Lynn Rankin-Esquer's Blog, page 3

When the Shame Isn’t Your Fault – My Biggest Second Grade Lesson

The first time I remember really being embarrassed was in second grade when Mrs. C admonished me in front of a completely quiet class to finish the silent reading assignment. The whole class looked up from their books to stare at me. Over fifty years ago and I still can feel the rush of heat to my face, the panic at being the center of very unwanted attention. Mrs. C walked towards my desk, her shoulder length brown hair falling forward into her thin face.

I said I had already finished.

She shook her head in disbelief and said, “there is no way you could have finished that already.”

But I had. It turns out reading fast is my superpower, but no one knew it then.

I heard giggles and whispers around me and dropped my head to my book and started flipping pages, pretending to read, my heart beating so loud and fast I could feel it in my ears. Pound, pound, pound. My face stayed red, this time in anger at the unfairness of it all. I had done the assignment and then quietly waited for everyone else to finish.

Amazing, how easily someone can make you feel ashamed when you have done nothing wrong.

It is many years later. I’m standing outside of a dance studio with the other mothers, staring through the glass at our tiny barely-out-of-toddlerhood girls in their little pink tights and black leotards. It is just a step above herding cats, but the girls are enthusiastic in the way they fling their bodies around trying to do the steps the teacher is showing them. She directs them to march in a circle. Then to gather together in the center of the room and crouch down, folded up into child’s position, head down, pretending to be asleep. Then she gives the command to get back up.

One child does not get up.

My daughter.

My heart starts to race for her. Get up I think, seeing everyone else up and jumping around.

She stays down. Face to the ground.

Every other girl has moved on to the arms in the air move the teacher called for. Then they spin around, again following the teacher’s instruction.

Get up I think again.

She stays down.

Finally, the teacher taps my curled-up daughter on the shoulder, and she looks up and around and I can see it, that same shameful feeling. What did I do wrong? How am I the only one being singled out? Why is everyone staring at me and giggling?

She jumps up, face red.

It feels like I’m back in Mrs. C’s class, only this time it is worse. Far, far worse when it is someone you love feeling shame.

My daughter makes it through the class with a steadily blank face. Even from that young of an age she had decided not to let people see her cry.

In the car she tells me she doesn’t think dance is for her.

I nod. “Worth a try, not for everyone,” I say. “Thank you for giving a shot.”

Not a chance I’d make her go back there. Turns out she’s more of a martial arts gal anyway.

It would not be long after that we discover that she is hearing impaired. That she had been reading lips and making use of other cues to understand what people want of her. That she had no chance of hearing the teacher’s instructions in a loud, echoey dance studio, full of music and clomping girls and many voices and her head down.

Just like no one knew I could read fast, no one knew my daughter was hearing impaired. Understandable mistakes, resulting in understandable embarrassment.

Mrs. C and the dance teacher were just humans doing human things. I can give them a break. But there is a huge space in my heart for the singled out, the unfairly accused, the tender introvert who just wanted to read, the stoic faced little girl who so remarkably navigated a confusing world that it took four years to realize she needed hearing aids.

Postscript: That little girl is currently twenty-one years old, about to graduate college with two majors and a minor, and is kicking ass at Krav Maga (an Israeli martial art).

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Navigating the In Between

To my kids when a new phase of life feels uncomfortable:

Sometimes you end up in a place called The In Between, where one thing has ended or changed and you haven’t yet found your footing in the new place. Maybe it is literally a new place or maybe a relationship ended or maybe you’ve dropped a bad habit or started a good one. Maybe you chose it or maybe it was forced upon you, but either way, things are unfamiliar. Unfamiliar can cause warning lights to flash in our brains.

When discomfort jumps in to ride shotgun he’ll tell you to turn the car back to the Known. He’ll whisper that the fix is to go back to the familiar. But let me urge you to try tolerating uncertainty for a while instead. Maybe even trust the force that brought you here, whether it was your own decision or Life itself that added the plot twist.

Mario Martinez writes about ‘mourning the known misery’ which is when we feel nostalgic for something even if we know it is better left in the past. Mourn if you must, but don’t let the mourning convince you something is necessarily wrong.

Open yourself to the possibility that things might work out. If you chose this change, trust the you that made the decision. If you didn’t choose it, allow space for the idea that there might be something worthwhile ahead. As the song goes, God bless the broken road and all that.

Do you have the patience to wait,
‘Til your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving,
‘Til the right action arises by itself?

