Rivers Folklife Society, Tumbleweed Music Festival

Sanity, or, the fine line between helping and hurting

Shortly after Michael’s death, I joined an online grief group for parents in my position. The idea was to have some place and some people to talk to about my son who weren’t immediate family or my husband — because as we all know, when you are in grief, you tend to repeat yourself as you work through it, and being a broken record to those who live with you is frustrating at best, especially when you are all feeling the same. I also figured it might help me to see others who had successfully worked through the heartache, and to learn how they did it so I might have a better plan as to how to proceed.

And for a time, it was so. I felt (and still feel) comfort in talking, it helps me make sense of my world now.

But there comes a time when you can’t stand still anymore. Eventually, there comes a time when you are better served by walking on your own two feet. I’d expected my “moment” would arrive later, much later. I didn’t expect myself to be even remotely capable of standing on my own for a year, let alone two, or three, or five.

As it turns out, I am stronger than I suspected, and I am ready to take my first steps a scant three months from my son’s birth and death.

The days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months, and I find I am wearied by hearing all that can go so very wrong with the birth of a child. Certainly there is solidarity in knowing my husband and I are not alone in this loss, but I grow frustrated and disheartened in hearing all the stories. Hearing just how many can be lost before a couple brings home a living, breathing child. Hearing all the crazy things that can go badly, all the crap outcomes. And it’s not good for my sanity, just like all the other “help” we’ve received about how losing Michael is a spiritual “lesson” (implying God chose to inflict this hurt on us. Meaning God is a sadistic bastard… which I refuse to believe), or how we need to “get over it” (as if Michael wasn’t my son, and worthy of my grief). I am already wrestling with the question of the Subsequent Child, and being slapped with the hard, ugly face of reality just makes me want to run, because what good is it to want something as beautiful as a child when the odds are never in your favor? What is the point?

More importantly, what is the point of hanging on every word of these tales when I already know how badly and how quickly things can go wrong?

There isn’t.

It is time to focus on moving forward under my own power. Certainly these first steps are going to be shaky, but I am blessed to have staunch friends and family to bear me up along the way. I am blessed to have my music, to give voice to the things I cannot find words to say. It is time to focus on the times things go right, the ways hope still exists, and how happiness can still be achieved. Because I already know about the dark side, and I can’t keep living there.

So today? I am living by the motto my creative writing professor always used to say:

Onward and Upward.

Indeed. It won’t be easy, but it also won’t always be tough, either.

Tagged: coping, grief, loss, neonatal death, Pregnancy

Storyteller

In the wake of my achievement of Artisan rank in our local(ish) SCA group, I have rediscovered an old interest: medieval music, specifically, new medieval-esque music. I find myself fascinated with songs that operate off the old tropes of medieval literature (knights, quests, love, and the like), but breathe new life into the ideas.

I have also been itching to write more things appropriate for SCA use around the bardic circle (and also for potential gigs at Renaissance Faires). Tonight I sat down with a cup of coffee and Lola the SCA guitar, and we hashed out this:

As a young child I sat at mother’s knee,

Listening with rapt attention the stories she told to me

A fair princess in a tower, a knight shining on a horse,

His sword gleams with power as he takes the dragon by force.

CHORUS:

Oh let me sing you a song

Of days long gone,

Of true love and valiant deeds,

And brilliant banners waving in the breeze,

Oh let me sing, let me sing,

Sing you a song

He’s knocked down and battered, but still he gets up.

He slays that evil dragon, his valor proven tough

CHORUS

The princess rushes down the stairs, takes him into her arms.

They ride into the sun, they’ll never be apart…

I became the princess,

And the knight and the dragon,

Their stories live inside me…

CHORUS

Tagged: folk, medieval, music, sca, songwriting

Caring about children

I never used to care.

When Husband and I got married, we realized we were content with our lives the way they were. We didn’t need children; look at how much stuff we were free to accomplish by not having them! I was able to finish my college education and pay back my student loans by getting a job, we were able to take up hobbies together, we were able to get work done around the house. I was able to pursue a mini-career as an author and later a songwriter, and he was able to pursue his interests in marksmanship and medieval martial arts. We had the world in front of us, just the two of us, and it was good. Sometimes I did wonder what I was missing by not being a mother, but I was so afraid of motherhood that I shrugged it off. Some women are not meant to have children, and that was okay. I had a very full and fulfilling life as it was. What did I need a kid for?

Then last Autumn we found out I was pregnant. And every last bit of it changed.

I never knew you could love someone you’ve never met so much. I never knew the dreams and the hopes you could build around the idea of a family. I never knew how one little event could redefine your entire identity so thoroughly, or restructure your entire existence so completely, without even lifting a finger…

And I never knew how crushed you could be when it all comes apart at the seams in the final hour.

In a lot of ways, life is no longer fulfilling. It’s no longer complete. I am no longer satisfied with the status quo. I don’t want this to be all there is. And I keep coming around to the fact that if I didn’t care so much, this would all be so much easier to deal with. Not easy, mind you, but easier.

