...talk us down from the ledges...

(Amy Grant, That's What Love is For)

A girl's gotta have friends.

And this girl has the best ones.

Last week, in the middle of writing my research proposal for the secret Midwestern school application, I found a reference in a bibliography that I hadn't looked up. So I looked it up. And instead of seeing it as a piece of the puzzle, I saw it as the arrow that burst my research, that made my work invalid. Panicking, I picked up the phone and called Sally. Who, I had forgotten, had a house full of guests. She took a moment to assure me that no one was doing work on Third Culture Kids in libraries, that my work was important, and that this was just an application to graduate school, NOT a dissertation. She took five minutes away from her guests to talk me off my ledge.

All week, I have been screaming on Twitter, wanting to throw in the towel, and friends like Deb have been sending me reminders of what I want to do in the form of cupcakes.

Thursday morning, I sat my tush in my chair and filled in the online application. It took me all morning, including a trip to FedExKinkos because the watermarks on one of my transcripts made it impossible to compact it beyond 2000KB. The file needed to be under 500KB. Murphy was alive and well, but I had set aside the entire morning, so I beat him at his game.

Anyways, as I sit here, kind of like a couch potato, stunned that my year of striving is almost over, I want to say thanks. Because your encouragement is what got me through, you talked me off my ledges.

I'm leaving out a big plate of cupcakes.

[Anaiis Nin quote here]

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." (Anaiis Nin)

Well, I'm still working hard on my Midwestern essays. Exhausted, but I am working. Or like we say on twitter, #amwriting #amworking. I took this morning off work to take time to write. And I thought I would have a chance to do so much more. But it has to be enough. I have 7 days. 8 if you include the 15th. In those 7 or 8 days, I have to gather together my research proposal and I have to update my resume. Oh, and show up for work for 5 of those days.

I wrote these bits when I was putting together my "statement of purpose" but I think they fit here more than in an application for "further schooling." (Yes, I have to be secretive.) (Yes, you'll know when I find out, which won't be until late Feb for an interview, and after that, I think March or April.)

A little bit of background, as I sort of start in the middle here: I had been writing about my teen years, reading with sibs, how it kept me interested in picture books as a teen.

...While all of this was happening, something else was happening that would shape my life’s work, though I didn’t recognize it then. My father, a career foreign service officer, was preparing for his next post, in Warsaw, Poland. He and I both had a lot of homework my senior year of high school; while mine was in English with a little bit of Spanish, his was entirely in Polish. My parents and siblings lived in Warsaw, Poland from 1989 to 1992, as communism was being replaced by the private sector.

In college, I was trying to live the normal life of an American teenager, but I couldn’t ignore that my life was markedly different from the lives of my fellow students, most of whom spent Christmas vacation in a place called home. I spent Christmas vacation with people I called home, in a foreign country where I could barely tell cab drivers my parent’s address. In high school in the suburbs of Washington, DC, I was able to pretend I was just another kid. Now, at 17, I was faced yet again with my heritage: of many languages, many houses, and many different “homes.” The concept of the third culture kid was not yet mainstream, and most of the writing is still non-fiction by adults, for adults. As a confused teen, I would have benefited from some books to mirror my experiences. Instead, I took all the “windows” and made some of them into mirrors.

In high school, I could forget that I had lived overseas. I found teens like me in the books of Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and Paula Danziger. I didn’t talk about my childhood abroad, and no one asked me about it, because I blended. I no longer looked for books about kids like me who had lived abroad, because I pretended that I had lived in Maryland my whole life.

**

There is much more there, but I need to drive home and take in some restorative television. If you are the praying type, please pray. These next 7 days are going to be FULL. Thankfully tomorrow I have two things on my side (which also mean I won't get any writing in): a massage at 8:30, with a guy who is also a third culture kid, so I'll be able to tell him about my project, and a woman at the library school I graduated from, who has agreed to talk to me. She can't help me with the writing, and I was sure I'd be done with it all by now, but she can also be a "bounce ideas off" person.

Setting out a plate of cupcakes for you all,

xo,
SL

My mother, the theologian

So. With all the "living" I've been doing, hanging on by the seat of my pants, getting by on the skin of my teeth, my contemplative life has been pretty much nil.

Instead of reading and praying and going for walks, I pick up the phone to call my mom or Sally in Michigan. If they aren't home, I try Emily in Russia, or Lilly in Maryland. I get online. I tweet, or play game upon game of Free Cell. (I did play solitaire with real cards for a while, but the colder weather necessitates a comforter on my bed and it's too bumpy for real cards.) I watch episode upon episode of Bones.