                        Lao Tzu

Unmoving can be a very wise choice in the In Between. As Nancy Levin said, honor the space between no longer and not yet. It’s kind of simple, all you have to do here is nothing. Just for the moment don’t move. Don’t rush back. Don’t doubt the decision. Just wait. Let the mud settle. Gather some data on this new place while you wait. Realize that tolerating uncertainty is a superpower that you will use repeatedly in your life. Believe that something New is on its way but it will only arrive if you don’t rush back to the Old. Will the New be better? Who knows? But the Old is done, its time is past.

This is the story of life, finding a way through, not back. And those with the courage to wait out the In Between often find a whole big life waiting on the other side.

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Starfish and Rescued Dogs – Love in the Face of Pain

If you need a reminder that love walks in human form on this earth, all you have to do is watch Niall Harbison’s videos of caring for dogs (link at end of post).

Sound up!

With our global connection to the world we are simultaneously too connected and not connected enough. From a little screen in our hand we watch the horrors of war in another country, the horrors of violence in our own. There is too much to see and process and feel about and our attention is so distracted. I saw a clip of a cute dog and clicked on it and before I could be completely appalled at the neglect and abuse the dog had experienced I heard the loving and cheerful voice of someone caring for that dog.

It was too late to look away, thank God.

In Thailand Niall Harbison noticed these horrifically abused and neglected dogs, living on the streets or chained up for breeding. Their skin raw, stretched painfully tight against their skeleton, hard to imagine how they are still alive at that weight.

Niall didn’t look away.

Niall sees them, he feeds 700 of them a day! He picks up the ones he can and nurses them back to health and finds them homes.

You have to listen to the videos. In the face of all this pain, his voice is so loving and cheerful, it soothes my soul and I’m not a dog or lying in a ditch.

It is the best part of my morning, logging in to find out how Tina Turner (recently rescued dog) is doing, watching the latest Rodney video. I am along for the journey these dogs are on. It’s the best reality TV going.

Niall’s loving attention to these dogs, these neglected and abused beings, hits so hard in my heart. It is beyond a love of dogs. It is a love for the wounded, the forgotten, the exiled.

It reminds me of Internal Family Systems therapy [Self Therapy], and how the goal is to accept all the parts of yourself. All of them. The neglected and scared and violent and raw parts are all needed to make you whole. To embrace the parts of you that are hurting and have acted badly (because they were treated badly by others, because they were neglected by others) and to speak to them with the cheerful loving voice of Niall. To bring the most wounded parts of you, the exiles, home and give them a soft bed and the medicine they need to heal.

I hear him lavish love on these dogs and it makes me more able to lavish love on the parts of myself that I don’t like.

And it makes me more able to stand and look at other people in pain, not look away.

To watch Niall is to know that one way to offer love on this earth is to not look away. To show compassion and caring when it is within our power. We cannot all feed 700 dogs a day, but we can find the parts of ourselves that need love and we can look straight at the parts of other people that need love too.

It reminds me of the starfish story: how there was a big storm and thousands of starfish had washed up onto the beach, and they were slowly drying out and dying. And a boy was walking along, picking one at a time up and throwing it back into the water. And a man saw him and gestured to the thousands on the beach and said ‘you’ll never save them all, why are you doing this?’ and the boy picked up a starfish and put him back in the ocean and said ‘I saved that one.’ And then picked up another one.

The world is overwhelming, and we are so connected to it all that it can be paralyzing but I love the idea of just doing the small things around you. I’m trying to live a starfish life.

So today, I pre-ordered Niall’s book. Helped that one.

Link to Niall Harbison’s book: Hope – How Street Dogs Taught Me the Meaning of Life

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A Way Back to Wonder?

I remember being filled with wonder,

years and miles ago.

I believe there is a road back,

well, more of a path,

well, more of a faint set of tracks,

well, more of an inkling.

I sit very still and wait.

Nothing much happens, the world seems the same.

Silly, this, and yet I don’t move.

The hummingbird won’t land unless you are completely still. And even then, maybe just a fly-by, a whisper floated into the air near your ear as the hummingbird disappears into the magnolia tree.

That faint.

That is how you find an inkling.

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A Moment of Reverence

How do you show reverence for life? How do you not let all your attention land on the what’s for dinner decision, the who gets the car dilemma, the leaking faucet, the constant demands for attention to things that are of such low stakes you despair of wasting even a glance at them, and yet are forced into deep, intensely debated, agonizingly long discussions that suck out all your carefully collected energy?

I hear a smash, clearly broken glass, outside of my carefully locked study door.

