Michelle L. Rusk's Blog, page 46

How The Green Dress Changed Me

While in some ways it's challenging to tease out how all the events of the past year or so have changed me, notably my mom dying and my getting married, I know that the writing The Green Dress had a big impact.

There are the aspects I have talked about before: writing from beginning to end, about the challenge of publishing my first book in three years. But this was something more.

It's about who I am and how I want to spend my time. 

Having had so many losses in my life, I'm the opposite of most people who only use the formal china on holidays (if that) or might let the house guests use the good towels. My wedding china has been used several times since we've been given it as a wedding gift and we have plans to pull it out for a dinner party in two weeks. The good towels are always out.

I watched my mom not even let us eat off her everyday dishes, the china only coming out every few years. When my friend Bonnie was dying of cancer, I brought her back some chocolates from Washington, DC, where I had been for a conference. They were the touristy kind with photos of various places on them. After she died, when we were cleaning out her room in the hospice facility, I found them in a drawer and I pointed to them. Her daughter Sadie said, "She was waiting for a special occasion."

I have learned life is too short. Eat the chocolates, save the wrappers if you need to.

My fear is about running out of time: I'm afraid I won't have the opportunity to do everything I want to. Instead, I'm finding I have to focus on what's important to me. As I've written before, I've discovered over the past seven years that I am the Michelle I always wanted to be. But now I need to make sure I put my time and focus into the projects that make me that person.

Writing The Green Dress, spending the time creating Audrey and Sally's lives, and exploring their journeys, reminded me of how much being a storyteller is who I am. I can't focus on whether or not the books are bestsellers (as much as I would love that so I could devote more time to writing). Instead I need to write. It's as easy as that. Write.

And create. Last night I pulled out a manuscript I had started in the early 1990s. Some of it was hand written on papers that had been used for notes in college from journalism classes. I found what appeared to be a spelling test (we did those sorts of things in j-school) and my taking the rest of the page and the back to work on my story. Then there were pages of the story printed on dot matrix paper. 

I have other files like that as well as countless started manuscripts here on my laptop. The ideas don't go away. And writing The Green Dress reminded me they are waiting for their stories to be told.

The Guest Photos

I had to laugh the other day when I realized there might be just as many– or more– photos of my sister and the people I call my "UK family" at my wedding (all of whom are pictured above).

I am not upset about this at all. Last week when I was taking the time to post the photos of the wedding to Facebook to share with everyone, I kept thinking there were way too many. But when I tried to cut down the number, I realized it was because I had many photos of other people I wanted to share with them (and the others who were at the wedding). This was our means of giving everyone a chance to see the photos– as well as anyone else who was interested.

But I'm also grateful that there are so many photos of our families and guests because this also was a reflection of Greg and I. Yes, the wedding was about us and our marriage, our new journey together, but it also was about probably the one time we will have all our families and friends gathered in one place. We are two people who entertain a lot, who talk to a lot of people, and the wedding was about connecting everyone.

Having all these photos of our guests and the laughter and smiles makes me happy. It reminds me that life is about the those with whom we share our lives and the memories we create with everyone. It's about all of us.

Nourishing the Creative Soul

In the five or so years I have become more aware of how much of who I really am is the person who was formed early in my life. While I often talk about how much I wanted to become a writer when I was in first grade and how I taught myself much of what helped me cope with the losses in my life while running cross country and track, there is another side of me that I have often pushed aside. The Martha Stewart in me.

My neighbors used to call me Martha Junior but it wasn't until recently that I began to realize how true that is. But I also see how much of that was formed back in elementary school. I was always rearranging the room I shared with my younger sister (and later my own room). I learned to cook early. And my mom taught me to sew: I made a lot of Barbie clothes and then in sixth grade shorts for myself (I never had the chance to take sewing in junior high because I somehow ended up in the construction class which I was not happy about but dealt with). I love to create things. 

Mom was great with the sewing machine. While I have no memories of her actually showing me how to sew, she made my older siblings quite a few shirts and my sister Karen a bathing suit (my Barbies got a matching bikini). And Mom had stacks of magazine and newspaper pages filled with ideas. 

