Sometimes you can’t jump; sometimes you need to be pushed

You know, I had a whole post ready to go up on Thursday morning. This was going to be the first time that I would get a second post up in a week as scheduled. I had been compelled by an email from a friend and a fortuitous web of link-following to write that post. I even let myself miss a deadline for a lit journal in order to get that post finished on time.

It was all very exciting.

In the post I was going to talk about the difficulties of mining one’s own life as a writing/art subject. I was going to talk about how uncomfortable it is for me to put myself and my life on display, how so much of my personal life—including my own marriage—is intimately tied into this project that I’m writing about, how I struggle with the fear and anxiety of having to put my own dirty laundry out there when I have spent so long learning to hide all those thoughts and vulnerabilities and embarrassments. I was going to say how this artistic pilgrimage often feels like a campaign and a crusade in which, more often than not, I find that I’m fighting against myself, how I do want to be read but don’t always want to be seen.

It was a pretty good post. It even had a couple of metaphors. But I’m not going to post it.

Instead I’m going to make the post moot.

But I need to beg your indulgence as it’s going to require a little time and a decent amount of B-story.

In the meantime, by way of introduction, I’d like to present to you my mother, Maureen, the lady to the left.

Without that lady, I wouldn’t be writing, let alone writing a book. Without that lady, I wouldn’t have spent more than a year chasing a dead rock band on two sides of the Atlantic. And without that lady, a green flag would never have stalked a drummer around the world.

That dress that she’s wearing in the picture—my mom loved that dress. That’s the dress that she wore to my wedding. That’s also the dress that she wore to her cremation.

Because my mom was just that good, she managed to do all of those things despite having been dead.

*****

RIP, Natasha Richardson. My heart goes out to your family.

Thanks to mtj for the thread title.

*****

Continuation: Last Mother’s Day

Tagged as: fear, green flag, Mom, self-consciousness, writing