I drop a stitch in the story I’m writing, my heroine abandoned mid-sentence. I hear arguments, wisps of the discussion float through. The bowl for a visiting cat, an unaware kick, an unintentional breaking. Yelling and ‘hold the dog’ and ‘grab the cat’ and ‘put on shoes.’ And then the sound of a vacuum cleaner. More arguing. Accusations made. Defenses offered. Me half out of my chair, ready to go help, and yet.

And yet.

And yet. I was showing reverence for life, just then. In my way.

So I sat down, fought my way back to my heroine, found the rest of her sentence. And then the next one.

Sometimes my reverence for life is to clean up the broken bowl.

Sometimes, though, my reverence is to not clean up the broken bowl.

“There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”  -Rumi

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Crooked is a feature, not a flaw

“Tree branches will grow to give the most leaves the most light, even if that means growing sideways… Part of the trade-off any tree has to make is between gathering light, staying stable in the wind, and succeeding against nearby competitors. So when branches grow crookedly, that’s part of a tree’s overall survival strategy.” (From EarthSky)

Maybe this is why people grow crookedly too, it’s a survival strategy. Bend away from the person who questioned why you like watching The Great British Bake Off. Bend towards the one who smiled at the way you added lemongrass to the stir fry. Know how running stabilizes you, how turning the phone off while you work is the portal to the magic, how the birds washing themselves in the shallow bowl of the Buddha fountain tickles your soul, how getting your writing done before anyone is awake allows your roots to be deep enough to withstand the winds of unexpected ride needs and homework needs and could-you-rub-my-shoulders needs and the insurance-will-lapse-if-you-don’t-get-this-paper-scanned-and-submitted-today needs.

Crookedness, when it comes to growth, is not a flaw, it’s a feature. Bend towards what roots you, what gets you the most light, what keeps you steady in the wind.

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The Smell of Crushed Mint

When I was little I loved our trips to visit Grandma Rankin at her little red brick house in Cheswick, Pennsylvania. After the giggles at her referring to our dad as “Kenny” (he was Ken to everyone else) and some sweet tea out of her ‘icebox’ I’d slip into her tiny backyard.

I’d go first to the bed of mint growing in the corner. I loved fiddling with the mint, brushing my hands through it to pick up the scent, crushing a leaf or two to really get the smell on me, sticking a couple leaves in a pocket. I liked the wildness of the bed of mint, the way it seemed to spread at will, disobeying the straight line of hard edging that was supposed to define the bed as separate from the grass. I like how every time we came the mint had spread farther along the back fence.

Grandma would sort of toss up her hands and say something about how she really should get to tidying that garden but I know she preferred it that way too. Everything in her house was immaculate and neatly lined up and had it’s own place. She cleaned obsessively. She had the shiniest kitchen floor, the most sparkling windows, a living room of rectangles so perfectly aligned she might have used a protractor on them each morning. She went to Catholic mass every morning. She slept in a hairnet on a silk pillow to keep her ‘set’ neat all week.

Grandma followed all the rules and I think she enjoyed letting this one area of her life have its own way. A narrow little backyard with runaway mint and unruly geraniums and an apple tree that dropped apples all over the long grass underneath. One side of the backyard was a thicket of high bushes hanging with overgrown ivy, like it hid a portal to the secret garden or the Narnia. That backyard was where the wild part of her lived, the quiet rebel.

It wasn’t neglected, that back yard. It was protected.

Maybe that was why grandma was so good at making me feel seen and loved. She saw my little unkempt self, the parts not yet civilized, and she loved those parts too. I like to think she could see how I shared her fondness for that backyard, like a secret handshake, something understood between us before I even knew what that thing was. Everyone else saw her obsessively neat and clean house, but I saw that backyard, knew it was okay to have unruly parts, okay to spread past the edges, okay to leave your apples on the ground for the squirrels to chew on.

The parts of me that are not curated or precise or civilized, those turned out to be my favorite parts. I feel like she’s happy those parts have survived, knows she had something to do with that. She died years ago but among the many gifts Grandma left me is the way crushed mint smells like love.

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Past the First Mile

She had never thought of herself as an athlete but when she was 22 she tried to impress a guy by going for a run with him. She hated it. She didn’t tell him that, just smiled every time he looked back at her, like isn’t this fun? Then she started running on her own, still in hopes of impressing him or some other guy in the future. She sees now that’s how God got her out on the trail, God used her young self’s need to impress boys to bring her to something way beyond boys.