Oh Yes, I am unsatisfied. I am back to being afraid of the very thing I want the most, and I would go back to being my former ambivalent self in a heartbeat, except that I can’t. I am left with a myriad of questions as to how to pick up the pieces of the life I thought I had, and no answers. People talk at me all day long about how I should feel (thankful) and how I should act (humbled by God’s will). There are a million instructions and bits of advice to be had, but I admit I’m a poor student. Because none of them have been here.

I have.

And for all of my wishes for an emotional on/off switch, I cannot turn myself off. I care. I can’t help it. I can’t help crying when I see another article in the paper about all the women who choose abortion, I can’t help the heart squeeze when I see a happy young family in the grocery store, and I can’t help the pang of terror I feel when I hear someone else has gone into labor, or the hot rise of jealousy as I learn of their healthy little arrival.

I am a tender, wounded soul. Spin the wheel, see how it goes; where it stops, nobody knows…

Tagged: coping, God, grief, loss, neonatal death, Pregnancy, questions

The girl in the mirror

I used to think I knew myself. I knew what I wanted from life, I knew where I was heading, and for the most part, I knew how to get there. I was secure and self-assured in that knowledge.

But the day Michael was born ripped that rug right out from under me.

The moment the last nurse left my husband and I cradling our dead son in the recovery room, I realized I had nothing. All my security, all my courage, all my self-confidence was gone. I was left reeling, adrift in a sea of wreckage from a life imploding upon itself. Who was I? Was I even a woman? Women give birth to live children. Was I even a mother? Mothers carry their children home with them, and after a couple hours I had to call the nurse to take my son’s cold body away because he looked too ‘dead.’

Everything I thought I knew was gone.

I am not blind anymore. They say hindsight is 20/20, and the more distance I gain from June 11th, the more I begin to see. I see the girl in the mirror, and she’s different, now.

Some things about this girl haven’t changed — she is still her clearest when she looks back and has a guitar in her hands. It comes as no surprise, for that is her natural state. She throws herself into music with an abandon and freedom rarely seen otherwise; in those moments, she is who she always has been. The ready smile she used to have is a little sadder, but it is still available at a moments notice, especially in those unguarded seconds spent among friends.

But those are the constants. It is the variables previously seen as constants that stare back at me, like my desire to be a mother that has hardened and coalesced into a deep-seated and primal need, instead of a negotiable bullet point on the bucket list. It is my understanding of what strength is, who my family is, and how faith is like a muscle — it must be broken down before it builds back up (a weight lifter’s description). It is how, as Doria’s family put it, trust looks different. It is how I see the relationships in my world as more precious and sacred.

I will never say I am “grateful” or “happy” or “thankful” that God chose to call my son up before we could know him. That’s an ugly sentiment that sullies the legacy of my son’s too-short memory. But taking the fall — HARD — has shown me introspection I may not have had otherwise. Would I want to go through this again, just for the sake of self-discovery? No. In fact, HELL No. This is not something I would wish on anyone. Is the insight I’ve gained worth it? Not even. I would gladly give back the things I’ve gained in trade for a life spent with my son alive. But, this is what I’ve been handed. We don’t get second chances or “do overs” in this life. I don’t get my son back, and even the knowledge that I’ll see him again in the hereafter is small consolation. So I am left with two choices: take what I’ve been given, or, not.

I’m not the kind to look a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak.

So I look in the mirror and see the girl looking back at me, now. I’m slowly beginning to accept her as she is. Her life has been separated into Before Michael and After Michael, and she is still madly trying to stitch the After Michael parts back into something somewhat resembling ‘whole.’ Sure, she’s smarter now, possibly even wiser… but she’ll never be quite the same. There will never be a time when she is no longer wounded or scarred. There will never come a day when she doesn’t ache to hold her baby boy. The only thing we can hope is that perhaps, in another month, or two, or a year, she’ll be able to look back and say her vision is brighter and her soul, stronger.

Tagged: coping, grief, loss, neonatal death, Pregnancy

I’m just a singer in a rock-n– wait — a worship band??

(title text mashed from the Moody Blues)

Let me just say I never thought I’d be here. Here, as in performing with a worship band. Especially considering my stance on the majority of worship music today.

Yeah. Odd. Weird, even.

And what’s odder is I’ve drug out the Balrog from her cave for it. (There’s gotta be some epic subtext in that, somewhere…)

But ‘here’ is where I seem to be at the moment. Singing harmony and playing tasty jams and background riffs complete with whammy bar application to liven up music that by its very nature, tends to make the majority of music aficionados raise eyebrows. The cool part is, the group I’m jamming with? They’ve upped the ante. They are challenging me, in a roundabout way, to play backup better, and to get off my hesitant rear and actually attempt honest-to-goodness lead guitar. And in return, they are picking music that has that personal connection I have been craving.

It’s amazing. I used to be in the camp that would snigger at groups like Creed. I skipped past the worship stations on the car radio, and if that was the only station that happened to come in, I gave an exasperated groan and turned the radio off. Anytime someone asked if I sang gospel or worship music, I fought back the urge to make a derisive snort of denial. But I’ve come a long way in the last year and I’ve learned my lesson: you can’t fall prey to stereotypes.

I’m eating my hat.

Tagged: Christian band, God, music, performance, Worship