As I got older and into running– which took up a lot of my time– I put it all aside. While I still loved clothes and making art, I didn't take any art classes in high school because I was consumed with journalism classes. Becoming a writer was most important to me and I didn't want to miss any opportunities.

But after graduate school, I began to sew again (and Mom kindly gave me her Bernina sewing machine). When I moved across the street from an older woman named Bonnie, she built on what Mom had taught me: I learned how to quilt, we made all the dresses when I married the first time, and we took on all sorts of projects many of which are scattered across my house.

Yet one day when I was teaching and wearing a shift dress I had made, a substitute teacher asked, "Did you make that?" I felt insulted and never wore it again. And gave away all my patterns for making clothes. 

Today, however, it's become cool again to make things and as I start this journey to create bucket bags, I'm doing it because I'm not finding what I really want and I'm looking at what designers have created and I think, I could do that." And yet as I was working on the prototype (pictured above) on Saturday, I also found myself talking to Mom, to Bonnie, and to my grandmother who also sewed, asking them for help. 

So while I'm nourishing my creative soul, I also find myself talking to the people in my life who are no longer here with me, knowing they will bring me the help I need to accomplish whatever I set out to do.

 

Mom and the Butterfly

It's been quite a week. I keep hoping it's Friday but then I have too much to do for it to be Friday. On Monday, I managed to get stung by a bee which can be perilous for me as I'm allergic to them. My right hand is still swollen although I can see my knuckles again. Then yesterday as I started my swim, I dislocated my shoulder. It popped back shortly after, as I lay on the bed and Greg telling me to let it hang. This morning it hurts a little but overall things are good.

And that doesn't include the long list of things that happened in July that I'm not going to recount. As Greg said, we used up all our luck in June with the wedding.

Two weeks ago I sat with the priest at the Norbertine Monastery with whom I do my spiritual direction. As I went down the list of things that have happened, making recent life challenging in multiple ways. I had big plans for July of projects I wanted to complete and I have had to throw them out the window and reconfigure my schedule.

"It sounds like there is chaos all around you and you're learning how to focus," Fr. Gene said.

Yep, that's exactly it.

I have always joked about how I wrote my dissertation while walls were being restuccoed and painted outside my home office– a doing of my then-husband who wanted to have the house in perfect condition for my graduation party a month later. And I continued writing in the weeks after surgery this spring, even after the anesthesia left me feeling flat and depressed. Eventually it wore off but I knew I had to keep trudging along, no different than when I'm out for a run and don't feel great.

Life is never perfect nor does it ever go according to plan. We will never have the perfect time to work on the projects we want to accomplish. Instead, we need to learn to focus.

My reminder to focus came while I was in the pool Monday– before I was stung– when a butterfly flew by and then into my neighbor's yard. The last one I saw was the one I wrote about recently that grazed Greg's head while we were at the monastery in Big Sur. 

Just before the butterfly came by, I'd been thinking about my spirituality, my writing, and things I want to accomplish. Mom flying by was confirmation, a "Yes! That's what you're supposed to do!"

And a reminder that there is always peace in the midst of chaos.

Giving Thanks

If there were one part of my wedding that I wanted to do for my mom, it was the "Ave Maria." I'm not sure why but she always talked about how she wasn't allowed to have it at her wedding. I know another woman who also was married in the early sixties in a Catholic church and she couldn't have it either.

So when I knew we were going to have a Mass for our wedding, we also were going to have the "Ave Maria." It's traditional that the bride leave flowers for the Virgin Mary during the song, however, at my church the Virgin Mary statue is out a side door in a little room that also serves as an entrance to the church. I thought it would seem weird if I walked out of the church while everyone was still sitting and waited for me to return (and I'm sure it would cross someone's mind that maybe I wasn't coming back!).

But this decision was made easy because Our Lady of Guadalupe, best known in Mexican culture, is much more meaningful in my life and there is a painting of her right in the church. I have written before how her feast day is the day of my birthday, something I didn't know until I moved to New Mexico. And my group for divorced and separated women was held for two years in the Our Lady of Guadalupe Room at my church. That room also serves as the bride's room in the church, a room that was built during the short time I had moved away. When I returned, it was finished.