Now, tens of thousands of miles later, she sets off, OG (original guy) long forgotten. What was his name anyway? The gentle jog at the start, her feet barely come off of the pavement, her speed slower than many walkers. The tight thighs and achilles slowly warm up, the stab of pain near the big right toe makes her adjust the stride.  When she first starts to run her body feels like it was assembled by five year olds doing art with dried pasta tubes, frayed strings slipped through the pieces that clack together. All the right parts but assembled hastily, knee not perfectly lined up with tibia, tendons slapped onto bone. It all rattles a bit, but she knows that will go away.  By the end of the first mile, the hardest part by far, the part so many people manage, the blood is flowing, the joints oiled, the pieces now aligned and softened and working together. Like the orchestra members finally stopped warming up and started playing an actual song.

The first mile is where the rational world gets shed, an argument considered and tossed by the side of the road, a worry left on a rock, a limitation dropped in the bushes. It’s where doubt and resistance rise up in front of her and she dodges them, again and again, as her parts remember they belong to the same body and start working together. The rest of life often feels off, with her always adjusting to fit other people’s timing, other people’s needs, other people’s vision for her and the world, but somewhere in that first mile she’s able to shed that self.

The first mile is of the rational world, a running from, but the rest is freedom, a running to. Now her body feels like it was put together by the Gods. Past the first mile is a place where she matches the beat of the earth, where the sun and the wind and the trees cheer her on, where she runs, where she belongs.

As she runs she imagines how to urge the rest of her tribe out, how to summon them past the first mile.

She wants them all to know the magic that waits there.

Past the first mile is where she became a runner, but it is also where she became a Dr., and then a Mrs., and then a mother, and then a writer. And it is where she returns to the self that is none and all of those things, every time she runs.

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The Lost Art of Listening: Confessions from an imperfect family

We are a family of many passions. A family of strongly held opinions, of arguments well-honed in the shower, of confidence that we can transmit our brilliance to the minds of the rest of the family, filled with a certainty that the rest of the family is eager to absorb our wisdom.

Thus, we talk over each other. And during the rare moments we are silent when someone else is speaking, we are not really listening, we are preparing our next brilliant verbalization. We aren’t listening to each other. Not really listening, which is to ‘give one’s attention to a sound.’ We are not doing that, unless you count the way we listen to our own monologues.

Dinner time at our house might as well be the tower of Babel, a cacophony of voices. All transmitting and no receiving, each with our own special style of not listening.

I am The Expert. I read a lot. I think a lot about what I’ve read. I deep dive on topics and thus feel like I am the one who should pontificate. I am bewildered that the family is not hanging on my every well-informed word.

Husband is The Agitator, or as we often call him, the ‘Dadgitator.’ A lifetime spent in locker rooms has turned him into someone always ready with the tease, with the barb, the jab. It is highly entertaining for him and he assumes, despite many assurances to the contrary, that it is as entertaining for me.

Son is The Provocateur. He leans into the shocking, the opposite of whatever he thinks I believe, never missing the chance to get a rise out of me. He laughingly admits he doesn’t even believe a lot of what he says, but he gets me every time.

Daughter is The Reformed, having escaped to college and experienced civil discourse with other people, amazed to discover people might actually listen and then respond to what you said. She is trying to help us mend our ways.

All of us think our way is right, and secretly (or not so secretly) deride the others for their communication style.

Occasionally I pull out my credentials, I taught people how to communicate for a living! Listen to me, I got paid to do this!

This tends to backfire because I only do this when I am in defensive mode, at which point I am no longer following my own good advice. They fight to be the first to point that out. It becomes a source of embarrassment for me and extended humor for Husband and Son.

As is the case with so many other things in my life, I find relief at the ocean. Sounds that won’t agitate, sounds that will soothe. The wind and the waves and the birds. They are just there, just being water, being air, being animals. The birds screech over each other too, but they aren’t trying to convince me of anything. They aren’t mad at me or entertained by me or questioning me. They don’t even notice me. I’m not trying to convince them of anything either. We all just exist together.

The wind and the waves eventually scrub my brain clean.

The emotion fades. The arguments seem silly. The vastness of the ocean brings a calmer mind.

I start to remember the endearing things about my people. The funny things. The kind things. The loving things. Their strengths and lovable quirks. The myriad reasons I love them.

How do we know we are loved? When we feel someone’s eyes really on us. When someone pays attention to us. I’m reminded of a phrase I read years ago, that ‘attention is the magic elixir.’ Attention is the magic elixir that grows love.

And isn’t attention the heart of listening?

And don’t I want my people to feel my love?

More than anything.

From this peaceful remove of the ocean, I decide to be the bigger person, to put aside my perfectly crafted arguments and just listen. Respond to what they say, not just scan for a place to insert my thoughts.

Our brains aren’t always prepared for such a massive shift so I put some parameters on it.