But this morning, when I chatted with my mother, as I tried to dust the sand from my sleepy eyes, she was in the midst of preparing for Bible Study later in the morning, and so she told me all about Psalm 124. They are doing a Eugene Peterson* study, so the translation below is his:

A Pilgrim Song of David

^1-5 If God hadn't been for us —all together now, Israel, sing out!—
If God hadn't been for us
when everyone went against us,
We would have been swallowed alive
by their violent anger,
Swept away by the flood of rage,
drowned in the torrent;
We would have lost our lives
in the wild, raging water.

⁶ Oh, blessed be God!
He didn't go off and leave us.
He didn't abandon us defenseless,
helpless as a rabbit in a pack of snarling dogs.

⁷ We've flown free from their fangs,
free of their traps, free as a bird.
Their grip is broken;
we're free as a bird in flight.

⁸ God's strong name is our help,
the same God who made heaven and earth.

She said, the point of the psalm is that even when the turkeys tried to get us down, God was with us, and we kept on going. (Those weren't her exact words.) So, as I sat down at the kitchen table with my Grape Nuts and raisins, I got out my Jerusalem Bible, and then my Timothy Botts' book of the Psalms. (Do you know Timothy's** work? Yowsa. His calligraphy is phenomenal.)

And so I sat there, reading Psalm 124, 127*** (if God doesn't build the house)... and ate my breakfast and thought about my mother. Who has been a nurturing force in my life--all of my friends have been. And how finally, I have gotten to the place where I have not one but two scriptures open on my breakfast table.

These are not easy times. I am racing at breakneck to come up with a plausible research project to wow the folks in the Midwest who will determine if I get to start my PhD in the fall. I was pulled off of Mother Goose duty, (where I sing to babies) for the next two weeks, when the session ends, because there were complaints that I seemed not into it, unhappy. And my boss, rather than reprimand me, decided that I have a lot on my plate (oh, did I mention recovery from sinus surgery?) to say, take a break. We'll reevaluate in the new year. Here, I have been off my game, thinking as I look at a sea of young ones and their mothers, grandmothers, fathers, will this be my last fall of singing to them? How they ARE my sunshine. And that sadness came through. And so it's relief, sort of, because yes, I could tell I was off my game, but also, again, sadness, as there is, when you're pulled off the game and someone else is put in.

If God hadn't been with us,

We would have lost our lives
in the wild, raging water.

And I haven't been lost. I haven't been washed away. I'm still here, still plugging, still standing. For now, that is enough.

(I have put the links at the end, in hopes that you will go to them, but to prevent you from leaving the post before finishing reading.)
_____________________
*Eugene Peterson, A long obedience in the same direction.
**Timothy Botts: Online Gallery
***Psalm 127:1-2, from Biblegateway.com

Playing solitaire on the computer at two thirty in the morning...

Yeah, so if I play endless games of computer free cell or solitaire, you can guess that I am in anxiety h-e-double hockey sticks.

Called my parent's house this morning as I woke up from bad dreams around 10 a.m. (Thank you God that I work at 1 p.m.)

So, what are you anxious about, my dad asked.

• my car
• the surgery (for deviated septum -- nose sinus surgery, Wednesday the 19th)
  
• my mother coming to visit; (my apartment is SO NOT READY)
• getting into grad school
• what if I don't get into grad school
• things I'll miss if I do get into grad school, like how well the Penguins are doing.
• Sidney Crosby (so you can imagine my GLEE that he has been cleared for contact today!!!)
• moving
• Mother Goose (where I sing to babies and their mamas)
  

Yesterday I had 64 folks (babies and adults) in my 10 am session. That's like performance, making sure you are projecting to the folks in the back of the double room. In the 11 am session, I was off (don't know why...) (um, anxiety, um, having 64 folks in session 1) and so were they. It was like doing story time to a wall. I didn't let them know THIS IS PARTICIPATORY and even though we're four weeks in, it was almost all new folks so there weren't people modeling "this is what we do when she reads the book about animal sounds." (You make the animal sounds!!)

My dearest friend, Marian the Librarian, is a ghost that I see once in a blue moon...she can't seem to get healthy!! And she was my sounding board at work for years! So then I started going out with the ladies who lunch (my nickname for them) and then the soy allergy came ker-blow into that, I eat in, and now I've gotten to a point where I just read on my lunch hour, so I try to not go at noon, I go at 12:30 so that I miss the people that sit and talk while eating. Yes, I am going into myself. It's bad.

I need to find out WHAT I can eat at some of the restaurants the ladies go to. B/c I need to spend some lunch money--the way you get to know what's going on, and the way to kvetch about it, at our library, is to go out for lunch.