Before the ceremony began, I had the women in my group meet me there and we said a prayer. I considered this graduation day for them. I had given them everything I could and my wedding was the perfect time for us to all move forward. 

Greg told me he didn't want to just stand there while I went to take the flowers to Guadalupe so he joined me, something we saw another couple do at a ceremony last year. And it wasn't until the wedding was just days away that I began to see how important Guadalupe was in my life. In some ways I still can't put it into words.

What I do know is that Greg entered my life less than three months after I started the group in the Guadalupe Room. Many prayers were said and so much change has happened in all the women's lives, including mine. 

In January when I bought a Guadalupe candle at the grocery store (I'm probably the only white girl buying them) and started my work day with a 5-minute prayer each morning, within several days I had a buyer for my house in Illinois. I didn't realize it then as it took several weeks for it to play out, but change was in the air.

Much has happened since I've given more time to Guadalupe and having the opportunity to give her thanks during our wedding ceremony was yet another milestone in that road. And also part of a road that has just begun.

The Name Change

I wasn't going to become Michelle Linn-Gust-Rusk.

It would have been easy to continue have been legally Michelle Linn and professionally Michelle Linn-Gust as I had been since 1999. And Greg was quite okay with that.

However, to me, this was about not fearing letting go of the past. When I married the first time, it was before my first book was published and I was afraid that if I left Linn off, no one who knew me could find the book. And then when I divorced, I had built a career with seven books as Michelle Linn-Gust. And as I sit here writing this, I am trying to figure out exactly what it was that would happen if I dropped Gust and now I have no answer.

It's probably because I realized when I was marrying Greg six weeks ago that I needed to stop fearing letting go of the past. I am proud of all that I accomplished as Michelle Linn-Gust and just because it's causing some confusion with eight books published as Michelle Linn-Gust and one as Michelle L. Rusk, and it appears we have to create a completely new Wikipedia page, it's okay.

One of my mantras over the past few years that in passing time I feel more strongly about is not fearing anything about the past. I can let it all go because I'm really not letting go of it– the memories are mine to keep– but instead I'm saying that I don't need to hold it tight. And the more I let it go, the more I can let new opportunities come raining down on me (and I am less likely to miss catching them!).

Becoming Michelle L. Rusk is about my commitment to Greg but it's also about our future together. And the future that I'm continuing to build as I work toward achieving more of my dreams.

The Monastery and Mom

I had no idea that once you got somewhere past San Simeon heading north on Highway 1 in Calfornia you can't get off it until you get to Monterey. We were searching for a mission– having already been to two– in the mountains and we didn't know that our phones (each of us with two major carriers here in the United States) wouldn't work. And we didn't know that my road atlas that was about ten years old would be up to date (we thought maybe there were more roads built since it was published).

Honestly, while the scenery is beautiful, after a while it starts to look the same. And I was on the right side of the car as we headed north so I had to crane my head to see what Greg could see better although he was preoccupied with keeping us on the road and not falling down the cliff.

When we passed a sign for a monastery and an arrow pointing to the right, before I could ask if we could go, Greg asked me if I wanted to go. He turned the car around at a small motel and as we made the left turn onto the road, we started a two-mile journey almost straight up a hill.

But it was worth it. The Benedictine Monastery had some of the most beautiful views ever. And the quiet. I can imagine some people are uncomfortable there because they can hear themselves think (cell phones don't work either). The gift shop had the most amazing collection of books although the monk manning it didn't seem to be too interested in having a conversation. I gave up on having a spiritual conversation with him– as Greg said, it was like he was told he had to work that day, a Saturday, and wasn't too happy.

We walked around, meandered through the chapel, and as we got ready to leave, standing next to our car in the parking lot, a butterfly grazed Greg's head.

While I used to see them often in my backyard or perching on my zinnias in my front yard, this was the first time we had seen one since Greg came in from the cleaning the pool just a few weeks after Mom died and announced one had been flying around. 