I will do it for short periods of time. Like, try five minutes (which turns out to be TOO LONG). Back it down to three minutes.

I will make a note of the argument I am so compelled to share so I won’t forget it and put it aside. Always a chance later if it is truly worthy. Good arguments don’t evaporate.

I will breathe. Deep breathing, the type that uses the diaphragm, that activates the parasympathetic nervous system so that the agitating and provocations aren’t coded in my body as running from the tiger.

 And one last reminder for these moments, a mantra if you will: I can be right or I can be loving. I don’t actually get to see the members of my family for long periods in the day (one works insane hours, one is at school in another state, one is a teenaged boy, so, you know). I’d rather be loving, if I have to choose.

When it comes right down to it, we all just want to be known and loved.

And I’m going to do my best to use the magic elixir of attention to give that to my people. That’s all I really want for them, to feel known and loved.

I’ll just have to take my wondrous, exhaustive, comprehensive wisdom into my next life. Maybe someone will find a use for it there.

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No Going Back

Life gets better in so many mundane ways. What would you not want to go back to?

I was recently talking to my sister and we realized we both made a big mistake with our teenagers. For good reasons at the time, we both opened up a lunch food budget but now can’t seem to close it. They have all come to expect that they should be able to buy lunch if not every day, a lot of days. We can’t seem to get the genie back in the bottle without being accused of denying our children food.

This made me think about how many things we can’t really go back from. In fact, there are many things I wouldn’t want to go back from. That is a more fun game to play:

Once we bought a pre-owned car, I couldn’t imagine buying new again. I am currently cruising around in a luxury car I could never have justified buying new (not that I care if other people do, I just like to keep extra cash for my TJMaxx visits).

Once I had the idea to put mashed potatoes in the crock pot at Thanksgiving to keep them warm and I never would change that. Mashed potatoes cool off faster than a Kim Kardashian relationship but in the crock pot (after cooking them regular way), they are always tasty warm.

Once I put a topper on my bed I have realized I can’t go back to sleeping without one. Every night I sink into and feel like a princess. One without a pea. Good sleep is the holy grail of the middle aged and I am killing it.

Once we got a Spotify account I can’t imagine going back to CD’s or tapes or records (that is going way back. I’ve used them all! Record player. Tape player. A Walkman. A Discman. An MP3 player). Hear a song you like and immediately it is in your possession. Unlike those days when I kept a tape cued up in the boombox so that if I heard a song I liked I could run to it and hit ‘record.’ None of my songs back then had the opening notes.

Never going back to not running. Fingers crossed my knees hold out because my mood is too dependent on it. I’d like to keep my family around and am not sure that would be possible without the regular brain bath of endorphins that turn my anger/resentment/anxiety knobs down enough to function in polite society. 

Never going back to not meditating in the morning. See above, re: smoothing out anxiety/squirrel brain. Even if I need to get up at 4:00 am for a flight, I either get up ten minutes early to calm my brain before I leave or I meditate as soon as I get to the gate at the airport (not possible in the car, too anxious about arrival time. Even though as a Rankin I leave early enough to arrive at the gate with hours to spare – thanks for that legacy of time anxiety Rankin side of the family, I’m talking about you Grandma Rankin who I love forever and ever but yikes the anxiety).

And speaking of airports, I’m not sure I want to ever go back to flying on a plane without a mask, even after the pandemic is over (will that ever happen?). Now that I’ve thought about how I am inhaling the exhalations of a hundred other people for five hours I feel sick at the idea of every going back to that (I don’t buy this ‘recycled air’ business, not every flight could possibly be filtering all the germs out of the air). I imagine germs flying towards my face and skidding to a stop in disappointment when they see my mask, they look at each other and shrug and fly towards someone else.

It is a supreme comfort to me that I will never be forced to go back to high school. The bubbling insecurity, the braces, the pimples, the body shame, the way in which so many other students externalized these same things by bullying any handy target. The uncertain future, the desperate longing to be liked, for a date to the dance, for someone, anyone, to notice something good about me. I can’t even look at pictures of those days without my whole torso knotting up. My husband and I watch our son enjoying high school and shake our heads at each other, what must that be like? We are bewildered. It’s like we gave birth to a unicorn.

Which brings me back to my kids. Even with all the whoops-now-they-expect-that-stuff mistakes, and the stretch marks and the late nights worrying until the garage door goes up and the hemorrhaging food budget, I’m so very grateful there is no going back to life before them.

Thanks to the running and meditating (and other tools in my Holding It Together Parent toolbox) I can just manage to live with my heart walking around outside of my body, because that is what being a parent feels like.

No putting that heart back in.

Completely worth it.

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