I knew that was Mom. And I knew this was Mom, too.

And I knew then exactly why we'd been stuck on Highway 1– so Mom could pay us a visit.

The Rings

When my husband's mother Delcia was young, her family spent the entire summer by the beach in Argentina where they lived. One summer, around the time Delcia was ten, her mother lost her wedding band in the sand. In a hurry to make sure his wife had a ring, Delcia's father ran off and had a new one made immediately. 

The next day, however, Delcia went back to the spot at the beach where they had been sitting and circled it; searching, hoping.

She found the ring.

Today I'm looking down at that ring on my left hand, resting next to my silver engagement ring.

While it's always easy to go to a store and buy a ring, there's nothing better than something that has a story, or history to it. Or was worn to commemorate a lasting marriage.

Greg's ring is made up of the second ring, the one his grandfather had made in a panic, and a gold medal that was given to him at birth. The two were melted into the ring he wears on his left hand today.

While we begin our life together, we hold onto history from the past that led us to where we are today.

Stories to Tell

Recently I wrote about how my work is shifting direction and one of those directions includes writing more about what inspires me. But the second part is sharing more about people who have stories to tell which I did last week when I wrote about the woman who opened the boutique in the Los Angeles garment district.

For a long time I didn't realize how lucky I was that people had told me the stories about their lives– and of their families. I remember sitting in the living room on Christmas night about fifteen years ago of my new deceased across-the-street neighbors as they talked about how they wanted to buy a house around the corner but the homes were bigger and more expensive. And there was the story from another couple I know about how in the 1950s he had to order a screwdriver from Denver because Albuquerque was so small and didn't have what he needed available.

These might seem like small insignificant pieces of people's lives but together they make up the details that I put together when I write a book. In my new work, The Green Dress, there is a part when Sally remembers how Reuben brought her a piece of cake from a wedding they weren't attending, all because Sally loved wedding cake. I have a friend whose husband did this very thing for her in Ireland last year because she loves wedding cake.

Life is about the little pieces that we remember because together they make up the whole of who we are. We often think that life is only about the big events that happen to us: the major celebrations, holidays, vacations. But the small details are what stick with us.

And sometimes it's about the stories we don't know about someone. The candlesticks pictured above are from the house where I bought the green dress that inspired my new book. They were in the back yard, white paint peeling off them. I sanded them and painted them a bright yellow and set them on my dining room table.

While I don't know the story about them, they are the other part of stories to tell: sometimes the story is in what we don't know because we let our imagination wander. And that's where stories are created.

 

Being True to Myself

I sent out my first newsletter this week. It wasn't much but it had taken me a year to do it and I was proud of the fact that I actually accomplished it (especially because I did it on a day when I kept getting distracted by various things). I received an email from Mail Chimp a few days later and it told me that two people had unsubscribed. 

At first I was thinking, why would someone unsubscribe when they had been the ones to sign up for the newsletter? But as I thought about it more, I am aware of that there are people who are disappointed in the fact that I'm not writing about grief like I used to. 

While my work has always been about moving forward in life, now it's less focused on understanding what we go through and more driven about how we actually make positive change in our lives. I want to help people build skills to do that, using what I have learned to get through the various challenges in my life.

It was then that I realized that I am not going to change my work because people are disappointed. I have had the perfect opportunity to make sweeping changes in my life: a huge new beginning. More than anything, I need to be true to myself.

I have times where I see it would be easy to venture off and do things that might be good to do, might bring extra income in ways that would be easy for me, but then I realize they aren't what makes me truly happy. Life is short and I need to keep focused on what does make me happy. I have always allowed myself to get distracted in helping others and in other ways.

Now though, it's my time. And I know that it's almost important that I show how I have been able to take my life forward because that inspires others; they see that they, too, can do it. And I know it will show in my work– as it already does in my new book, The Green Dress– that I am doing what makes me happiest inside. And the more I do that, the more others will resonate with it.

And so a leap forward into the unknown although I see it more like the red carpet rolling out in front of me.